A Day in the Life of the Modern Day Cartoon: Special Edition!

Oh my stars and garters, have I got a surprise for you!

Don’t worry, this picture of Korra wasn’t the surprise. I just had this, and wanted to put it in.

So, a while back, our big boss handed out some assignments. I got shows like Legend of Korra, Dragons: Defenders of Berk, and Space Dandy ( I kinda called dibs on that). We were straddling that line between comedy and action. Wait, did I say action? I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say something along the lines of, “But CM, didn’t you write an article a year ago about how Bubbleblabber will never cover action shows?” Well, that sure was a thing. To be honest, I wrote three articles about how the action / anime  genre sucks now, two of them specifically targeting Toonami.

To my credit, Toonami really fucking sucked when it came back. Having a block rerun after three hours, plus only having two new shows to the block, will not keep the block running for long. Even being a card carrying advocate of Toonami, I underestimated the pull Toonami had, even after 6 years of nonexistence. I blame it on the April Fool’s joke that they played in 2012. If you missed it, you missed a fucking great time in animation history. It was a 6 hour block of all of the shows that Toonami used to run. It was a glorious nostalgia trip. Then we got that shit that premiered the next month.

But a lot changes in two years. Like I said before, we took on a lot of new shows that ride the line. Those shows hit hard for us, and we got to explore more options.  That got us started on covering Dragon Ball Z Abridged, as well as Yugioh Abridged. By the way, be on the lookout in October, where we will definitely cover the latest episode of Hellsing Abridged. We also started with a shit ton of web shows like 8-Bit Cinema, NPC, and Titanfall Dropouts. What else do we have coming? Well, we got the kind of / sort of article in January, so I think it’s time we get the full monty.

The word of the day is, “Expansion.” With Cartoon Network shifting an hour out of their broadcast day, every single show we covered on Cartoon Network is now gone. When we’re supposed to contract, we expand. From here on out, we are going to cover those action shows that we said we would never cover. This is where I probably eat my words. They need salt.

What does that mean?

What a week to start this coverage, eh? Starting today, we go balls deep into the coverage. Nothing is safe, not even democracy. Toonami, DisneyXD’s smattering of shows, Hub, those fantastic DC animated features, all of them are in our scope now. We can probably throw Marvel animated movies as well, but those show up next to never. So get ready for your eyes to fucking explode!

One of the things I want to touch on is the proficiency of sites like Crunchyroll, where they let Americans get the episodes pretty damn close to the air date in Japan. However (this is a big however), we are taking Toonami’s stance on anime, and we are only covering anime in English. We’re taking it a step further, and we are only covering a show if it’s in its first run. What does this mean? We won’t be doing reviews of Naruto, or Ghost in the Shell, or Full Metal Alchemist, or Samurai Jack.

With this, there are a bunch of shows that I am looking forward to. Attack on Titan comes with a lot of hype, but who knows if the hype is worth it. We are going to cover Beware the Batman when the final 15 episodes air starting in July, and we get season two of Space Dandy. There’s going to be a lot of home releases, like the DC movies, as well as anime like Attack on Titan, Naruto, One Piece, Beware the Batman and more!

All in all, these are pretty exciting times for Bubbleblabber. Don’t worry, though. We have a lot more surprises coming down the pike.