HBO MAX: First Impressions Of Animation Offerings (Or Lack Thereof)

 

Today, May 27th, 2020, we, the United States of America will have recorded two important launches. The first, Elon Musk is counting us down to today at 433 pm ET with SpaceX’s very first manned-orbital space flight, weather-permitting (at the time of this writing, the weather is 60% favorable). The launch will be the first time a manned spaceflight produced by a private company will take hold and will hopefully be the first step of launching Elon, his wife Grimes, and whatever they named their kid off to Mars thereby leaving us all in peace.

The other launch, seems to have already experienced it’s weather-delay. This, in the form of the launch of HBO MAX, and it’s very underwhelming offerings for the first day. After months of promising a deep reservoir or animation offerings, the launch instead gives us a decent amount of DC Universe films (that are already on the DC Universe App), very few English dubbed anime titles from Crunchyroll, past original offerings from HBO (Animals, The Life and Times of Tim, and Spawn, all of which were available on HBO NOW which HBO MAX replaces), and “collections” of offerings from Adult Swim and Cartoon Network. Collections is a polite way of saying, “this is it”.

When you lift the hood from under HBO MAX’s animation offerings, we get fewer Adult Swim titles than even competitor Hulu has (this is expected to change by September 1st), no South Park, and even those looking for archives of TBS original animated series will be somewhat disappointed. Series like American Dad and Neighbors From Hell, both co-productions with 20th Century FOX, are largely absent as is other original TBS series like Final Space and Tarantula. So far, the best review I’ve seen of Adult Swim’s offerings has come from one of the network’s more prolific producers, Tim Heidecker who had this to Tweet:

 

Whoa! @hbomax has @adultswim ‘s vast collection of groundbreaking shows!!! pic.twitter.com/oIT8JY6pWs

— Destroyer Of Comedy, Humor (@timheidecker) May 27, 2020

Where’s Squidbillies? Where’s Tom Goes To The Mayor? Where is Frisky Dingo? Answer: the already free AdultSwim.com. I do find ironic that Adult Swim continues to shit on the fans of Metalocalypse who want nothing more than one more season and that being one of the few original series made available on HBO MAX at launch. Other than that, nothing.

If you’re a fan of original animation offerings, HBO MAX has some promising IP on the way. But, on launch day, the offerings are very minimal. Perhaps it’s raining over the collective areas of Dallas (AT&T HQ) and Atlanta (WarnerMedia HQ), today. Hopefully, Elon will have better luck.