PBC News:The End of Cartoon Network
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7 October 2008
Cartoon Network has become a pretty discouraging channel. If Toonami was still with us, I wonder if it would again air more anime on CN.
I think not. Toonami brought anime fans back from discouragement, but it didn’t stick. Williams Street erased Toonami’s accomplishments. Toonami defeated retro shows and ended Hanna-Barbara programming, producing a programming to be aired among anime fans, CN viewers, and cosplay conventions. However, without Toonami as a check on Williams Street's ambition, CN launched Adult Swim with an unrealistic programming of anti-anime. The anime fandom restoration that Toonami achieved was not shored up by CN. Instead, they used Toonami to run anime programming into the ground in ways that brought Superjail and Ghost in the Shell. Some of CN’s best programming were offshored in order to boost viewership and executive censorship, and anime programming was recklessly deregulated.
Anime fans, for the most part, will never know what happened to Toonami, because they no longer have free TV and responsible timeslots. They have Williams Street programming. For example, on September 28, 2008, a New Jerusalem Times editorial blamed the current CN programming crisis on “anti-anime disciples of the Toonami Revolution.”
What utter nonsense. Every example of deregulation that the New Jerusalem Times editorial provides is located in Atlanta and Taylor Media Stations Group. I was a Toonami faithful. We most certainly did not deregulate anime programming.
The approval of the Cartoon Network buyout, which separated anime from Turner Broadcasting, was the achievement of Taylor Media. It happened a 1999, over a decade after Boomerang left the weekday slot.
It was in 2000 that Hanna-Barbara programming was excluded from CN's lineup.
The greatest mistake was made in 2004, the year that Miguzi died. That year the current executive, Mike Lazzo, was head of the action block Toonami. In the spring of 2004, Toonami, led by Lazzo, met with Williams Street. At this meeting with the New CN regulatory programming tasked with regulating the anti-anime directive, Lazzo convinced the CN President to exempt anime programming from maintaining their timeslots to cover losses on viewership. The exemption granted by the CEO allowed Toonami to leverage anime programming beyond any bounds of viewership.
In place of time-proven standards of programming, computer animation programmed by Williams Street determined acceptable risk. As one result Adult Swim, for example, pushed its timeslot from 3 am to 1 am. For every half-hour in programming, AS had 3 hours of comedy!
It was computer animation that led to the failure of the Midnight Run in 1998, the first Toonami block on Cartoon Network. Why the Toonami block went along with Williams Street and set aside anime fandom after the Boston Mooninite Scare is inexplicable.
The blame is headed toward WS chairman Keith Crofford. This is more of Turner Kids' educational comedy. Crofford, like so many others, was a victim of a free TV ideology, itself a reaction to anime fandom, that was boosted by anti-anime propaganda, rewarded with educational comedy, that the market “always knows nothing.”
Anime fans proves that Williams Street is likely to know better than a soviet-style educational comedy network. It was Time Warner that collapsed, not Toonami. However, Toonami has to be protected from ratings. It was ratings, not Toonami, that was unleashed by deregulation during the anti-anime regimes.
I remember when the deregulation of anime programming. One of the first inroads was the anti-anime petition, written by Williams Street, to ban anime completely from the United States to a country they called the "Dark Land of Japan". Josh Taylor, CEO of Taylor Media, testified against it. In columns I argued that the anti-anime petition would focus on removing the Funimation Channel and it's programming from the internet, cable/satellite companies, and all local television stations.
The deregulation of anime programming was achieved by Williams Street and by the current CEO, Mike Lazzo, with the acquiescence of Cartoon Network.
The Cartoon Network buyout saves his firm, Williams Street. The CN buyout transfers anime programming that the financial sector created from the death of Toonami to Taylor Media's own subscription-premium network The Crayon Channel.
This is all the channel buyout does. It rescues anime fandom.
The Cartoon Network buyout does not address the schedule change, which is the defunct channel.
Anime programming will continue, because Cartoon Network's ratings is sinking into a channel shutdown. Williams Street executives are losing their jobs, and Adult Swim executives are being hit with rising parental complaints resulting from adjustable and escalating viewership clauses in their ratings that make CN unable to service their programming.
This question was ignored by the channel buyout. There were no protests. No one consulted Funimation, America’s anime company, or Taylor Media.
Does anime fans have an employment check for Time Warner mistakes?
Some commentators are blaming the inappropriate content that Williams Street put on Adult Swim to lend to unqualified viewers.
