I have certain issues with Adult Swim. Though some of it still makes me laugh from time-to-time, I feel its brand of humor has drifted considerably from its roots to a point where it no longer resonates with me. Really, part of it is the fact that it's so entirely driven by humor now - when AS started, it was anime-driven, featuring Cowboy Bebop and Yu Yu Hakusho, as well as Pilot Candidate/Candidate for Goddess, Inuyasha, and several other series. But good luck trying to get AS to play anime on more than one night a week, now.
Which is why that one night a week - the revival of the Toonami block on Saturdays - has been pretty rockin'. Toonami was a huge part of my teenage years, serving as an introduction to many series that I had never heard of, and when Toonami Midnight Run premiered - featuring "uncut"(read: "with some of the swearing left intact") episodes of a few shows - I was glued to my TV every midnight. Shortly after I started college, TMR evolved into Adult Swim, and the rest is history.
What's that? You're saying you don't know the rest of the story, or what my point in reminiscing about old anime is? Alright then, let me elaborate a little with my own experience.
Whilst hanging out being The Ro in my apartment recently, I tend to leave Toonami playing on Saturday nights, once it gets past the couple of series I'm working on elsewhere and don't want to have spoiled. Toonami has more recently switched from playing its shows on a three-hour cycle to playing each show only once, leading to a grand six-hour marathon of anime goodness. Since the newer stuff like Sword Art Online and Attack on Titan always goes first, later in the night they put on older shows like Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell. Those two anime are some of the most iconic and influential in my life, and in our modern geeky culture on the whole, in my opinion, so I'll talk about them.
Cowboy Bebop was one of the most mature animes to be exposed to a wide American television audience when it began playing on Adult Swim in the early 2000s, and it helped pave the way for anime to be marketed more strongly at adults in the US. An old college roommate, upon seeing me watching an episode where Spike Spiegel is smoking(90% of the series), commented "What's going on? Smoking in a cartoon? Cartoons are for kids!" Anime still gets some of that from time-to-time, but it's definitely broken into the mainstream now, even the stuff that our culture insists is only for adults. Bebop was one of the biggest game-changers in that regard, and that's even without going into the fact that the series is incredibly-written and constructed, with some of the most iconic music, characters, and scenes in all of anime history. In a real sense, Bebop helped usher in the modern anime age. To me, Bebop also accompanied a shift in my own entertainment tastes. I had never had much of an interest in more serious, mature stories, and Bebop, with its hybrid of pulp action, old-school noir, jazz culture, philosophy, and so forth was a perfect gateway show. To this day, hearing the opening theme, "Tank!", gets me pumped up for a bittersweet detective story, or a high-flying kung-fu showdown, or a heist followed by an over-the-top chase with ridiculous collateral damage.
While Bebop is most closely associated with my first year of college, Ghost in the Shell was Years Two and Three. I had tried watching the original Ghost in the Shell movie before, but it had never held much interest for me; to be fair it is markedly different from the series, slower in pacing and heavier in tone, and at the time I wasn't as interested in such things. But then Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex made it to the US. Whereas the original movie was very much a heavily cerebral and philosophical(to the point of being a bit dry) cyberpunk story, the series follows the day-to-day operations of a counter-terrorism unit as they investigate cyber crime, both in the real and digital worlds. The heavy questions of philosophy are still there, but that content is interspersed with run-and-gun battles with heavily-armed enemies, tense infiltration operations, and lighthearted Tachikoma(the artificial intelligence tanks that work with the unit) antics. Ghost in the Shell tells a story that is not only more and more topical as we move into our own increasingly-cyberpunk reality, but also a crazy thrill ride from start to finish. Like Bebop, the music for the series was composed by the legendary Yoko Kanno, and much like how Bebop's diverse compilation headlined by jazz, big band, and blues set a perfect tone for the adventures of a bounty-hunting crew, Stand Alone Complex's trance-y(for lack of a better term) musical score is a match made in heaven for a show that revolves around the blurred lines between human and machine. Watching this series now takes me back to nights spent in the commons building of my college apartments, watching both GITS and Fullmetal Alchemist on the cable there since I lacked it in my own dorm, and makes me miss textbooks and classes and lazy days with few responsibilities.
Truth be told, lots of things tend to make me nostalgia pretty hard. But the big milestone animes that brought us to where we are today are among the strongest. It's often said that the memories you attach onto things are as powerful as the content of those things, and I have to agree. So what do you think, Ninja Faithful? Are there any series that provoke similar reminiscence in your own lives? Let's hear about 'em.
EDIT: Apparently, Toonami has been pulled back from six hours to three, with most of the older stuff getting culled. But, hey, Kill la Kill is playing on it, so you know, it's not a total loss.
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