This may come as a surprise to some of the younger generation, but there was a time when watching anime took a little bit of work. There was no service like Crunchyroll that allowed you to watch anime any time you wanted. Video stores had a very limited selection. For kids in the nineties, the only place you could watch anime on a regular basis was on Cartoon Network. The network had a block where anime was shown and it was called Toonami.
T.O.M.
The block started out in the afternoon. The premise was that the shows were being broadcast from a spaceship. The owner and host was a robot named T.O.M. (Toonami Operations Module) and a sidekick named SARA. The show had a much more edgy feel, backed by video game reviews, electronic soundtrack and music videos of anime shows. Toonami was the most adult thing on the network. The shows were a who’s who in anime, Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon among it’s first offerings. You could actually follow a series and watch it in the proper order.
Midnight Run
Toonami took over the network entirely at night. The show began at midnight and went to the earlier hours of the morning. Sometimes, the anime shown was the uncut versions, showing that executives knew that it had a growing audience on it’s hands. There was also story lines, such as the spaceship being under attack and T.O.M being destroyed. It seemed like nothing could stop it, but a new block at night had started to become more popular. Adult Swim kept getting more and more air time and in 2008, T.O.M and the rest signed off for good.
April Fools
On 2012, people tuned in to see what April Fools prank Adult Swim would do on their programming. After a few minutes of The Room, viewers were suddenly faced with T.O.M once again. Toonami aired the rest of the night and the next day, Adult Swim asked on Twitter if people wanted it back. The answer was a resounding yes and Toonami returned permanently in 2013 in it’s former slot on Saturday night. The show now gets some of the latest anime and it’s continued existence shows the appetite Western audiences had for anime. Even if we had to stay up all night to watch it.