This. Adult Swim has always been background stuff for me, especially in my late teens & early 20s. When I wasn't living with my parents and finding episodes outside of cable became easier, I just stopped going.
I will say, AS has the best vibes of any block on tv and probably influenced my taste in music somewhere along the line.
Used to have it on 3-4 nights a week when I still lived at home.
Went to college in 2016, there was a dorm TV that we would have on Adult Swim on Saturday and Sunday nights (mostly for Jojo/DBZ and KOTH/Eric Andre/Rick and Morty) when I was a freshman and sophomore.
After that, I ended up moving into a place with only streaming + the block quickly turned to shit anyway (R&M, Eric Andre, and Toonami all unwatchable now).
when they kicked out the dude that was pushing Venture Bros, and now they're just greedy israelites that since Rick and Morty don't push any new media, even cancel Joe Pera or the whispering truth. They're really just the A24 of adult animation right now.
Adult Swim's ownership has changed hands twice in the past 7 years. All the old staff except Demarco and the one Harvey Birdman showrunner who's a corporate bootlicker has either been fired, quit, or retired from the industry entirely.
I got rid of cable in 2013, so aside from a short stint from 2016 to 2018, that's basically when I stopped watching.
Looking at the network now, doesn't look like I'm missing out on much.
It was always junk, if that werent the case they wouldnt have put a price hike on “premium” channels.
Shit, the more I think about it, its fricking stupid boomers used to pay to watch commercials. Tried watching South Park at a hotel a few years ago and I couldn’t believe how long those commercials break were.
Yeah but there used to be variation. Now it's all just:
It's all 1 show per channel, spammed 24 hours a day. If you don't like the one show, that channel is dead.
And ad breaks have definitely gotten longer over the decades. 80s - 00s shows that air in syndication have scenes cut out to make room for more commercials. I know some channels would even speed shows up.
Somewhere in the mid-2010s, I'd say. Went to college, and I didn't have a TV to plug in for cable. Later, around 2015, I got back to somewhere with cable, only to find that the block was basically Fox 3, and I had long since built up a dislike for those shows. The originals they showed were the same few, and they only ever seemed to show about an hour's worth a night. I keep trying to get back into watching it, but every time, I'm turned away by that 90% of the schedule being Fox reruns, and the hour of originals being Robot Chicken, or ones I've seen a thousand times over already. I don't get how they can sabotage streaming like they are, but then turn around and make such awful schedules on the channel. It's like they want the whole company to crash and burn. It's maddening.
The funny thing is that certain streaming services/Smart TVs have their own pseudo-cable channels meant to mimic the feeling of linear TV. And people actually watch it because it takes the pressure out of deciding which show, much less episode/season of that show to choose.
If Warner Bros Discovery were remotely intelligent they would set up a similar thing on Max. They're already simulcasting live sports there.
Hell, I don't understand why they don't just throw the Turner Classic Movies live feed onto Max. So much kino that you can't find on streaming. All ad-free.
You could easily conjure up a "linear TV" thing for nostalgia bait Cartoon Network-related stuff. Every day has a six-hour block repeated 4 times.
>Boomerang
Airs Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies, all the old Hanna-Barbera/Ruby-Spears stuff from the 60s through 80s, maybe occasional movies. They could do a "year" theme sometimes like the old Boomerang used to.
>Cartoon Network
Would basically run CN originals, with a heavier emphasis on the 90s and 00s shows. Could also show occasional movies too.
>Adult Swim
Same as above, emphasis mostly on the 00s shows, maybe they could do an hour of anime every day. And also run little bumps and shorts or the special feature clips mined from old DVDs. Or some of the music from the Adult Swim Records catalog.
NTA, but that's a good site. Sadly they had issues and stopped adding new bumps back in 2014, though I guess many would argue that even bumps past 2012 weren't too memorable anyways.
oh yeah.
I've been looking for a certain Bump and i still cant find the track
6 months ago
Anonymous
Do you know which bump it is? There are a few people out there on the internet who have continued finding the music for a lot of old bumps on that site, as well as finding bumps not on there and archiving them.
6 months ago
Anonymous
I know the bump it's in a compilation i have to find again, the main thing is that track they used, it was also used in this promo
You have no idea how long I've been looking for this
>almost every bump and track used in adult swim
up until 2014, so nearly a decade uncatalogued
i've been going through the entire site in chronological order and got to 2012 and there were still good jokes being made.
i've got about 7 gigs downloaded onto my harddrive, which is 2,212 bumps, and i plan on looking for post-2014 bumps on other sites
>The funny thing is that certain streaming services/Smart TVs have their own pseudo-cable channels meant to mimic the feeling of linear TV. And people actually watch it because it takes the pressure out of deciding which show, much less episode/season of that show to choose.
I was just thinking about this the other day. If I wanted to put effort into my entertainment, I'd just play videogames instead. And every streaming interface is just junk, making it a lot of effort.
Me, I got into [adult swim] in around '05, and comparing then to now just hurts. They always seemed to have something going on: A new show, some new anime picked up, a new Flash game, or some insane stunt like showing Gigantor, Astro Boy, Peewee, or Saved By The Bell. And they talked with the audience in a tone that at least felt like they were trying to actually entertain. It was really something else. Now, it's all the same episodes of the same 7 shows, with untouched stock video or some #relatable noise as bumps in between. I know it's not on them, but it even feels like ads now are alienating nonsense. I've looked up commercial break recordings from the mid-00s on YouTube, and sometimes those are almost more enjoyable than TV now. It's insane.
You could tell they really liked anime, I bet somebody in the office was real excited to show the world some cool stuff.
I remember checking out all the anime I never heard of from 2000-2008ish, back when anime was a lot less popular and we only had dial-up.
(Oh there they are
Summer 2006 was the greatest time to watch Adult Swim >Futurama >The Venture Bros. >Aqua Teen >Moral Orel >Boondocks >Space Ghost Coast to Coast >Sealab 2021 >Tom Goes to the Mayor >Metalocalypse >12 Oz Mouse >Home Movies >Squidbillies >Frisky Dingo >Family Guy >Tom Goes to the Mayor >The Oblongs >Mission Hill >Robot Chicken >Minoriteam >Harvey Birdman >Pee Wee's Playhouse >Inuyasha >Full Metal Alchemist >Neon Genesis Evangelion >The Big O >Ghost in the Shell >Samurai Champloo >Cowboy Bebop >Paranoia Agent >S-Cry-Ed >Trigun >Eureka 7 >Super Milk Chan >Cartoon Planet >Mr T. >Karate Commandos >Gigantor >Korgoth pilot >"Have it Your Way" fan takeover night
>You could tell they really liked anime
Them constantly getting more, and skewing towards the obscure definitely implies that, though their own words in bumps always made themselves out to really hate it. >Had a hateboner for Ranma though
Ironically, apparently DeMarco said in an interview in the past that he loves it. I'd assume it's a combination of the above ironic-salt and knowing full-well that Ranma would never, ever get on AS due to censorship/edits needed.
In-general, it seemed like they loved everything they were doing, from animating and anime acquiring to bump writing and web design (some of the splash-screens for the old AS site were trippy). It's just sad to see, especially in retrospect, the decline of that passion to where it stands today.
I got really bored with it around 2011ish. I had seen every Aqua Teen and robot Chicken episode already so I did not care to keep watching the same shit over and over again every night. And this is also when they were really leaning heavily into the liveaction stuff I never liked.
Fortunately this was around the time Hub came around so I switched over to watching 80s cartoons at midnight until that channel ended. By 2015 I did not even bother having cable and only streamed shit.
Me, I got into [adult swim] in around '05, and comparing then to now just hurts. They always seemed to have something going on: A new show, some new anime picked up, a new Flash game, or some insane stunt like showing Gigantor, Astro Boy, Peewee, or Saved By The Bell. And they talked with the audience in a tone that at least felt like they were trying to actually entertain. It was really something else. Now, it's all the same episodes of the same 7 shows, with untouched stock video or some #relatable noise as bumps in between. I know it's not on them, but it even feels like ads now are alienating nonsense. I've looked up commercial break recordings from the mid-00s on YouTube, and sometimes those are almost more enjoyable than TV now. It's insane.
Seems like everyone misses watching it to an extent, myself included. The bumps were always my favorite part of [as].
What if Cinemaphile made their own version of adult swim, could be like a live stream or something, and just played shows and bumps? It would be a cool Cinemaphilemmunity thing imo.
Summer 2006 was the greatest time to watch Adult Swim >Futurama >The Venture Bros. >Aqua Teen >Moral Orel >Boondocks >Space Ghost Coast to Coast >Sealab 2021 >Tom Goes to the Mayor >Metalocalypse >12 Oz Mouse >Home Movies >Squidbillies >Frisky Dingo >Family Guy >Tom Goes to the Mayor >The Oblongs >Mission Hill >Robot Chicken >Minoriteam >Harvey Birdman >Pee Wee's Playhouse >Inuyasha >Full Metal Alchemist >Neon Genesis Evangelion >The Big O >Ghost in the Shell >Samurai Champloo >Cowboy Bebop >Paranoia Agent >S-Cry-Ed >Trigun >Eureka 7 >Super Milk Chan >Cartoon Planet >Mr T. >Karate Commandos >Gigantor >Korgoth pilot >"Have it Your Way" fan takeover night
>1 hour of Fox, even on Sundays >Despite having 6 less hours, showed a wider variety of shows >Had room for old cartoons, old live-action shows, and anime, both current and black-and-white >Totally ignoring bumps and their website, which were also good
We were spoiled.
Unironically, the runaway success of Adult Swim from 2004/2005 onward + the Aqua Teen movie Boston bomb debacle + turbulent times for the entertainment industry circa 2007 - 2009 + losing Futurama created the recipe for a slow downward slide.
It's pretty sad. It felt like they still tried to have the same energy up until around the early- to mid-2010s. Then they just gave up. Like, the shows until the mid-10s felt fun, if not always to the level of their old shows. The bumps seemed to keep it up until around then too.
I agree. I feel like there was a slight rebound around 2012 - 2014
Some of their best April Fools pranks were in the first half of the 2010s.
There was some cool stuff like DVR Theater which gave a dedicated home to the earlier and weirder AS shows + stuff like "Off the Air" or "Too Many Cooks".
Some of the new shows like "Eric Andre", "Mike Tyson Mysteries", even "Rick and Morty" before the hype took off, were all pretty fun. And a lot of old shows were still on: "Aqua Teen" hadn't ended, "Boondocks" (though the last season was lame), "Metalocalypse" wasn't cancelled until 2015.
Also Toonami was fun the first couple years it returned.
They also did those streams on their site, too. I never really watched those a whole lot, but I've heard a lot of people loved them. They also had that short stint publishing games on Steam, like "Toejam & Earl: Back in the Groove". There was definitely still fun to be had in those years.
6 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah the streams were fun. Plus if you didn't like the hosted stuff like Fishcenter or SMB, there were always rotating, daily marathons of every AS show.
Adult Swim were one of the innovators of streaming too. They used to put stuff online on Fridays (because Adult Swim didn't air on Friday nights at the time) back in like 2005.
6 months ago
Anonymous
>They used to put stuff online on Fridays
Ahh, yes, "The Fix". Good times. It's too bad they killed that branding for the conglomerated thing they use now. Though they do still run marathons, but it has been the same handfull of shows for a long time.
6 months ago
Anonymous
Yeah at some point it morphed into something bigger (ie. "the Fix"/"AS Video") that was 7 days a week, sometimes shows would even premiere online before they hit TV. Strangely, I don't think it impacted the ratings too much (as streaming was a very niche/nerdy concept at that point). I think it lasted a few years before it just morphed into a general video section on the adult swim website (though shows were still free to watch; now they're mostly paywalled behind a cable subscription).
Anime and industry went bust in the mid- late 00s around the time the recession happened. US distribution companies folded and online pirate streaming sites flourished. Which basically meant that anime damn near disappeared off Adult Swim around 2009-2011.
For me, the logical answer is when my family stopped carrying cable packages that had it and moved onto streaming services.
The personal answer is that I got tired of watching Rick and Morty and American Dad reruns. I didn’t bother staying up late to watch whatever else they had.
Video Game streams on YouTube and Twitch completely mog [Adult Swim] or cable tv for that matter, let alone various YouTube animations or documentaries.
All that's on TV is commercials and "EVERYONE SHOULD CONSUME ALL PRODUCTS AND TAKE OUT A HIGH INTEREST LOAN" propaganda because banks and friends bought all the TV networks.
I never really watched it much, because most adult cartoons are shit. Just "le so random" humor, or "LOL SATAN". It's just unfunny garbage.
Aqua Teen was about the only thing in that genre I could tolerate, so I watched it. But I don't get the cartoon channels anymore, so I don't watch any of them anymore. Shit sucks, I hate being a poorgay.
Not counting toonami? Sometime in the last year since i'm burnt out on koth, sick of futurama, have learned to despise bob's brats, and the only new or recent things of worth were primal and unicorn.
Push the shit-eating block back to 10:00 PM.
Like, that was the last time I turned it on and was like "WHOA WHAT THE FRICK IS THIS?!" and then stuck around to see what it was and where it was going. Though, admittedly, that was itself a one-off. I wasn't into TV much at the time and it was pure happenstance that the spirit took me just then. So really it was BEFORE then, and maybe by years.
Anything airing there now, if I wanna see it, y'all homies don't shut up about it, I just download it.
Permanently when Family Guy left, but I was already on the edge of quitting when they stopped embracing the fact that they were Cartoon Network.
I don't even watch Checkered Past or Toonami despite them being 'CN' because I'm checked out now.
probably somewhere in the late 2010's, I think the lineup just didn't have anything new that appealed to me at the time. I appreciate that they still make bumps, they were one of the best channels for that back in the day.
On a related note, when did Adult Swim completely lose its soul?
It just feels very bland now. Not talking about edginess, I just can't imagine something like ATHF, Brak Show or 12 Oz. Mouse coming out today. At least not in its original forms.
The fact that things like that even exist as actual shows in the first place is surreal and honestly I loved it. Nowadays all we get is generic adult "comedies" with none of the feeling that the creators were on some really strong drugs making this shit (which I mean in the best possible way by the way).
Completely? Hard to say. I think most people might point to 2007, with the Boston Stupidity, and the ensuing changes from then. I would also consider 2010, when they got the 9PM hour and thus started at the tail-end of primetime. Or 2013, with Rick & Morty coming onto the scene, and ushering in a complete change in animation style for their shows. Or maybe 2015, with the sudden end to their evergreen Aqua Teen. You could probably even go later if you wanted; there's tons of weird decisions in AS's history.
Mike Lazzo retired in 2019 and then Keith Crofford in 2020. Hard to lose pretty much all of the core leadership who were there since the begining and not suffer for it.
>On a related note, when did Adult Swim completely lose its soul?
Well it was a long process of decline but there were signs along the way:
>New upper management above Lazzo & co. after Boston fiasco
2007 >Increased FOX show dominance and more static schedules
2009 >"Dawn is Your Enemy" bump retired
Sometime in 2010 >Expanding to 9PM Eastern to attract more of a normie audience
January 2011 >The Sunday night "numbers game" ratings bumps get retired
Ended sometime in 2011 >comfy tilt-shift nightime bumps w/ J Dilla beats got replaced
Last of those bumps disappeared in 2012 >*All Times and Music Eastern* schedule bumps
Also stopped around 2012 >Fox show overload (Cleveland Show picked up)
2012 >Adult Swim got rid of 4:3 for 16:9, even in the SD feed
Spring 2013 >Moved back to 8PM EST for even more normie audience
Spring 2014 >Adult Swim undergoes a styllistic brand revamp and gets rid of all existing bumps/music
Also Spring 2014 >New president of CN: Christina Miller
Summer 2014 >Boondocks final season is McGruder-less phoned-in cash crab
Spring/Summer 2014 >Metalocalypse cancelled
Sometime in 2014 >Aqua Teen cancelled
Sometime in early 2015 >ASMB gets revamped; older posts deleted
Summer 2015 >Older shows more-or-less vanish from the lineup completely
2015 >ASMB deleted for good
Fall 2016 >AT&T enters deal to buy Adult Swim parent company Time Warner, Inc.
Fall 2016
>Adult Swim ratings begin to noticeably decline
2017 in general >Rick and Morty becames a runaway success; sauce incident
Fall 2017 >AT&T buyout is completed
Summer of 2018 >Rick & Morty renewed for 100 episodes
Fall 2018 >Turner Broadcasting (which operates CN/Adult Swim) is dismantled by AT&T; new bosses in charge at cable division
Fall 2019 >Mike Lazzo retires
Fall 2019 >COVID happens, ratings fall off a cliff + production stalls
Spring 2020 >HBO Max launches; free AS shows are removed from site and put under paywall
Summer 2020 >Massive layoffs at Adult Swim/Cartoon Network
Summer 2020 >All streaming/online shows on Adult Swim's site abruptly cancelled & staff fired
Summer 2020 >Venture Bros. abruptly cancelled mid-way through Season 8 production by AT&T higher-ups
Fall 2020 >Keith Crofford, the other remaining high-up "day 1" Adult Swim member, retires
December 2020 >AT&T prepares to sell off media division and merge with Discovery Inc.
Spring 2021 >Toonami is basically on life support at this point, as production/dubbing on new shows falls months behind
Spring 2021 >Adult Swim Animation is shut down, staffmerged with new HBO Max production team
Spring 2021 >Squidbillies cancelled, with Early's voice actor replaced in final season due to controversy
Fall 2021 >Loses rights to Family Guy and begins squeezing extra ads during breaks, including credits
Fall 2021 >Adult Swim Singles program/Adult Swim Records shut down
Winter 2021 >Discovery Inc. officially buys and merges with WarnerMedia
Spring 2022 >Joe Pera Talks With You cancelled
Summer 2022 >9 other Adult Swim shows are cancelled and deleted from record as tax write-offs (meaning they are not on streaming or TV)
Summer 2022 >Discovery announces extreme cost-cutting measures and further layoffs
Summer 2022 >Adult Swim transitions to a skeleton crew, mural torn down
Fall 2022
>HBO Max rebrands to Max; linear TV division like Adult Swim see additional layoffs (there's basically only a handful of people left like Jason DeMarco and Michael Ouweleen, who has to manage like 5 different channels because Discovery merged 5 former jobs into 1 to save money)
Spring 2023 >Adult Swim moves up to 7PM EST to get more normie audience
Spring 2023 >Adult Swim moves up to 5PM EST to get a more normie audience
Summer 2023 >Certain Adult Swim shows like Metalocalypse and Space Ghost removed from Max, presumably due to lesser popularity
Summer 2023 >Cartoon Network Studios closes and Discovery Inc. takes control of Adult Swim operations and broadcasting, no longer truly based out of Atlanta
Summer 2023 >Starts airing old nostalgia-bait CN shows from the 90s in a last ditch effort for viewers
Fall 2023
Oh and I guess you can count zombie Rick and Morty airing a new season currently with totally different voices because of Justin Roiland being a nonce.
And that was supposed to be the big cash cow the network was riding on. They're totally fricked, just like all of cable TV. And streaming isn't in a much better place either honestly.
It's the weirdest thing. These companies shilled so hard with the "streaming is the ONE and ONLY future" thing, and then they turn around and immediately run all their services into the ground. And it's not like they just suddenly jumped into website hosting, or CDN management; These companies have been messing with this for decades, but when they finally commit to it, they suddenly fail miserably.
6 months ago
Anonymous
Simple really. They don't really care about providing a good consumer product and are largely incompetent. All that matters is shareholder profits. They've inherited dying TV companies, so basically they have no choice but to do streaming. But now there's so many services its not convenient for anybody, so they're just going to end up selling them for parts to some other willing buyer until it all ends up bundled together like cable.
The sad thing too is, they're making the same mistake as cable - maybe worse.
About 10 years ago, when streaming was first blowing up, it made sense. Netflix had a shit ton of recent and classic TV and their own originals that were pretty good, for a low price. And a zillion movies. Now there's like 15 different streamers, each with dwindling and ever-changing catalog, most of their originals are crap, and they're charging you way more than what you used to pay and are even starting to force ads into things.
The more complicated, painful, and expensive it becomes to deal with all this, the more people are just going to opt out.
6 months ago
Anonymous
The worst part is, all that said, they could just focus on making TV fun again (aka attractive to audiences), but they probably won't. I wouldn't mind whatever happens to streaming if I got an AS that was fun to tune into again. I personally have always thought TV could still survive just fine with streaming existing if they just cared about it, and sadly there's no way to prove it since all these channels suck anymore.
6 months ago
Anonymous
At the very least they could offer TV channel "streams" that are on 24/7 on these streaming services. It's not the same but it's something.
But yeah, there's really no thought put into this stuff anymore. Most channel on cable just air 12 hours of the same show on repeat. How quickly this has all changed.
is basically on life support at this point, as production/dubbing on new shows falls months behind
Toonami is beyond fricked. Their ratings in the mid-2010s were like over a million for a good chunk of their shows. Now there's like 40,000 people watching.
Streaming was already eating away their audience 10 years ago, but has basically devoured it. The schedule is absolutely dire and filled with reruns recently. Crunchyroll (which used to be Warner but was bought by Sony during the merger) and Netflix are keeping most of the good new anime to themselves. Since 2020, the schedule has been significantly shorter, like 3 hours only.
HBO Max/Discovery+ merger has been a disaster and it's trickling down hard. And now they're getting Cartoon Network rejects clearly meant for children (like that Superman show) or FLCL sequels nobody asked for or a Rick & Morty anime (that is currently in production).
Ratings info doesn't even come out regularly because the sites that used to publish them got b***hed at by WarnerMedia in 2021 because every single article every week would read things like "Down 30% from the same week last year". AKA they couldn't handle the truth and it made their company look bad.
More sites popped up to try to fill the void, but again in June 2023 Showbuzzdaily stopped all their ratings reports in general because basically every show outside of news or sports was getting like 0.01 ratings and 20,000 viewers in the 18-35 demo. And media companies were furious and decided to keep all these numbers internal.
Keep in mind the sites were just regurgitating what was being reported in Nielsen's subscription publication. It wasn't public knowledge per say unless you were in the TV industry.
>People discussing and analyzing TV ratings
Speaking of things I remember so vividly, from when I used to use the [adult swim] Message Boards. It's funny, though, how AS used to show the ratings for the top 3 shows of Saturday and Sunday on TV cause they were so proud of it. Now they're desperate to hide it.
>Adult Swim Animation is shut down >Spring 2021
You know, I never thought of that, but now Bento Box working on the second Aqua Teen movie makes sense. They probably don't even have any of the original resources to work on the show anymore. It sucks. The animation style was half the fun of watching.
I think the big difference is that Adult Swim consciously used to use the more mainstream shows (Futurama, Family Guy) as a way to help prop up their own originals, particularly the more weirder shows. As long as they were making a profit from FOX reruns and stuff like Aqua Teen, Robot Chicken, Boondocks, they could produce and air just bizarre shit like OzMo or Xavier or pick up weird British sketch shows that had more niche appeal.
But over the last decade, particularly in the last 5-7 years, it seems like they've just opted to only show the most mass appeal MOR shows all the time and ditch any outliers or potential liabilities. They only want the next Rick & Morty that they can fleece for a decade and hawk merch for. And that's why they're now reneging on these cancellations and bringing back old shows for a movie or short seasons - because they know the nostalgia factor is real and want to cash-in. None of their originals are worth any cop (maybe Smiling Friends) so they have to rely on ancient properties and normie bait to make ends meet.
The whole aesthetic of the network seems to have changed, much more sanitized and PC and just... normal.
I watched from around 2003 to 2011, my high school and college years. I stopped watching when I graduated, mainly because I was now paying for shit myself and cable wasn't a priority for me. I did keep up with Metalocalypse and the Venture Brothers, but I don't really consider that as "watching adult swim".
When it started airing at 9 pm in the evening.
when i got rid of cable, before that though kinda just drifted out
Same , by the time i got cable during the 2010's there was no reason to continue watching
This. Adult Swim has always been background stuff for me, especially in my late teens & early 20s. When I wasn't living with my parents and finding episodes outside of cable became easier, I just stopped going.
I will say, AS has the best vibes of any block on tv and probably influenced my taste in music somewhere along the line.
Around late high school, which was around the time Rick and Morty was gaining traction.
Tom's Black Lives Matter speech.
Moved out, I like to sleep and I can watch which ever show I want at my own time with my laptop.
Wut?
Nta but here
?si=aOpzRp2a7i4YsZvz
They could've just played the Equality speech... why did they feel the need to do this...
What were his main talking points?
I never paid for cable once I moved out in 2011 so I never saw CN after that outside of individual originals through streaming.
Used to have it on 3-4 nights a week when I still lived at home.
Went to college in 2016, there was a dorm TV that we would have on Adult Swim on Saturday and Sunday nights (mostly for Jojo/DBZ and KOTH/Eric Andre/Rick and Morty) when I was a freshman and sophomore.
After that, I ended up moving into a place with only streaming + the block quickly turned to shit anyway (R&M, Eric Andre, and Toonami all unwatchable now).
when they kicked out the dude that was pushing Venture Bros, and now they're just greedy israelites that since Rick and Morty don't push any new media, even cancel Joe Pera or the whispering truth. They're really just the A24 of adult animation right now.
Adult Swim's ownership has changed hands twice in the past 7 years. All the old staff except Demarco and the one Harvey Birdman showrunner who's a corporate bootlicker has either been fired, quit, or retired from the industry entirely.
Around the late 00s when I moved out and stopped having cable.
I got rid of cable in 2013, so aside from a short stint from 2016 to 2018, that's basically when I stopped watching.
Looking at the network now, doesn't look like I'm missing out on much.
Cable tv is just 100% junk now
It was always junk, if that werent the case they wouldnt have put a price hike on “premium” channels.
Shit, the more I think about it, its fricking stupid boomers used to pay to watch commercials. Tried watching South Park at a hotel a few years ago and I couldn’t believe how long those commercials break were.
>its fricking stupid boomers used to pay to watch commercials
People still do that today with streaming lol
Yeah but there used to be variation. Now it's all just:
And ad breaks have definitely gotten longer over the decades. 80s - 00s shows that air in syndication have scenes cut out to make room for more commercials. I know some channels would even speed shows up.
Damn, then they wonder why people would rather piracy.
It's all 1 show per channel, spammed 24 hours a day. If you don't like the one show, that channel is dead.
around 08, there was no reason to keep watching
I missed the early years before The Boston Bomb Scare
Somewhere in the mid-2010s, I'd say. Went to college, and I didn't have a TV to plug in for cable. Later, around 2015, I got back to somewhere with cable, only to find that the block was basically Fox 3, and I had long since built up a dislike for those shows. The originals they showed were the same few, and they only ever seemed to show about an hour's worth a night. I keep trying to get back into watching it, but every time, I'm turned away by that 90% of the schedule being Fox reruns, and the hour of originals being Robot Chicken, or ones I've seen a thousand times over already. I don't get how they can sabotage streaming like they are, but then turn around and make such awful schedules on the channel. It's like they want the whole company to crash and burn. It's maddening.
The funny thing is that certain streaming services/Smart TVs have their own pseudo-cable channels meant to mimic the feeling of linear TV. And people actually watch it because it takes the pressure out of deciding which show, much less episode/season of that show to choose.
If Warner Bros Discovery were remotely intelligent they would set up a similar thing on Max. They're already simulcasting live sports there.
Hell, I don't understand why they don't just throw the Turner Classic Movies live feed onto Max. So much kino that you can't find on streaming. All ad-free.
You could easily conjure up a "linear TV" thing for nostalgia bait Cartoon Network-related stuff. Every day has a six-hour block repeated 4 times.
>Boomerang
Airs Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes/Merry Melodies, all the old Hanna-Barbera/Ruby-Spears stuff from the 60s through 80s, maybe occasional movies. They could do a "year" theme sometimes like the old Boomerang used to.
>Cartoon Network
Would basically run CN originals, with a heavier emphasis on the 90s and 00s shows. Could also show occasional movies too.
>Adult Swim
Same as above, emphasis mostly on the 00s shows, maybe they could do an hour of anime every day. And also run little bumps and shorts or the special feature clips mined from old DVDs. Or some of the music from the Adult Swim Records catalog.
If it means anything there's a page named Bumpworthy it feature almost every bump and track used in adult swim
https://www.bumpworthy.com/
NTA, but that's a good site. Sadly they had issues and stopped adding new bumps back in 2014, though I guess many would argue that even bumps past 2012 weren't too memorable anyways.
oh yeah.
I've been looking for a certain Bump and i still cant find the track
Do you know which bump it is? There are a few people out there on the internet who have continued finding the music for a lot of old bumps on that site, as well as finding bumps not on there and archiving them.
I know the bump it's in a compilation i have to find again, the main thing is that track they used, it was also used in this promo
You have no idea how long I've been looking for this
There’s also [wsg] which is just a bunch of anons making their own bumps
>almost every bump and track used in adult swim
up until 2014, so nearly a decade uncatalogued
i've been going through the entire site in chronological order and got to 2012 and there were still good jokes being made.
i've got about 7 gigs downloaded onto my harddrive, which is 2,212 bumps, and i plan on looking for post-2014 bumps on other sites
Boomerang should be fairly easy since when Cartoon Network first launched in 1992, they had over 1,000 hours of old cartoons in their catalog.
Damn, i did i miss boomerang
>The funny thing is that certain streaming services/Smart TVs have their own pseudo-cable channels meant to mimic the feeling of linear TV. And people actually watch it because it takes the pressure out of deciding which show, much less episode/season of that show to choose.
I was just thinking about this the other day. If I wanted to put effort into my entertainment, I'd just play videogames instead. And every streaming interface is just junk, making it a lot of effort.
You could tell they really liked anime, I bet somebody in the office was real excited to show the world some cool stuff.
I remember checking out all the anime I never heard of from 2000-2008ish, back when anime was a lot less popular and we only had dial-up.
(Oh there they are
)
Had a hateboner for Ranma though.
>You could tell they really liked anime
Them constantly getting more, and skewing towards the obscure definitely implies that, though their own words in bumps always made themselves out to really hate it.
>Had a hateboner for Ranma though
Ironically, apparently DeMarco said in an interview in the past that he loves it. I'd assume it's a combination of the above ironic-salt and knowing full-well that Ranma would never, ever get on AS due to censorship/edits needed.
In-general, it seemed like they loved everything they were doing, from animating and anime acquiring to bump writing and web design (some of the splash-screens for the old AS site were trippy). It's just sad to see, especially in retrospect, the decline of that passion to where it stands today.
Definitely, a lot of passionate, creative people doing a lot with a little. If that makes sense.
Adversity and creativity and all that, yeah
I never started because by the time it was in Canada I wasn't watching TV at all
I got really bored with it around 2011ish. I had seen every Aqua Teen and robot Chicken episode already so I did not care to keep watching the same shit over and over again every night. And this is also when they were really leaning heavily into the liveaction stuff I never liked.
Fortunately this was around the time Hub came around so I switched over to watching 80s cartoons at midnight until that channel ended. By 2015 I did not even bother having cable and only streamed shit.
Me, I got into [adult swim] in around '05, and comparing then to now just hurts. They always seemed to have something going on: A new show, some new anime picked up, a new Flash game, or some insane stunt like showing Gigantor, Astro Boy, Peewee, or Saved By The Bell. And they talked with the audience in a tone that at least felt like they were trying to actually entertain. It was really something else. Now, it's all the same episodes of the same 7 shows, with untouched stock video or some #relatable noise as bumps in between. I know it's not on them, but it even feels like ads now are alienating nonsense. I've looked up commercial break recordings from the mid-00s on YouTube, and sometimes those are almost more enjoyable than TV now. It's insane.
Seems like everyone misses watching it to an extent, myself included. The bumps were always my favorite part of [as].
What if Cinemaphile made their own version of adult swim, could be like a live stream or something, and just played shows and bumps? It would be a cool Cinemaphilemmunity thing imo.
When they started shilling merch extra hard during bumps. I still pirated shows occasionally but I dropped cable entirely around then.
Summer 2006 was the greatest time to watch Adult Swim
>Futurama
>The Venture Bros.
>Aqua Teen
>Moral Orel
>Boondocks
>Space Ghost Coast to Coast
>Sealab 2021
>Tom Goes to the Mayor
>Metalocalypse
>12 Oz Mouse
>Home Movies
>Squidbillies
>Frisky Dingo
>Family Guy
>Tom Goes to the Mayor
>The Oblongs
>Mission Hill
>Robot Chicken
>Minoriteam
>Harvey Birdman
>Pee Wee's Playhouse
>Inuyasha
>Full Metal Alchemist
>Neon Genesis Evangelion
>The Big O
>Ghost in the Shell
>Samurai Champloo
>Cowboy Bebop
>Paranoia Agent
>S-Cry-Ed
>Trigun
>Eureka 7
>Super Milk Chan
>Cartoon Planet
>Mr T.
>Karate Commandos
>Gigantor
>Korgoth pilot
>"Have it Your Way" fan takeover night
>1 hour of Fox, even on Sundays
>Despite having 6 less hours, showed a wider variety of shows
>Had room for old cartoons, old live-action shows, and anime, both current and black-and-white
>Totally ignoring bumps and their website, which were also good
We were spoiled.
Unironically, the runaway success of Adult Swim from 2004/2005 onward + the Aqua Teen movie Boston bomb debacle + turbulent times for the entertainment industry circa 2007 - 2009 + losing Futurama created the recipe for a slow downward slide.
It's pretty sad. It felt like they still tried to have the same energy up until around the early- to mid-2010s. Then they just gave up. Like, the shows until the mid-10s felt fun, if not always to the level of their old shows. The bumps seemed to keep it up until around then too.
I agree. I feel like there was a slight rebound around 2012 - 2014
Some of their best April Fools pranks were in the first half of the 2010s.
There was some cool stuff like DVR Theater which gave a dedicated home to the earlier and weirder AS shows + stuff like "Off the Air" or "Too Many Cooks".
Some of the new shows like "Eric Andre", "Mike Tyson Mysteries", even "Rick and Morty" before the hype took off, were all pretty fun. And a lot of old shows were still on: "Aqua Teen" hadn't ended, "Boondocks" (though the last season was lame), "Metalocalypse" wasn't cancelled until 2015.
Also Toonami was fun the first couple years it returned.
They also did those streams on their site, too. I never really watched those a whole lot, but I've heard a lot of people loved them. They also had that short stint publishing games on Steam, like "Toejam & Earl: Back in the Groove". There was definitely still fun to be had in those years.
Yeah the streams were fun. Plus if you didn't like the hosted stuff like Fishcenter or SMB, there were always rotating, daily marathons of every AS show.
Adult Swim were one of the innovators of streaming too. They used to put stuff online on Fridays (because Adult Swim didn't air on Friday nights at the time) back in like 2005.
>They used to put stuff online on Fridays
Ahh, yes, "The Fix". Good times. It's too bad they killed that branding for the conglomerated thing they use now. Though they do still run marathons, but it has been the same handfull of shows for a long time.
Yeah at some point it morphed into something bigger (ie. "the Fix"/"AS Video") that was 7 days a week, sometimes shows would even premiere online before they hit TV. Strangely, I don't think it impacted the ratings too much (as streaming was a very niche/nerdy concept at that point). I think it lasted a few years before it just morphed into a general video section on the adult swim website (though shows were still free to watch; now they're mostly paywalled behind a cable subscription).
Anime and industry went bust in the mid- late 00s around the time the recession happened. US distribution companies folded and online pirate streaming sites flourished. Which basically meant that anime damn near disappeared off Adult Swim around 2009-2011.
For me, the logical answer is when my family stopped carrying cable packages that had it and moved onto streaming services.
The personal answer is that I got tired of watching Rick and Morty and American Dad reruns. I didn’t bother staying up late to watch whatever else they had.
A lot of people stopped when Family Guy left.
I wished i saw that
Video Game streams on YouTube and Twitch completely mog [Adult Swim] or cable tv for that matter, let alone various YouTube animations or documentaries.
All that's on TV is commercials and "EVERYONE SHOULD CONSUME ALL PRODUCTS AND TAKE OUT A HIGH INTEREST LOAN" propaganda because banks and friends bought all the TV networks.
I never really watched it much, because most adult cartoons are shit. Just "le so random" humor, or "LOL SATAN". It's just unfunny garbage.
Aqua Teen was about the only thing in that genre I could tolerate, so I watched it. But I don't get the cartoon channels anymore, so I don't watch any of them anymore. Shit sucks, I hate being a poorgay.
Not counting toonami? Sometime in the last year since i'm burnt out on koth, sick of futurama, have learned to despise bob's brats, and the only new or recent things of worth were primal and unicorn.
Push the shit-eating block back to 10:00 PM.
I still watch the shows but I stopped watching cable in general around the late 2010s when I just started streaming/pirating everything.
When was the first season of Tender Touches?
Like, that was the last time I turned it on and was like "WHOA WHAT THE FRICK IS THIS?!" and then stuck around to see what it was and where it was going. Though, admittedly, that was itself a one-off. I wasn't into TV much at the time and it was pure happenstance that the spirit took me just then. So really it was BEFORE then, and maybe by years.
Anything airing there now, if I wanna see it, y'all homies don't shut up about it, I just download it.
I still watch it for American Dad/King of the Hill/ATHF reruns. I haven't been a "fan" since about 2020 though
Permanently when Family Guy left, but I was already on the edge of quitting when they stopped embracing the fact that they were Cartoon Network.
I don't even watch Checkered Past or Toonami despite them being 'CN' because I'm checked out now.
Checkered Past came years too late. TeenNick was already doing "The Splat" (aka late night 90s nostalgia block) back in 2015.
Yuck post
Why post itt if you don’t care about or even respect them enough to acknowledge they’re not just the family guy network and CN’s conjoined fetish.
probably somewhere in the late 2010's, I think the lineup just didn't have anything new that appealed to me at the time. I appreciate that they still make bumps, they were one of the best channels for that back in the day.
When ATHF ended.
On a related note, when did Adult Swim completely lose its soul?
It just feels very bland now. Not talking about edginess, I just can't imagine something like ATHF, Brak Show or 12 Oz. Mouse coming out today. At least not in its original forms.
The fact that things like that even exist as actual shows in the first place is surreal and honestly I loved it. Nowadays all we get is generic adult "comedies" with none of the feeling that the creators were on some really strong drugs making this shit (which I mean in the best possible way by the way).
Completely? Hard to say. I think most people might point to 2007, with the Boston Stupidity, and the ensuing changes from then. I would also consider 2010, when they got the 9PM hour and thus started at the tail-end of primetime. Or 2013, with Rick & Morty coming onto the scene, and ushering in a complete change in animation style for their shows. Or maybe 2015, with the sudden end to their evergreen Aqua Teen. You could probably even go later if you wanted; there's tons of weird decisions in AS's history.
Mike Lazzo retired in 2019 and then Keith Crofford in 2020. Hard to lose pretty much all of the core leadership who were there since the begining and not suffer for it.
>On a related note, when did Adult Swim completely lose its soul?
Well it was a long process of decline but there were signs along the way:
>New upper management above Lazzo & co. after Boston fiasco
2007
>Increased FOX show dominance and more static schedules
2009
>"Dawn is Your Enemy" bump retired
Sometime in 2010
>Expanding to 9PM Eastern to attract more of a normie audience
January 2011
>The Sunday night "numbers game" ratings bumps get retired
Ended sometime in 2011
>comfy tilt-shift nightime bumps w/ J Dilla beats got replaced
Last of those bumps disappeared in 2012
>*All Times and Music Eastern* schedule bumps
Also stopped around 2012
>Fox show overload (Cleveland Show picked up)
2012
>Adult Swim got rid of 4:3 for 16:9, even in the SD feed
Spring 2013
>Moved back to 8PM EST for even more normie audience
Spring 2014
>Adult Swim undergoes a styllistic brand revamp and gets rid of all existing bumps/music
Also Spring 2014
>New president of CN: Christina Miller
Summer 2014
>Boondocks final season is McGruder-less phoned-in cash crab
Spring/Summer 2014
>Metalocalypse cancelled
Sometime in 2014
>Aqua Teen cancelled
Sometime in early 2015
>ASMB gets revamped; older posts deleted
Summer 2015
>Older shows more-or-less vanish from the lineup completely
2015
>ASMB deleted for good
Fall 2016
>AT&T enters deal to buy Adult Swim parent company Time Warner, Inc.
Fall 2016
>Adult Swim ratings begin to noticeably decline
2017 in general
>Rick and Morty becames a runaway success; sauce incident
Fall 2017
>AT&T buyout is completed
Summer of 2018
>Rick & Morty renewed for 100 episodes
Fall 2018
>Turner Broadcasting (which operates CN/Adult Swim) is dismantled by AT&T; new bosses in charge at cable division
Fall 2019
>Mike Lazzo retires
Fall 2019
>COVID happens, ratings fall off a cliff + production stalls
Spring 2020
>HBO Max launches; free AS shows are removed from site and put under paywall
Summer 2020
>Massive layoffs at Adult Swim/Cartoon Network
Summer 2020
>All streaming/online shows on Adult Swim's site abruptly cancelled & staff fired
Summer 2020
>Venture Bros. abruptly cancelled mid-way through Season 8 production by AT&T higher-ups
Fall 2020
>Keith Crofford, the other remaining high-up "day 1" Adult Swim member, retires
December 2020
>AT&T prepares to sell off media division and merge with Discovery Inc.
Spring 2021
>Toonami is basically on life support at this point, as production/dubbing on new shows falls months behind
Spring 2021
>Adult Swim Animation is shut down, staffmerged with new HBO Max production team
Spring 2021
>Squidbillies cancelled, with Early's voice actor replaced in final season due to controversy
Fall 2021
>Loses rights to Family Guy and begins squeezing extra ads during breaks, including credits
Fall 2021
>Adult Swim Singles program/Adult Swim Records shut down
Winter 2021
>Discovery Inc. officially buys and merges with WarnerMedia
Spring 2022
>Joe Pera Talks With You cancelled
Summer 2022
>9 other Adult Swim shows are cancelled and deleted from record as tax write-offs (meaning they are not on streaming or TV)
Summer 2022
>Discovery announces extreme cost-cutting measures and further layoffs
Summer 2022
>Adult Swim transitions to a skeleton crew, mural torn down
Fall 2022
>HBO Max rebrands to Max; linear TV division like Adult Swim see additional layoffs (there's basically only a handful of people left like Jason DeMarco and Michael Ouweleen, who has to manage like 5 different channels because Discovery merged 5 former jobs into 1 to save money)
Spring 2023
>Adult Swim moves up to 7PM EST to get more normie audience
Spring 2023
>Adult Swim moves up to 5PM EST to get a more normie audience
Summer 2023
>Certain Adult Swim shows like Metalocalypse and Space Ghost removed from Max, presumably due to lesser popularity
Summer 2023
>Cartoon Network Studios closes and Discovery Inc. takes control of Adult Swim operations and broadcasting, no longer truly based out of Atlanta
Summer 2023
>Starts airing old nostalgia-bait CN shows from the 90s in a last ditch effort for viewers
Fall 2023
Oh and I guess you can count zombie Rick and Morty airing a new season currently with totally different voices because of Justin Roiland being a nonce.
And that was supposed to be the big cash cow the network was riding on. They're totally fricked, just like all of cable TV. And streaming isn't in a much better place either honestly.
Very bleak time for media.
It's the weirdest thing. These companies shilled so hard with the "streaming is the ONE and ONLY future" thing, and then they turn around and immediately run all their services into the ground. And it's not like they just suddenly jumped into website hosting, or CDN management; These companies have been messing with this for decades, but when they finally commit to it, they suddenly fail miserably.
Simple really. They don't really care about providing a good consumer product and are largely incompetent. All that matters is shareholder profits. They've inherited dying TV companies, so basically they have no choice but to do streaming. But now there's so many services its not convenient for anybody, so they're just going to end up selling them for parts to some other willing buyer until it all ends up bundled together like cable.
The sad thing too is, they're making the same mistake as cable - maybe worse.
About 10 years ago, when streaming was first blowing up, it made sense. Netflix had a shit ton of recent and classic TV and their own originals that were pretty good, for a low price. And a zillion movies. Now there's like 15 different streamers, each with dwindling and ever-changing catalog, most of their originals are crap, and they're charging you way more than what you used to pay and are even starting to force ads into things.
The more complicated, painful, and expensive it becomes to deal with all this, the more people are just going to opt out.
The worst part is, all that said, they could just focus on making TV fun again (aka attractive to audiences), but they probably won't. I wouldn't mind whatever happens to streaming if I got an AS that was fun to tune into again. I personally have always thought TV could still survive just fine with streaming existing if they just cared about it, and sadly there's no way to prove it since all these channels suck anymore.
At the very least they could offer TV channel "streams" that are on 24/7 on these streaming services. It's not the same but it's something.
But yeah, there's really no thought put into this stuff anymore. Most channel on cable just air 12 hours of the same show on repeat. How quickly this has all changed.
is basically on life support at this point, as production/dubbing on new shows falls months behind
Toonami is beyond fricked. Their ratings in the mid-2010s were like over a million for a good chunk of their shows. Now there's like 40,000 people watching.
Streaming was already eating away their audience 10 years ago, but has basically devoured it. The schedule is absolutely dire and filled with reruns recently. Crunchyroll (which used to be Warner but was bought by Sony during the merger) and Netflix are keeping most of the good new anime to themselves. Since 2020, the schedule has been significantly shorter, like 3 hours only.
HBO Max/Discovery+ merger has been a disaster and it's trickling down hard. And now they're getting Cartoon Network rejects clearly meant for children (like that Superman show) or FLCL sequels nobody asked for or a Rick & Morty anime (that is currently in production).
Ratings info doesn't even come out regularly because the sites that used to publish them got b***hed at by WarnerMedia in 2021 because every single article every week would read things like "Down 30% from the same week last year". AKA they couldn't handle the truth and it made their company look bad.
More sites popped up to try to fill the void, but again in June 2023 Showbuzzdaily stopped all their ratings reports in general because basically every show outside of news or sports was getting like 0.01 ratings and 20,000 viewers in the 18-35 demo. And media companies were furious and decided to keep all these numbers internal.
Keep in mind the sites were just regurgitating what was being reported in Nielsen's subscription publication. It wasn't public knowledge per say unless you were in the TV industry.
>People discussing and analyzing TV ratings
Speaking of things I remember so vividly, from when I used to use the [adult swim] Message Boards. It's funny, though, how AS used to show the ratings for the top 3 shows of Saturday and Sunday on TV cause they were so proud of it. Now they're desperate to hide it.
>Adult Swim Animation is shut down
>Spring 2021
You know, I never thought of that, but now Bento Box working on the second Aqua Teen movie makes sense. They probably don't even have any of the original resources to work on the show anymore. It sucks. The animation style was half the fun of watching.
I think the big difference is that Adult Swim consciously used to use the more mainstream shows (Futurama, Family Guy) as a way to help prop up their own originals, particularly the more weirder shows. As long as they were making a profit from FOX reruns and stuff like Aqua Teen, Robot Chicken, Boondocks, they could produce and air just bizarre shit like OzMo or Xavier or pick up weird British sketch shows that had more niche appeal.
But over the last decade, particularly in the last 5-7 years, it seems like they've just opted to only show the most mass appeal MOR shows all the time and ditch any outliers or potential liabilities. They only want the next Rick & Morty that they can fleece for a decade and hawk merch for. And that's why they're now reneging on these cancellations and bringing back old shows for a movie or short seasons - because they know the nostalgia factor is real and want to cash-in. None of their originals are worth any cop (maybe Smiling Friends) so they have to rely on ancient properties and normie bait to make ends meet.
The whole aesthetic of the network seems to have changed, much more sanitized and PC and just... normal.
when they stopped showing inuyasha reruns
I watched from around 2003 to 2011, my high school and college years. I stopped watching when I graduated, mainly because I was now paying for shit myself and cable wasn't a priority for me. I did keep up with Metalocalypse and the Venture Brothers, but I don't really consider that as "watching adult swim".