Toonami Was Cancelled in 2008. An April Fools' Joke Brought It Back in 2012.
By Jimigrimm
If you had Toonami on the night of September 20, 2008, you got two episodes of Naruto at 9, Ben 10: Alien Force at 10 and Samurai Jack at 10:30. Then TOM came on and said goodbye. Cartoon Network had announced the end of Toonami earlier that same day at Anime Weekend Atlanta, and that night’s block was the last one.
The block that brought Dragon Ball Z, Gundam Wing and Sailor Moon to American kids after school went out on a Western cartoon in a two-hour Saturday slot, with Naruto as the only anime left on the schedule. Three and a half years later it came back because of a joke. Adult Swim brought Toonami back for one night on April Fools’ Day 2012, the response got the network to ask for a weekly version, and it’s still on the air in November 2026.
Toonami Ruled Weekday Afternoons
Toonami launched on Cartoon Network on March 17, 1997. By 2003 it ran Monday through Friday from 5 to 7 p.m. A Turner release built on Nielsen numbers for the week of March 17 to 23, 2003, had it averaging 734,000 viewers ages 9 to 14, up 24% from the same week a year earlier, with Dragon Ball Z and Rurouni Kenshin featured in the release. That’s one week, not a yearly average, but it shows where the block stood.
On April 17, 2004, Toonami left weekdays. Cartoon Network moved it to Saturday nights from 7 to 11, and a new block called Miguzi took the afternoons starting April 19. The network didn’t sell it as a step down. Jim Samples, Cartoon Network’s general manager at the time, told Animation World Network that “we’ve created a new Saturday night destination just for it.” The plan was premieres, with Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, Gundam SEED, Rurouni Kenshin and Transformers: Energon on the roster.
The first year on Saturdays looked good on paper. Cartoon Network’s 2004 year-end report credited Saturday Toonami with 513,000 viewers ages 9 to 14, up 16%. That number comes from a different time slot and a different measuring window than the 2003 week, so you can’t subtract one from the other and call it a loss. What did change is that Toonami stopped being something kids came home to every day. Toonami co-creator Jason DeMarco later named losing the weekday slot as one of the things that wore the block down.
Cartoon Network Was Changing Around It
The network went through a shake-up in 2007. Samples resigned on February 9, 2007, after the controversy over an Aqua Teen Hunger Force promotion in Boston. On May 2, 2007, Turner named Stuart Snyder executive vice president and COO over Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and the rest of its animation and kids business.
The programming was changing too. At its February 2007 upfront, Cartoon Network announced new animated shows like Chowder and Flapjack next to a live-action hybrid called Re-Animated. By April 2008, its action shows had a new home. Cartoon Network built Friday nights around Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Ben 10: Alien Force and The Secret Saturdays. “Friday nights are going to become fantasy-adventure night,” chief content officer Rob Sorcher told TVWeek on April 6, 2008.
The popular version of this story is that Cartoon Network gave up on cartoons for live action. The record doesn’t back that up. The same plans that added live action kept paying for new animation. What changed was where the network put its biggest new action shows, and that was Friday nights.
The Dark Age
Cartoon Network never called it the Dark Age. That’s a fan name. Fans on Toonzone were using it by 2015 for the stretch from March 17, 2007, to September 20, 2008, and who came up with it first isn’t on the record. We touched on it in Every Era of Toonami Brought Something Different.
It started on Toonami’s tenth anniversary, March 17, 2007, with TOM 4. The redesign gave TOM a more expressive face and a crew of companion robots, a big change from the space host fans knew. There’s a rumor that the redesign helped kill the block. Nothing on the record supports it.
Early 2007 still looked like a full block. On February 3, 2007, the four hours ran Pokémon Battle Frontier, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Teen Titans, a Naruto rerun, a new Naruto, One Piece, The Prince of Tennis and MÄR. That summer, Fantastic Four took the 9:30 slot, and Storm Hawks replaced it on July 21.
On October 13, 2007, the 7 to 9 hours disappeared. Toonami was down to two hours, 9 to 11, with Naruto, Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, One Piece and Dragon Ball Z, and a week later Bobobo was swapped for more Naruto. One Piece, which Funimation had only brought to Toonami in 2007, aired for the last time on March 15, 2008. By spring the block was two episodes of Naruto, Blue Dragon and Samurai Jack, and in late May, Ben 10: Alien Force took Blue Dragon’s spot.
The schedule wasn’t all reruns. Some shows were premieres, though “new” often meant new to Toonami, not newly made. Toonami also ran a Klik Tour and sweepstakes in the summer of 2007, so it got some promotion. DeMarco later described promotion that kept shrinking, and no budget numbers have ever been made public to measure it.
Toonami Was Streaming Anime In 2006
Before the TV block shrank, Toonami was already online. On April 25, 2006, Cartoon Network and VIZ Media announced Toonami Jetstream, a joint venture that streamed full episodes for free on a website, paid for by ads. It wasn’t a channel or a paid subscription. The announced lineup included Naruto, Samurai Jack, Hikaru no Go, MÄR and The Prince of Tennis, and some of those shows weren’t on American TV at the time. An August report also listed Megas XLR.
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Jetstream went live in July 2006. That August, VIZ reported 9.5 million streams in the first four weeks and an average of 725,000 visitors a week. Those are the companies’ own numbers, and a stream is a play, not a person.
Jetstream outlived the TV block. It kept running after September 20, 2008, and shut down on January 30, 2009, according to AnimeNation, with Naruto staying available on Cartoon Network Video. Why it closed was never explained publicly.
Why Cartoon Network Ended It
DeMarco was already unsure about the future in July 2008. In a July 9, 2008, interview with a Toonami fan site, he said about the block, “I’m not sure how long we will have it.” He also said finding shows had gotten harder, and on acquisitions he said, “We are also not a part of that process.” The original interview is offline now. Those lines survive because fans quoted them in forum threads at the time.
On September 20, 2008, Cartoon Network announced at Anime Weekend Atlanta that Toonami would end that night. Anime News Network reported that Naruto was the only anime left on the block. Two days later, AnimeNation reported the reason as declining viewership, but it didn’t publish any ratings to show it. No Cartoon Network or Turner executive has gone on record explaining the decision.
What holds up is a mix of causes. AnimeNation reported falling viewership. The schedule shows the block cut in half in October 2007. DeMarco said in July 2008 that his team was out of the acquisitions process. In Complex’s oral history of Toonami in 2017, he pointed to losing the weekday slot, less promotion and “our network having different priorities,” along with the anime home video market pulling back after the earlier boom. He offered that as his read looking back, not as a memo from 2008, and how much each cause weighed is unknown.
The ratings story has a catch. A Cynopsis chart for September 15 to 21, 2008, reposted on Toonzone, had the 9:30 Naruto on the final night at 730,000 viewers ages 12 to 17 and the 9:00 Naruto at 689,000. Those are teen viewers, not total viewers, and two episodes can’t explain the money behind a whole block. Still, a lot of teenagers were watching the night it ended.
The Last Night
Samurai Jack’s “Jack’s Sandals” was the last show of the original Toonami. After it, TOM thanked the audience and left the door open to meet again. A fan on Toonzone who transcribed it that night wrote the last line down as “And so, until we meet again… Stay Gold. Bang.”
Fans in that same thread caught the Cowboy Bebop reference right away. Steve Blum, the voice of TOM and of Spike Spiegel, told Complex in 2017, “Saying ‘Bang’ in that last broadcast on September 20, 2008, broke my heart.”
The Beat covered the shutdown on September 22, and its comments had readers saying the lineup had lost what made it Toonami. Some weren’t sure whether ending the block meant losing the shows too.
The April Fools' Night That Brought It Back
Anime didn’t leave Adult Swim when Toonami ended. Bleach was already running there, and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood premiered on Adult Swim at midnight on the February 13, 2010, broadcast night. Fans kept pushing for the block, too. By October 26, 2008, a PokéCommunity thread was telling people to write Cartoon Network and Turner. What was gone was Toonami itself, TOM and the way the block put the shows together.
The return started as a joke. In a 2013 interview with Review Or Die, DeMarco said Adult Swim’s Mike Lazzo and programming executive Kim Manning came to him and Gill Austin about reusing the old Toonami packaging for April Fools’ Day. DeMarco and Austin pitched making new material instead of just replaying the archive.
After midnight on Saturday, March 31, 2012, which made it April 1, Adult Swim ran a new episode of Bleach under the Toonami banner. Then it kept going with Dragon Ball Z, Gundam Wing, Tenchi Muyo!, Outlaw Star, The Big O, Yu Yu Hakusho, Blue Submarine No. 6, Trigun, Astro Boy and Gigantor. On April 2, Adult Swim asked viewers to use #BringBackToonami.
DeMarco said that after the April Fools’ night, Lazzo asked them to look into a weekly block on a small budget. “We had to figure out how to build a weekly 6 hour block with very little money,” DeMarco said. On May 16, 2012, Adult Swim announced Toonami was coming back “in response to overwhelming fan enthusiasm and devotion.” The fans supplied the response, DeMarco’s team built a version cheap enough to work, and Lazzo approved it.
Toonami came back for good on May 26, 2012, from midnight to 6 a.m. Six hours was really three hours of shows run twice: Bleach, Deadman Wonderland, Casshern Sins, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG and Cowboy Bebop, then the same six again. Deadman Wonderland and Casshern Sins were the new pickups. The audience grew in week two. Ratings tables fans posted at the time, credited to the Son of the Bronx blog, had Bleach going from 1,060,000 total viewers on the first night to 1,274,000 on June 2, and Deadman Wonderland going from 860,000 to 1,107,000.
Toonami Is Still On The Air
The revival has lasted more than 14 years, far longer than the Dark Age did. Akame ga Kill’s Toonami debut in 2015 drew 1,822,000 viewers, according to a Toonami Faithful ratings roundup. In March 2016, Adult Swim and Production I.G announced two new seasons of FLCL, which meant Adult Swim was helping make anime, not just licensing it. On March 11, 2017, a new season of Samurai Jack premiered on Adult Swim, the same show that closed out the original Toonami in 2008.
In 2024, Adult Swim added a Friday afternoon side block called Toonami Rewind, with Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z Kai and Naruto. It ran from May 31 until December 27, and the Saturday block kept going. Since then, Toonami has premiered Shinichirō Watanabe’s Lazarus on April 5, 2025, Rooster Fighter on March 14, 2026, and DC’s Get Jiro on October 3, 2026. The November 7, 2026, lineup ran Get Jiro, Wind Breaker, Gachiakuta, One Piece, IGPX, Lazarus and Blue Exorcist: Kyoto Saga from midnight to 4 a.m. One Piece, the show that left the block in March 2008, is back on it.
What's On The Record And What Isn't
Confirmed: the 2004 move to Saturdays and the network’s stated reason, Jetstream’s launch and partners, DeMarco’s account of how the April Fools’ broadcast turned into a weekly block, and Adult Swim’s May 2012 announcement crediting the fans. Reported by period outlets and fan archives: the October 2007 cut to two hours, the September 20, 2008 announcement at Anime Weekend Atlanta, the declining-viewership explanation, the final night’s lineup and TOM’s last line, and the 2012 ratings.
Not established: Toonami’s ratings averages for 2007 and 2008, what the block cost or earned, what Cartoon Network paid for licenses, and how much each cause weighed in the final decision. A few popular stories don’t hold up either. Nothing shows that TOM 4’s redesign, Naruto filler or one executive who hated anime killed the block, and there’s no verified count of #BringBackToonami tweets. Treat those as rumors and theories.
Did you see the last broadcast in 2008, or find out after Toonami was already gone? And looking back at that final lineup, was the Dark Age as bad as the name, or did Naruto, Ben 10 and Samurai Jack deserve more credit?
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