ANIME: Why Isn’t There Different Anime On TV?

Harper Kingsley - Author of sci-fi and fantasy, loves to babble about books, movies, comics, and whatever

WHY ISN’T THERE DIFFERENT ANIME ON TV?

I love to watch anime, but there’s very little of it that I want to watch on TV. Everything lately just seems geared toward dudes and there’s very little girls programming.

I enjoy watching mechas and battling toys or whatever sometimes, but after you’ve seen “Fullmetal Alchemist,” “Death Note,” “Dragonball Z,” and “Yugi-oh” all the way through, you start craving a new show line up. You want to see something in a different genre.

I remember when I was a kid, rushing home from school to watch “Sailor Moon.” It was like the girls version of Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles — the can’t miss show — which I also watched. There were pretty princesses having girl problems, arguing with each other, winning through the day with the power of friendship, and they got to beat up beautiful baddies. It actually kind of seems like an early rendition of the last season of Buffy when there were a bunch of Slayers, only they were planetary space princesses that killed youkai.

Then a few years after “Sailor Moon,” there started being episodes of “Inuyasha” and “Cardcaptor Sakura” to watch. There was “Hamtaro” for a chunklet of nothing but cute fluff. My childhood was filled with awesome anime that was neither too childish or 100% action or angst or whatever “Death Note” is.

Nowadays there’s nothing I really want to watch. I’ve either watched all of the episodes already or I just don’t care. I don’t want to watch “Pokemon” or any other show involving balls or cards or games and nothing much else. There’s Toonami back again, but it’s nothing I want to see, and rather than showing all of “Fullmetal Alchemist,” then switching to another show, they just repeat the series again. Over and over and over.

More anime needs to be available on regular American TV. Maybe there needs to be a whole nother cartoon channel, one that shows anime and live action anime shows, but doesn’t slip into the trap Cartoon Network has fallen into lately in making cheap live action shows with no tie-in to, you know, cartoons. And everyone has pretty much heard my hate rant about the current live actions shows on Cartoon Network, so we’re not even going to go into that.

It would be nice to be able to watch shows like “Paradise Kiss,” “Ouran High School Host Club,” “Serial Experiments Lain,” “Ranma,” “YuYu Hakusho,” and “Yami no Matsuei” on the TV. (By the way, YnM needs more episodes. I need MOAR!)

I like being able to watch anime mixed in with regular shows and I like to watch shows on the TV, not on my computer. It doesn’t tie up my computer and everyone in the room can watch it on the big screen, and I like the idea of channels.  I like being able to watch a bunch of different shows and not having to go through and pick and choose what I’m going to watch. I like to have a pre-set schedule so I can just turn on the TV and start watching.

I wish Netflix offered dedicated channels of shows as feeds you could have on a playlist you make. Like you pick a number of shows you want to have listed on your personal channel, and the list would show one episode of each show. That way you can watch the episodes in order.

My dream playlist:

Big Bang Theory

Venture Brothers

South Park

Metalocalypse

Sailor Moon

House

Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Family Guy

American Dad

Criminal Minds

CSI: Crime Scene Investigators (Vegas)

Bones

Breaking Bad

Robot Chicken

Recess

Megas XLR

Looney Toons (the new one. I seriously love it)

Animaniacs

Tiny Toon Adventures

Mad TV

Spongebob Squarepants

Absolutely Fabulous

Franklin & Bash

Rizzoli & Isles

Cupcake Wars

I find that even though I love watching serialized shows, once I see all the episodes and the series is wrapped up, I feel no real desire to watch the show again. Meanwhile, the shows that have largely disconnected episodes are shows that I can happily watch time after time.

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