We’ve finally made it to one year of Toonami on Adult Swim and along with that we can now compare Toonami 2013 to Toonami 2012 instead of a quite frankly weak Adult Swim Action line-up which was mostly reruns and running on auto-pilot. Unfortunately I was not able to obtain the 18-49 ratings this week but if we get them next week we might be able to get May 25th ratings as well. Please leave us your comments and suggestions and thanks for reading.
Ambient Virus’ Assessment:
Another week of poor total viewers and a rather strange double drop as well. Again it’s another non-million week for Toonami but given it was Memorial Day weekend I could place the blame at people being outside and eating burgers. Not much to say overall but regardless, assessment time!
Per Slot: More loss than gains this week with it being kind of a roller coaster with the ups and downs and some rather strange outcomes. Two major points of this part is the drop between Naruto and One Piece at 189k and Soul Eater to IGPX at 198k. Soul Eater to IGPX is something to be expected since it’s just after the “Shonen Jump” beginning and people tend to leave either for sleep or other things. One Piece is another story all together given its popularity. That kind of hit is not good that early on from a public standpoint, HH is another matter altogether. After that, the ratings stayed at a normal drop of 30k and a gain of 60k for the rest of the night.
Per Week: Actually a good gain overall with many late night shows gaining over 100k. Even IGPX managed to pull itself out of the hole from last week with a 56k increase, which could be better but given its time slot it’s more of a push to get people to stay up. The big notice again is One Piece which lost a massive 286k from last week. The only other drop was with Soul Eater with lost 130k from last week. A nice gain after last week’s slight dip so week up the eyes of the TVs.
Per Year: Back to the beginning again! Given that at this time last year we were all giddy for Toonami’s return, it’s nice to see that we are all still watching and enjoying the show. Only a few shows failed to beat last year: Bleach, One Piece, IGPX, and Eureka 7. Only one is a real surprise since Bleach was a the semi-good warm to the 4th movie Hellverse, IGPX was fighting against GITS, hard pick there, and Eureka 7 was against Bebop. One Piece failing to beat Casshern Sin’s premiere? I’m personally shocked. Given that CS had a bit of a hard time getting fans IMO, though nothing like GXP, and OP is one of the Big 3 you’d figure it would have beaten it by a lot, but somehow failed by 39k. Not saying it’s a major issue but it’s rather strange that OP would lose to anything.
Overall: The One Piece drop is rather strange given the popularity of the show, not sure if I would say it’s a bad thing since the HH of .7 is still acceptable for that slot. However, that’s the ONLY thing I would say made that acceptable since by all other public, not network, viewpoints, it’s rather pathetic for the mighty One Piece. The only reason I could guess is the horrible clip show Naruto filler sucking the life from the viewers and having them leave until they were sure something new was coming on. Beyond that the other slots did about as much as you would expect with minor drops or gains for the later parts of the night. So good overall but OP took a random cannon-shot in the gut with IGPX taking the splinters later on.
Hopefully One Piece will rebuild and prepare for the next boarding cause beyond HH, it really needs it. IGPX is hanging on but we really need more people to watch since it is slowly getting pushed back by all the new stuff. We need to keep on watching everything, regardless of how dumb or “filling” the episodes are.
Sketch’s Assessment:
Memorial Day weekend was expected to be relatively low and sure enough it was. Mad props to Sym-Bionic Titan for the impressive 744k at 3:30AM. It is good to see most of the line-up did better than the Toonami premiere last year, though I am a bit disgusted that the premiere of Deadman Wonderland lost to Naruto’s recap episode. I can’t hardly believe One Piece lost even that much to Casshern Sins so my one solace is the possibility that One Piece did beat Casshern in the most important demographics.
One Piece suffered a substantial drop from Naruto but it still managed to win more 18+ demographics than Naruto did, less competition tends to help with that. I’m quite pleased to see, despite not even cracking 800k, One Piece was #1 in its slot with adults 18-24, men 18-24 and men 18-34. However, Soul Eater won even more key demographics than that and One Piece can’t keep losing to Soul Eater if it wants to stay at 1AM. One Piece still has some time to prove itself and it had better do so. IGPX recovered a bit from last week and hopefully the gap between it and Soul Eater does not widen in the weeks to come. I think it is a bit unreasonable to expect One Piece to do amazing right out of the gate. Even Naruto and Bleach struggle from time to time.
Overall: Gains on last year make this a mostly successful week for Toonami given the holiday weekend. While Bleach, One Piece, IGPX and Eureka 7 did not beat their counter-parts in total viewers last year we see strong evidence that using the full 6 hours instead of encoring after 3AM improved the ratings. Not to mention the premieres earned mostly double-digit gains across key adults and men vs. the same time period last year. Not too shabby Toonami.
Forecast: I hope One Piece bounces back and that IGPX can close that gap with Soul Eater. For that matter, I hope Bleach and Naruto bounce back with the return to the Aizen fight and the Forrest of Death arc respectively. Toonami will get some outside assistence starting in June as Black Dynamite leaves taking its huge drop from The Cleveland Show with it, Cleveland gets a half hour closer to Toonami and even more FOX reruns populate the pre-Toonami hours leaving just The Boondocks between the MacFarlane trio and Toonami. That will put the kabosh on expansion for now but it’s going to make Toonami look really good compared to Sunday night’s original comedy reruns and Saturday’s 11PM hour isn’t the only place they could possibly expand Toonami into.