Blue Dragon & Bakugan Join Toonami
Toonami will finally be getting some fresh blood after so long of a time. Two new series will be joining the block this April 5th on Cartoon Network, but unfortunately it'll come with a cost. Well actually only one of these series can be considered truly new. The new series & the bigger news of the two is that the Blue Dragon anime will debut for the first time in America on the action block. The other series is, well, repeats of Bakugan. I say repeats because it'll still be showing regularly on weekend mornings. Incidentally, the first episode of the series is available for free right now on iTunes. It seems my guess of it being a Toonami series was right, even without extending the block.
Which brings us to the problem here. Despite two new shows coming to the block, Toonami will still only be 2 hours long. So what's getting the boot? FUNimation's new dub of One Piece, & classic episodes of DragonBall Z. The one hour of Naruto fillers, however, are here to sat. Now before you start panicking about losing One Piece, keep in mind that this most likely not a cancellation but rather a break for the dub to catch up in production. Now that it has been revealed that Funi will be releasing the earlier episodes of One Piece on DVD, it means that they're now dubbing twice the amount of episodes. So it only makes sense that they'd be slowing down on releasing season 3 eps to make room for season 1 eps. Also at the end of this month when Toonami will cease showing new episodes, it'll bring Funi's new One Piece to a stop after 26 episodes. 26 being a typical season number supports this theory even more.
Still though, would it be so hard for Cartoon Network to add these new shows AND keep the old ones by extending to block to three hours? I'm excited about seeing Blue Dragon, a series based off the hit video game & has DBZ's Akira Toriyama as part of the staff. I just don't see why CN feels they have to continue restricting Toonami to such a small part of their schedule. As someone who's been watching Toonami since the very beginning, this all feels very insulting.
Source: http://www.toonamiinfolink.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1158