Toonami is officially cancelled

[phil]

Three days ago, the GREATEST cartoon block in history sadly came to a close. Toonami is officially offline as of September 20, 2008. First debuting on March 17, 1997, Toonami was easily the most influential block Cartoon Network had and was the arugably the leading reason for the sudden boom in America's interest for anime, particularly Dragon Ball Z, which was its flagship program. However, major signs towards its ending most likely appeared on March 17, 2007, when Toonami celebrated its 10th Anniversary. In honor of the Anniversary, Toonami initiated 3 major changes none of its long-time fans expected: they ditched the Absolution, which was the spaceship that broadcasted the block since July 10, 1999, replacing the ship with a base in a jungle; they removed SARA, the ship's AI who gained a supporting role to the show's host TOM and also had her own unique personality, replacing her with two robots known as Flash and T; lastly, they introduced a radically different version of Toonami's host and iconic mascot TOM (short for Toonami Operations Module), who had previously underwent 2 different upgrades over years (technically starting out as TOM, then TOM 2.0 and then TOM 3.0). The "upgrade" had NO backstory whatsoever, which was the polar opposite for TOM's other upgrades. Each upgrade had intriguing and unique backstories behind them that were also interactive shows known as Total Immersion Events, or TIEs for short. TOM's upgrade to TOM 4.0 was undoubtedly the biggest omen of Toonami's impending doom as he now resembled a robot version of Thomas the Tank Engine. I've liked Thomas the Tank Engine since I was a little kid, but this upgrade left an extremely sour taste not only in my mouth, but in the millions of the Toonami faithful as well. For now, I say R.I.P. Toonami.

Here are pics of TOM's first, second and third forms (from left to right):

http://www.anxtoonami.com/shows/toonami/tom.jpg

And here is the disgraceful downgrade of TOM:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v145/S.Droid/TOM4.png

Edited September 26, 2008 by phil