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I want to ask you a question: What is the best year of Toonami? The answer may vary from one Toonami Faithful to another. For some, maybe 2000 was the best year, since it introduced some of the most revered and beloved anime such as Tenchi Muyo! and Gundam Wing to the block. Maybe it’s 2013, when the revival of the action cartoon block was still fresh and still experimenting with what to grab that fit the block while still being fairly well-known. Shows like Soul Eater, Sword Art Online, IGPX, One Piece, and the original FLCL made for a fairly unique lineup that while lacking in terms of actual dub premieres (Sword Art Online was it for that year.), they were smart pick-ups that were mostly new to this incarnation of Toonami, not to mention getting IGPX back on TV after Cartoon Network wrote it off. That’s nothing to scoff at.
If you’ve been reading my articles for a while, you probably know what my favorite year of Toonami was. It was 2014, eleven years ago. That year kicked off strong with the block expanding into the 11:30p timeslot, with a world premiere of a new show from the creator of Cowboy Bebop: Space Dandy. Just after that, at 12:30a, the block didn’t just expand as they also managed to acquire Naruto Shippuden thanks to its license with Disney XD having expired. It would be just a few weeks later when another new schedule update would be made when, on February 14th, Toonami’s now-inactive Tumblr account made a lineup announcement revealing the next show to replace Sword Art Online: Blue Exorcist. The show premiered the following week at 1:30am and would run until August 9th, 2014.
I remember seeing promos for it when watching the block and it caught my interest, so I decided to give it a few weeks and if I found I didn’t like it, I would drop it. Thankfully, I stuck with this show until it ended. At the time, I thought it was a fun series that had issues, but I never really wrote a review on it or even bothered to continue onwards with the manga at the time. Granted, I was a broke high school student who had to save up money to buy some of the things I wanted and volumes of manga weren’t a high priority for me at the time. In the end, I decided to wait and see if the anime would ever return and if it did, I would watch it if it aired on Toonami. Eventually, after a few years passed, a new season of Blue Exorcist was released in 2017, adapting the next arc of the manga. However, the show would not be returning to the action cartoon block but instead the dub would be exclusive to Hulu, which was a bummer at the time as back then, I had no interest in subscribing to Hulu to check out a single show. Unfortunately, as a result, I never continued with Blue Exorcist. I actually had thought about revisiting it at some point within the last year or so and I guess Adult Swim thought the same thing because, at New York Comic Con 2024’s Aniplex of America panel, they would announce that along with Mashle: Magic and Muscles coming to the late night block, the first season of Blue Exorcist would rerun on Toonami in November, replacing one of several shows that would be ending a couple weeks before, which I thought was cool. I appreciate when Adult Swim reacquires old pickups that aren’t just DBZ or Cowboy Bebop because it gives shows a chance with a new audience who may have not been watching back when it was “new” who now have a reason to check it out. While it’s a rerun for most of us, I was interested in rewatching Blue Exorcist as I hadn’t seen it in a decade. I decided to do it just as I watched it back in 2014, where every week Blue Exorcist ran on Toonami, I would watch along with the Toonami audience. I wasn’t on Twitter at the time, so I normally would just watch by myself with my cat curled up on my bed in a crappy two-bedroom apartment I was living in with my family at the time. A lot has happened in ten years since then and for the most part, I had forgotten most of what happened in Blue Exorcist, so a refresher is always welcomed. But the question I have to ask is, “does it hold up?” Well, let’s find out! Get fired up because True Cross Academy is back in session! Blue Exorcist reignites. Welcome to Toonami Throwback.
