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“There is no secret. Tell your sister, not the fish, or rice, or wasabi. Every ingredient is treated equally, with the same care. You lose sight when focusing on individual pieces. All that matters is what they make as a whole.”
– Jiro, Get Jiro (Ep. 01)
The Toonami Trending Rundown for October 3-4, 2026. Back in 2012, the late, great travel writer and chef Anthony Bourdain partnered with novelist Joel Rose, illustrators Langdon Foss and Alé Garza, and DC Comics to create the graphic novel Get Jiro. Today, we continue to celebrate Bourdain’s life and legacy as the first two episodes of the animated adaptation of Get Jiro make their debut on the better cartoon show.
On Twitter, #Toonami trended in the United States alongside Get Jiro. Meanwhile, #Toonami also trended on Tumblr.
This week’s feature was a new Toonami ID titled “Ninja TOM” by Jimmy Nickerson and Ariel Zengotita. You can check it out below.
For the fifth time since its founding in 1992 and after four years of mismanagement of parent company Warner Bros Discovery under David Zaslav, Cartoon Network is once again under new management as Warner Bros Discovery will be merging with Paramount Skydance, with the newly merged company to be named the Skydance Corporation, or simply Skydance.
According to Deadline, both Paramount+ and HBO Max will remain separate services for now, with a streaming bundle soon to be offered for those who wish to subscribe to both. There are long term plans in the works for both services to eventually merge.
Skydance on X (formerly Twitter): “Today, we are Skydance. One team with a shared ambition to entertain, inspire, and inform the world through extraordinary storytelling. https://t.co/hdAJCYt0wm pic.twitter.com/Uoc99Y9srG / X”
Today, we are Skydance. One team with a shared ambition to entertain, inspire, and inform the world through extraordinary storytelling. https://t.co/hdAJCYt0wm pic.twitter.com/Uoc99Y9srG
David Ellison, who has served as CEO of Skydance since its original founding in 2005, and the son of Oracle Corporation co-founder Larry Ellison, will serve as the CEO of the new merged company. Meanwhile, David Zaslav, whom has been blamed for many of Warner Bros Discovery’s woes that ultimately lead to this merger, will step down with a “golden parachute” package, including $606 million in stock and cash, and $34.2 million in cash severance. Prior to this merger, Zaslav had previously proposed splitting off Warner Bros and Discovery again (with Warner Bros taking the studios and streaming services, while Discovery took the networks, news and sports divisions), and selling Warner Bros to Netflix. Also of note, Bobby Kotick, widely blamed for running Activision Blizzard into the ground and ultimately selling the company to Microsoft, will be a part of Skydance’s board of directors.
While Skydance has been quite aggressive in eventually getting this merger through, critics have long been raising the red flags that the merger will ultimately prove disastrous to Hollywood, especially with the overall economy veering towards recession and the entertainment industry already going through much upheaval this decade with declining cable subscriptions due to rising costs and a streaming service bubble also trending towards bursting due to rising subscription costs. And that’s to say nothing about concerns of media bias (CBS News has received plenty of accusations of conservative bias under Ellison and Bari Weiss, including the controversies of the firing of Scott Pelley and the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, among other things. And such controversies will be magnified now that both CBS News and CNN are now both under the same company), mass job layoffs and overall, less competition across the board.
This is the fifth merger the networks founded by the late, great Ted Turner have been apart of since Turner Broadcasting was merged into Time Warner/Warner Bros in 1996. And said mergers ever since have been described as one humiliation conga after another, including the AOL-Time Warner Merger from 2001-2009 (AOL was spun off in the 2010’s), the AT&T/Warner Media merger from 2018-2022, the Warner Bros Discovery merger from 2022-2026, and now the Skydance/Paramount merger in 2026. Given that their solution to the debacle that was the Zaslav era turned out to be yet another merger, Warner’s executives and stockholders may just be following the definition of insanity to a T, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Understandably, critics are very skeptical that Skydance will be much better in this regard.
And the new Skydance is already off to a rough start, already carrying around $80 billion in net debt right from the jump, far exceeding the $53 billion Warner Bros Discovery had when they first merged back in 2022. Not surprisingly, credit rating agency Fitch has already downgraded Skydance’s overall credit rating. CEO David Ellison have assured fans and critics that the newly merged company will be in “the business of rebuilding trust” and are insisting that its debts can be managed and won’t shortchange productions to do so. No doubt Skydance has got their work cut out for them to win back dissuaded viewers and critics and not to repeat the mistakes of its predecessors before them, or we might just be seeing yet another merger or spinoff involving Warner Bros in the future.
As for what this can entail for Toonami, Adult Swim, and Cartoon Network as a whole is still to be determined. Cartoon Network is now in the same company as Nickelodeon, as with Adult Swim is with Comedy Central and Nick at Nite, and those who grew up watching said networks will be watching closely to see how these former cut-throat competitors will now cooperate as corporate siblings.
Tune in tonight as Wind Breaker breaks its way into the lineup at 12:30 a.m. Eastern, among other great moments. And we’re also just a week away from Gachiakuta also joining the lineup on October 17th. Until next time, be sure to make your plan to vote in the November 3rd Midterm Elections, and stay gold as always.
Legend: The shows listed are ordered based on their appearance on the schedule. Show trends are listed in bold. The number next to the listed trend represents the highest it trended on the list (not counting the promoted trend), judging only by the images placed in the rundown. For the Twitter tweet counts, the listed number of tweets are also sorely based on the highest number shown based on the images on the rundown.
United States Trends:
- #Toonami [#12]
- #GetJiro [#14]
Tumblr Trends:
- #toonami [#9]
Notes and Other Statistics:
No Soy Sauce! Only Toonami on [adult swim] on Cartoon Network.
