How a 4 p.m. cartoon block turned America on to anime
Toonami went on the air on Cartoon Network on March 17, 1997, as a weekday afternoon block running from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern. It took over the slot from an earlier action block called Power Zone.
It was built by Sean Akins and Jason DeMarco, working under Cartoon Network programming chief Mike Lazzo, who wanted a home on the schedule for action cartoons. Complex's 2017 oral history of the block describes a team assembling it mostly out of shows the network already had rights to.
The first host was Moltar, the lava-headed character borrowed from Space Ghost Coast to Coast. He was a Hanna-Barbera creation, so Cartoon Network could use him without paying for a license. Moltar introduced ThunderCats and Voltron alongside the shows that mattered more in hindsight: Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z and Mobile Suit Gundam Wing.
For a lot of American kids, that 4 p.m. slot was the first place they saw Japanese animation with its serialized plots left intact. Moltar hosted until July 1999, when he gave way to TOM, the Toonami Operations Module, a small robot voiced by Steve Blum. The block later moved to Saturdays, grew science-fiction storylines of its own, and ran for 11 years.
Why Cartoon Network pulled the plug in 2008
The final Cartoon Network broadcast aired on Saturday, September 20, 2008. The network said the block was no longer pulling the ratings it needed, and pointed to Adult Swim as its main home for anime from then on.
The decision came from Stuart Snyder, who ran Cartoon Network from 2007 to 2014. In a radio interview on WGN Radio 720 that fans later surfaced, reported by CBR, Snyder said the block "just was not drawing a large enough audience," and described a network that needed those hours for new shows aimed at children.
By 2008 the lineup leaned heavily on Naruto reruns, which made the Toonami branding hard to justify against airtime the network wanted for its own originals. Snyder has said the call was difficult precisely because the fanbase was so loud about it.
TOM's farewell that night became the most replayed moment in the block's history, and fans still trade recordings of it. Viewers treated the sign-off as a funeral. It turned out not to be one.
The April Fools joke that brought Toonami back
On April 1, 2012, Adult Swim handed its late-night schedule to Toonami as an April Fools stunt, with TOM back on screen and a night of shows from the block's Cartoon Network years.
The idea came from Lazzo, in Adult Swim's annual April Fools brainstorm. Jason DeMarco told Anime News Network in 2022 that the team had never seriously discussed bringing Toonami back before that meeting, because nobody believed it was possible. With only a few months to plan, they went to distributors asking for one-time licenses for single episodes, with no idea whether anyone would say yes.
Twitter did the rest. Toonami and the shows it aired that night became trending topics while the block was still on air, and a fan campaign followed, aimed squarely at Adult Swim.
Adult Swim announced the return in May 2012, and Toonami came back for real on Saturday, May 26, 2012, this time as a weekly late-night block rather than an afternoon one. It has aired every Saturday since.
What time does Toonami air in 2026?
Toonami airs on Adult Swim on Saturday nights, from 12:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. Eastern. In practice that is the early hours of Sunday morning, which is part of why the question keeps getting asked: almost nobody runs into the block by accident anymore.
It got longer at the start of 2026. On January 3, 2026, Toonami extended its end time to 4:00 a.m. and reshuffled the lineup, dropping Naruto and opening with Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, then Blue Exorcist, Mashle: Magic and Muscles, One Piece, Dan Da Dan, Dragon Ball DAIMA, Zom 100 and Rick and Morty: The Anime.
Four hours is not the block's ceiling, and it has been cut before. Toonami ran five and a half to six hours a decade ago, and Adult Swim trimmed it to three hours in February 2020. DeMarco gave the reason at the time, telling ComicBook.com in 2020 that at that length the block was "getting too expensive and unwieldy to handle," with too many shows rotating in and out at rising license prices.
The schedule has kept moving through 2026. Scavengers Reign joined the lineup in September 2026, and Wind Breaker premiered in the 12:30 a.m. slot on October 10, 2026.
One detail trips people up: Toonami is not part of Cartoon Network's own schedule. Adult Swim takes over the same cable channel overnight, so the dial position has not changed, but the block belongs to Adult Swim. Without cable, Adult Swim programming streams on HBO Max.
Who owns Toonami today?
Skydance owns it. Toonami belonged to Warner Bros. Discovery, through Adult Swim and Cartoon Network, until October 6, 2026. That is the day Paramount Skydance completed its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal valued at about $110.9 billion, and Warner Bros. Discovery became a subsidiary of the combined company. Cartoon Network and Adult Swim went with it, which makes Skydance the owner of Toonami.
Nothing about the block changed on the air that week. Toonami kept its Saturday slot through the closing, and the premieres announced for September and October 2026 went ahead on schedule.
What a new owner does with a four-hour overnight anime block on a shrinking cable channel is the open question. Cable built around young men has been dying for a decade, which is what finished G4 and its two attempts at a gamer channel, and the same arithmetic turned MTV into a network that mostly does not play music. MTV now sits inside the same company as Toonami, a strange ending for two brands that spent the 1990s at opposite ends of the cable dial.
Where to find the old Toonami broadcasts today
The 1997 to 2008 block was never released commercially. The shows it carried have been licensed and relicensed many times over, but the parts people miss most, the bumpers, the TOM segments and the Total Immersion Events, survive mostly as off-air recordings.
A lot of those recordings sit on VHS tapes in American basements, taped by kids who left the VCR running on a weekday afternoon. Magnetic tape loses quality every year it sits there, and nobody is making new VCRs.
The cheap route is to do it yourself with a working VCR and a USB capture dongle, which is the approach laid out in our guide to digitizing VHS tapes in 2026. The mail-in route costs more and takes weeks: Legacybox sells fixed-size kits priced by how many items you send in one box rather than charging per tape, so a handful of tapes still means buying a whole kit.
Fan uploads of the April 1, 2012 broadcast are archived on the Internet Archive, which is the closest thing to a clean copy of the night that restarted everything.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Toonami coming back to Cartoon Network?
There is no announced plan to move Toonami back to Cartoon Network. The block left Cartoon Network's schedule on September 20, 2008, and has aired on Adult Swim since May 26, 2012. A short Friday afternoon revival called Toonami Rewind ran on Adult Swim during 2024 and was retired at the end of that year, while the Saturday block carried on.
Who owns Toonami now?
Toonami is owned by Skydance, the company formed when Paramount Skydance completed its roughly $110.9 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, 2026. Toonami airs on Adult Swim, which came to Skydance with the rest of the Warner Bros. Discovery cable channels, Cartoon Network included. Before that the block belonged to Warner Bros. Discovery.
Does TOM still host Toonami?
Yes. TOM, the Toonami Operations Module, still hosts the Toonami block on Adult Swim in 2026, voiced by Steve Blum. TOM first replaced the original Toonami host Moltar in July 1999, and the robot has been redesigned several times since.