Since these heroes of yore have been given a new lease on life with the currently airing Yoroi Shin Den Samurai Troopers, I figured it might be fun to comb through the catalog of lesser-known Toonami shows and see if we can't throw a programming block together with the successors to these series. After all, remakes and reimaginings seem to be the name of the anime game these days.
Chris
Everything old continues to be new again. We talked Toonami previously here, but in the spirit of reboots, I think it's worth bringing the subject back around. In particular, that previous column was about the history and vibes of the block itself, but as the return of Samurai Troopers this season has shown, the specific shows were every bit as instrumental to Toonami's success, and there were a lot of them worth recalling beyond the ones everyone always does like Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon.
At the time, of course, Samurai Troopers was known as Ronin Warriors in probably the most prominent example of "You would never guess which of these titles is the Americanized one."
I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but I was the hard target age for many of these series as they aired in the early aughts. For reference, Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz hit Toonami on my seventh birthday back in 2000. So, I was pretty well locked into the whole Cartoon Network ecosystem.
I wonder if anyone will recreate my childhood Endless Waltz experience at these screenings... The one that involved me waking up in the middle of the night to discover that a family member got punched out while trying stop my mom's car from getting jacked in our driveway.
But on the topic of heroes who do a little punching... While I'd seen bits and pieces of Ronin Warriors as it aired, I was far more familiar with the line of toys released by Playmates (sorry about the Turtles license). I distinctly remember grabbing Ryo and Sage for US$5 a piece off the side of a KB Toys bargain bin...and how my Dad wasn't too thrilled that we'd set foot in the mall.
Rest assured, the new Samurai Troopers is no less toyetic, and you could even recreate your childhood experience for...slightly more than five dollars.
Woof. Some might say it is gauche to invoke the specter of toy tariffs in this column, but then the new Samurai Troopers is already off to its own earnestly political start, so I think it's fair!
Even before the tariffs set in, Samurai Troopers figures have always tended to be stupidly expensive. Then again, it's pretty niche among the Toonami pantheon. Heck, I thought Saint Seiya was related to Ronin Warriors when I saw the former on a different Saturday Night Cartoon Network block.
But to your point, New Samurai Troopers gets right to the brass tacks in conveying to the audience that our "heroes" are nothing more than propagandist pretty boys. Anyone who might be the real deal is retired, an actual demon, or hasn't spoken up yet.
It's a pretty wild way to kick off a legacy reboot, if somewhat in line with the trend of grim'n'gritty reinventions that have been seen generations prior. I admit they got me pretty good going in blind, thinking the new lineup of poster posers were the real deal until we saw them looting disaster scenes and spitefully team-killing.
Also, not for nothing, it's got plenty of gratuitous violence too. But does it work? This is 200% the kinda fare the edgy Toonami teens of yesteryear would've glommed onto, I can confirm that.
Despite the pile of hands there, the violence is handled rather seriously and never played for a laugh. In the aftermath of the scene, everyone involved is keenly aware of just how beyond the pale Gai's actions have been. For all that, I haven't found the gore to hit me with a "I'm so grim and edgy, you gotta take me seriously" vibe. It's all very matter-of-fact.
Then Ryu armors up and puts Gai in his place right away. The quick tone shift doesn't surprise me, given the pedigree of series scribe Shōgo Mutō, who penned the fan favorite Kamen Rider Build. I haven't fully finished that series, mind you, but within Build's opening cour, Muto weaves a similarly political and brutal tale that never strayed off into "this is too much" territory. That skill is impressive considering that Build is a show meant to sell noise-making belts to small children. Muto expertly rides that same line here, albeit with fewer restrictions to consider.
As someone who has finished Kamen Rider Build, I can tell you it mightily succeeds at tackling complex and often heavy topics while still feeling like it functions well as a "Kids' Show"—kids ain't stupid and the best material aimed at them doesn't treat them that way. The first couple of episodes of Yoroi Shin Den Samurai Troopers seem to be nailing that and have soundly drawn me in.
Pointedly, this seems to be in line with the original Samurai Troopers. I know I caught a few episodes of Ronin Warriors on Toonami back in the day, but I remember virtually nothing about it. But I did go back and check out the first few episodes of the original Japanese version this week, and was surprised at how much of its own grit it had, to say nothing of being surprisingly serialized!
More than I expected, anyway, off of a Super Sentai style transforming heroes setup. I can see why it caught on, and why Toonami saw fit to include this show from 1988 in its lineup so many years later.
Nothing hits harder than a little boy rushing home to discover his parents aren't there anymore.
That's probably enough toku talk thus far. Lord knows we're gonna be testing Lynzee's patience with other subjects as this column goes on.
Not that Ronin Warriors was the only Sentai-styled show Toonami ever ran. As we indicated, there were a whole bunch of lesser-recalled entries in the block's lineup, including the G-Force adaptation of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. Which, incidentally, is another classic that got a modern reboot with heavier political sensibilities.
I caught the first episode or two of Gatchaman Crowds years and years ago. However, I'd almost call it prophetic considering that I distinctly remember the plot hinging around an evil everything app with an "X" in its name.
It's a series sort of like SHIMONETA in that its societal appraisals have only been vindicated more as time has gone on, only in this case instead of censorship of adult material as a means of social control, CROWDS was bang-on about the dread of social media engineering and the whims of uninformed voters.
Sadly, both seasons are down from streaming, which sucks because I think it's a show we could use more than ever these days.
The way CROWDS is mentioned in these moments is also painfully reminding me of the many who use ChatGPT in every facet of their lives. Now that's terrifying.
Kenji Nakamura and Toshiya Ono had their fingers on the pulse of where society was headed, even if they couldn't entirely see how it would get there in 2013.
I don't know if this is the sort of density that would play well on Toonami, but this was a block that ran the likes of Evangelion and Nadesico, if only during a special event.
Now there's a place to find some lesser-known Toonami programming.
If we want to go even less known Toonami, let me tell you about this little show I found on Toonami Jetstream—the block's second shot at a streaming platform before streaming was widely adopted.
I didn't know it then, but I think Prince of Tennis might be the series that initially hit me with the sports bug. The handful of episodes I watched on Jetstream remain in fuzzy memory territory these days, but something about them made me fond of it for one reason or another. Though if I were putting together a programming block, I'd probably suggest the powers that be go with Haikyu!! for their pretty boy sports star needs.
I watched through Ryoma! The Prince of Tennis amid our Tubi deep dive and it's really not all that great. It might even be a little stinky.
If there was ever doubt that Toonami was ahead of the curve, consider that they were bringing over sports/competition anime like Prince of Tennis, Eyeshield 21, and Hikaru no Go before any other channels would have considered it. And they did it on a streaming platform in 2006! And it wasn't even their first go at such a thing!
And while, as you said, most of the Jetstream catalog, like The Prince of Tennis has been hard-up for decent, proper follow-ups or reboots, Toonami's prior online service, Reactor, had Star Blazers!
Space Battleship Yamato is enough of a stone-cold classic that it naturally has gotten a modern update, though not without its own release kerfuffles.
Crazy to think that Yamato 2199 has developed its own fair share of sequel series and films since debuting in 2012. Yamato in any form has been a huge blind spot in my watchlist for years. Putting the almighty Leiji Matsumoto factor aside for a moment, it's not a stretch to say that Yamato and Star Blazers are some of the most important titles to the medium. Yamato went on to inspire countless classics like Super Dimension Fortress Macross while Star Blazers was one of the first examples of an anime (even in an edited form) capturing the imagination of North American audiences. Without Star Blazers and its few contemporaries opening the dam for series like Robotech, there'd be no Toonami.
Robotech also ran on Toonami via "Giant Robot Week" (they even refer to it as one of the "greatest" in that promo up there). There's probably something to be said about where Toonami sits in conversation with edited English versions of anime—Ronin Warriors even changed the character names, though most of the content was otherwise unaltered. But it is funny to think about how even the bowdlerized version of something like Outlaw Star is remembered with less contention than Robotech these days.
But hey, they did mostly figure out the Macross release rights thing, meaning modern series like Delta would be ripe for a new theoretical Toonami guest spot!
While Delta is the latest entry in the series, I could see Frontier really speaking to modern audiences with the right dub cast and crew in place. In fact, I think it would probably be a great project for a studio like NYAV Post. They've shown time and time again that they know their way around a song or two.
That's another point: while Toonami has dabbled in airing subtitled Japanese anime (usually on April Fool's Day in their current Adult Swim era), airing on TV as part of the block generally means a given show has to have an English dub. These have to get out in front of the most mainstream TV-watching audiences, after all. Makes me wonder if a hypothetical dub of Yoroi Shin Den Samurai Troopers would pull a Digimon Adventure: (2020) and work the old English names in somehow. For the nostalgia.
With a series like Samurai Troopers, I could see a potential dub choosing to go with Ronin Warriors' proper noun terms and the names of any returning characters. The name tweaks in the original series appeared to be nowhere near as drastic in comparison to large changes made in series such as Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, or the aforementioned Robotech. Also, folks in the booth these days tend to be fairly savvy around what will and won't fly today.
Okay, but counterpoint, the children need to know about Nasti Yagyu.
"I'm Mia, but you can call me 'Nasti' if you're nasty."
Now, your invocation of NYAV Post also reminds me that while, as we covered, Toonami famously aired Gundam Wing, they also introduced a lot of audiences of the era to the original Mobile Suit Gundam!
Now, Mobile Suit Gundam is absolutely not a lesser-known series, but is it less known as a Toonami series, specifically? I dunno, but Mobile Suit Gundam did get a follow-up series just last year, so I'm throwing it in anyway in this extremely specific context we've constructed for this conversation.
Also, FLCL was one of the series that really built Adult Swim anime, so that crowd deserves to get a look at the latest Tsurumaki/Enokido joint in GQuuuuuuX, complete with that sweet NYAV dub.
Who's Gates Capa again?
See, this is the trouble with Toonami never airing Zeta.
Since you mentioned the needs of the children, we should probably talk about when your mom insists that you have Wu-Tang at home.
It aired very briefly on the block before being canceled, but Wulin Warriors was most likely the first time anyone on our side of the globe saw the name Pili. I remember being utterly confused by the episode I saw as a kid. I'm fascinated by it today, knowing that it came from the talented team of puppeteers who eventually blessed us with Thunderbolt Fantasy.
Who knew it only took a Gen Urobuchi, T.M. Revolution, and a little time for Pili's puppets to properly pop off over here.
I could absolutely see the current Toonami throwing Thunderbolt Funderbolt on, too, if only as another April Fools indulgence. Dub it anyway, and include a cheeky reference to Wulin Warriors in the promo? Two words: more puppets!
Now that you mention it, Adult Swim does have some legit ties to the Rap and Hip Hop scene... So maybe they wouldn't need to rely on "Wu-Tang at Home" for their beats.
Look, they were technically my first exposure to my all-time favorite rapper, Del the Funky Homosapien, so for that I will always be grateful.
And as long as I'm talking about things formative to my life and toyetic childhood favorites like Ronin Warriors was to you, I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up that Toonami was the original home to the anime era for Transformers over here.
Only appropriate, since they had Peter Cullen around, I suppose.
I'm thinking about how funny it would be if I figured out how to get you an affliction-style shirt with this printed out on it.
This is also absolutely stretching the definition of "lesser-known" for Toonami shows, since Armada is actually pretty fondly remembered by a lot of the kids from its generation. The animation and English dub were noticeably a rush job, though it's not like the 1984 Transformers cartoon was known for its sterling production either.
I was one of those kids! Robots in Disguise and Beast Wars are blurrs (yes, that typo is intentional) from my childhood. Alongside renting Transformers: The Movie every so often, Armada was the first time I'd fully absorbed a Transformers series. Well, as much as a grade schooler with regularly shifting hyperfixations could, that is.
But yeah, Armada has its moments! Some immortalized in that incredible anniversary video Studio Trigger put out last year! Air this so long as you're doing music videos, Toonami.
I bring that up, because actual Transformers anime has kinda been few and far between since the Unicron Trilogy (that's Armada and its two sequel shows) wrapped up. Just a few short-run specials and technicalities like the Polygon-Pictures-produced War For Cybertron trilogy on Netflix. So there's not really anything new and super-cool that could go on this hypothetical anime reboot block for Toonami.
Well, Cyberworld Snarl studied the blade and has the Naruto run down pat...
But that just might be pushing our editorial luck.
As I alluded to, I don't want to push Lynzee, but Transformers Cyberworld is about as anime all over, with the same irreverent sense of humor, as Toonami fave Megas XLR. But yeah, that's probably a subject for another time.
By the way, if our lovely readers are asking themselves, "Why all the robots?" Well, there's another old tune that catches the wind every so often.
It's a pretty NICE song if you ask me.
Between this and that "Giant Robot Week," there's probably a whole third Toonami column on their influence on the perception of mecha among western anime fans. Hell, Zoids was a toyetic also-ran on the block that actually has seen several new anime released since.
The latest series, 2020's Zoids Wild, was even graced with a dub courtesy of The Ocean Group. However, it seems to be unavailable on US Netflix at the moment. I'm seeing it also had a second season titled Zoids Wild Zero, but there isn't a Guitar Wolf to be seen from what I can tell.
Yeah, it's also wild that I can't stream the old Zoids anime as of this writing either. New Century Zero (so many zeroes in these shows) was a big favorite of mine back in the day, and I'd have thought it was a shoo-in for the likes of Tubi. Still, if there are dubs out there, maybe they'll surface eventually!
I wanted Liger Zero with all of his armors so bad growing up, but I ended up getting a Saber Tiger for Christmas. I remember being very confused by the combination of motors and plastic runners that greeted me when I opened that box.
Look, they knew Gundam Wing was getting the kids into model kits, they were just trying to ride the wave. Now that I think about it, it seems like a bunch of these less-prominent cult-favorite Toonami shows, like Ronin Warriors, had some sort of toyetic tie-in promotion element. Hey, maybe that's the defining feature that gets them brought back!
You know what that means: Kamen Rider on Toonami in 2026! We're doing live-action on Cartoon Network again, and this time it's actually going to be cool!
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