Toonami Article | Birth of a Network

Over the next few months, I had been placed in a corner.

I was angry and felt used. They pretty much picked my brain over at Turner Europe, wanted to know my two-cents here and there about what CNX should and shouldn't do, and I shared my thoughts, though not to the length of previous discussions and not with my friend Dom anymore. Instead, I had to deal with a guy named Finn for a while. People unfamiliar with CNX prior to the launch of the CNX network kept bombarding me with e-mails about the channel. Some I forwarded to the official folks while others I answered personally. I pointed them to the real official site, and some said they liked my site a little better.

For a brief time, just to lessen the amount of CNX mail, I briefly renamed my site as N49, an awkward initialization of Nami 49 Productions, a vanity label which is now TXB/Behemoth Webworks. It was back as CNX before Christmas. It was around this period that I became more insensed at the direction of Cartoon Network here in the States and grew more critical of them. My criticism was valid as less attention was being made towards Toonami and a bulk of the network while the network began to change into a Nickelodeon lite channel.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, viewers were entertained by CNX over in the UK, but it wasn't the same as a 100% Toonami channel. Since I didn't want to be considered associated with CNX in any form, I officially renamed the site The Bridge on May 5, 2003. It became The X Bridge once I got my new domain name in June 2003. Also happening in the summer of 2003, Cartoon Network announced that less than a year after it launched, CNX would fold and become replaced with the world's first Toonami network, an all-action animation network.

My friend Dom left Turner to be a part of Jetix Europe a year or so later.

That would be the end of the story, but if you really follow history, you know how the story ends. The Toonami channel was popular with viewers, but the direction of Cartoon Network was changing globally. It began in Cartoon Network India when they picked up numerous live-action productions and launched Pogo, a general children's entertainment channel. The Pogo format became utilized in many locations, mostly as revamps of Boomerang, including Boomerang UK. Toonami UK was also revamped in March 2006 as a general entertainment network. Essentially, it was transformed from an all-action-animation network to Nickelodeon Lite with live-action sitcoms, teen-based soap operas, science, and sports programming. I talked about it here. When the network folded less than a year later, nobody mourned the station that was born as a mature cartoon/live-action hybrid, reborn as the world's first and only Toonami channel, and died as a poorly conceived general entertainment channel.

And to think, I may have played a part in its initial formation.

Postscript: In June 2010, I got a letter from ol' Dom. He happened to read the article you just did. He's still a big muckity-muck at Disney Channel UK, in charge of Disney XD over there. Didn't know what to say to him. Still don't.