Because most of us are going to be watching The Dark Knight in theatres tonight, there's a good chance that you won't notice that Bionix isn’t airing in its regular timeslot. But if you tune in next Friday night, you'll notice that Bionix is once again not airing. It also won’t be airing the week after or... pretty much any week after that. It is actually entirely possible that you will never see Bionix air in that golden timeslot ever again. Tonight, YTV viewers will be treated to "Big Fun Fridays", a heavily tween-oriented line-up that consists of YTV's American Idol knock-off and a series of tween movies that scream "we want to be the Disney Channel!".

YTV has clearly already received a number of fan complaints, because despite what TV listings are saying, Fullmetal Alchemist, Death Note, and Eureka seveN reruns will still remain late at night, starting at 1:15am. Apart from that, all of the remaining anime on the station has been tossed aside to Bionix's needlessly crippled, obscured, and encore-free timeslot on the one night of the week that Neilsen analysts are doomed never to enjoy again throughout the entirety of their careers: Saturday. This massive fragmentation will be the most drastic change that the block has undergone in its four year history, and is most certainly the worst one to happen yet. It may seem like an innocuous change, but it certainly doesn't resonate well with our previous abundance of anime on Canadian TV rapidly toppling over as if the last two years never happened.

The truly hilarious irony: this unfortunate move just happened to exactly coincide with the fifth anniversary of this website.

That's right. The better half of a decade ago on July 18, 2003 (yes, I intentionally launched it a day after my birthday so that I'd remember), Zannen, Canada was launched. Being comprised of little more than some questionable rants written by a bored 16 year old over the summer and scraps leftover from my initial experiments with Dreamweaver, what started as a spin-off of the now defunct Pathea.com (remember THAT joke of a website?) wasn’t much to behold. But no one can really deny that as flawed as the content may have been, it got people talking. I'm not sure whether this day is better reserved for reflecting on this site, or breaking out of my current state of passive observation and bitching about how everything we’ve rallied for is facing oblivion. But come on, when’s the next time I’ll have a chance to do both?

My site was launched with the sole intention of getting what we would call “real” anime on TV. It’s hard to define that these days, especially with the way Viz is handling its properties, but it basically amounted to anime that hadn’t been heavily localized for television; closer to the types of shows that Toonami and Adult Swim had been picking up in the US for years. Two weeks later, by total coincidence, Inuyasha was announced for YTV. This was basically a cold shower for my amorous new cause, but I decided to keep things going anyway, just so people would have one place they could come and keep track of just where anime in Canada would go from there. And what a great direction it went - Bionix was formed a year later and developed a significant mainstream audience that expanded well beyond hardcore anime fandom. Its following was not quite like that of Cartoon Network’s Toonami, where fans would be willing to skip their best friend's wedding reception in order to catch that eleventh anniversary extravaganza and simultaneously complain online about what a letdown it is, but it didn’t take long for the block to make up for lost time and make a name for itself.

Delivering news and information on the block involved little more than checking a few key resources that nobody ever bothered to keep an eye on, and deliver it under the thin guise of Canadian animation news. These days, this site's community has burgeoned to the point where certain individuals are more than happy to take care of all the grunt work themselves, which I’ve certainly come to appreciate. Not to mention our trolls, resident critics, and those few veterans who always make sure to pop out of the woodwork every so often to remind me about who pointless my site has become. Thanks guys! We’ve certainly come a long way from the days when I refused to keep the forum up due to a lack of activity. But no, things are different now in the modern era of Wednesday, December 31, 1969.

I’ll admit that this website isn’t at the top of its game. While Zannen began by provoking that hidden, salacious desire of the masses to read giant blocks of text,what little writing is left has gone a bit downhill, and updates are a lot less frequent. But in a similar way, Bionix has rapidly fallen from grace. It had always been a stand-out block of programming on YTV in the sense that, for at least an hour-and-a-half a week (usually two hours), it was the only programming on the station completely immune to what we now like to call the annual “CanCon Purges”. Despite this obvious sign of success, and constant allusions to its popularity with the 12-17 demographic (funny that we keep harping on that, considering that I don’t think anybody who actually visits this website falls into that age group), it is now being cast away to the dead zone of Saturday nights, almost as if to imitate Cartoon Network. And we all know what a sorry state anime is in on that station.

At least with G4TechTV, Razer, and Much we could see logical reasons for anime being nixed. With TechTV, the affordable exclusivity deal they had with Geneon fell through after the latter company bowed out of the anime market earlier this year, Razer’s conversion to MTV2 leaves little room for crazy Asian drawings, and BECK had always been an isolated incident on Much. And there was also IFC Canada, but going exclusive with Manga Entertainment obviously didn't work out there. For a while we were ahead of the States for the first time… well, ever. But while anime is still in fairly bad shape on American TV, they still have a remarkable number of new shows coming this fall, especially on Sci-Fi. Now, YTV may still air some of that. And that would be just dandy. But even if the block does grow back the additional girth that it righteously gained throughout its run, the fact that it has been moved to Saturday is an enormous set-back, especially since the move may have more to do with a change of focus than an actual problem with ratings. (But don’t quote me on that – as usual, I don’t actually know.) Friday has generally been one of YTV’s red carpet nights, and with that timeslot gone due to a desire to shift focus over to tweens, anime is just… there… And with all of the other problems going on in the anime industry, it doesn’t exactly inspire much hope.

If what we’re seeing now is the track YTV is setting its sights on, we'll soon be back to where we were five years ago, only with Naruto and Bleach as the perennial exceptions to an otherwise dry anime landscape rather than Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon. If Blue Dragon hits Bionix this September (what a dire move that would be), the block will consist of nothing but kid’s shows from Viz. Yes, they may wind up launching that all-anime digital specialty station, but moving all of their major premieres there will mark the final, true death of anime on conventional television. Bionix made “real” anime into something for the masses, not just for a few rabid fans willing to pay extra for what will likely be a very limited service. For the sake of diversifying the mainstream Canadian television landscape with a much needed international flavour, Bionix needs to be restored. It may not represent the full potential anime carries on Canadian TV, but for now it's pretty much all we have.

After the unexpected (but understandable) demise of Anime Current on G4TechTV Canada earlier this year, it shouldn't come as any huge surprise that the wealth of anime programming which Canadian broadcasters had amassed last year is quickly dwindling away. As you may already know, CTV is planning to rebrand Razer as "MTV2" this fall, demonstrating once again that they will pull no punches in dismantling the Much brand. I probably don't even need to point out that all anime has already been removed from their schedule, and we can likely expect even further gutting of the station come September.

Despite their forced removal, Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo had always appeared to do well on the station, as suggested by the fact that they were run multiple times consistently every Saturday. While it would be nice if some station in the CTV family could find it in their hearts to take those series' in, the bigger concern lies with Shin Chan. New episodes are still being produced, and we certainly aren't going to be seeing them up here unless another broadcaster decides to take it on.

And I must say, it's looking pretty impressive. New series' include:

- The Smurfs
- Wait Till Your Father Gets Home
- Fraggle Rock
- Alvin and the Chipmunks
- Spider-Man (60s series)
- The Banana Splits Adventure Show
- The New Scooby Doo Mysteries
- 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo (I wonder what Vincent Price would say if he knew this was still airing)
- Reboot

Now all they need to do is introduce He-Man and this station will truly come to form. Assuming that they drop the repetitive quarter-day schedule (which is likely given that all of the above series' run no more than three times a day), Retro's fall schedule may be one of the few to look forward to this September.

Bandai announced this past weekend at Anime Expo that Gundam 00 will be airing on the Sci-Fi Network in the United States this coming November. With both this series and Gurren Lagann in the pipeline, it's pretty clear that certain Canadian broadcasters should start looking up at the stars for inspiration from Sci-Fi, rather than down the toilet for inspiration from Adult Swim and Cartoon Network.

Also, Bandai Entertainment has announced the preliminary cast for the title, which of course is being dubbed by Ocean Studios in Vancouver:

Setsuna F. Seiei - Brad Swaile
Lockon Stratos - Alex Zahara
Allelujah Haptism - Richard Ian Cox
Tieria Erde - Sam Vincent

It looks like Brad Swaile is officially the Canadian Johnny Yong Bosch.

Box office figures that more than a fair number of you likely saw Pixar's WALL-E this past week. What you may not have realized while watching that poor little love-struck automaton is that by paying to see this movie, you are directly subsidizing the promotion of soon-to-be-illegal copyright-infringing activities to a younger generation! That's right, according to SFFaudio blog, WALL-E shows no hesitation in his blatant disregard for the interests of content distributors as he engages in circumvention activities that will easily make him a Copyright Criminal under Bill C-61.

Remember that because the main issue here is DRM circumvention, all of this still applies despite the fact that the material will be in the public domain by that point in time. (That is assuming there still is a public domain.)

If you disagree with this, and happen to be in the Kensington area of Calgary this Saturday, you might be interested in attending Jim Prentice's Stampede Breakfast at the Calgary Stampede and let him know what you think of this bill. A number of people already are.

Just a reminder that YTV will be airing the Death Note finale this Friday night with the final two episodes running from 10pm-11pm EST. Now let's just hope the series actually gets a second run.

Oh, and I hope you're all having a great Canada Day!

Apparently Death Note is viewed primarily by suicidal emo time bombs, or at least the edit YTV made to episode 35 of the series last night should indicate as much. It has been pointed out by many viewers that the word "suicide" was muted out from the end of the episode. There have also been unverified reports that the written word was also blurred out - if that's true, then it would likely be the first case of the station ever using blurring to edit a program. Baffling, especially considering that the series had run unedited up to this point.

Man, I do miss the days when this type of stuff was the biggest thing we had to worry about.

Over the years a few people have recommended that I do some kind of podcast. Rest assured, I have no intention of ceasing to tell these people to cram it, but some of you may be interested to check out the most recent episode of the radio program HiSciFi. Broadcast on Fridays and distributed online shortly after, HiSciFi is a science fiction and technology talk program headed by Jevon Ryan and Irma Arkus to which I occasionally contribute. Although I usually lose track of what I'm talking about and become reduced to a confused and bumbling state which confirms why podcasting is something I'd like to avoid, our most recent episode covers the issue of copyright in Canada. A new episode should also be up in the next few days, and you can keep on top of that by checking out HiSciFi.com.

As of June 19th at 9:00pm, jPod has begun it's second airing on CBC. Be sure not to miss it - it serves as evidence that the CBC can make programming of a truly high calibre. There's very little chance of the show getting any kind of renewal at this point, but it would be great to actually see the show perform better this time around.

After a delay that should be predictable by now, I can say that the SakuraCon 2008 report is definitely underway. I'll try to have it up as soon as possible, but I should point out that the final product is going to be mainly critique. My feelings over the con have simmered down since April, so it will be less scathing than it would've been a month-and-a-half ago when I should've had it done, but I still hope that the staff will take note of these problems for next year.

In the meantime, I'll post a link to our private interview with Hiroshi Nagahama, director of Mushi-shi and the upcoming animated adaptation of Detroit Metal City. The interview was done by my friend Jevon Ryan for the CJSF Radio program, HiSciFi, with a few additional questions from myself near the end. Also, here is the best picture of Caitlin Glass ever.