I think all us normal folk can agree that Adult Swim really started to suck back when it was composed of about 3/5 anime. There used to be so much anime on Adult Swim that you'd think even people who like anime would have gotten sick of it, if it wasn't for the already-established fact that most people who like anime are like heroin addicts who would eschew their jobs, family, and friends (on the Gundam fan fiction newsgroup they post on, of course. Not real friends) just to get their fix. There was a time when 2/3 of the weekday line-up was anime, half of the Sunday line-up was anime, and if you wanted to watch Adult Swim comedy on Sundays you had to wait until Big O was over, because apparently a show that's more excruciating to watch than seeing one's own legs fed into a meat grinder was so important that Adult Swim had to make sure everybody saw it. And that was in addition to all the other anime Cartoon Network was showing, because the anime fags couldn't get enough. Adult Swim was so bad that it mentioned me on TV and I still hated it. That's pretty fucking bad.
But now Cartoon Network is starting to filter anime out of Adult Swim. They've put most of it on Saturday night, which is fine because only an anime fag would be watching Cartoon Network on a Saturday night anyway. There is no anime on the Sunday block. And most surprisingly, the weekday line-up is half comedy, half anime; and of the three animes shown on the weekdays only one is a show that anime fags would make homemade T-shirts of or write fan fictions about. So then it must stand to reason that Adult Swim is substantially better than it was about a year ago, right?
Yeah, don't I wish. Quite the contrary, Adult Swim is now somehow worse than it was back when the only new episodes were of Inu Yasha and Brak screamed at us about how wonderful Big O is. This means a few things; first, anime isn't the only thing that can ruin my television-viewing experiences. This isn't too surprising. I may not like anime, but when it's on TV I can just watch something else or turn the TV off, even if the TV SHOULD be showing Space Ghost instead. And of course, anime itself isn't nearly as bad as the fans of it who, if are told that somebody doesn't like it, will argue that it is impossible to have a negative opinion of it.
Ergo one naturally asks "well if Adult Swim isn't showing as much anime as it used to, then why do you think it sucks more then it used to? You hate anime, don't you?" Well yeah, but I hate other things too, like oral surgery. So Adult Swim can still blow, even if there was no anime. The following is a myriad of reasons as to why Adult Swim is total crap, and most of them probably don't have anything to do with anime, maybe.
1. Adult Swim is too aware of itself.
Have you ever seen that one episode of South Park where they find out that the entire planet Earth is an intergalactic reality show, and the show's alien producers want to cancel the show once Earth's inhabitants find out because they know they are on TV, and thus the show wouldn't be funny any more? Well much like the characters in South Park, when the dip shits at Adult Swim realized that people watched them and would see what they did, they flipped out and started running around in circles yelling "Oh my god, we're famous TV stars now!" You think that's not true? Well consider this: how many other networks do you know run program bumps or commercials or anything else that gives viewers updates into the comical hi-jinks inside said network's offices? And don't you fucking dare say ESPN; at least they have the sense to make shit up about themselves in those Sportscenter commercials.
Adult Swim seems to think the viewing public gives a shit about what Adult Swim thinks, and this is because there are idiots who post at the adultswim.com message boards who think that Williams Street is the kind of superstars whom a shit should given about, and would be happy to toss the salad of anybody who has ever met anybody who has ever been inside the Williams Street offices.
And the prototypical example of this phenomenon is what has happened to Sealab 2021. A few weeks ago, Sealab did an episode that was obviously the worst thing I've ever seen, and despite what some people might say, it was what I would call "Birdman bad." The idiots behind Sealab allegedly go on the adultswim.com message boards, see some idiot whining about how he loves Hesh and how Hesh should be more prominently featured, and then they actually listen to him and purchase his script for the show. See, those tricky fucks thought they would fool the viewers by saying that tonight's script was written by someone on the message boards named "MCHeshPants420," but it was obvious (after it was pointed out to me yeah, but in retrospect I would have figured it out) that it was a parody of a typical message board fag's fan fiction of the show. And it was actually a good parody, in that there were a lot of consistencies with what one might expect a Sealab fan fiction to be like.
But just because it was true-to-life doesn't mean it was funny. You know I could probably do a pretty good impression of what people who worked at concentration camps during the Holocaust would say to get people into the "showers" but that doesn't mean it would be funny. That's not funny at all, Sealab; how dare you racists try to poke fun at the holocaust. That's fucked up, Sealab. This episode was geared at people who post at the adultswim.com message boards, and their opinions don't count anyway, so what the fuck is the point? If you were fooled and really believed that it was a real episode, well then it wasn't funny to you because the jokes were intentionally bad. But even if you weren't fooled and you "got it" then it still wasn't funny because the jokes were still bad.
But the fact that Sealab is trying to please a few hundred anime fags on a message board isn't the only reason it sucks. When it first started, it was a brilliant, clever, dialogue-based show that was on par with Space Ghost when it was at its best. But now it's lazy, relying on such bullshit techniques as Birdman-style running gags that involve little more than unexplained cameos from characters in past episodes that might have been funny in their original context but surely aren't funny when they are there without jokes. Further examples of sloth are abound with all the new animations, flouting funny, random illustrations with absolutely no worthwhile dialogue. "I, Robot" was 11-minutes of overdubbed animation from the original show, with completely brilliant dialogue. However, now that the show's animation is all new and original, it has become a crutch (much like how I use profanity as a crutch); instead of writing good dialogue or actual jokes, Sealab now just has some "totally wacky, hilariously random!" new pretty pictures, something like someone doing drugs or Debbie wearing clothes with innuendos on them, and then a character making some stupid, pseudo-sarcastic remark like "riiiiight" or "I did not need to know that!"
Having good animation doesn't necessarily mean a show is going to be bad. Sure, "I, Robot" was a hilarious episode, but I also tend to think "Bizarro" was pretty funny, even if Bizarro Quinn was a little too annoying and in the episode a little too much and liked too much by idiots. But animation alone doesn't make something good. I mean, Birdman's animation is actually pretty good, but that doesn't mean that it makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out with my toe nails any less whenever I am even reminded of Birdman. I'm not saying that for Sealab to be watchable again the animation has to be shit again. But unless the writers are trying to get the show to go down in flames so that they can collect on the insurance, they might want to stop doing retarded shit like having an inexplicable Star Wars reference followed by a brief pause before Stormy tells Han Solo to shut up, because quite frankly I think that's the kind of humor that an orangutan with a massive head wound could come up with.
Those are the major reasons that Adult Swim blows right now; the Adult Swim site has a message board and too many people, including the writers for Sealab, are reading it. The following is a brief list of what else is wrong with Adult Swim, but I'm not going to go into extensive detail with too many of them because I already want to kill God just from thinking about how great Sealab used to be and how awful it is now; if I think too much about how great Adult Swim was when Space Ghost was on it, then I might want to invent a time machine for the sole purpose of persuading Jesus' mom to get an abortion.
2. No Space Ghost.
Regardless of what anybody says, there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for Adult Swim not showing Space Ghost: Coast to Coast constantly.
3. The bumps.
Here is my impression of a Thursday night, adultswim.com message board twat's love letter to Adult Swim:
Anime_Girl_8871: Hey Adult Swim! Insipidly random fictional anecdote that shows how crazy and random I think I am and ergo how funny I wish I was!
Adult Swim: Ummm yeah, OK, What-EVER. Thanks for sharing; we did NOT need to know that [adult swim].
If that doesn't sound less funny than cancer to you, well then I hope you pass a kidney stone the size of a watermelon because you fucking deserve it, prick.
4. I am getting fucking sick of reruns.
Ok I know new episodes of TV shows just don't shoot out of their creators asses on a regular basis, but Adult Swim hasn't shown anything new in months that wasn't Sealab and Birdman (which have been complete shit) or anime (which doesn't count). At first it was nice having Family Guy and Futurama on every single fucking night; I could catch the episodes I missed because Fox decided to show the shows at completely random times and not tell anybody that they were even still on the air. And those are shows that I can still find funny in syndication, meaning some episodes are funny even if I've seen them way too many times.
But as far as I'm concerned I've seen those episodes enough times, and I'm sure anybody who would be interested in seeing those episodes has already been watching Adult Swim enough times to watch the entire runs of both shows twice. As far as I'm concerned, Futurama and Family Guy are now pretty much just dead space. Mission Hill is pretty much the same too; even though it's a great show and they haven't shown it much recently, they've still shown the show's entire run way too many times. It's turned into filler, like Baby Blues (which sucks a whole bunch, by the way). This is why the lack of Space Ghost is such an insult; Adult Swim is pretty much putting whatever it has on the air that isn't Space Ghost for some reason I can't figure out. Fuck you, Adult Swim.
5. Birdman still sucks.
Yup. Still.
6. You know what? Anime.
Because any Inu Yasha is too much Inu Yasha.