Thursday, March 24, 2016

UPDATE: Toonami To Co-Produce Two New Seasons of "FLCL"

The unthinkable has just happened, right out of the blue. As announced by Toonami's Official Tumblr Page and by Turner's official press release, Toonami will be co-producing two new seasons of the cult-classic anime FLCL (an abbreviation for "Fooly Cooly") with the legendary Japanese animation studio Production IG, who co-produced (and eventually purchased) the original series with Gainax (another Japanese animation studio). The new seasons, comprised of six episodes each for a total of twelve new episodes, will premiere on Toonami sometime between late 2017 to early 2018.

It is currently unknown who will be producing the English language version of the series. Toonami/Adult Swim could possibly dub the new seasons in-house at William Street, or Toonami could contract Funimation, who has the license to the original series, to produce the dub. It's also possible that Toonami could contract another dubbing studio (such as Bang Zoom Entertainment) to produce the dub. Unfortunately, the original licensors of the anime/producers of the dub (Synch-Point/Broccoli) shut down at the end of 2008, so a dub from them is not possible.

It is also currently unknown if the original FLCL series will air on Toonami again to promote the new seasons, but considering the premiere time frame for the new seasons, a television broadcast probably won't happen until sometime before the new seasons debut on the network. However, it is possible that the series could be featured again on Adult Swim's website or on the Toonami Marathon Stream at some point between now and the debut of the new seasons on Toonami. Of course, this is assuming that Toonami still has the broadcast rights to air the original series from Funimation (considering the series is not on Adult Swim's website as of this writing, it's unknown whether or not these rights still lie with Toonami or not). However, with the new seasons on the way, Toonami will likely re-purchase these rights if their rights have indeed lapsed.

UPDATE 3/24/16: Jason DeMarco posted some additional information about the new seasons on his Twitter account. Essentially, the plan is to have all of the original voice cast return for the show (and although not specified, it can be inferred that DeMarco is referring to the English voice cast) as well as bring back other people who were involved in the original series. Currently, Kazuya Tsurumaki (the director of the original series) will return to the show as a supervisor (as well as shaping the story line) and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto (co-founder of Gainax) will return as well. According to DeMarco, most of the original voice cast has already signed onto the new seasons (no confirmation on who has signed on yet, however) and they are working on getting the band who performed the music for the original show (The Pillows) back for the new seasons as well.

UPDATE 2 3/24/16: Jason DeMarco has also mentioned on his Ask.FM account that the budget for show acquisitions is completely separate from FLCL's budget. This essentially means that the production of FLCL will not affect the acquisitions of shows for the Toonami block from now until production on FLCL finishes.