Every Saturday morning on the Toon Time Theater Twitch channel, the New Gabe Order is doing their best to build you the best Saturday morning on the internet. We call it, Toon Time Theater. In this weekend animation block, I provide the latest and greatest of action-based animation to viewers of all ages. Whether you are catching and battling capsule monsters, sailing the high seas for the greatest treasure mankind has ever witnessed, or doing some ninja business to become the next Hokage, Toon Time Theater has the right program for you depending on your tastes.
I launched Toon Time Theater on July 9, 2023 as an experiment to see if a live-stream of various cartoon series would work in the long run, assuming I don't get caught by the distributors and production companies. The fact is, 2022 was my worst year in my life. Combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, changing tastes in entertainment among my friends and family, and hard times for my family members, I had the loneliest time in my life, struggling to play multiplayer video games in person and getting others to play the games that in their local arcade. When 2023 came along, I was getting myself to watch more anime privately, play single player video games most often, and at one point, experiment with live-streams where I don't have to play any video games. I went with cartoon blocks, since we've lost them on over-the-air TV networks since 2014. (Blame it on Litton and Hearst for terminating the last Saturday morning cartoon block.) Toonami still exists, but since 2019, I honestly felt that the block was a shadow if its former self. I thought to myself, "what if I took Toonami and made it better?" And that's how Toon Time Theater came to be. Since launch, I would live-stream blocks of cartoons on Sunday mornings on Tumblr or Twitch depending on my Tumblr account's status. By the time Tumblr discontinued their live-streaming platform, I ended up on Twitch, but with a smaller audience. I kept the blocks running regardless of my audience since I was giving others an option to get caught up on most of the Toonami shows without having to stay up late at night. Back then, I get most of the programs from the previous night's Toonami broadcast. I kept running Sunday morning cartoon blocks on Twitch throughout 2023 as Naruto Shippuden English dub's later episodes weren't on a streaming service like Hulu yet.
The first year of Toon Time Theater was rough, but things started to get better for the block by Winter. When Christmas came, I received all the money needed to buy the DVD sets to the last remaining Naruto Shippuden episodes, complete with their English dubs. On January 20, 2024, I moved Toon Time Theater to Saturday mornings so I can live-stream the Naruto Shippuden English dub ahead of Toonami. Also, I figured moving to Saturday mornings would get the most out of my audience. There are some families that aren't willing to stay up on Saturday nights due to strict curfews and having to go to church the morning after. My audience improved, but by a bit. (Sunday mornings weren't a good idea...) I introduced the concept of U-PICK polls, where I would host polls on Tumblr to survey viewers what series they want to see on Toon Time Theater. The first few polls were lacking, and I had to change the strategy until I got my Tumblr account fixed. Since then, my polls had more engagement than ever before. From May 2024 to December 2024, I ran a short-lived Friday afternoon cartoon block to compete against Adult Swim's Toonami Rewind, complete with most of their shows and U-PICK rejects. 2024 came and gone, but I didn't like the year considering my father's death and a sudden change in my family's income.
2025 started rough. With my family's mismanagement of the money, Mom scolded me beg time and I was forced to drop my college classes, get a refund for most of my unnecessary purchases and return the money to Mom. I started the Separate Ways arc of Toon Time Theater where I have to deal with not having Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and Toonami in my household. I launched yet another short-lived block in the form of More One Night, a late-night cartoon block dedicated to all of the "essential" cartoons. I nerfed my Saturday morning block on purpose due to this. Turns out, I wanted a Toonami experience without Toonami. Eventually, I got access to YouTube TV, and that allowed me to watch Cartoon Network, Adult Swim and Toonami once again, but around that time, I had poor management of my weekend animation blocks on Twitch. I was setting up a plan that would change my blocks for the best or for the worst. After a U-PICK poll, my Saturday morning Twitch block was rebranded as "ONLY ONE SATURDAY MORNING", but only to focus on school anime as a response to the isekai oversaturation of the 2010s and 2020s. I was originally going to run the filler arc until September, but a certain DMCA is what caused me to change Twitch channels from my primary channel to a new, dedicated Toon Time Theater channel. I ended the filler arc early enough to start the Redemption arc of Toon Time Theater, which focused on combining both blocks into a giant, unified Saturday morning block. Since I am no longer allowed to live-stream LAZARUS on Facebook and Twitch, I ended up live-streaming Please! Teacher (Onegai Teacher) on Saturday mornings to be timed with Toonami's subtitled LAZARUS reruns. I still live-stream Toon Time Theater to this day, so feel free to stop by Twitch, Facebook, Kick or Trovo to watch some feel-good cartoons on Saturday mornings. (Hopefully Saturday morning cartoon blocks will come back in one form or another on over-the-air TV networks someday...)