I’ve decided to break my analysis of the post midnight anime into a series of smaller, more easily digested posts. You will be able to identify these by the prefix and tag “Past My Bedtime”.
There is a single driving factor behind this – TV Tokyo. As best as I can tell TV Tokyo’s approach to scheduling anime is this:
- Put a lot of it on TV.
- Hope someone watches.
While I believe it was they who started the boom in 1996 with Those Who Hunt Elves and have been the most prolific broadcaster of late night anime, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious strategy or particular audience they are going for. It’s going to take a lot of breaking down to try and make sense of anything going on there, and I don’t want that drowning out some of the clearer scheduling ideas other channels have had over the last 13 years.