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Who digs giant robots?
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Category All / All
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Oh no, it was cancelled/not renewed before it even aired, though the executives at the time liked to first cite "low ratings" (this is a lie, I have never met a single person that watched CN/Toonami in that era which didn't like Megas XLR), and then because it was basically the only thing Cartoon Network had made that was an original series at the time which wasn't from one of the people who built the channel's original programming library (I.E. the Craig Macracken and gendy taratovsky's) they could afford to give it the boot into being a tax write-off amidst warner's mid-00's financial shortcomings. The show's creators however saved copies of the episodes and released them online, on top of, bafflingly, copies showing up on the iTunes and Microsoft stores.
But even from the series' original pilot production "Lowbrow" (which won CN's 2002 animation short contest by such a significant degree it was seen as unfair) CN had been trying to shaft the series as, despite running Gundam and other mecha anime on Toonami for years at that point, they didn't understand the Super robot anime spoof series, despite it featuring two of the actors from one of the most successful-for-the-network-to-just-leave-in-syndication anime of all time. Megas was even meant to be released in 2003, but CN sat on it for a year before the Toonami block (which from its inception was somewhat independent of main CN's nonsense due to it being run by Williams Street AKA the Adult Swim people) picked it up to run it. But even with it succeeding in that block CN was intent on writing it off from the start. CN's executives intended to do the same thing with the IGPX Miniseries (which DID debut in 2003), but production agreements between CN and the japanese animation groups it was co-produced with prevented such from occurring there, as Japan has laws against using completed and released products as tax write-offs whereas America does not.
You also have to remember that it was during that period were CN was reducing their wide-age appeal series due to changes in audience sensibility regulations (i.E. conservative content censorship against violent-content programming despite...you know, every kid in America being likely to have lived through a domestic terrorism scare or incident so pretending violence doesn't exist or have consequence is idiotic) and locking off any programming that might be aimed at older audiences to just the Toonami blocks, and Megas was sequestered off to that for most of its run (alongside Yu Yu hakusho's later arcs, the anime adaptation of Hiro Mashima's Rave Master, Dragonball GT, Justice league, and Gundam SEED), without getting any other 'rerun throughout other timeslots' periods like, say, Justice League or the original Teen Titans series got. When an original series doesn't get any re-airings, it's going to appear to look worse on such a network, in comparison to the anime that was just licensed and mattered less overall to their distributions.
That's also why CN's insistence on constantly airing Teen Titans Go marathons in the 2010's instead of any of their other shows (I have NO idea if they're still doing it, I haven't had cable in years) was disastrous to most of their other programming as there was no chance to get new viewers on board with out-of-regular-timeslot re-airings that usually would be used to grow an audience for a series.
And worse, the original creators of the Megas have tried to re-acquire the rights to it from warner to get around the 'tax write-off' status, only to have no luck in getting it from them to at-all release physically; matching the current mess with the batgirl movie and "coyote V Acme" in choosing to not release works that have audiences for them which would at bare minimum allow them to break even, all out of stubborn pride from those at the top. The streaming release versions of the episodes are apparently a result of WHEN they were used as a tax write-off being before digital distribution existed as a valid version of commerce (this was the 'you wouldn't download a gun' era, and my 3d Print Outlaw Star Caster Gun would refute that notion now), so there is a valid legal exception there that's been exploited to show how many did and still do enjoy the series. CN's tried to do this with other properties as well ("Grim adventures of Billy and Mandy" being one such example), only for their respective popularities to prevent them from going under as much as CN wanted them to, whereas what they often tried to bank on blowing up in their faces. It's actually embarrassing to look back and see how plain badly so many of these groups were run, especially in the wake of Conservative S&P regulation changes made for television in the Bush Jr era that have never been appropriately rolled back.
But even from the series' original pilot production "Lowbrow" (which won CN's 2002 animation short contest by such a significant degree it was seen as unfair) CN had been trying to shaft the series as, despite running Gundam and other mecha anime on Toonami for years at that point, they didn't understand the Super robot anime spoof series, despite it featuring two of the actors from one of the most successful-for-the-network-to-just-leave-in-syndication anime of all time. Megas was even meant to be released in 2003, but CN sat on it for a year before the Toonami block (which from its inception was somewhat independent of main CN's nonsense due to it being run by Williams Street AKA the Adult Swim people) picked it up to run it. But even with it succeeding in that block CN was intent on writing it off from the start. CN's executives intended to do the same thing with the IGPX Miniseries (which DID debut in 2003), but production agreements between CN and the japanese animation groups it was co-produced with prevented such from occurring there, as Japan has laws against using completed and released products as tax write-offs whereas America does not.
You also have to remember that it was during that period were CN was reducing their wide-age appeal series due to changes in audience sensibility regulations (i.E. conservative content censorship against violent-content programming despite...you know, every kid in America being likely to have lived through a domestic terrorism scare or incident so pretending violence doesn't exist or have consequence is idiotic) and locking off any programming that might be aimed at older audiences to just the Toonami blocks, and Megas was sequestered off to that for most of its run (alongside Yu Yu hakusho's later arcs, the anime adaptation of Hiro Mashima's Rave Master, Dragonball GT, Justice league, and Gundam SEED), without getting any other 'rerun throughout other timeslots' periods like, say, Justice League or the original Teen Titans series got. When an original series doesn't get any re-airings, it's going to appear to look worse on such a network, in comparison to the anime that was just licensed and mattered less overall to their distributions.
That's also why CN's insistence on constantly airing Teen Titans Go marathons in the 2010's instead of any of their other shows (I have NO idea if they're still doing it, I haven't had cable in years) was disastrous to most of their other programming as there was no chance to get new viewers on board with out-of-regular-timeslot re-airings that usually would be used to grow an audience for a series.
And worse, the original creators of the Megas have tried to re-acquire the rights to it from warner to get around the 'tax write-off' status, only to have no luck in getting it from them to at-all release physically; matching the current mess with the batgirl movie and "coyote V Acme" in choosing to not release works that have audiences for them which would at bare minimum allow them to break even, all out of stubborn pride from those at the top. The streaming release versions of the episodes are apparently a result of WHEN they were used as a tax write-off being before digital distribution existed as a valid version of commerce (this was the 'you wouldn't download a gun' era, and my 3d Print Outlaw Star Caster Gun would refute that notion now), so there is a valid legal exception there that's been exploited to show how many did and still do enjoy the series. CN's tried to do this with other properties as well ("Grim adventures of Billy and Mandy" being one such example), only for their respective popularities to prevent them from going under as much as CN wanted them to, whereas what they often tried to bank on blowing up in their faces. It's actually embarrassing to look back and see how plain badly so many of these groups were run, especially in the wake of Conservative S&P regulation changes made for television in the Bush Jr era that have never been appropriately rolled back.
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