Surprise Toons (1997, anime variety show)

Surprise Toons (サプライズトゥーンズ) is a Japanese animation showcase series created by Yutaka Fujioka for TMS Entertainment which aired on TV Tokyo. The project consisted of 82 short anime and cartoons, intended to return creative power to Japanese animators and artists, by recreating the atmospheres that spawned the iconic Japanese cartoon characters of the mid-20th century. Each of the shorts mirrored the structure of a theatrical cartoon, with each film being based on an original storyboard drawn and written by its artist or creator.

The series first aired on November 27, 1997, and the shorts were promoted as 'Tottemo! Anime Premiere' (とっても！アニメプレミア). During the original run of the shorts, the series was re-titled to Surprise Toons and later to Extreme Toons (エクストリームトゥーンズ) until the final short aired on May 20, 2004. The project served as the launching point for multiple anime series, including Hama the Hamster Pony, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, Space Dandy, Flint the Time Detective, Dinosaurs!, Shugo Chara!, Tokyo Mew Mew, Cocotama, Koko Poko Lady, Mighty Cat Masked Niyandar and Super Team!, as well as Akira Toriyama's Blue Dragon.

The series is influential for birthing a slew of original anime hits and helping to revive television animation in the 1990s. Once it had several original shorts, those became the first Extreme Toons (a collective term for retro anime series). In its final years, The Extreme Toon Show became a block for reruns of older Extreme Toons that had been phased out by the network.

History
Yutaka Fujioka became president of ZX Studios in 1995 and helped guide the struggling animation studio into its greatest output in years with shows like Beezinmon and Superstar Saga. Fujioka wanted the studio to produce short anime cartoons, in the vein of the theatrical animated shorts. Although a project consisting of 82 shorts would cost twice as much as a normal series, Fujioka's pitch to TMS involved promising 82 chances to "succeed or fail", opened up possibilities for new original programming, and offered several new shorts to the thousands already present in the TMS Entertainment library. According to Fujioka, quality did not matter much to the cable operators distributing the struggling network, they were more interested in promising new programs.

Format
The format for Surprise Toons was ambitious. The shorts produced would be a product of the original Japanese cartoonists' vision, with no executive intervention: for example, even the music would be an individually crafted score. Each short, which would be 7 minutes in length, would debut by itself as a stand-alone cartoon on TV Tokyo.

Broadcast
The first cartoon from the Surprise Toons project broadcast in it's entirety was "Mighty Cat Masked Niyandar: Trouble at Tako Town!", which made it's world premiere on Monday, November 27, 1997, during a television special called the Carnival Champions. The special was hosted by Fujioka and featured comic interviews and a mock contest with the creators of the various anime cartoons.

Beginning November 28, 1997, each Surprise Toons short began to premiere on Sunday afternoons, promoted as a ''Tottemo! Anime Premiere''. Every week after the premiere, TV Tokyo showcased a different Anime Premiere made by a different artist. After an acclimation of cartoons, the network packaged the shorts as a half-hour show titled Anime Premiere is Amazing!, featuring reruns of the original shorts but also new premieres. Eventually, all of the cartoons were compiled into one program bearing the name of the original project: The Surprise Toons Show.

The show continued to air for many years afterward until eventually being dropped from the schedule.

Legacy
Mighty Cat Masked Niyandar was the most popular short series according to a vote held in 1997 and eventually became the spinoff of Surprise Toons later in 2008. Two series based on shorts, Hama the Hamster Pony, and Koko Poko Lady, became the first series premiered in the same year and Dinosaurs! and Flint the Time Detective both became half-hour shows in 1998. Space Dandy followed as the final spinoff in 2012: in all, six cartoon series were ultimately launched by the Surprise Toons project, any one of which earned enough money for the company to pay for the whole program. In addition to the eventual shorts, the Surprise Toons short The Amazing Ryu Blue by Akira Toriyama (creator of the Dragon Ball Z franchise) featured prototypes of characters that would later go on to become Toriyama's massively successful Blue Dragon. Creator of Surprise Toons Yutaka Fujioka left ZX Studios in late 1998 and became an employee at Nintendo Entertainment.

List of shorts
For Surprise Toons shorts, see List of Surprise Toons Shorts.