Toonami @ MomoCon 2013: One Piece! Movie Night! New Tom!

Right now at the Hilton Atlanta, there’s a con going on. Inside of the con, there’s a panel going on. Inside of the panel, there’s news. Toonami news.

Our buddies at Toonami Faithful.com are currently at the Toonami panel at Momocon, and they’ve been livetweeting all the big news coming out of it. And, when I say big news, I sort of really mean big dang news.

First up, if you’ve ever been clamoring for One Piece to make its way over to Toonami, guess what? Your wishes have been granted. The 586-episode nautical shonen anime about a boy pirate aspiring to be King of the Pirates named Monkey D. Luffy, who has the properties of rubber after eating something called the Gum Gum Fruit, trying to find the One Piece treasure will be coming to the block soon. No date yet, as far as we know, but we’ll let you know once we know. I assume it’ll be a replacement, perhaps for Tenchi GXP.

Next, a movie night is a-comin’! Soon, too! The block will host a Neon Genesis Evangelion movie night on March 17th. Next weekend! I’m unsure of which, but I do assume it will be the Rebuild films, since FUNimation owns those. And if they are, watch them! Even if you’ve seen the original show. It’s a whole new story.

Next up: the block will make a couple changes to its look. Specifically, to its host and his ship. TOM 5 was introduced at the panel:

TOM 5 twitter.com/ToonamiNews/st…

— Toonami News (@ToonamiNews) March 10, 2013

…along with an all-new Absolution:

New absolution twitter.com/ToonamiNews/st…

— Toonami News (@ToonamiNews) March 10, 2013

The panel is still going on, and the Toonami Faithful dudes are there, taking it all in both on their own and with a camera. They’ll be providing video of the entire panel later on today, after the panel has ended, and when they do, we’ll let you know and we’ll throw it up here. Or, you can follow their account @ToonamiNews, and find out exactly when the video goes up. You should actually probably just follow them anyway. They’re integral on Twitter in the efforts to raise awareness that Toonami is back, so people will tune the heck in and get the block the ratings it so needs and deserves. Follow our friends for the most breaking of Toonami news.

If any more news comes out of the panel, we’ll be updating this post. So keep it locked here, and on Twitter for anything else new regarding the panel.

Updates under the cut, since we have some big ol’ images.

UPDATE: The panel is now over. We’ll let you know when Toonami Faithful’s video comes out.

UPDATE (2): The Toonami Tumblr has posted the schedule for next Saturday, the 16th, and at 1AM-3:30, the block will have a special presentation of Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone. It’ll be surrounded by your regularly scheduled Toonami programming otherwise, Bleach, Naruto, Bebop, and Inuyasha. It’s their birthday!

UPDATE (3): Check out TOM 5! Dude’s lookin’ slick.