Spacetoon and it shaping us today

First, a history lesson:

For those who never heard of the cartoon channel that airs anime dubbed in Arabic, Spacetoon.

Let me just say that you missed half of your life!

Founded back in year 2000 (I was 10 years old back then *shocked face* time flies), broadcasting on one of the Bahraini channels yet in a limited time frame daily till it became an independent channel after 2 years, with the motto of “قناة الشباب المستقبل” future youth channel and had a theme of a space system, which contained:

·         The Action planet

·         The History planet

·         The Sports planet

·         The Girlie/Emerald(Zomoroda) planet

·         The Adventure planet

·         The BonBon planet (for kids)

·         The Science planet

·         The Movies planet

·         The Comedy planet

·         The Alpha planet

All planets come with a special introduction song and on-&-off break intermissions fitting for the theme that represents them.

It was well received by the audience and had the right amount of Edutainment (entertainment + education), even though it had a few channels running, it seems like some of those channels have stopped broadcasting.

For many of us, Spacetoon has heightened our love for anime, or introduced us to the culture of it. A lot of us found a place to belong, a place to call home, discovered the hidden talents within our souls from voice acting, singing, drawing and writing plot ideas, which later some took to the next level in making their own comics and mangas etc. for some others, it was the beginning of their anime discovering journey, something I would call the weeaboo journey.

One memorable moment for us watchers definitely lies within the songs that were customized for the anime on the channel, songs were mostly written and sang by composer and song writer Tarek Tourgane which we were fortunate to meet at the Middle East Film Comic Con, Dubai 2017, along with his son Mohamed Al-ArabiTourgane who follows in his father’s footsteps of composing, writing and singing plus voice acting, remeeting them again in Oman’s first 968GameZ, where they came to perform beloved songs such as Hazeem A’Raad, Ahd El Asdiqaa, Simba, Hunter x Hunter…etc.

My two cents: I am actually glad this channel was in my life, it had brought all my favourite shows under one roof at appropriate timings. I remember how it started a bit before or during ramdhan, we would gather around the TV and watch the Action and Sports planet and sing with each planet’s intro song and the songs of some of my favourite cartoons with so much passion.

(Hazeem el Ra’d anyone? :p)

One of my dreams as a kid was to voice act for one of the anime, good ol’ times hehe..

*slowly slides my CV in*

All in all, those were awesome days, with a pretty decent amount of cartoons that had different variety and feels to it, seems like I need to binge watch some of them now! and I think I shall do exactly that .

 Let me know, favourite planet and maybe favourite anime song ? :)