Doraemon leaves Indonesian TV after 35 years; here's how fans react

For 35 years, Doraemon lived on Indonesian television. He was the blue, round constant of Sunday mornings, post-homework afternoons, and that oddly specific hour when kids negotiated “just one more episode” with parents who secretly wanted to watch it too. And then, unceremoniously, he vanished.

Doraemon stopped showing up on RCTI, the channel that had hosted the robotic cat from the future since the late 1980s. Indonesians noticed immediately. 

Indonesian TV channel RCTI drops Doraemon after decades, viewers react online

Social media filled up with disbelief, nostalgia, and the kind of emotional overreaction usually reserved for football losses and breakups. “This raised me,” people said — and they weren’t being dramatic. Doraemon wasn’t niche fandom content; he was multigenerational. Parents who once watched Nobita mess up his life were now watching their kids do the same, just minus the futuristic gadgets.

After three-and-a-half decades, RCTI didn’t bother with an explanation. No official word on licensing issues, scheduling strategy, or whether Doraemon was gently retired or shoved offstage. This is about what happens when legacy TV meets a world that no longer waits for appointment viewing. Kids today don’t grow up wondering what’s on at 8 a.m. on Sundays — they scroll, stream, skip intros. They binge entire childhoods in a week. Traditional broadcasters everywhere are quietly reshuffling, cutting costs, and betting on content that delivers instant numbers, not long-term affection.

For many Indonesians, Doraemon was their first emotional relationship with fiction. He taught generosity, consequences, and the simple truth that no gadget can fix a lazy attitude. He also taught kids how to laugh at themselves, preferably while Nobita was crying in the corner. The reaction online says it all, because people aren’t just sad, they’re personally offended. 

Doraemon isn’t gone from the world because the franchise is alive and well, still churning out episodes and movies, still globally beloved. He’ll likely resurface on another channel or migrate fully into the streaming ecosystem.

Free-to-air TV — the great equaliser — just lost one of its last universally loved characters. Doraemon didn’t belong to a subscription tier or a device. He belonged to everyone with a television and time to kill. That era is slipping away slowly. It’s the slow, unglamorous death of the idea that millions of people once watched the same thing at the same time and loved it. Doraemon came from the future, but he anchored people in the past. And now, he’s moved on again without warning, without explanation, leaving behind a generation that didn’t think it was ready to say goodbye.

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