FISCHER: One Piece lowers the barrier for entry

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

“One Piece” occupies a high spot among my personal pantheon of favorite franchises, right up there with “Spider-Man,” “Sonic the Hedgehog,” “Godzilla,” and “Star Trek.”

The fantastical tale of Monkey D. Luffy and his band of pirates has become one of the most successful media franchises in history, though only relatively recently has it started to gain the appreciation in North America it has elsewhere in the world.

Netflix has produced a pretty successful live-action adaptation, I’m seeing “One Piece” T-shirts at Target, and there’s currently an orchestra concert series traveling around celebrating the anime’s 25th anniversary.

It’s about time that “One Piece” becomes a household name.

I started watching the show in 2006 during a summer where I had a lot of spare time to fill, making an anime with a backlog of more than 200 episodes very appealing. By winter I had caught up to what was then the most recent episodes, and had to make the adjustment from binge watching multiple episodes in a day to waiting a full week for the latest installment.

Anybody that’s ever binged an ongoing series knows the struggle. One minute you’re enjoying the unrestricted freedom of being able to watch a new show as much as you want for as long as you want. Then, all of a sudden, you crash into the brick wall of production reality.

Sometimes I skip a few weeks worth of episodes so I can enjoy them all in a row, but I’ll never have that seemingly infinite backlog again.

And what a backlog it has become. After 25 years of running more-or-less non-stop on a weekly basis, a new viewer coming into the show would have a whopping 1100+ episodes to catch-up on. You could dedicate two hours a day, every single day, to watching “One Piece” and be caught up in about eight or nine months.

Personally, as somebody that feels the pain of seeing “to be continued” every week after a paltry 24 minutes, that sounds wonderful. However, apparently that colossal backlog of episodes is too overwhelming for some. “There’s too many episodes” is a frequent refrain I hear from people when I recommend the show.

Factor in the challenge of convincing 2024 audiences to watch a show that began with 1999’s animation standards and you have a significant barrier for entry.

And apparently Netflix agrees, because the streaming service is backing the production of a “One Piece” remake, separate from its live-action adaptation. While not a lot is known about the new show, one can presume it will serve as a much more condensed experience, cutting out filler episodes and picking up the pace in storylines where the original drags itself out.

The “One Piece” anime itself is adapted from Eiichiro Oda’s manga series of the same name, which is being produced nearly concurrently. It’s a common practice in Japan to make anime adaptations of ongoing manga series as they are still being written, which often results in the anime having to resort to several tried-and-true tricks to avoid running out of source material to adapt. Such shows are often riddled with flashback episodes, drawn out sequences where not much happens, and entirely original filler arcs, and “One Piece” is no exception.

It’s not uncommon for an anime to get a remake that cuts out the fluff, but I can’t think of a time that it has happened while the original show was still in progress.

I’m here for it though. After all, with a quarter-century of content for the remake to adapt, there is little concern that it will run out of material before either the manga or anime ultimately come to an end.

The bigger question is whether or not the remake itself will even get to the finish line. Netflix isn’t exactly known for its support of long term projects and even a conservative estimate of a briskly paced and filler-free remake would require 300 to 400 episodes just to get to where the show is now.

Assuming the new show launches next year and puts out an episode every week, it could still conceivably run for a solid decade. But only if Netflix, or somebody else, supports it for that long.

The best case scenario is that in 2035 you’d still have people saying “Oh, I can’t watch this. There’s too much to catch up on,” at which point it will probably get remade again.

— Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and will apparently be watching and re-watching “One Piece” forever.