Rosie Towler is a senior and the Unity Director for the Fishers Tiger Times. Her views do not necessarily reflect those of the newspaper.
The anime One Piece was originally an adventure anime that follows the adventures of the main character, Monkey D. Luffy and his pirate crew to find the greatest treasure ever left by the legendary Pirate, Gold Roger. The show originally aired on Oct. 22, 1999, and has been running ever since, with a episode count of 1,079. The new One-Piece live-action on Netflix with only eight episodes that came out on Aug. 31. I can not tell you how they were able to even spread that storyline out over the time of 1,000 episodes. It is an anime that is known to have many unfinished sub-plots that have been argued may or may not be needed for the plot. Just by reading the synopsis, it actually baffles me that they were even able to spread it out that long, although I’ve never seen the anime or the live-action (that I am considering watching). Hardcore fans of the anime are coming out of nowhere to convince live-action watchers to start watching the anime.
While American TV shows have also gotten worse with a lengthened runtime, shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Riverdale are key examples. Viewers of the shows even wanted them to end while running. Grey’s Anatomy has only 400 episodes so far with an average run time of 43 minutes and 19 seasons. According to ratingraph.com, which tracks how many ratings different TV shows get by a graph, the number of people rating went from an average of 1,845.6 in the season to only 355.4. One-piece fans are not calling for the show to end. In actuality, they want the show and the manga to continue for as long as the author can continue.
There are many ideas of the show that I do not understand because the bottom line is that it is too long. While I am not the only person with this belief, fans of the original show will disagree because it is considered one of the best adventure animes of all time. This is not the only Japanese animation I refuse to watch because it is too long. I will not watch all of the big three animes, which I consider Bleach, One Piece and Naruto because of their length.
According to Comic book resources (CBR), watching the entirety of One Piece would take 25,656 minutes, which would equal 427.6 hours or 17.81 days and that is not counting the movies. Something I did not even know existed till I started researching this topic. With the movies and the episodes, there would be a total viewing time of 449.7 hours, or 18.73 days. Those stats do not account for the amount of time it would take to sleep, eat or to have a life.
Fans on Reddit, when asked if they consider the anime too long, came to a consensus that some parts of the anime do feel dragged out and unfinished but the sub-plots are just too good not to watch. CBR and Reddit both agreed that the manga is less hurried and has a better timeline than the anime. If I do not have the patience to sit and watch a TV show, I definitely do not have the time to sit and read 106 volumes. It would not only be a lot of money but a lot of time as well.
The number of animes I have stopped watching them because of their length and how much they dragged on is way too many. An example that I can think of is Fairy Tale, which is also a very popular adventure anime. I did watch the anime for a while, I was obsessed with it. I never finished it because I did not have the time nor the patience for the amount of little storylines there was in between the main plot. One piece is the same way.
