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One-Piece... In 433 parts.

My question is this: Is it worth it to watch it? From the beginning?

Even if it is over four hundred episodes long (seriously, if you cannot tell a simple story in less than four hundred episodes then you really are waffling badly).

Is it worth it to watch it? From the beginning?

Certainly not all parts will be fab, I do expect it to drag in places (like the later half of Naruto's first run, prior to Shippuden).

Was it good, then fizzled out?

Is it resting on it's laurels just churning out fodder to feed the fans who want more, regardless of quality?

What's more, I've heard it mentioned that those episodes aired in the States were censored from the originals for content and language (like Naruto, and other 4Kids anime titles). I'd assume the uncensored Subs exist, but did the same uncensored treatment ever go to the Dubs?

...only it's not by Beethoven it's composed by Justin Timberlake. Sure JT can be a good musician... but he's no Beethoven. lol. Y

Friendship is very important in most Shounen Jump series, with people who try to be all bad-ass by themselves getting kicked around and realizing the true value of friendship, etc. But One Piece isn’t about that, well, most of the time (the whole Robin getting kidnapped was about the traditional Shounen Jump meaning of friendship). Instead, it’s about a guy (I’m gonna refer to Luffy as a guy, even though later I’ll make a claim about his mental age/ ability to connect with the reader) who wants to be the leader of a bunch of friends who go exploring and do cool things.

This is even more important because, due to Luffy’s actions, he’s obviously intended to be a contact point for the child-reader. He’s a child in a man’s body, but not in the weird, Fauknerian man-child sense (well, if One Piece were more serious, he would be). So the child-reader of One Piece is supposed to associate with Luffy, and seek to emulate him, because he’s uniformly shown in a positive light. Moreover, once you get past the Macguffin of the One Piece, you can see that the reason for Luffy’s travels is pretty much the travel itself. He’s going places because he, with the help of others, can go places, and, so, he can live his life to the fullest by being out there, in the middle of things. So, rather than trying to assuage the child/teenager that he too can function in the adult word, if he tries and is good, it tries to say, “look, you don’t have to worry about tomorrow and growing up, it’ll happen. What’s important is for you to go out and make friends and explore the world.” Which is an important message that I feel needs to be said more often.

But for those of us who are no-longer young (oh man, recently, I have felt so old, well, old is the wrong word, more like, an adult with the whole “gonna TA a class” and “people assuming I’m like 26 and have a job”), what’s the value of One Piece, and when, precisely, am I going to get back to those pretty charts? Well, for the same reason that Tolkien proposed that there was a value in adults reading fairy stories, to begin with, and, secondly, because One Piece does a damn good job of taking the endless rising action Shounen Jump formula and making it into an actual narrative structure. You see, in the early volumes of One Piece, there are a number of things referenced (the big ones being Luffy talking about who he needs for a crew and Usop telling a bunch of stories) that, slowly, come to pass (Luffy now has everyone needed for the ship but a musician, and that might be resolved in the current arc, while I haven’t kept much track of Ussop’s lies recently, but, for example, he tells a story when he’s introduced about how he saw a giant goldfish, and, about 10ish volumes later, a giant goldfish is indeed spotted). There are a finite number of these predictions, suggesting that Oda does have a conclusion in mind.

Moreover, the fundemental problem of trying to match the story of growing up to a structure of endless rising action is that you eventually do grow up, and it’s kind of a bummer. There’s no rising action to infinity involved with growing up. Exploration and friendship, on the other hand, do offer almost endless rising action, each time you go somewhere new, and each time you make a new friend, it’s not only important, but, also, it adds to the stock of experiences that you have without necessarily needing to be bigger. Because that’s the problem of rising action, especially when the primary conflict is physical. If you’ve just beaten the Robot Devil and saved the world from eternal destruction, what’s left to do if your entire story is based around finding evil and destroying it? However, each time you see a new mountain, if you’re not jaded, it’s different, and the experience has value, regardless of how many other mountains you’ve seen before.

That’s the value of One Piece. It takes a bad structure, and, by virtue of the story it tells, and, by virtue of the characters (who are anything but jaded), it makes it work. Also, it’s fantastic voyage, if you’re willing to look at things from a child’s perspective, into the great wide world, which, to most people who really think about it, is so vast and wonderful that it’s nearly as miraculous as islands where it’s winter all the time and cities built on clouds in the sky.

It's also quite funny because, most shonen failed so badly with female seiyu, just look at Dragon Ball and Rurouni Kenshin(which isn't even shonen by the way).

Why does Funi insist on re-recording the OP & ED titles of their shows now? 4Kids, which gets poor marks for redaction/censorship, had a much better Opening theme, hands down. Is this just another cost-savings for them, in addition to giving more work to their cross-trained, in-house talent?