So a couple of new television shows debuted today; Alcatraz and Smash. While it probably would have made for a more interesting piece if I had watched them and could write a little something about them, I must sadly admit that I did neither.
I spent the entire day catching up on One Piece.
Let me be absolutely clear here: I’m not a big fan of anime. I’ve seen the usual suspects over the course of my life, of course. Trigun, Evangelion, and Initial D are a few that jump to mind. But in my weird ass group of friends and surrogate family I was never the anime guy. That honor fell to my best friend/ might-as-well-be-brother, and I just sort of tagged along for the adventure when he would find some new show to watch.
So the reason I’m catching up on One Piece isn’t because I’m some great lover of the eastern animation. It’s actually because it’s a cartoon about pirates, and goddammit, I love pirates. There’s a Jolly Roger hanging in front of me, draped above my computer monitor and television. I’ve had it for so long, and through some weird times – there’s years old blood staining the top of the skull, and just an extra smudge below the eye.
Pirates are so awesome that for a long time my friends and I had a meticulously detailed plan to steal the Bluenose and roll down to the Caribbean with it. When the zombocalypse hits there is an even more detailed plan to escape to the sea. If you walked up to me with a TARDIS and said, “Hey man, I got a time machine,” before you could finish the sentence I would have already blurted out the word ‘pirates’ and jumped inside.
So it’s sort of a given that I’d be a fan of One Piece. It’s a world where people can get super powers and most of the planet is ocean, and everybody is either a pirate or a marine. And because it’s an anime it could have gone one or two ways: a twenty-odd episode season that would have covered the entire story or an endless run only limited by how quickly the comic it’s based on can be written. This show happens to be the latter, and is currently a good clip past five hundred episodes.
When I first started watching One Piece I decided to marathon the entire thing. Over something like a week I watched something like four hundred and fifty episodes before hitting the end of what had been released. So, that done, I took a break and moved on to other things. Having come back years later there are almost a hundred additional episodes to watch.
But what is the cartoon about, some of you may be wondering. The boiled down summary is that the main character eats a piece of magic fruit that turns him into rubber. He can stretch his limbs and bounce bullets, can’t swim, and wants to be the king of the pirates. So he sets out, assembles a crew, and fights a bunch of other pirates and the world’s navy in the process. Think Dragonball Z style fights, except no ridiculous strings of episodes where dudes just power up.
The thing is: I’m coming at it from a super biased place. I’ve made my position on pirates pretty clear: they’re kind of the coolest thing ever. I can sit here and watch every episode of a show about pirates and enjoy the ride. So, this week I’m posing a three part question to everybody reading this piece.
First: How awesome are pirates? They’re pretty much the best, right? Second: Is my love of pirates clouding my judgment on One Piece, or is it definitely a pretty cool cartoon? Third: Are there any other awesome pirate shows out there I may have never heard of? I’m not talking movies here; I’ve probably seen all of those. But shows about pirates seem kind of rare.
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