One Piece is a show like no other. The adventures of Luffy and his comrades has captivated audiences of all ages and has met success from viewers around the world. Or has it? Despite being the most popular show in Japan, the show has received very few legal uncut DVD releases, only coming out in Italy, China, America, France and just recently in Australia. Many fans from countries such as Spain, Germany and Portugal have been demanding this kind of the release for years but tonight, we are going to be discussing its impact, release and future in the United Kingdom. Read on as I, PirateBeck, inform you of the facts.
To start with its history, One Piece was first aired here back in Spring 2005. They aired new episodes of the 4kids dub twice a week (Monday and Wednesday) but with the added addition of a new ‘next episode preview’ created by Toonami. The show took a break after 26 episodes, later returning with 27 to 52 later in the year (you have seen their advertisement for this season on youtube as the original song is quite… catchy). They then aired 53 to 78 in early 2006. At this point in the series, they took over the American run and did so again in September 2006, airing episodes 79 to 104 over the course of 4 weeks (An episode per weekday for week one, an episode per day for the remaining three), finishing in October 2006. During this period, we also recieved the games "One Piece: Grand Battle" and "One Piece: Grand Adventure" in a limited quantity (The first was only available at Virgin Megastores and the second could only be found in shops like Forbidden Planet).
Then, it just stopped. Nothing new of the anime has been shown in the country (Although there has been the occasional re-run of the 4kids dub on Toonami since) and it looked like we’d get nothing from that point on. However, we did receive something in the form of the games “One Piece: Unlimited Cruise 1 and 2”. From what I can gather, the licensor for these was French and decided to release it in the 5 major European countries: France, Spain, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. I heard that Australia later received a release too.
However, we live in the time where One Piece has now been released uncut in America for over two years and Madman has just announced a monthly release in Australia. So United Kingdom fans do occasionally ask about a UK One Piece release. Heck, that’s noticeable from the recent mishap by the Manga UK Twitter guy, who said it was ‘selling bad’. Well, that’s not the reason why it’s not received here from what I can gather. No, let me explain what I’ve found out.
Manga Entertainment are the company who are after the rights in the UK. One of their main reps explained at the expo that one of his own hobbies is to keep sending new offers to Toei Animation for the rights to DRAGON BALL and ONE PIECE and let me tell you, they aren’t selling it cheap. While I can’t reveal the exact price for the series, I can say that the first season (53 episodes) would cost them over half a million dollars to license. This price has not changed much in the past year or so.
Now we get into the mathematical part of the facts. To just license the first 53 episodes, it would cost over $500,000 (around £300,000+ at the time, closer to £342,000+). So let’s divide that into four sets so each one would cost roughly cost $125,000+ each (£75,000+, now £83,750+). Then you have to get to the BBFC board to rate the content of the set and allow it to have a release in the country. I’ve seen the price of £3,000 to £4,000 being thrown around per set so let’s just use that for now. Of course, I haven’t included the price it would cost to manufacture the packaging for the sets and DVDs for the UK sets. If we round up the figures to include packaging, you’re looking at a figure of £88,000 per set. Now, I’m not sure how much Manga receive from a single release on DVD but figuring that they charge £25 R.R.P for a set that amazon can sell for £15, I’ll just say they make £8 from the sales of each set (although it’s probably lower than that). To just break even, they would need to sell at least 11,000 units. Manga stated at their press conference that the average title would need around 8,000 sales and Ouran High School Host Club, a very popular series, beat expectations by managing around 15,000 per set. Should also mention that Ouran was being sold on Play.com for quite some time for £8. But most important of all, I haven't even taken into the other factors surrounding the release, such as re-encoding the footage from NTSC to PAL, advertising the series in magazines/on the internet and so fourth. And people wonder why Manga haven’t bought the series yet.
Okay, so if you guys want the series over here, you would need to be serious about buying it. You would need to put your money where your mouth is and purchase these sets. Manga knows it would sell but simply do not have the finance (especially after the recession) to purchase the series. However, there is one thing that could happen and I definitely think this would be the most likely solution to getting One Piece released here.
As some of you may know, the French licensor of the series is a company named KANA. Kana have many titles under their belt (They started releasing Naruto: Shippuden BEFORE Viz Media even announcing it!) and know what they doing when comes to marketing. Now, as you may have heard, KAZE (one of the biggest licensing companies in Europe) made a deal with Manga over the Professor Layton movie in that Kaze bought the United Kingdom distrubution rights and then hand that over to Manga UK to release here. Having spoken to the previously mentioned rep, he informed me he has suggested that since One Piece is a show in a similair situation to the movie, that Kana should buy the UK rights and give them to Manga. I mentioned the video games because we only recieved them because sub-licensing took place so this situation has happened before.
So if you United Kingdom members truly wanted One Piece here, we would have to do the following things:
Step 1: Send letters to both Manga UK and Kana to show our interest in buying a UK release
Step 2: If a connection is established (or we just want to get word out of the effort), advertise the movement on other forums. If it does go ahead, I would create a Facebook group to advertise the idea and (hopefully) have co-operation from groups like the UOPP to work together in advertising it.
From this point onwards, we’d have to wait and see.
With the announcement of an Austrailian release, there is nothing to stop One Piece getting a release here. But if we want to succure that release, we’ll need to act as one, rather than individuals, to show them that we are interested in purchasing a Region 2 Uncut release. At least we know we have a far higher chance of getting One Piece than Dragon Ball or even Sgt. Frog. It may be successful but at least, there’s a goal we can really aim for together. So if you guys want to band together to get it here, let's work something out. Otherwise, this thread can just act as the UK thread of One Piece. It's honestly up to you.
But until then, don't send any letters yet, we need someone who can speak French to join the group. XD
