One Piece in the Philippines

Overview
GMA Network, one of the two TV network giants in the Philippines, acquired license to dub One Piece episodes in Tagalog, the most spoken language in the Philippines, and broadcast them.

Contrary to most other anime already shown in the Philippines, One Piece was dubbed straight from Japanese and not from available English dubs. The first Philippine run of One Piece happened in 2003 and covered up to the whole Baroque Works saga. It was rerun several times since then with each rerun covering the next major arc. Most of these reruns had started from the very first episode.

Like most of other anime showed in the Philippines, One Piece was run 5 episodes a week. Its latest rerun was shown for more than one year continuously and it covered up to the Water 7 arc. The next rerun will likely take place in 2009 and might cover up to the Thriller Bark arc. One Piece is normally slotted between 4:30-5:30pm, making students (elementary to college) able to watch it (Philippine schools normally end classes by 4pm). GMA7 never skipped any single episode One Piece has. It showed all including filler episodes.

Popularity
At first, One Piece received poor ratings in the Philippines. This might be because GMA7's rival network, ABS-CBN, managed to show other anime like Naruto, Samurai X, Get Backers and Card Captor Sakura which received unparalleled high ratings from viewers. Because One Piece is a long anime series, it is obvious that most viewers will not watch it completely on the first run. And because most of households in the Philippines don't have a dvd player, the chances for a viewer to watch missed episodes are slim. This make One Piece popularity even lower, with most viewers not getting the flow of story at all. However, GMA7 continued to rerun it. Viewers started liking One Piece after several reruns. After several reruns, viewers were able to see any missed episodes they had with previous reruns. Hence, this cleared the story to most of them. The emergence of websites which offers free watch of One Piece episodes is also believed to have helped viewers watch any missed episode they have. Though most viewers don't have a computer at home, there are many computer rental shops in the Philippines which provide cheap internet access.

The latest rerun of One Piece received high ratings, achieving more than 17% on average compared to 12-15% ratings got by ABS-CBN's. Filipno anime fans suddenly became obsessed discussing One Piece in online boards. In MMORPGs, like Ragnarok Online, many players have started naming their players after One Piece characters.