One Piece in the Philippines

One Piece Anime in the Philippines
GMA Network, one of the country's three major TV networks, acquired license to dub One Piece episodes in Filipino, the national language of the Philippines. One Piece was dubbed straight from Japanese and not from available English dubs. The first Philippine run of One Piece happened in 2002 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 (Mondays to Fridays). Its latest rerun shows up to Amazon Lily arc (Episode 417). One Piece is normally slotted between 4:30-5:30 PM, making students (elementary to college) able to watch it (Philippine schools normally end classes by 4 PM) but as the newest rerun it is slotted at around 9:00-9:30 AM since the former timeslot is reserved for afternoon television dramas. GMA7 never skipped any single episode One Piece has. It showed all including filler episodes.

One Piece Film: Z was premiered in the Philippines on May 1, 2013 and became the second highest earning film during its first week only after Iron Man 3.

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. One Piece popularity even lower, with most viewers not getting the flow of story at all. However, GMA7 continued to rerun it.

The latest rerun of One Piece received high ratings, achieving more than 10% on average compared to 12-15% ratings got by ABS-CBN's.

Trivia

 * Luffy's common way of saying "amazing" when he is amused with something was given more emphasis for Filipino fans using the same meaning in Tagalog (astig!) in a catchy way of saying it.
 * Devil Fruit is dubbed as Sinumpang Prutas which means Cursed Fruit in the English Language.
 * Gomu-Gomu is dubbed to rubber which is Goma in the Philippines, so it is called Goma-Goma. (e.g Gomu-Gomu no Pistol is dubbed into Goma-Goma Pistol.)
 * Some of the pirate crew names are dubbed inversely because there is no equivalent word for it. (e.g "Sun Pirates" is dubbed Pirata ng Araw, which is Pirates of the Sun in correct translation.)