One Piece Actor Patrick Seitz Explains Why The Anime’s New Specials Are Needed

For those who may not know, One Piece has released a bevy of material not just in the form of the television series, the feature length theatrical releases, and the substantial manga, it also has thirteen “television specials” to its name. What these specials entail is either brand new stories that visit new lands and present new problems for the Straw Hat Pirates to hash out, or alternate retellings of arcs that we’ve seen take place before. We had the opportunity to chat with Patrick Seitz, the English voice actor for Franky, at the recent Anime Expo convention to get his thoughts on why these specials should be considered a necessity.

Comicbook.com: “What was your personal reaction to hearing about this TV special’s creation, and now hearing that One Piece is hopefully planning to revisit these first arcs, and make them more digestible for new fans?”

Patrick Seitz: “I think it’s a great idea. For something as long living as One Piece, there’s certainly nothing to be lost by giving folks a digestible [recap]. I think it’s a really good idea, and you don’t have to watch the recap if you don’t need it, so if anyone out there is digging in their heels out there, they think I don’t know. Okay, cool. Then, don’t watch the recap.”

One Piece, since beginning in 1997, has amassed a gigantic number of episodes for the anime and chapters of the manga. With nearly a thousand of each, I think it’s safe to say that the tv specials may be a welcome recap, as Patrick states in our interview. Certainly, if you’re new to the series or want to revisit a specific arc, being able to catch up in a two hour block rather than a twenty hour one may be the best way to go about it when all is said and done.

Seitz’s resume is chock full of different characters and fan favorites from numerous anime series. Some of the more prominent ones include One Piece, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventures, Justice League Action, One-Punch Man, and My Hero Academia to name a few.

What do you think of the One Piece Television Specials? Do you agree with Patrick? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics and anime!

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.