The fourth season of the One Piece anime series was directed by Konosuke Uda and produced by Toei Animation. Like the rest of the series, it follows the adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his Straw Hat Pirates. The first 17 episodes, dealing with Nefertari Vivi and the Straw Hats as they arrive in Alabasta to stop a civil war from happening, make up the Arabasta Jōriku (アラバスタ上陸?, lit. "Arrival at Alabasta") arc. The remaining episodes make up the "Arabasta Gekidō" (アラバスタ激闘, lit. "Alabasta Fierce Fighting"?) arc, in which the protagonists defeat Baroque Works and Nico Robin joins the crew. This season adapts the 18th to 24th volumes of the manga by Eiichiro Oda.
The fourth season originally ran from December 16, 2001, through October 27, 2002, on Fuji Television in Japan. The first half was released on DVD in six compilations, each containing one disc with two or three episodes, by Toei Animation between February 5, 2003, and July 2, 2003. The second half was released on DVD in seven compilations between August 6, 2003, and February 4, 2004. The season was then licensed and heavily edited for a dubbed broadcast and DVD release in English by 4Kids Entertainment. Their adaptation ran from February 25, 2006, though July 28, 2007, on Cartoon Network and, in contrast to the other seasons, also contained the same number of episodes as the original. DVDs of their adaptation were not released. Starting with the sixth season, Funimation Entertainment took over dubbing new episodes for broadcast on Cartoon Network. Eventually they began redubbing the series from the start for uncut release on DVD and released the fourth season, relabeled as "One Piece: Season Two – Fourth Voyage", "One Piece Season Two – Fifth Voyage" and "One Piece: Season Two – Sixth Voyage", respectively, on December 15, 2009, January 19, 2010, and March 16, 2010.
The season makes use of six pieces of theme music: two opening themes and four ending themes. The first opening theme, "Believe", is performed by Folder5, and continues to be used as the first opening theme until episode 115. Starting with episode 116, the second opening theme Hikari e (ヒカリヘ?, lit. Toward the Light), performed by The Babystars. "Before Dawn", performed by Ai-Sachi, continues to be used as the ending theme for the first two episodes. The second ending theme, from episodes 95-106, is "fish" performed by The Kaleidoscope. The third ending theme, from episode 107-118, is "Glory -Kimi ga Iru kara-" (Glory-君がいるから-?, lit. Glory: Because You Are Here), performed by Takako Uehara. The fourth ending theme, used from episode 119 onwards, is "Shining Ray", performed by Janne Da Arc. 4Kids used original music for their version, while Funimation opted to use the original theme songs for their version.
Famous quotes containing the words list, piece and/or episodes:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)