Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Do American Companies Bother To Release Filler Episodes?
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Sailor Sedna
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I don't really have problems with filler, IMO it helps with certain shows like Sailor Moon, because they do a good job with characterizing and developing the characters, I don't see most of Sailor Moon's filler episodes as filler. It's a huge problem in SuperS though.
One other filler arc I do like is the Waking the Dragons arc in Yu-Gi-Oh!; that was one of my favorite arcs of that anime series. On the other hand though, I do understand how some fillers like ones in Saint Seiya (the Ghost Saint and Docrates episodes for example), do slow down the story a bit, and especially ones with Dragon Ball Z, the Frieza arc may be the slowest arc in Dragonball Z. |
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chex mix
 Posts: 415 |
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[quote="doubleO7"]
To add, Ace of Diamond had four total fillers through its 125-ish ep run, and Toriko had 18 in like 175 eps. To be fair, though, I'd never recommend Toriko to anyone. Also, depending on how long a show you want, there are a ton of 75-ish episode long shows with little to no filler in a bunch of genres. You just have to move further away from the bigger shounen properties to find stuff that didn't have the budget to stretch itself out needlessly. |
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Somewhere
Posts: 361 |
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Bolded applies. Let's use end of March 2012 as a starting date (airing of the last episode). Obviously the decision to kill it had to be made some time before, but I wouldn't know when that as so I'll work with a date I can find. Going back from that, sales of the manga have been on a downward trend for about... 2 and a half years or so? Sales noticeably started heading downward in August/September of 2009. Although, the sales did hit a valley around October-December 2011. Then it stabilized there until a second, smaller decline started in May 2014 and lasted through August of last year. |
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Nonaka Machine Gun B
 Posts: 819 |
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The Lost Agent arc was not very popular, so the BLEACH anime ended. It more or less had nothing to do with filler. If the series, on the whole, had been doing well, it would just do what Naruto's been doing and continues to do.
I say more or less because the anime didn't get great ratings for the majority of its run, and they only sunk lower when the Lost Agent arc came. Again, these things are not the brainchildren of any creative force or drive, they are commercials, so ratings were never a big deal. However, TV Tokyo, the broadcaster, was on BLEACH's production committee. They're not going to kick money into production if they get close-to-nothing out of it. So, ratings weren't a big deal, but they were a portion of a deal. I also kind of can't believe this was a real question sent in. This person clearly doesn't have much of a clue. Nobody enjoys filler, but if you have to have it, I'd much rather it be the Pierrot-style stand-alone, skippable story arcs than the Toei-style of stretching out the source material to its thinnest. As far as play in the West goes, Adult Swim, once upon a time, was doing double premieres of BLEACH, which I thought was a good way to not lose peoples interest by playing one episode a week for 8 years. But then, they would burn through canon material. It kind of doesn't make any sense to me why One Piece, as incredibly long as it is, is not in double premieres. |
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JDude042
 Posts: 261 |
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I'm pretty much in the same boat these days, but I'll usually check out the major stuff that I would want to see in anime form (introduction of new characters, etc). Also, as a fan of Akame ga Kill, I must say that I do enjoy the manga quite a bit, but I'm disappointed that the anime had to just go in its own direction and change things around 2/3 of the way through. It's kind of a stinker, especially considering everything before it was actually good in my book, but then again things are playing out somewhat similar in the manga anyways, except for some differences here and there. |
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SWAnimefan
Posts: 634 |
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I can understand the need for fillers for long-term anime series so the content doesn't catch up to the manga releases, but really fillers do not do series justice when it's full of bad content. I remember all too well, with the original [i]Naruto[/i] series, waiting for that 3 years of filler hell to end. Then going through those horrible filler arcs with Bleach. I just made me intolerant of fillers altogether.
And that's why the Bleach anime was cancelled, fillers literally killed it! So it was smart for them to cut their losses and put the series on hiatus until Kubo finished the last arc. Which is something that should've been done with the original Naruto series, it would've been smarter for them to get to the ending than burning away viewers through those years of filler. Another thing I personally hate about filler is how they interrupt the flow of the story. Being in the middle of a major battle then suddenly we're in the middle of filler. It always drove me crazy! But all in all I think studios now understand that fillers isn't always the best option.
Yeah, they underestimated the power of fillers. 
Call me crazy, but I think their logic is that those who don't know the series are ignorant of fillers and actually think it's part of the story. Compared to those who know, like those who follow the mangas, novels, or watched subs beforehand. So ignorance is bliss? Or in the case of fillers, secret torture? 
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MrBonk
Posts: 192 |
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Reading this thread of people whining and moaning about filler is just hilarious.
As if original manga's aren't ever prone to filler material and anime (Long running concurrent shows) should be a 1:1 adaptation. I don't watch some of shonen crap like Naruto,OP,Bleach and what not so I can't comment. But i've never really seen filler that was truly all that bad or wasn't worth watching. At worst, with DBZ the only thing wrong with the original adapation is how fights are drawn out. The filler arcs IMO improve the story and is better because of it. |
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Touma
 Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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That is not true. There has been a lot of filler that I enjoyed. I liked all of the Inuyasha filler. I mention that one because I cannot think of any others right now, but there are a lot more. Filler can definitely be good, unless you believe that anything that was not in the manga is bad simply because it was not in the manga. |
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JDude042
Posts: 261 |
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One Piece is anything but crap my friend. 
Ironically with the whole "stretching it out" thing, it's funny how it takes what, 30 episodes or so for Namek to explode in 5 minutes, or about 100 episodes to cover the events of Dressrosa that happened in a 24 hour period in One Piece's world. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5987 |
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Simple why give One Piece a courtesy that you wouldn't extend to the other shows airing on the same block?
The Vegetto-Buu fight was the one fight that was better in the anime because of this. We get to see Vegetto kick ass in both his normal state and his transformed state instead of just the latter. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4602 |
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Personally I'd far rather go for the Toei style. One Piece has gotten awfully draggy at times (though the climax of Dressrosa wasn't too bad relatively speaking), but I'd say it's infinitely preferable to a show like Naruto taking off for more than two solid years with absolutely no plot progression (and then diving right back into filler less than a year after its return...how the hell did anyone keep watching that show anyway?) At least in the former case you still have at least a little bit of new material to look forward to every week, as opposed to basically forgetting about a series' existence for months on end. (Related side note: I've often wondered just how precipitous a drop Viz saw in Bleach's DVD set sales for the Bount arc. It can't have looked good.) Last edited by Top Gun on Sat May 07, 2016 1:46 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Generally, you can tell which shows the fans are watching: If "Filler Episodes are The Devil!", they're watching Naruto, One Piece and DBZ, and if "I LIKE Filler Episodes, what's wrong with the characters?", they've watched Sailor Moon and Slayers. The problem starts when each one thinks the other is talking about the exact same thing. Ten times more often in the case of the former than the latter. The solution to the problem?: Stop watching fight serials on Adult Swim...How many times do we have to tell you that?
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emory
Posts: 615 |
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Adult Swim has stated in the past that most of the anime deals they make are based on quantity of episodes. If they wanted to run two One Piece episodes a week, they'd have to buy additional One Piece episodes, and that's money that could've been spent on acquiring another series. |
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pikabot
Posts: 168 |
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That's not really a contradiction. People who complain about editing are unhappy with some element of the story being changed. Filler episodes of an adaptation are, necessarily, something being changed in the original story, typically by inserting something which doesn't make sense, doesn't belong, or simply isn't up to the quality of the original. The two viewpoints you see as being in conflict ('don't edit things when you bring them over' and 'get rid of the fillers') can easily come from the same impulse. And as for those saying 'just skip them'...that's great advice if you're watching on DVD or if you're watching a whole show in bulk, it's not such great advice on a week-by-week basis. If you're watching episodes as they air, it's pretty frustrating to have to put a series on hold while you wait out the filler. I'm not necessarily anti-filler; from time to time one will be good. Like the episode of Dragonball Z where Goku and Piccolo get their driver's licenses, that episode is perfection. But it's hard to get around the fact that in almost all cases, filler episodes are at best deferring plot progression so that something less interesting than the actual story can take place. Given that it costs localization companies money to deliver these sub-par episodes to the viewer, the question of 'why bother' is a pretty fair one. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11407 |
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If the filler is good, bliss. If the filler is awful, torture, but the same is true for canon. If it's bad, it's bad. I for one, liked the Bount arc in Bleach. At least as much as I liked any of the canon to begin with. I even enjoyed some of the filler in Kenshin, although the fact that it killed the series before the final canon arc is still a bitter pill stuck in my throat. Given that, I can't understand how Shippuden has survived the Jiraya's Ninja Tales arc. As others have noted, filler can be a good thing, adding to the clarity of the canon in the best cases. Naruto is probably the most egregious use of filler I can think of, and given its apparently bullet-proof popularity, they squandered a genuine opportunity to do some creative additions to a number of characters' backstories by choosing to instead recap the entire series from the very beginning in a "what if Naruto had grown up with his parents" format. And then when they got to Itachi's backstory, a character people are interested in and whose story fans actually wanted to see, they barely adapted any of the source material and made a mess of what they did adapt. It's baffling. On the other hand, I might've misunderstood, but I think Kakashi's backstory arc was filler, but it was great. If Toonami is still around by then, I have to wonder what they'll do when they get to the Jiraya filler, because those are absolutely going to tank the ratings if they air. Viz putting them out on disk will be a waste of plastic. I think people might prefer watching Haruhi's Endless Eight. Also, for what it's worth, I wish people would agree on terms here so they can just use one word instead of having to describe what they're talking about every time. Can we define filler as non-canon material (see Naruto) and padding as the term for stretching out material, canon or otherwise, to slow down the pace (see most long running Toei series) with recaps, flashbacks to previously aired material, and animation stalling tactics? |
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