Warship Island Arc

The Warship Island Arc, sometimes referred to as the Apis Arc, is a story arc in the One Piece anime. It is the first story arc of the series not to be based on any content from the manga by Eiichiro Oda, making it the first filler arc. It was left out of the 4Kids dub for an unspecified reason. This arc takes place just after Luffy receives his bounty of Beli30,000,000 at the end of the East Blue Saga, and before the Straw Hat Pirates enter the Grand Line. The Straw Hats find a young girl named Apis floating in the ocean. They find that she has escaped from Marine Branch 8 and is running from Commodore Nelson. The Straw Hats agree to return her back to Warship Island, and they are soon attacked by Branch 8. After escaping from the Marines, the Straw Hats realize that they are in the Calm Belt where they find large sea kings.

Then, narrowly escaping the Sea Kings and the Calm Belts, they continue on their course to Warship Island. After reaching Warship Island, they find out that Apis has a Devil Fruit ability that allows her to talk to animals, and she has used it to befriend a dying Sennenryu, a type of dragon species thought to be extinct. In the English dub of the anime, produced by 4Kids Entertainment, these episodes were cut completely from the series. No explanation was given, and nothing (other than their irrelevance to the main plot of the series) would seem to be just cause for dropping them from the show entirely. Since their content is much more "kid-friendly" than the rest of the series, many fans actually expected 4Kids to heavily promote the arc, but the exact opposite happened. The precise reason for their deletion from the run of the English-dubbed anime remains unknown. However, 4Kids had been known to omit particularly strong death scenes from anime that they dubbed which could upset younger viewers, and this arc contained the passing of Ryuji.