Anime series

Anime series
Naruto
Main article: List of Naruto episodes
Directed by Hayato Date and produced by Studio Pierrot and TV Tokyo, the Naruto anime adaptation premiered in Japan on TV Tokyo October 3, 2002, and ran for 220 episodes until its conclusion on February 8, 2007.[27][28] The first 135 episodes are adapted from the first twenty-seven volumes of the manga, while the remaining eighty episodes are original episodes that utilize plot elements not seen in the original manga.[29]

Episodes from the series have been published in DVD. The first DVD series has been the only one to be collected in VHS format.[30] There are a total of five series, with each of the including four episodes per volume.[31] The series has also been collected in a series of three DVD boxes during 2009.[32][33] The newest DVD series is Naruto The Best Scene which collects scenes from the first 135 episodes from the anime.[34]

Viz licensed the anime series for broadcast and distribution in the Region 1 market. The English adaptation of the anime began airing on September 10, 2005 and finished on January 31, 2009, with 209 episodes aired.[35] The episodes have been shown on Cartoon Network's Toonami (United States), YTV's Bionix (Canada) and Jetix's (United Kingdom) programming blocks. YTV still airs the show with newer ones at midnight on Sundays and with reruns at 4am on Tuesdays-Fridays. Beginning on March 28, 2006, Viz released the series on DVD.[36] While the first 26 volumes contain four episodes, since DVD volumes have five episodes.[37] Uncut editions are compiled in DVD Box Sets, each containing 12-15 episodes, with some variation based around story arcs.[38] In the American broadcast, references to alcohol, Japanese culture, sexual innuendo, and the appearance of blood and death were sometimes reduced for the broadcast, but left in the DVD editions.[39] Other networks make additional content edits apart from the edits done by Cartoon Network, such as Jetix's stricter censoring of blood, language, smoking and the like. The series has also been licensed to the websites Hulu, Joost, and Crunchyroll, which air episodes online with the original Japanese audio tracks and English subtitles.[40][41][42]