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Japanese Naruto DVDs are broken up into sets of 12 DVDs called "Stage". Each stage covers one year worth of episodes -- with
around four episodes per volume, and one volume per month (matching the rate the episodes air on TV, thus the gap between the two
is always the same).
The stage number ("3rd Stage", "5th Stage", etc.) shows the amount that a stage has completed and then started over again.
In other words, when the 1st Stage hit 12 volumes, it changed to the 2nd Stage and then reset back to volume 1. Therefore the
term stage can also be another way of saying how many years the DVDs have been releasing. For example, the 4th Stage marked
the 4th year that Naruto DVDs had been in production.
Actually, the entire system that Naruto DVDs are named with can be linked to the time that they're released (with the
exception of the later volumes in the the 5th Stage). Pick any volume/stage and you can know when it released. Let's take 2nd
Stage, Volume 3 for example. This would be the 2nd year of releases (DVDs first began releasing in 2003, so this would mean
that the 2nd Stage was released from January-December 2004), and the 3rd month of that year (March).
It might not be the most obvious naming system an anime has gotten, but it keeps things simple when you have such a high
number of volumes.
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