Longest running series?

Just wondering what people consider the longest running anime series to be, and what criteria they're using to judge with? Episode count? Years from first airing to last?

My intial reaction was DB/DBZ/GT, because I remember hearing about that running for around 10 years. After I started thinking, I came up with other shows such as Doraemon and Lupin, but I'm not sure if Doraemon's always had new stuff since the 60s/70, or if it just popped up again in recent years. I know Lupin had the yearly movies for the longest time, so would you consider that enough to justify saying it been around for 20-30 years? Also, would you consider Gundam to be one ginormous thing, or just a bunch of different series under the Gundam umbrella?

It's Sazae-san, running for 35 years and estimated more than 5500 episodes were aired.
It seems a short anime series called "Instant Histroy" aired more than 5900 episodes but finished in 1984, and detailed informations were lost.

DB has only 508 episodes and Gundam is less than 500.

5500 episodes? holy crap, how long were these episodes? 22 minutes? or 5-10?

Speaking of Sazae-san..  my friend told me to watch it, mainly because it was about a Kansai family and she wants me to learn Kansai-ben...  has anyone seen it on Winny, or another program?

>>3

3 "episodes" per ~20 minutes, so it's more like 1800+ episodes but yes the longest running.  doraemon has more episodes though

>>4sazaesan lives tokyo
kanntoujinn