Netflix's live-action One Piece series is finally moving forward, as the streaming giant has revealed several new details about it on Twitter. These include an official logo and a script photo, both of which hold many clues to what the show's creative team has in store.
One Piece has been published consistently for almost 25 years and is the best-selling manga series of all time. The One Piece anime has aired more than 950 episodes to date. So it came as no surprise when Oda announced in 2020 that Netflix had sealed the deal on a live-action adaptation of the manga, ordering a single ten-episode season. But news of the series has been slow, with the few updates released between then and now only serving to confirm that it was still in production.
On Friday, the NetflixGeeked Twitter account shared the first official logo for the series. Their Tweet was captioned with the phrase "no matter how hard or how impossible it is, never lose sight of your goal", a quote from One Piece protagonist and self-proclaimed "king of the pirates" Monkey D. Luffy. The logo itself is a fairly accurate 3D reimagining of the manga's logo, with some noticeable changes. Netflix also released the title page of the first episode's script, which revealed its working title as "Romance Dawn". It shares this title with the first chapter/story arc of the manga, and with an early series of one-shots written by Oda that would become the foundation for One Piece.
Converting manga into live-action can be disastrous, especially for Americanized adaptations such as Dragonball Evolution or the Netflix-distributed Death Note. However, Netflix having One Piece's original creator on board as an executive producer (much like with their upcoming Cowboy Bebop series) is a breath of fresh air to fans. Titling the first episode after the manga's first chapter also seems to indicate that the series plans to be a faithful adaptation of its source material.
The chronicled adventures of the Straw Hat Pirates have left a massive legacy. One of the things Netflix will have to make sure of is that it understands the One Piece fanbase's taste. Complaints have already emerged about the series' logo, as Luffy is no longer represented as the "I" in "One Piece" (though, as an easter egg, he can be seen standing inside the skeleton's nose).
Still, this amount of information isn't enough to draw a serious conclusion on how the live-action One Piece series will turn out. It is, however, an exciting glimpse into what's to come — which will hopefully be exactly the swashbuckling adventure fans deserve.
Source: Netflix|Twitter