One Piece Live-Adaptation Drama Announced

MugiMikey

Yeah, the creep factors are a bit high with this one... I saw a picture of it months ago but seeing as this does appear to be the final version, I can't really say I like it all too much.

zorosempai

This post is deleted!

Cinder

@MugiMikey said in One Piece Live-Adaptation Drama Announced:

Yeah, the creep factors are a bit high with this one... I saw a picture of it months ago but seeing as this does appear to be the final version, I can't really say I like it all too much.

Same here!

Merry's gotta scream

MugiMikey

@Cinder Hahahah! Yeah, during her funeral.

Robby

zeltrax225

so I guess we are going for semi-realistic now
oh boy

NightGrinder

It's kinda amazing that you could get such a simple thing wrong.

But at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter. Hopefully the actors and directors are good at their job.

StuckWithInsomniac

I loved how they portrayed merry.

Robby

@NightGrinder said in One Piece Live-Adaptation Drama Announced:

It's kinda amazing that you could get such a simple thing wrong.

They gotta find their own path 100% strict adherence to the manga designs would be a complete disaster in live action. Traditional Merry looks great in cartoon form where everything is flat and you can guaranteed a good face shot with ever drawing, but it'd just be a round ball in live action and be bad at a lot of angles.

Also, the thing will look different from the side, or when its going up and down on the water, something the manga version never really needs to deal with.

Cyan D. Funk

I Have A Mouth And I Must Scream

Cinder

Odaiba Merry. I guess it wouldn't have looked cool in the episodes, huh?

alt text

Robby

Honestly? It looks perfectly good to us that are used to the look, but that looks extremely cartoony and childish and kind of unfinished in live action.

Maybe they went too far in the other direction, but that absolutely would not have worked. It looks extremely out of place against the realistic wood and water. It looks like a toy.

Which is a complaint I've always had about the Sunny but never had about Merry before.

LightningAce

So on WIRED Autocomplete interview with Mark Hamill, a question came up "Is Mark Hamill in One Piece" He responds with "Well so far, the day is young, let's wait & see "

I could totally see him playing Rayleigh maybe or someone.

The Light of Shandora

Like the idea of him having a cameo in One Piece, it doesn't need to be a main character or some important side character, such as Rayleigh, maybe someone like Sengoku could work.
But I do see him on the marines side, not necessarily a Pirate or StrawHat friendly character.

Kitsune Inferno

@LightningAce said in One Piece Live-Adaptation Drama Announced:

So on WIRED Autocomplete interview with Mark Hamill, a question came up "Is Mark Hamill in One Piece" He responds with "Well so far, the day is young, let's wait & see "

I could totally see him playing Rayleigh maybe or someone.

Unless he's being coy, judging by the way he reacted to the question, I don't think he registered it as relating to One Piece so much as literally "am I still in one piece today?", hence his response.

andre

I think they're going to lose people every day as out of context images leak until they put out a trailer. I really don't get the Netflix strategy of waiting just a few months before a show comes out to release a trailer.

Robby

@andre said in One Piece Live-Adaptation Drama Announced:

I think they're going to lose people every day as out of context images leak until they put out a trailer. I really don't get the Netflix strategy of waiting just a few months before a show comes out to release a trailer.

Because Netflix has 78 bazillion shows and they can't show love to any of them as a result.

They really need to drop their method of dropping whole seasons at once and go to weekly for new projects. Give it time for people to pick up on it and develop watercooler conversation. Have a show be a topic for 2 months instead of two days. And then they won't have to cram out so many shows.

zeltrax225

why are we going for the cool and dark and gritty route again?

andre

@zeltrax225 said in One Piece Live-Adaptation Drama Announced:

why are we going for the cool and dark and gritty route again?

This reads as Dark and Gritty to you:

zeltrax225

you see you didn't pick out the part where I mentioned cool
we want less cool, but more fun, that is the essence of one piece because no one really thought it was the cool kid during west blue when it ran against everything else.
also come on, you can't deny that the design looks like someone put in the going merry through a dark fantasy filter. Not even a little?

andre

It doesn't look like it's going for dark and cool at all. It's legitimately goofier than manga/anime Merry. It's also a little less cartoony, but I truly don't think cool, dark, and gritty are fair descriptors to communicate the design distance between them.

Kitsune Inferno

@zeltrax225 said in One Piece Live-Adaptation Drama Announced:

you see you didn't pick out the part where I mentioned cool
we want less cool, but more fun, that is the essence of one piece because no one really thought it was the cool kid during west blue when it ran against everything else.
also come on, you can't deny that the design looks like someone put in the going merry through a dark fantasy filter. Not even a little?

I don't understand most of your argument, but I feel like if you see that Merry and think "dark fantasy" your bar for dark fantasy must be really low.

Kaiolino

Technically, it's still May 31in some parts of the world but it's weird Weekly Shonen Jump would hype up May 31 as the release date of a key visual and a website launch and not go through with it.

andre

It's bizarre. If I'm a mangaka and negotiating with Netflix for a live action show, everything about this pre-release is making me hesitant.

last-exit-to-laughtale

The final version of the Merry is especially odd when you consider that, in 2021, the initial photos of the ship were much closer to the source material:

alt text

It even looks like the neck of the figurehead was a little longer compared to the images of the final product that were released a year later.

I have the feeling this wasn't a matter of trying to make the Merry's design grounded or cool or gritty. If I had to guess, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point between 2021 and 2022 the production team discovered that the structural integrity of the figurehead was in some way compromised (either it couldn't stay upright or it couldn't hold the weight of a person) but they were too far along to redo the whole thing. So the solution was to add a bunch of supports, and then to cover up those supports they coated the whole thing in sculpting plaster to make it look like it's carved; which probably necessitated making it look more detailed. You can even see the original support beams and beakhead underneath the new one in some of the photos, with the new ones having been extended all the way to the forecastle, presumably to give it the additional support.

Still creepy looking though.

FolhaS

Or it was just a normal part of production.

They made a super faithfull figurehead, tried it out, realized it doesnt actually look that good in camera or interacting with real people, so they made a new one.

Its still a smiling sheep.
And although it looks edgy by comparission, to us used to the cartoon look, it still looks silly as shit.
I bet people unfamiliar with OP are gonna take a look at that figurehead and say thats a funny and harmless looking ship. The same feeling we had when we first saw Merry.

zeltrax225

@Kitsune-Inferno nice personal jab
but basically I'm saying that there's no need to go out of the way to make One Piece look cool because that's all shallow theatrics. The whole world-building/this shit is deeper than I thought only comes after Crocodile and the first arc of the grand line. Most of what is cool, or edgy, or dark was mostly an afterburner to the raw emotions and goofiness during the series introduction. So yes, there's no need to go out of the way to make it something that it's not: be it design wise or whatever. We already have a million precedent of adaptions that try to "appeal to the mass" and proceeds to fucked it up.

Even if I give it to you and say that's not dark fantasy like because obviously you are a connoisseur, we have a significant number of people calling it out for being creepy. I guess creepiness and uncanniness was the character defining and design highlight of the Going merry we all know am I right? But if that screams adventure, fun and innocence or whatever you want it to scream to you, that's fine. It isn't that big of an issue, I just wanted to point out design changes is always the first step an adaption takes before proceeding to screw the source over. It might be for the better in this case, I doubt it but we'll see.

Kaiolino

Kitsune Inferno

@zeltrax225 Was that personal? If anything, I was calling it a reach. Nothing about it is dark or gritty, and cool is subjective.

I will give you at the bare minimum that maaaaybe it's a little more elaborate. But that is simply form following function. Figureheads were used as symbols of status and notoriety, so the more elaborate and intimidating, the better for a pirate seeking to make a name for themself.

I don't think the fun factor is lost by making something that's more elaborate and intimidating. It fits more in line with what the figurehead is meant to accomplish. The manga and anime can get away with something simple and inviting because it's a cartoon ultimately being marketed to children. Just because it makes sense in a drawn space doesn't mean it inherently works in live action.

Whether you prefer one or the other is subjective. I do have my own reservations about the live action design, but I'd like to see it in action first. Just because I don't prefer it doesn't mean it's not a reasonable design choice. Dark fantasy aside, to frame what can easily be described as a practical choice as "shallow theatrics" "going out of the way to look cool" is just, in my humble opinion, bad faith concern trolling. Especially when you see the posts above showing that they DID go with a more faithful-to-the-source-material design in the beginning that, more likely than not, did not translate well to the camera.

LightningAce

@Kitsune-Inferno
You could be right there.

LightningAce

@Robby

Well they have been splitting shows up in to 2 parts. They did it with Stranger Things last year, and several other shows.

Others they're just releasing all in 1 go and it seems to work just fine for them. Shows they've licensed from other networks like Riverdale get weekly releases.

Kitsune Inferno

It's weird to me that Netflix is still clinging to the binge model when Apple TV, Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, and Peacock have re-embraced the weekly model (or n+weekly) and it pays off in spades.

andre

@LightningAce In my opinion, the 2 part strategy is ass. It should either be all at once or a weekly release. As is, they're just removing the hype. Stone Ocean is a great example where the release in parts didn't help the hype.

NightGrinder

@Robby said in One Piece Live-Adaptation Drama Announced:

They gotta find their own path 100% strict adherence to the manga designs would be a complete disaster in live action.

I did not say you should copy manga designs whenever possible.

I meant that it should be a rather simple task to adapt a ship's figurehead in a satisfying way.

Or, at the very least, someone in the room has a pulse and says "hey, how about we dial down the creep factor by 5%?"

But maybe it's just weird promotional material and lack of CG and it will look fine in the show. Who knows. We probably won't see the ship for most of the show anyway, so it kinda doesn't matter.