The preview clips are not in themselves a terrible idea, but I do think in Dreamin' On specifically, they go on for far too long. 20 seconds straight out of a two-minute opening? Ehh… Over the Top with its ten seconds felt much more reasonable.

As per the usual, the recap and mid-episode flashbacks went on for a bit longer than I would have liked, (The fact that we saw the exact same Thriller Bark flashback just a few episodes ago didn't help) but hooooley sheets that ending. Given that we just came off of episode 1000 with its "Everyone is here" staff, it seemed entirely reasonable to assume that this episode would be more conservative, but no, they just suddenly spring this utter insanity on us.

@Snowmint:

So is the 1000 episode actually going to be special or just a run if the mill episode?

Like chapter 1000, it will just be another episode, albeit one that has some really strong staff on it and that adapts a particularly hype moment. Toei clearly wants to make it a particularly good episode, but yeah, it is ultimately just "the next episode of this ongoing storyline."

Well at least they are continuing… But given what we've seen so far I still expect them to be dumb and keep doing them in SD.

@Nouryoku:

I''m not a big fan of Film Gold but conceptually just something akin to an underworld boss like Tesoro would be more interesting than the already stale "big inoperative legend from the past" again.

Film Gold is quite frankly severely underrated. I rewatched it not too long ago and I was really surprised at how fun it ended up being. Sure it has the pretty glaring flaw that they neglected to come up with a way for Luffy to defeat Tesoro and so it literally just ended with "Luffy shouts real loud and suddenly Tesoro is defeated" (srsly, I have no idea what actually happened there) but other than that, it was a ton of fun, and the fact that it was basically a heist movie gave it a pretty distinct feel from every other One Piece movie.

Meanwhile Stampede… Sure it was fun and had some absolutely outstanding action animation, but it was literally just "There's this ludicrously strong dude and pretty much every major character from the manga teams up to fight him."

With Deguchi at the helm and this being The Episode Before 1000, my expectations were fairly modest…

It was fine. Nothing mindblowing, but I guess it was a bit better than I anticipated.

@G1Ravage:

Hmm…unless I'm mixing something up in my brain...the FUNi dub is going with the far more popular "Beast Pirates", while the Viz manga went with "Animal Kingdom Pirates"?

That's interesting. They seem to try to stay in sync with terminology these days.

What, really? Yet they still called Kaido "King of the Beasts" rather than just "Kaido the Beast" or something to that effect… Very odd.
Re: Lipflaps... I mean, "Animal Kingdom Pirates" VS "hyakujuu kaizokudan"... They seem to be of similar length to me.

So Straw Hat Chase was not dubbed? Hrm, sounds a bit weak… They really should have at least told people that ahead of time. Oh well, not a huge loss either way considering how... Straw Hat Chase is kind of a nothing movie. Still hope that they'll at least put it up for streaming or download somewhere just so that we can have a semi-competent translation for it, though. And yeah, it would be nice if they could go back and actually release those earlier movies. At the very least, if they put out Baron Omatsuri and Episode of Chopper + (in some capacity where a Norwegian like myself could actually get them to work) I would be happy to buy them. Would also probably get Dead End Adventure maybe possibly. Well… all of this does still depend on them getting at least semi-competent translations which is a bit of a crapshoot with this series. (Though even the extremely dry in-house Toei translations that the show gets would be a tremendous improvement over what currently exists for Straw Hat Chase.)

@redon:

“Skypiea” pack will include 85 episodes, from episode 144 to episode 228.

[qimg]https://images2.imgbox.com/33/36/Yo62Rylj_o.jpeg[/qimg]

I am very late on this but… 228. 22 episodes into the HD run. Yet they are still releasing it in SD only.
Why is the Davy Back Fight arc perpetually cursed.
Also looking at when they announced this... Is that also the last one? Are they literally stopping the BD release as soon as they get to actual HD content?!
AVEX. What is wrong with you?!

EDIT: Oh, looking at the time from announcement to release for all of these, I suppose hope is not entirely lost for further releases… But given how they are just doing everything wrong here, I have no doubt that a potential Water 7 box would still be in SD.

Yeah this was… kind of a nothing episode. Also, they put the big money shot right there in the opening yet even said big money shot only looked so-so. At least we got a bit of Thurlow animating Dragon Kaido which is always cool but... that was really about the only part that actually was cool and it was super brief.