When One Piece Almost Wasn't (Part 1)
Cringe Weeb Alert! Oh wait it's just me...
After my very first trip to Japan yielded an unprecedented opportunity to purchase some used mangos, I ended up reading One Piece all the way up through the Alabasta arc as it was being released back in 2002. This was around the time when I’d gotten jaded about most other anime, and One Piece had such a unique style and sincere call to adventure, I fell in love with it.
I spent the next few years drawing fan art and attempting to convince people to check out this unique and fun story about a pirate crew and their adventures. At one point I recall being referred to as the “One Piece Pope” for the sheer number of people online and IRL who ended up checking it out at my behest, and similarly encouraging their own friends to read the chapters. I’d be burning discs with the raw scans and then linking people to a guy who was writing text-only translations that could be read in tandem with the raw Japanese chapter zips, in addition to loaning out my own bunkobans whenever possible.
All this being said: I dreaded (and still do dread) Netflix’s adaptation of this series. I’ve been treated to a whole lotta One Piece on my feeds these past few days, so I suppose that means the Netflix version was a hit.
Because of that, I’ve been privy to an incredible whiplash of just how insane One Piece’s journey has been from humble and unknown mango back in the day, to most popular anime in existence, and now to HIT Netflix series.
No one who is new to the One Piece fandom today could even imagine how unheard of it was 20 years ago outside of Japan. It took a LOT of work from the subbing and scanlation communities to scrape together the raws of the manga and record VHS’s and DVD’s of the anime as it aired Japan-side while wrangling a rag-tag team of dedicated fans to translate, edit, typeset, encode, render, and distro to get this series out for its very small fan base. And when it was announced that the infamously horrendous 4Kids had acquired the rights after battling it out with Funimation and DiC? Well, we’d all but given up on the possibility of this series ever becoming successful outside of Japan. You may laugh at this assertion, but I was there Gandalf, I was there 3,000 years ago…
My ancient 2004 music video using the latest Toei filler arc of the time even had our sentiments burned into the credits, so reading Mark Kirk’s laughable rewrite of his Boss’ shenanigans nearly 20 years ago was a real head-spinner:
This is the first time I’ve put all this information down in a proper post, it’d always been something fun to gab about with close friends or as a wild story to tell over dinner, but after seeing this absolute History retcon from 4Kids entertainment after the wild success of the Netflix adaptation, and knowing that this information just doesn’t exist outside of the tiny group of people who were actually involved in it, I knew I had to start digging through the annals of forgotten nerd history and write for posterity.
Prepare yourselves for a trip down moonspeak memory lane… In the next chapter.
