One of the showrunners for the Netflix series opens up in a new interview about the biggest changes they made from Eiichiro Oda's best selling manga for the live-action adaptation.
- Sep 4, 2023
AceShowbiz - Changes are inevitable when it comes to live-action adaptation. One of the showrunners for Netflix's "One Piece" opened up in a new interview about the biggest changes they made from Eiichiro Oda's best selling manga when they created the live-action adaptation.
In the first season of "One Piece", which closely follows the first 100 chapters of Oda's ongoing story, Matt Owens and Steven Maeda made some alterations. It included the shift around the exact timing and circumstances where Luffy (Inaki Godoy) meets two of his Straw Hat gang members, Nami (Emily Rudd) and Roronoa Zoro (Mackenyu).
Despite that, Maeda thought the biggest and most controversial change, which has been blessed by Oda himself, was the one involving "One Piece" villains Don Krieg (Milton Schorr) and Arlong (McKinley Belcher III). "One that I'm sure will be debated endlessly was not leaning into the character of Don Krieg, and bringing Arlong up as the Big Bad of the first season," Maeda told Variety.
In the original manga, Don Krieg has a much larger arc as he serves as the primary antagonist for Luffy and the Straw Hats while they're at mid-sea restaurant Baratie. The series, meanwhile, features Krieg only for a very brief moment. He's killed by master swordsman Mihawk (Steven Ward) during a large-scale battle that takes place before Krieg even meets Luffy.
Maeda shared, "We made these decisions, and Oda blessed it, to bring Arlong to Baratie, introduce him earlier than he is in the manga." With the change, the showrunners were allowed to "really ramp up towards the last two episodes so that Arlong is our Big Bad of the first season." Another major change made on the live-adaptation was the revelation that [SPOILER] Vice Admiral Garp (Vincent Regan) is actually Luffy's grandfather.
In the interview, Maeda also addressed the alteration, which was with Oda's signoff, of physical characteristics of "One Piece" manga characters, including Straw Hat members Usopp's (Jacob Romero Gibson) nose and Sanji's (Taz Skylar) eyebrow. "It's not long in the show - it's a normal size nose," Maeda reasoned. "I felt that the nose was going to be unintentionally comical in a way that would distract from the character."
Of Sanji's eyebrow, the showrunner explained, "Likewise with Sanji's eyebrow - his curly eyebrow - and we had some very, very passionate debate on that. But ultimately, we decided to not use the curlicue eyebrow as a way just to ground the show and make it feel more real. And that was certainly what was done across the various departments."
Maeda additionally commented on why previous manga or anime adaptations "perhaps have not done that well." He said, "It's an almost impossible task," adding that the "One Piece" live-action series "should be a bridge" between the people who know the IP and the people who don't.
"That's the whole reason for doing this, is to come up with something that the diehard fans are going to love and appreciate and recognize as something of their own and go, 'Wow, look what they did,' and at the same time be telling a compelling story that is not inside so baseball that new fans are going, 'What's going on here? What is this crazy pink pirate ship?' " he noted.
