https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntoB59VttFU

One of the strangest pieces of news to hit this year had to do with the impending Hollywood adaptation of the long-running manga series, One Piece. The comic follows a band of pirates in their journeys around the world to find the great pirate treasure of the same name, left by former Pirate King Gold Roger.

While the story is epic in all the right ways, and the characters memorable and unique, its cartoonish and distinctly Japanese nature makes it a tough one to adapt. They’d need to change a good number of things in order to make it more palatable for mainstream American audiences, and once that’s done, the series may lose what made it special in the first place.

And that’s not the only big obstacle. It’s also a ridiculously long series. Just this year, the manga celebrated its 20th anniversary, and it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if it lasted for another 10 years before the story was finally finished.

However, as a result of being such a long series, you can imagine some studios will want to fast forward a bit and start the new show off much later down the line — perhaps the Alabasta arc, where the world starts to open up. So can fans expect some sort of truncation to occur?

According to producer Marty Adelstein while at this year’s Jump Festa event, the series will start off with the East Blue arc and then will “broaden from there.” This is great news for fans of the series, as the East Blue arc is where the manga started, and it gives us the impression that they are dedicated to making a faithful take on the source material.

This is all very much in keeping with author Eiichiro Oda’s statement earlier this year, that he had a condition that the new series “will never betray the fans who have supported me for 20 years.”

Does this sound like good news to you for the One Piece series? Let us know your thoughts down below!

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SOURCE: The One Piece Podcast