No matter how you approach it, Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece is a famously long, ongoing anime and manga series. Thankfully, Netflix’s surprisingly fantastic live-action adaptation has given fans who swear by the show a new way to share it with friends and family without the weight of 1,000+ episodes and chapters. To tide old-head and newfound fans over for the third season, the streamer has opted to release special recaps to catch folks up on the Straw Hat Pirates’ journey thus far in a two-episode Lego animated special.
Instead of reviewing what is essentially a baby-show version of a series I know like the back of my hand, I took a page out of my video game colleagues’ book, who had their children give their own input on a game clearly geared toward them. Here, I used the Lego One Piece show as an experiment to see whether it would succeed in getting a friend of mine who has only watched one anime in their life but absolutely loves Lego on board with the wondrous world of One Piece. While the show failed to make them a born-again fan of the live-action series, it did make them curious enough to check out the anime proper, which, honestly, is a win.
Lego One Piece is as advertised on the tin. The two-episode special, each part clocking in at a little over 30 minutes, sees famous fibber Usopp (Jacob Romero Gibson) regale new crewmate Tony Tony Chopper (Mikaela Hoover) with the Straw Hat Pirates’ adventures. The big selling point here is Usopp’s predilection for embellishing stories, making himself look more heroic in the process. If you’re familiar with the anime YouTube channel Team Four Stars’ abridged treatment of Dragon Ball Z, the Lego One Piece special is pretty close to their brand of humor, offering a supercut-sized summary of the Straw Hats’ adventures in a colorful Lego package. While the special keeps things pretty safe and PG content-wise, glossing over the bloodier and more tragic moments of the show to give a sanitized, safe-for-kids-ages-7-and-up retelling of events without all the tears, the show does nestle a couple of clever deep-cut fandom gags befitting the live-action series’ attention to detail, including fan theories and fandom memes about the Straw Hat Pirates, especially its swordsman, Zoro.
That said, the show isn’t a full-belly-laugh affair throughout. If anything, its bits garner a polite chortle from time to time. The real laughs don’t come from how the live-action cast brings their Lego counterparts to life, but from the supporting cast. Namely, how Jeff Ward’s Buggy the Clown and the dry delivery of Steven John Ward’s Dracule Mihawk add to the Looney Tunes-style sight gags in the show’s more cartoonish moments. The show doesn’t really hit its stride until it gets to the scene with the bisected clown’s Lego pieces and comically diminutive sword-scraping while besting the Straw Hat Pirates.
Because the show is Lego-animated, it also has a surprising leg up on the live-action series it’s serving, using Lego to make Luffy’s Devil Fruit powers far more creative than in the show proper. However, as far as Lego animation goes, its quality is a far cry from what folks have come to love in the Lego Star Wars, Indiana Jones, or Batman games, which was a huge sticking point for my friend.
While I found the two-episode special fun enough, if not a blanket brand-synergy way for Netflix and Lego to shill sets to kids like the halcyon days of Saturday morning cartoons, my friend wasn’t sold on checking out the live-action series based on what the Lego special was showcasing. When I asked my friend why, they pointed out that the main strength of Lego anything is familiarity with the series it’s collaborating with. Before we watched the show, all they knew about the series was that Luffy was named Luffy and the Chopper-crying meme. So the few moments where Lego One Piece made me chuckle flew over their head. Still, our viewing of the special wasn’t a total crapshoot.
And as someone whose day job is video editing, the show’s use of stock explosion sound effects and the patented Wilhelm scream got a chuckle out of me. As a fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the Lego One Piece series opened my friend’s eyes to the fantastical scope of Oda’s series as more than just pirates sailing for treasure, with how Devil Fruit powers and the politics of the World Government come into play on their adventures. They were also taken in by the fact that each island had its own deal, with different biomes, denizens, and the like. They were especially partial to Drum Island’s gothic-esque design and the fact that Little Garden had dinosaurs. And as someone who wanted to be an architect because they grew up with Lego, and whose mother, while we were viewing the show, texted him about her rekindled love of Lego (after threatening to throw their own set away when they went to college), seeing locations like Arlong Park’s Fish-Man pirate hideout and Baratie’s kooky fish-shaped restaurant oasis scratched their itch to build.
As an advertisement for Lego sets, the show succeeds. As a gateway to the live-action series, not so much. To my complete surprise, Lego One Piece piqued my friend’s interest to dive beyond the live-action show’s otherwise shallow waters. They want to check out the anime and see what all the Lego misadventures look like in 2D animation. I’ve yet to take them to task on whether that means they’d be down to watch Toei Animation’s OG ongoing run or WIT Studio’s leaner remake when it sets sail. Honestly, their answer was far more than I could’ve asked for from my friend group’s door-to-door Jehovah’s Witness, Eiichiro Oda. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a win in my book.
Lego One Piece embarks on Netflix on September 29.
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