One Piece: Season One: First Voyage DVD Review

[steaner]

This particular set of DVDs comes to us by way of a long and twisted trail. One Piece was first licensed in America a few years ago by 4Kids Entertainment, with an eye towards an afternoon kids' TV broadcast. This in itself wasn't a bad idea at all, but plenty of bad ideas followed hard on its heels – the product that wound up on TV and DVD was badly dubbed and edited beyond recognition.

Fast-forward a little while and, for some strange reason, the show isn't selling all that well on home video. 4Kids lets the license go, Funimation picks it up, and here we are today, with a perfectly acceptable localization of the series in a compact collection at a reasonable price. Pity it took so long.


One Piece has been one of the mainstays of Shonen Jump magazine for years. It's one of your classic boys' action comics – a colorful, macho, freewheeling story about a crew of cartoon pirates and their adventures across the seemingly endless seas of a fantasy world. Monkey D. Luffy, blessed with the soul of a shonen manga hero and the stretchy limbs of Mister Fantastic, vows to sail across the Grand Line until he finally discovers a legendary treasure and claims the title of King of the Pirates.

This is not a difficult concept to make a fun series out of. It's about bad-ass pirates beating the hell out of each other, 24 hours a day. Eiichiro Oda's character concepts are bad-ass even by bad-ass pirate standards, though – besides Luffy and his stretchy limbs, he has a gorgeous navigator with a boss shoulder tattoo, a big-nosed hilarious pathological liar who never misses with his trusty slingshot, and a two-fisted swordsman with a katana in his teeth.
Gundam's Shuuichi Ikeda just about trumps them all, though, with his brief guest appearance as Red-Haired Shanks, the captain who inspired Luffy to become a pirate king in the first place. It's the Shanks flashbacks that make you really appreciate this unedited version of the series -- 4Kids deplorably deprived America's youth of a chance to watch his pirate crew raise hell in all their violent glory. This show may be a little bit rough for very young kids, and perhaps a bit too cartoony for the no-longer-young-at-heart, but for a 10, 12, 14-year-old audience, it hits a pretty sweet spot.


One Piece does have one basic problem, although you might just call it a convention of the genre. Like most shows based on Shonen Jump-style manga – Bleach, Naruto, and Dragon Ball Z are good examples, too – it moves at a very slow pace. The six hours and change of animation here only adapt a couple of volumes worth of manga stories. If you're used to plowing through the comic-book version at high speed, you might well get impatient waiting for the story to move forward.
Funimation's started moving towards releasing many series in larger box sets right off the bat, though, and that's absolutely the right choice here. Selling this show in four-episode chunks for 20 bucks a pop would be ridiculous – aside from the cost issue, it would be months before the story went anywhere interesting. Instead, this box set includes 13 episodes, and if you shop around you can find it for less than half of the $50 suggested retail price. That's a more than fair price for a solid chunk of story – by the end of these discs, you'll have made it through a couple of introductory plotlines and met half a dozen major characters, which is a fair amount of progress by the standards of a series that's run for more than 350 episodes and counting now.



Video and Presentation
With six episodes on one disc and seven on the other, some viewers might be bracing themselves for some iffy video quality, but in fact the transfer doesn't look bad at all. The dual-layer DVDs hold episodes that look plenty sharp, especially for a TV series that had comparatively low production values at this point in its life. (The aspect ratio is still 4:3, since this predates the trend towards widescreen presentation in TV anime.) One Piece's bright colors are the key to its visuals, and they stand out very well on this disc. You might spot some aliasing here and there, but it's only noticeable, not actively aggravating.
Funimation also whipped up a sharp new set of menus for its release, and threw in the "marathon play" feature that also shows up on the new Dragon Ball Z season sets. The way that works, you can watch each episode individually, with the intro and credit sequences included each time, or you can plow through the disc in "marathon" mode, without re-watching the introduction and credits over and over. It sounds like a simple thing, and it is, but it's a surprisingly nice convenience if you plan to binge on a whole disc at once.
Score: 7 out of 10
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Languages and Audio
In addition to stereo tracks in both English and Japanese, there's a 5.1-channel surround mix for the English version. Viewers who stick with the Japanese version shouldn't feel too terribly left out, but the 5.1-channel track does add some extra mustard when Luffy winds up the old Gum-Gum Punch.
Those who prefer their anime with English vocals may be glad to have anything better than the sloppy 4Kids dub. To its credit, though, Funimation's re-dub is a more than marked improvement on the first go-round. Even the supporting cast gets the benefit of some good performances – Brett Weaver is nice and growly as "Axe-Hand" Morgan, the murderous Marine captain who's one of the series' first antagonists.
Score: 7 out of 10
Extras and Packaging

There's not much on these discs besides the episodes themselves. The bullet points only include:

• Marathon Play
• Staff commentary

Only one episode – the first one – has a commentary track, so it's hard to call that a significant selling point for this box set. It's an interesting track, though, with Mike McFarland (one of the ADR directors) and the voices of Luffy and Zoro (Colleen Clinkenbeard and Christopher Sabat, respectively) talking about the process of taking over the dubbing of One Piece in mid-series.
Score: 5 out of 10
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The Bottom Line If you're willing to accept that it's not going to develop an overarching plot any time very soon, and that individual arcs are going to take a lot longer to resolve themselves than they did in the manga version, One Piece is a pretty good time. It's a colorful, funny, action-packed kids' adventure show, and Funimation's wrapped it up in a well-produced package at a price that can't be beat.

[bimo]

I so enjoyed watching crocodile and arlong geting beaten up in the first english version i bet in funimation i will enjoy it 10x more

[budz01]

i really love one peice

thanxxxxxxxx for sharing.......

[sampo01]

I really can't imagine at first what the fuss was all about regarding one-piece. So, I watched it. and now.... I'm hooked.

thanks