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One Piece Franchise Gets Commemorative Short Drama Videos with Theme Song by RADWIMPS
posted on by Alex Mateo
The official website of the One Piece franchise announced on Thursday that the series is inspiring a video collection of five short dramas titled "We Are One!" that will launch on a newly opened website and the franchise's YouTube channel on August 30. Mika Ninagawa (live-action Helter Skelter film) is directing the dramas, which will feature both live-action and animated segments. The short dramas will center on readers of the Eiichiro Oda's One Piece manga, and it will include actor Kengo Kōra as one of its cast members. RADWIMPS (your name., Weathering With You) will perform the theme song for the video.
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The video commemorates the One Piece manga's 100th compiled book volume and its anime adaptation's 1,000th episode. The website unveiled the 100th volume's cover:
The 100th volume will ship on September 3.
RADWIMPS' theme song will debut on YouTube on July 22 at 9:00 p.m. JST.
Eiichiro Oda's One Piece manga has surpassed 490 million copies in circulation worldwide as of Monday. That includes over 400 million in Japan and 90 million in at least 57 countries and regions overseas.
The manga is commemorating its 100th volume with several projects. One is the Kibo Discover Project, a collaboration between One Piece's publisher Shueisha, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the interactive production company Bascule. This project will challenge people to spread hope throughout the world by venturing into space. (Kibō or "hope" is the name of a Japanese module of the International Space Station, as well as of a video communication system between ISS and Earth.)
Other commemorative projects include a Where's Waldo crossover, a voice comic of Oda's one-shot manga "Monsters," an interview between the cast members of Luffy and two more ship captains, a reader mail-away offer for figures, the third Shokugeki no Sanji spinoff chapter, a new streaming program on the franchise's YouTube channel, the free (for a limited time) release of the first 90 volumes, and the third One Piece Knowledge King test.
Oda began serializing the One Piece manga in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump manga on July 19, 1997. The 57th volume had a first printing of 3 million copies, a national industry record, in March 2010. The 67th volume had a first printing of 4.05 million copies, the new national industry record, in August 2012.
The manga won the 41st Japan Cartoonist Awards in 2012, and set a Guinness World Record in 2015 for "the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author."
Oda published the 1,000th chapter in this year's combined 5th/6th issue of Weekly Shonen Jump magazine on January 4.
Oda said in an interview last August that he plans to end the story in four or five years.
Sources: One Piece franchise's website, Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web
