The live-action adaptation of “One Piece” is full of Easter Eggs and allusions to the gigantic manga template and its anime adaptation. And one such hidden detail now even makes a particularly nice bow to the original.
Various wanted posters, cameos by notable pirates and mentions of other infamous buccaneers and locations: There are Easter Eggs to be discovered at every turn in the “One Piece” original series, which refer to the larger world of the franchise completely apart from the actual plot, which die-hard fans already know from the over 1,000 chapters of the underlying manga and the over 1,000-episode anime series.
However, these allusions are not exclusively of a visual nature, but are also sometimes hidden on the sound level, such as in a flashback directly in episode 1. When we see in a flashback (from minute 18:50) how Shanks (Peter Gadiot) is stitching up the wound that his young protégé Ruffy (Colton Osorio) has inflicted on himself in the windmill village, a melody can be heard in the background that should be all too familiar to all “One Piece” connoisseurs. It is an instrumental version of the pirate song “Binks Sake”, which is famous in the world of “One Piece”.
And the fact that the song is heard in the scene in question (although it first appears in the originals much later) is of course no coincidence. As we learn in chapter 486 of the “One Piece” manga (and also mentioned in the anime series), Ruffy first heard “Binks Sake” from Shanks’ crew when he was young, which is why the song is closely connected to this crew and the place where he grew up and met Shanks.
By using it in the live-action adaptation at that very location, this fact is subtly taken into account and a nice circle is closed. This ultimately makes the overall experience of manga template and adaptation even better and more rounded, and once again makes clear how familiar the people responsible behind the live-action series (who were in constant exchange with manga creator Eiichirō Oda) are with the source material.
