With a number of things going on to celebrate the 20th-anniversary of One Piece, one that I think is really appealing has been announced. A special is being produced for an October 20th, 2019 debut in Japan that adapts the Romance Dawn manga one-shot that Eiichiro Oda produced in 1996. This is essentially what we see with a lot of one-shots that hit manga magazines over the years in that we get an idea, it gets tested in this form, then reworked and relaunched later under the same name or with some other changes.
The special will air on exactly the 20th-anniversary of when the TV anime adaptation began in 1999. This one-shot was originally released in 1996 and shows some very different ideas for the characters. It’s seen an adaptation of sorts before with the 2008 One Piece: Romance Dawn Story where it used the basic story ideas but set within the fully realized world. This one will adapt the one-shot faithfully, similar to how Dark Horse Comics produced The Star Wars based on the prior screenplay for Star Wars that had been produced.
