Here, production manager Justin Cook discusses the edits that FUNimation will make to keep One Piece on the air.
First of all, how excited are you to have One Piece?
COOK: It’s great. We actually got our hopes up once before for One Piece, but to have it now and to have the chance to bring it back to the fans, to have the chance to restore it to its original luster and original clever dialogue is really our main goal. We want to capture the essence of what One Piece is and to bring that back as much as we can to a television audience. And of course, the uncut DVDs will be the original work in its entirety.
Bliss! So you’ll be using new voices of course.
COOK: Yes, and on the casting we are not trying to match either the Japanese voices or the former dub. We are looking at both sets of voices, but we don’t want our cast trying to imitate a voice that, in our opinion, might not necessarily fit that character.
Any plans for wacky accents?
COOK: If it fits the character, we might find a place for some kind of accent. In our brief history, we have found places in a show where an accent of some kind really fits. But we don’t want to force an international feel on the show when it already really comes across in the animation. And of course, a bad accent will usually be more distracting than even bad acting.
I think One Piece fans – including me - are concerned about Nico Robin’s wacky hick accent and Sanji’s God-awful Brooklyn accent.
COOK: I am almost totally certain that none of the Straw-Hat pirates, the main characters, will have any kind of accent at all.
And the pirate accent that everyone else seemed to have?
COOK: If you have a guy who is obviously a pirate with a peg leg and a hook for a hand, you might get away with a traditional pirate voice, but the production team really doesn’t want that just running rampant throughout the whole thing. We’re sure there will be some instances where it will be appropriate but we’ll never use an accent if we can’t do it perfectly.
Are there any announcements about who will be working on the dub?
COOK: There are two line producers that are working on One Piece at this time: Mike McFarland and Christopher Bevins. Of course, Mike McFarland was a line producer for Trinity Blood, and a voice director for Trinity Blood as well as Fullmetal Alchemist, a number of Dragonball episodes, and a couple of other series. And Chris Bevins worked on Burst Angel and Samurai 7. We have a very experienced lead staff working on the show. The head writers working on this are John Burgmeier and Eric Vale, both of whom are taking an equal chunk of the workload. As far as the cast, I can’t say as of yet.
I know Bevins at least is a pretty big One Piece fan.
COOK: Actually, both Mike and Bevins are extreme One Piece fans. Both have felt that so far, One Piece has been…a little lackluster in its performance and are both very anxious at the chance to step in and try to course-correct this ship.
That’s very diplomatic of you.
COOK: Well, you’ve got to understand that when One Piece first went on the air [here in the U.S.], it was at a very different time slot than what we’re looking at now, so a lot of the standards that they were held to, we aren’t. Instead of Saturday morning at 9 a.m., we’re looking at Saturday night. There is a very different set of standards for that time slot.
So what else will FUNimation’s TV version not be doing?
COOK: What I can say for sure is that there will be no smoking in One Piece-land, as according to Cartoon Network, consumption of alcohol will be missing from the show, and obviously, a lot of the violence and gore will be missing.
I know as soon as I say, “No smoking,” everyone’s mind immediately goes to Sanji and his sucker, and we will be continuing that. The whole reason the sucker is there is that it’s just too much work to repaint everything in the shot to remove the cigarette. You have to consider, for every one second of footage that’s aired, there are 30 individual frames that need to be painted. So, for a three-minute scene of Sanji with a cigarette in his mouth, that’s easily a week to two weeks of work, doing nothing else but that for eight hours a day.
We’re much more concerned with finding a cast that fits the characters and brings the characters to life to whet the appetites of the fans so that they want to go check out the uncut DVD version of the show. And I think the change in voices and the script styling of the show will be enough to get the fans interested in the original series. We know we’re going to have to ask for forgiveness on the missing violence and the missing cigarettes, but there’s nothing we can do about that besides not air it on TV at all.
And it’ll still be totally uncut on DVD.
COOK: Yes.
So then what about the character of Smoker, who smokes two cigars at the same time? The previous version edited them out and renamed him Chaser.
COOK: Well, there’s actually an exception with cigars and pipes. All we have to do is get rid of the smoke and the burning bit at the end. For whatever reason, [the FCC broadcast standards] are more concerned with getting rid of cigarettes. But cigars and pipes can be shown, provided they’re not lit or being used.
But there are other shows like Naruto, which airs close to the same time as One Piece will, in which characters are seen with cigarettes with just the smoke removed, though not main characters like Sanji.
COOK: We have been asked not to do that, though we did ask if we could. We’ve been asked that before. “Why can the show before you or after you do this and you don’t?” We’re just going with the orders we’ve been given. We’re not sure why other shows can do certain things but it’s not okay for One Piece. In the Jaya saga, there is a pretty major character who smokes all the time on the island. That’s an instance of a character that smokes all the time, as well as having the cigarette in his mouth, where we have to decide if we can replace it with a toothpick or edit out the smoking altogether. Basically, it’s going to be a group effort to decide how to best handle it without steering away from the idea and the feel of One Piece.
Obviously, there were a lot of extreme edits that were made previously, like replacing guns with cork guns or water guns. What are your plans for that?
COOK: We have not been asked to remove the guns. I think that is probably due to the time that it’s being shown. There still is some violence due to that that cannot be shown. For example, if someone is decapitated, we would probably choose not to show the actual decapitation, but leave it to the viewers’ imagination as to what happens, but the sound effect would be there. Also, instead of showing blood pouring from a wound, it would just be a clean slice, or when there’s a punch we’ll have a flash, and just not show the connection.
We’re looking for ways to change it as little as possible, to cause the least amount of interruption. We have to edit out some things to get it on TV but we’re going to try to make up for that by giving the audience the most we can with the acting. This is something I feel we have a lot of experience with; building an ensemble cast is something that both Mike and Chris have a lot of experience in and have done before in numerous shows. I think we’re in store for a bunch of very fun episodes.
What about name changes? Zoro was changed to Zolo, possibly because of a legal issue with the Zorro character, but that Luffy’s brother Ace was changed to Trace, seemed arbitrary.
COOK: As far as Ace is concerned, I feel inclined to stick with Ace as the name. Every script that we’re writing goes through approval with Toei, and they have requested that we stay as close to the manga, as released by VIZ, as possible. They want us to keep character names, place names, item names as they are in the manga. Ultimately, what you read in the manga will be what you hear in the anime. I have no intention of changing names. Now the edited TV version may change some things to match up with what was done in the past, but the uncut version will most certainly have the original names.
Most importantly, will you use One Piece’s original score?
COOK: We plan to. We feel that the original vision, the scope and soundscape of One Piece is wonderful. We will only try to polish the existing canvas, and add slight coloring with our new cast.
What about the opening and closing music?
COOK: It’s still under discussion, but I assure you we will not be using the “Gum-Gum Rap.”
So you’re starting with the Jaya arc?
COOK: Yes, episode 144, according to the original Japanese numbering, but episode 105 according to the numbering by the former dub house.
4Kids removed a lot of the non-canonical filler arcs entirely. Are there any plans to do that?
COOK: If we do have to lose some episodes, I think it’s preferable to lose a filler saga than to lose storyline from the original manga. However, once again, it will all be available uncut.
You mentioned that Cartoon Network had some requirements, but what about Toei? Have they required anything of you besides sticking close to the manga?
COOK: Not really. We told them what was going to be necessary for us to bring this show to a television audience, and we just want to bring One Piece back to the fans. And Toei was very excited that we felt that this was a successful venue for One Piece.
I heard rumors that Toei wanted to have a female voice actress voice Luffy, like Mayumi Tanaka does in Japan.
COOK: That was a request that came from very high up, from the person without which One Piece would not exist. Obviously, it had a lot of thought behind it. However, at FUNimation, in recent years, we’ve brought in more and more kids to do voices. I mean, after 52 episodes and a movie of Fullmetal Alchemist, I can’t imagine Alphonse being played by anyone but Aaron Dismuke, that anyone else could have pulled off the genuine sincerity and innocence of that character. I think that worked really well against the backdrop of the rest of the cast for that series.
Now, will that work for One Piece? I don’t know, but as with any casting decision, I don’t think you can pick one voice for a character without hearing them with the rest of the cast. And even though Toei did make the request for a female voice actress, they are also very understanding of American television and what we have to do. We said we would definitely meet their other requirements for casting but we wanted to be free to explore the option of bringing in a younger male actor or perhaps a very talented older actor who could perhaps do a voice that would be very convincing for Luffy’s character. Right now, Toei is open to hearing any auditions we are considering.
Personally, I think that a male voice would be easier for an American audience to buy, make it easier to suspend disbelief. If you lose that even for a few moments, your audience can become jaded and more critical and become distracted by things outside the story. Obviously, there’s a lot of pressure to have a really good script and a really tight voice cast so that fans of the show will be really happy with who’s playing their favorite character. We want people to be excited about Sanji’s character, about Zolo’s character.
Do you have a favorite character or story arc from One Piece?
COOK: I’ve watched quite a bit of One Piece and I’ve read even more than I’ve seen, but as far as favorite characters go, I’m weak and I always choose the main character in almost every show. Luffy’s character really captures the essence of innocence, loyalty, a need to do what is right, and sometimes, just an idiot’s heart. It’s so unique to Japanese shows to have these kinds of selfless characters that I don’t think are on television enough.
In American TV, you’ll sometimes have that sense of that Greek hero, but it’s usually skewed by mixing doing what is right with what is politically correct. Many times, that character gets muddled in trying to make things okay with everybody. One Piece is a show that begins with stereotypes and then breaks the molds. They start with characters that you think you’ve seen in every show, and then systematically break those characters down so that each one of them has to reconsider who they really are and what they stand for.
