Weirdest One Piece Episodes

Summary

• One Piece’s weirdness shines in bizarre filler episodes like the animated adaptation of the Chopper Man manga strip.
• Unusual crossovers like One Piece x Toriko and Dragon Ball often deviate from the main plot in weird ways.
• The TV special One Piece Fan Letter exemplifies Toei’s surprising brilliance in animated projects.

Eiichiro Oda’s magnum opus, One Piece, is many things: epic, captivating, emotional, fun and, most important of all, weird. This long-running pirate series wouldn’t be as popular as it is today if it wasn’t for its large number of goofy, surreal, and over-the-top situations and characters.

Toei Animation not only managed to perfectly adapt the weird nature of the One Piece manga into a successful anime, but they also upped the ante by creating many filler episodes that feature truly bizarre scenarios, which are sometimes based on supplementary material from the manga, while others are 100% original to the anime. There are a lot of weird One Piece episodes, but the following are the most egregious examples.

8 Episodes 279-283

A Collection Of Recaps And Goofy Comedic Skits

This collection of strange episodes is placed right in the middle of the critically acclaimed Enies Lobby arc, which made a lot of longtime viewers very confused. Episodes 279 to 283 are mostly made up of flashbacks that recap the events of the anime up to that point, which was a common practice in mainstream anime during the late 90s and early 2000s. The weird thing is in the second half of these episodes, the Straw Hat Theater.

These are brief but bizarre shorts starring “chibi” versions of Luffy, Zoro, Nami, Usopp, Sanji, Chopper, and Robin going through some surreal and absurd scenarios. What if the Straw Hats were middle-aged women? What if they were mythological monsters? Needless to say, these fun little skits are all adapted from the famous omake manga strips of the same name.

7 Episodes 291, 292, 303, 406, and 407

The Infamous Saga Of “Boss Luffy Historical Special”

A weekly anime as expansive as this one inevitably has to go through the occasional filler arc to prevent catching up with the manga. Toei Animation usually pulls this off by creating original stories set in the normal One Piece world, but in 2005, they came up with something completely new and different: a bunch of special episodes set in an alternate world in which the Straw Hats are living in Japan during the Edo period.

Simply known as Boss Luffy Historical Special, this is not just one single arc, since it’s made up of several episodes that aired sporadically on TV from 2005 to 2009. Creating an entirely different alternate dimension is already weird enough, but the fact that these episodes feature new versions of characters from recent arcs, like the Long Ring Long Land arc or the Thriller Bark arc, made them even harder to explain to new viewers.

6 Episode 336

Chopper Man’s Adorable Adventure

Similarly to the aforementioned Straw Hat Theater, Chopper Man is a series of comedic manga strips starring Tony Tony Chopper as the titular superhero. While he already debuted in a segment of Episode 279, Chopper Man was expanded into an entire episode of his own, titled “Chopper Man Departs! Protect the TV Station by the Shore” (yes, even the title is quite weird).

This is like watching a 24-minute-long version of a Straw Hat Theater skit, complete with bizarre alternate versions of the Straw Hat Pirates (Like Namifia, Dr. Usodabada, Robiflowan, Zorogilla, and Sanjilops) simple animation, and a lot of humor. On the bright side, Chopper Man himself is quite an adorable and charming little superhero, so this episode is a treat for Chopper fans.

5 Episodes 492 & 542

One Piece Crosses Over With Toriko

It is not uncommon for popular anime to cross over with each other, especially if they are both made by the same animation studio. This is exactly what happened in 2011 when Toei Animation made One Piece crossover with another one of its series, Toriko, based on the manga of the same name. As a result, “The Strongest Tag-Team! Luffy and Toriko’s Hard Struggle!” became one of the most infamous One Piece episodes of all time.

This is not only because Toriko is a fairly obscure series, especially for Western anime fans, but also because the episode is completely unrelated to anything that came before or after, as it interrupted the emotional Post-War arc that was airing around that time. Not to mention that there’s no real explanation as to why both worlds are connected now, the characters just randomly meet each other. And if that wasn’t enough, Toei later made a second One Piece x Toriko crossover episode in 2012, titled “Team Formation! Save Chopper.”

4 Episode 590

A Bizarre Crossover Episode With Dragon Ball (And Toriko Again)

Dragon Ball served as one of the main inspirations for One Piece and, since these are two extremely popular action shōnen series, fans of both wanted them to cross over for many years. Characters from these series did meet a few times in the past, in the manga, and in some video games, but it wouldn’t happen in the anime until 2013, when “History’s Strongest Collaboration vs. Glutton of the Sea” aired on TV.

The thing is that this isn’t the epic action-packed adventure that many fans were hoping for, as it is instead focused mostly on food since this is a big crossover between three shows: One Piece, Dragon Ball, and Toriko. As odd as it may sound, this culinary theme does make some sense, considering that the three protagonists, Luffy, Goku, and Toriko, like to eat huge amounts of food. However, similarly to the previous crossover episodes, this one feels very out of place because it’s completely unrelated to the main plot of the series, and it interrupted the Punk Hazard arc that was airing in 2013.

3 Adventure Of Nebulandia

The Foxy Pirates Are Back And They Got An Entire Special

“Silver Fox” Foxy and his crew, the Foxy Pirates, didn’t appear much in the One Piece manga after the end of the Long Ring Long Land arc. But this is completely different from the anime adaptation, as this huge crew of whacky (and sometimes annoying) characters kept making appearances in more than one filler arc, to the point that they even got their own hour-and-a-half-long TV special.

Adventure of Nebulandia is an anime-original story that’s set after the time skip, and it focuses on the Straw Hat Pirates and the Foxy Pirates’ journey on the titular island of Nebulandia, which has the ability to nullify Devil Fruit powers. Just like Foxy, this special is weird and over-the-top, but it can get surprisingly dark for an episode that stars a bunch of characters as goofy as the Foxy Pirates.

2 Episode 907

An Unexpected Adaptation Of One Of Oda’s Original Drafts

Longtime viewers of the One Piece anime were naturally very confused when Episode 907 aired right in the middle of the Wano Country arc. In it, Luffy is all alone with no crew, he meets a girl named Ann who looks a lot like Nami, his grandfather is a pirate who inspired him to go on his journey, and he defeats a bizarre-looking pirate who wields magic named Shupeal.

This is because Episode 907, simply titled Romance Dawn, is a loose adaptation of Romance Dawn, Version 2, the second iteration of this one-shot that Eiichiro Oda created back in 1996, which eventually became One Piece. It’s important to keep in mind that the first version of Romance Dawn was also adapted into the anime, but it loosely connected to the main plot of the series and includes characters that were not in the original one-shot, like Zoro, Nami, Sanji, and Usopp.

1 One Piece Fan Letter

One Of The Most Surprisingly Brilliant Things Toei Has Ever Made

Just because something is weird, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad. The recent TV special, One Piece Fan Letter, is a solid example of this philosophy. It has a lot of unusual elements, like a more cartoony and bouncy art style, a story that follows many new characters that have never appeared in the show before, brief cameos from the Straw Hat Pirates as background characters, and ambitious cinematography that makes it feel like something out of a feature film.

But this is exactly what made Fan Letter work so well. As bizarre as it is, it’s also surprisingly endearing and inspiring, not to mention that most dedicated fans can relate to the struggles of its main cast of characters. This special ended up becoming one of the best animated projects that Toei Animation ever produced (even if it’s a loose adaptation of a novel) and it’s so undeniably excellent that every One Piece fan should check it out at some point.