Director: unknown
Writer: unknown
The third featurette, and so far the last to be a theathrical short, as it played before the One Piece movie The Cursed Holy Sword, and like the previous featurettes, has bugger all to do with the subject of the movie. I would argue the movie itself has almost no business being a One Piece movie and seem like a rejected script for a completely different franchise….but this is not the place.
Since the previous short was soccer… now we have the One Piece characters playing baseball, which is a sport i care even less about than soccer, but it happens to be big in America and Japan, and this is a japanese property, so it kinda makes sense. I really don’t know in this case, i don’t know the rules to baseball, so it’s no surprise my interest isn’t exactly high given the subject matter.
So imagine how baffled i am, since this is the featurette with the best animation and drawings quality so far, noticeably better than the previous ones. Like Dream Soccer King, we have the Straw Hats (sporting Robin as well) facing a villain team in this specific sport, this time they’re up against the Arlong Pirates, complete with MooMoo, the giant water cow from the Arlong Park arc.
Odd how the characters aren’t dubbed by the same voice actors… not all of them. It’s just Buggy and Bon Kurei/Mr. 2 Bon Clay usual japanese VAs doing the commentary and acting/repeating everyone’s lines for comedic effect, sometimes you see them laughing at the booth, but they’re mostly voiceovers, until Buggy get decked in the face by the homerun ball, there’s no “dream” in the title, so we end this 5 minute short by continuing the One Piece tradition of everyone using Buggy as a comical punching ball.
There was a One Piece baseball videogame released the same year on GBA (again, Japanese only release), One Piece: Going Baseball, and it has the same baseball costumes seen in this featurette, alongside a password – see the image below – for the game “hidden” in the background of the short (which released just 5 days before the game, btw). That’s some cross-marketing right there, me hearties.
Wise Cafe (International) 