One Piece Shows-Off New Side of Straw Hats in Cup Noodle Promo

Ramen and anime are pretty much linked in the minds of fans, so it’s no surprise that Nissin has channeled anime on more than one occasion for its big promotional campaigns. A fan favorite has been the “Hungry Days” campaign, which has seen several gorgeously animated commercials filled to the brim with anime influence and style. Now this gorgeous campaign has combined with the world of Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece, and the results are something else.

While fans have seen glimpses into the Straw Hats’ childhood days, this new “Hungry Days” commercial shows off a new side of them by giving a slick new glimpse at each of their teenage years. Check it out in the video above!

While this imagining of the Straw Hats’ teenage years may not necessarily be canon in the universe of the series, these high-school renditions of the series’ characters could definitely fit into the series itself. Oda often experiments with his character designs when he does those full spreads for special chapters of the manga, and it’s not hard to imagine a “school days” version of one of these pieces.

But a promo like this is just pleasing to the eyes as it presents many of the characters in an entirely new style as blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpses of Nami, Zoro, Sanji, a more human take on Chopper, Robin, Franky, Brook, and Luffy. Fans will be seeing more new takes on the Straw Hats in the anime soon as the series will reportedly begin the much-anticipated Wano arc this July.

Dragon Ball Super: Broly director Tatsuya Nagamine will be taking over the One Piece anime beginning with this arc, so not only will the series get brand new looks for each of the Straw Hats, fans will hopefully be getting a new take on One Piece in the future as well.

Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece first began serialization in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1997. It has since been collected into over 80 volumes, and has been a critical and commercial success worldwide with many of the volumes breaking printing records in Japan. The manga has even set a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book by a single author, and is the best-selling manga series worldwide with over 430 million copies sold. The series still ranked number one in manga sales in 2018, which surprised fans of major new entries.