One Piece Fan Spots Surprise Joker Cameo in New Cup Noodle Promo

Eiichiro Oda's One Piece has been the latest franchise to get a gorgeous makeover for Nissin's [...]

By Nick Valdez

Eiichiro Oda's One Piece has been the latest franchise to get a gorgeous makeover for Nissin's "Hungry Days" promotional line that has morphed all kinds of anime favorites since 2018 for special Cup Noodle promos. It's a perfect fit for the franchise's 20th Anniversary as each of these promos have explored monumental moments of the series with a new point of view as it reimagines everything within an alternate universe high school setting. The latest promo put a new spin on the famous Alabasta arc, but it also included a surprise and completely out of left field cameo.

With the latest promo showing off a high school version of Princess Vivi, there's a brief festival scene which features a quick cameo of Joaquin Phoenix's hugely successful take on the Joker. Here's the moment in question as spotted by @MikeLuckas on Twitter:

And here's a much closer, and disturbingly in motion, look at the cameo from @Necromancer1983:

The Joker is one of the most successful films of 2019, and while Joaquin Phoenix's take has been notable in its own right, the character has really taken off online with memes and several in-jokes being sprouted from Phoenix's many strange poses and dances seen in the film. One of such dances is seen in the promo, and is a hilarious take on One Piece's own clown.

Given the hat and hair color, this is most likely the high schooler version of the Buggy the Star Clown, but that suit and movement is a clear reference to the newest take on the Joker. This just goes to show how much of an influence this newest take on the character has had on the world, even making its way into promotional campaigns for noodles and soups featuring alternate universe takes on famous anime franchises.

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.

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