Builder chat: LEGO® set 75636 One Piece Windmill Village Hut
L: Okay, well, what do you think of the set?
M: I think it’s definitely design-biased for viewing from one angle. Not sure why there’s the rowboat. I didn’t see that that had any particular relevance in the show. And I suppose we should talk about the show, this set relative to the show, a little bit.
L: Yeah.
M: So this scene takes place early in the show and we have young Monkey D. Luffy.
L: Loo-fee.
M: Loo-fee, yeah, it looks like Luffy, but they pronounce it Loo-fee. I don’t know why they spell it l-u-f-f-y. So yeah, every time I see it I say Luffy, but every time you hear it it’s Loo-fee. And Luffy in the set has the hat that’s given to him by Shanks. Shanks is the older pirate. Set has two hats. One with Shanks’ hair and one without.
The hat: I was a little surprised at the shape of the hat. The hat in the show has a taller top and a much narrower brim, but I noticed the hairless hat has a little handle on it, so I’m wondering if, if that was a design concession…
L: Well, the hat shape is more like the hat in the anime.
M: …the brim width a concession to make it able to be held by a minifigure hand. Also because the dual mold with the hair, the proportions of the hat need to look like the crown is going around the hair. If it weren’t for the hair the hat could have had a narrower brim and a taller crown.
M: Oh, and and Shanks here has, he has both arms. In the show he loses one arm and on the back of the box they have a scene from the show where Shanks gives Luffy the hat and Shanks’s missing arm is not removed but is covered by the cape. And the the barmaid, whatever her name is. They’ve given her green hair…
L: Makino.
M: Oh, Makino. They’ve given her green hair, which is true to the show, but as far as I can recall, she always had a cloth wrapped around her head.
L: She also did not have her hair done in a ponytail, it was a much shorter haircut.
M: Maybe this was the only green hair they had available…or dark green hair.
L: Or they wanted to match her bangs.
M: And we get the, uh, the devil fruit…
L: The gum-gum fruit.
M: …that Monkey D. Luffy eats and then becomes rubbery. As an aside here, what gives with the inconsistent presentation of Luffy’s rubbery-ness? First thing we see is he is hit in the chest with a big ass ball shot from a gun and his body deforms and bounces the ball back. The rest of the show, somebody punches him and he flies across the room. Shouldn’t Luffy be able to absorb a punch, or any number of punches, in rubberman fashion?
L: It’s like he can if he wants to.
M: It’s not the punches he wishes to avoid, it’s the dramatic tension that would be avoided if he didn’t.
I guess…oh, I wanted to touch on the detail of “Partys” on the sticker and you pointed out the…
L: That is how Partys is meant to be spelled because it’s…
Source: IMDB, © Toei Animation
M: You know, I can forgive Japanese people misspelling or mispunctuating words, but in a toy that’s supposedly educational, I have a little harder time with it not being corrected. You know…okay…it’s true to the show and it’s true to the, true to the anime, but still, it’s just, you know, 44 years of working in a perfection business relative to the visual portrayal of language, it just rankles me.
L: But on the other side of it, um if they were to correct Partys to be spelled with an IE, there would be somebody who would be upset that it was not accurate to the show and saying…
M: First, I’d be upset because that would also be incorrect. That would be otherwise misspelling it. It should be p-a-r-t-y apostrophe s. This is, this set is aimed at kids. It’s an eight-year-old set, so why reinforce bad punctuation at eight years old? I mean this is just asinine. We’ve already got too many adults who can’t properly punctuate and can’t properly spell…knowing the differences between plural and possessive and plural possessive. Yeah, so that’s my rant on that [chuckles] on that number, like anybody will care.
Oh, what do what do you think about the interior here?
L: It’s…it feels correct but also too cramped.
M: Well, every interior that LEGO makes is too cramped. I thought that the stools were ridiculously high.
L: And… [long pause]
M: And…?
L: Well…on adding to the stools’ being too high…if you want to recreate the scene where Luffy is at the bar and he eats the devil fruit, he has to stand on the stool and if he does he’ll fall off.
M: I, uh, yeah. You can’t sit the people on the stools ’cause the stools are too high. Yeah, it’s ridiculous. You sit them on the stools and their feet are at table level and Luffy has to stand on a stool. I don’t know why they selected the telescope piece as the stand for the stool. I’m fairly sure that no stools in the bar had a single stand under them, nor were they fixed.
L: It was also interesting for LEGO to, with their can’t show alcohol or or drug references, to include a bar as a main set for this wave.
M: Yeah. It’s…well, you get around that by calling Partys Bar “The Windmill Village Hut” when it’s a pirate bar.
The construction of the roof here is is the typical fingered, alternating fingers at the at the seam trick, but they did put some reinforcements on the underside that are technic bits. That holds the roof pretty pretty well. I was, when I was assembling it, I thought: “Oh, it’s this, it’s this technique again, but then…yeah, it’s a little more stable than sometimes.
L: Yeah. And also this set’s main draw for why somebody would buy it is so you can display all eight of the pirate wanted posters, which this set comes with one of.
M: Well, yeah. We got Arlong.
L: The only problem is if you buy the other sets, which might come with two or, you know, one or two, you might get a duplicate and then crapshoot with that.
M: Yeah.
L: And I thought it would be very funny if we, if we had gotten the Monkey D. Luffy poster in this set. You know?
M: The Don Krieg poster. I…what character is…
L: It’s Don Krieg.
M: Well, I don’t recall Don Krieg being a character in the show. Buggy, certainly. But I don’t recall Don Krieg. Okay, so who was Don Krieg?
L: He was the guy with the gold armor that Mihawk fought. He had the shoulder cannon and the…Mihawk cut the cannonball and killed him. The guy with the purple hair.
M: Oh. Right. So he was in about what…minute-and-a-half of the show?
L: Yeah, he was more important in the anime because he was the major antagonist for a whole arc, but…okay…gotta turn about…you know…three hundred chapters of a manga into six hour-long episodes.
M: I think, I think it’s eight episodes.
L: Something like that.
M: The show I thought was, I thought it could have been a bit tighter. It seemed to drag in some spots. Some scenes were, I think some scenes end up being just filler to pad out the time. The other thing that’s notable to me, or at least my perception of it, was that this is the one movie that I think, in my opinion, has fairly well represented anime as a translation from anime to live action. The humor is there, the goofiness, the actors have taken on some of the poses or mannerisms.
L: Yeah.
M: The physicality of the anime, yeah. Luffy in particular, walking with the fists, and the way he walks, and the arms extended while he cheers, the multiple rubbery extended arms when fighting is…is very anime. And I thought that translation read really well, that it felt like an anime. It’s surprising though, or I don’t know if surprising is the right word, but this set is aimed at eight-year-olds. And there’s some language and some scenes in the show that are I think a little bit rough for eight-year-olds. The Buggy character uses the word “shit” and variations of that very frequently. And I…I…I don’t…I don’t know. The show seems like it wants to be aimed at a younger audience, but the language… and just seems like, oh, that’s a little bit old for…
L: One Piece live action is rated TV-14.
M: TV. Okay. Yeah. So you’ve got a set that’s rated for eight. There’s a little bit of a disconnect there. I mean yeah, it does come with warnings. Every episode comes with the warnings so I…I don’t know…
M: It’s kind of like is this a continuation of the LEGO Netflix partnership that I guess started with the Wednesday sets?
L: Or Stranger Things.
M: Stranger, Stranger Things.
L: Stranger Things. Stranger Things.
M: Anyway, I guess that’s it. It’s kind of, it’s a tiny set, it’s cute. Once again we have the frickin’ blue representing water.
L: I mean it is called the East Blue.
M: It… [various noises of exasperation] You look at the show! The water around the place is what color?
L: Gray.
M: Brown.
L: Yeah.
M: Yeah. It’s sort of bluish if you’re on out in the middle, but it’s mostly gray. Yeah, water is not blue. You should not drink things that are blue. That’s why things that are blue are colored blue so you’d know not to drink them. Things like Windex and windshield and toilet bowl cleaner. So in the LEGO One Piece world they have a really baaad algal bloom, I guess. Oh yeah! The blue! What’s blue, what’s blue in the show? The blue liquid in the show is what?
L: Uhh…
M: The poison for Kaya.
L: Oh. Yeah.
M: Yeah!
L: Weird that they didn’t include Luffy’s hair with hat. Shanks has red hair with hat and other sets Luffy has black hair with hat. ’Cause if, if, if you want to have Shanks give Luffy the hat and do the pose, you can’t put the Shanks hat on Luffy.
M: Well, Shanks has an extra hair piece; Luffy has an extra hat. But yeah, it’s, it’s a thing.
M: Thank LEGO for providing the set.
L: Thanks LEGO.
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