Long Ring Long Land's Big Adventure!

With their flight from G-8 behind them, the crew drops softly back onto the waves and keeps sailing. Far off in Mock Town, Donquixote Doflamingo settles atop a pillar and punishes Bellamy and Sarquiss for the defeat they suffered at Luffy's hands before the trip to Skypiea. He decides the two are useless to him and, working his strings, makes Sarquiss cut down a begging Bellamy, who manages to survive the blow.

Out at sea, the crew passes a drifting vessel stripped of its sails and missing any captain or navigator. They watch a huge wave crash over and destroy it. Soon after, they reach a flat, uninspiring island that nobody finds appealing, Sanji least of all. The land is called Long Ring Long Land.

Luffy, Usopp, and Chopper leap ashore at once and start clowning around while exploring, amazed by the elongated creatures roaming the place. They reach two giant bamboo stalks whose tips disappear far overhead. When the stalks abruptly move and one knocks into Luffy, he grows thrilled rather than annoyed and snaps it apart, dropping an old man named Tonjit along with his horse, Shelly.

Tonjit explains that he built the tallest stilts in the world, then spent a full decade stranded at the top because he was too scared to climb down. He says the wide-open grassland keeps everyone here loose and relaxed, which is why their bodies have grown so long. As the crew tours the area, the battered Going Merry is taken by a rival ship, and its captain, Foxy, steps out to confront them with a wager.

This installment launches two storylines at once, the Water 7 Saga together with Long Ring Long Land's opening arc, and it is the series' first to use a 16:9 widescreen frame, though the DVD and analog prints stayed cropped to 4:3. It introduces the widescreen To Be Continued card still in use years later, the opening Kokoro no Chizu, the ending Mirai Kokai, and a second set of eyecatchers. It was the first episode broadcast on Toonami and the first aired uncut on US television. Licensing kept the FUNimation dub from the original credits, so it ran Eternal Pose and subtitled the themes rather than dubbing them; from here forward that dub presents every title card in full capitals.