A Trailer, a Tide, and Twenty Years of "Into the Ocean"

 This post was written on 6/24/2026.

Today is June 24, 2026, and Netflix finally let the world see "The One Piece," the WIT Studio remake of Eiichiro Oda's manga that fans have been waiting on since it was first announced back in December of 2023. The teaser dropped at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and within hours it was everywhere, splitting opinions the way only a beloved, decades-old franchise can when it gets a new coat of paint. Some viewers are thrilled by the cleaner animation and the fluidity of the fight choreography, while others are mourning the loss of the scrappy, lived-in texture of the Toei original that's been airing since 1999. That tension is the whole story of a remake, isn't it, you're not just updating visuals, you're asking an entire fanbase to renegotiate its relationship with something it has loved unconditionally for a quarter century.

What caught my attention, though, wasn't just the animation debate, it was the timing. Because this trailer landed in 2026, the same calendar year that Blue October's album "Foiled" turns twenty years old. "Foiled" came out on April 4, 2006, and it became the band's breakout record, the one that finally got them on the Billboard charts, the one that turned "Hate Me" and "Into the Ocean" into the songs people still associate with Blue October above everything else they've ever recorded. Two decades later, the band is marking the anniversary with vinyl reissues and a tour where they're playing the album front to back, which tells you everything about how much that record still means to people. And somewhere in that same stretch of calendar, completely unrelated on paper, Netflix dropped a trailer for a show about pirates chasing a treasure across an endless ocean.

I don't think these two things are connected in any official sense, there's no press release linking WIT Studio to Blue October, no soundtrack announcement confirming any of this. But sometimes the universe hands you a coincidence so clean you can't help but run with it, and this is one of those. Because "Into the Ocean" isn't just a song with the word ocean in the title, it's a song about being pulled under by something bigger than yourself, about drifting, about the terror and the relief of letting go and seeing where the current takes you. Justin Furstenfeld wrote it during a stretch of his life when he was untethered, living in Los Angeles, putting together demos for what would eventually become "Foiled," and you can hear that unmoored quality in every line of it. It's a song about surrender to water, literal and emotional both, and that is, when you boil it all the way down, what "One Piece" has been about since chapter one.

Luffy doesn't even know how to swim, that's the joke that's been baked into the premise since the very beginning, a boy who ate a Devil Fruit that grants him incredible power at the cost of being permanently vulnerable to the one element that defines his entire world. He can't swim, and yet he spends every single day of his life out on the open water, chasing something that may or may not even exist, trusting a crew of equally broken, equally hopeful people to keep him afloat when the ocean inevitably tries to claim him. That's not just an adventure premise, that's the emotional architecture of the entire franchise, and it's almost eerie how well "Into the Ocean" maps onto it without ever having been written with Luffy in mind. The lyric isn't about pirates, obviously, it's about a relationship, about being swept into something that scares you and excites you in equal measure, but strip away the specific context and what you're left with is a universal feeling of being pulled into deep water and choosing, against every instinct, to stop fighting it.

That's why I think "Into the Ocean" belongs somewhere on "The One Piece" soundtrack, whether as a needle drop in a key episode or as something woven into a trailer down the line. Soundtracks for big anime remakes get a lot of scrutiny, and based on the reactions to today's teaser, the score is already one of the more contested elements of this whole rollout. Longtime fans have pointed out that the new music doesn't carry the same emotional weight as the themes they grew up with, the orchestral swells and the openings that have lived in their heads for over a thousand episodes. That's a real challenge for any remake, you're competing with nostalgia, and nostalgia almost always wins unless you give people something that earns its place rather than simply replacing what came before. A song like "Into the Ocean" earns its place because it's not trying to out-orchestra anything, it's a rock song with a confessional core, and it would land as a needle drop the way "Lust for Life" landed in "The Wolf of Wall Street," not as background music but as a thesis statement.

Picture it for a second, the East Blue Saga is where this first season is staying, according to everything that's been reported about the seven-episode run, which means we're getting Luffy's earliest days, the recruitment of Zoro and Nami and Usopp and eventually Sanji, the formation of a found family that doesn't know yet how big its world is about to get. There's a moment in nearly every adaptation of this saga, official or fan-made, where Luffy stands on the deck of the Going Merry and looks out at water that goes further than he can see, and that shot, that exact beat, is begging for a song like "Into the Ocean" to swell underneath it. Not as a literal narration of the scene, but as emotional shorthand, the audience feeling the vertigo of stepping into something vast and uncertain at the same moment the character does. Music supervisors do this kind of thing constantly, they reach for a song that isn't about the show at all but somehow says everything the show is trying to say, and "Into the Ocean" is sitting right there, two decades deep into cultural memory, just waiting to be repurposed.

There's also something poetic about the math itself, the fact that "Foiled" turns twenty in the same year this remake finally shows its face after three years of waiting. Twenty years is long enough for a song to become a generational touchstone, the kind of track that soundtracked breakups and road trips and late nights for an entire cohort of people who are now in their thirties and forties, the exact demographic that grew up reading "One Piece" or watching the early Toei episodes when they first aired. If you were a teenager in 2006 falling apart to "Into the Ocean," you were probably also a teenager discovering Luffy and his crew for the first time, and now, twenty years later, both things are being revisited simultaneously, one through anniversary vinyl and a victory lap tour, the other through a total reinvention aimed at a new generation. There's a strange symmetry there, an old song getting a fresh spotlight at the exact moment an old story gets a fresh face, and if Netflix or WIT Studio wanted to make a statement about continuity, about old and new coexisting, dropping that song into the new soundtrack would do it without saying a single word.

Of course, none of this is confirmed, and it's worth being honest about that, this is speculation built on a coincidence of timing and a thematic alignment that feels too good to be accidental even though it almost certainly is. Soundtrack decisions for a project like this are made up of a lot of unglamorous, complicated factors, licensing costs, the composer's original vision, what the director wants the emotional palette of each episode to feel like. "Into the Ocean" might never make it anywhere near the final cut, and the people actually making these decisions might not have even thought about Blue October once during the entire production process. But that's sort of the fun of being a fan watching something get built in real time, you get to throw your own associations onto the canvas before anyone official tells you you're wrong, and sometimes the connections you draw say more about why you love the story in the first place than any official announcement ever could.

So today we got a trailer, divisive, ambitious, clearly the product of a studio trying to thread an impossible needle between honoring twenty-five years of source material and making something that feels alive for people who've never opened a single volume of the manga. And this year we also get to watch a band celebrate the twentieth birthday of the record that made them, touring the country playing a song about being swallowed by water you can't control. Two anniversaries, two oceans, one coincidence that probably means nothing and feels like it means everything anyway. If "The One Piece" ever does drop "Into the Ocean" into an episode, I will absolutely take credit for calling it, and if it doesn't, I'm still going to play that song the next time I watch Luffy stare out at the horizon and decide, against every rational impulse, to keep going anyway.