Product:  One Piece Wanted Long Cafe Curtain Product Type:  Houseware Number of Designs:  4 Manufacturer:  Kouwa Suggested Retail Price (SRP):  £8 Purchased from:  Neon Martian Rarity:  Uncommon Reviewer:  Rich (Webmaster)

There's one certainty in the anime world, and that is that if an anime or manga series becomes really popular they'll slap its image on literally anything.  Eiichiro Oda's best-selling manga series One Piece has reached that level.  It's fast approaching its 600th chapter in Japan, has enjoyed a record print run of several million copies for its most recent collected volume and its spawned an anime series boasting hundreds of episodes and no less than ten anime films.  Not many franchises maintain this level of popularity for over ten years, and Japanese publishers know a cash cow when they see one.

Yes, we've had the usual figures and soundtracks, t-shirts and trading cards, computer games and artbooks... and we've now also got a One Piece curtain.  Oh yes.
 

On the surface this item seems somewhat innocuous.  The box is relatively small, measuring about 13cm x 10cm x 4cm, and shows a wanted poster featuring one of the Straw Hat pirates on the front.  However, when you open the box you realise that the size is somewhat deceiving.  The One Piece Wanted Long Cafe Curtain is a lot bigger than you may expect, measuring a whopping 120cm x 80cm.  The range has four designs based on the wanted posters from the manga and anime of four of the Straw Hat pirates - captain Monkey D Luffy, first mate Roronoa Zoro, navigator Nami and ship doctor Tony Tony Chopper.  Each image is a faithful reproduction of the original artwork from the series and unusually for boxed anime merchandise the image on the front of the box corresponds with the contents.  Usually anime merchandise is 'blind boxed' so you don't know what you will get until you open it, but for these this isn't the case.  The curtains themselves are made from 100% polyester and boast a good quality print with very little colour-bleed.  The stitching on the hems is even and inconspicuous and the whole things looks great, the only issue is its use as a curtain.

In Japan cafés often have a curtain part-covering the entrance to the kitchen, so presumably that is the supposed use for these.  The curtains are designed to slide onto a curtain rail without the need for hooks but the only real issue is that it's not really long enough to cover most normal house windows.  Using it to cover the kitchen entrance is not always an option either, most people will have a door for that and even if they don't will be unlikely to have a curtain rail there.  You could use it for a side window maybe, but as a normal curtain it literally falls short.  If you don't use it as a curtain then it's effectively just a wall scroll without the bars at the top and bottom to hang it with, but to be honest that doesn't matter.  The curtains look fantastic on display, no matter how you hang them up, and all four designs are excellent.  It's interesting to note that several crew members are not included in this collection either, which opens the possibility of a further range featuring Usopp, Sanji and Robin.

The One Piece Wanted Long Cafe Curtain is an excellent piece of merchandise that features iconic images of the series' main characters in a form that is far more durable than a poster.  The lack of the entire crew at present is a drawback, as is the length, which hampers practical use as a curtain.  However if you take these curtains as a durable and cheaper alternative to a wall scroll then you can't go far wrong.  Good stuff and well worth a look whilst they're still available!

Extras:

Err, a box showing all of the designs in the range.

Ratings

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