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Scorekeepers will catalog the discrepancies. Inquisitors will ferret out departures from the true faith. This means that it’s also guaranteed that Netflix’s new “Cowboy Bebop,” an American-made live-action version starring John Cho as the space-traveling bounty hunter Spike Spiegel, will undergo a particular kind of scrutiny. When it comes to the original “Cowboy Bebop,” I absolutely am one.) (“Fanboy” is used here with no pejorative intent. This version of “Cowboy Bebop” feels like it’s always calling attention to what it’s doing visually instead of world-building.“Cowboy Bebop,” an anime series that ran for one season in Japan 22 years ago, inspires a particular kind of devotion.Ī 1:1 mix of sci-fi western and film noir, steeped in American jazz and blues and framed by retro James Bond-meets-Blue Note credits, it was guaranteed to spawn a reverent cult - custom made for the more refined class of what would soon be called fanboys.
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Instead, it leads to a show here with too many canted angles and self-aware close-ups. “Cowboy Bebop” often played out like animated comic panels-with striking shots that conveyed information like a graphic artist-but that approach doesn’t work for much longer seasons of live-action television. Creator Christopher Yost seems to fundamentally misunderstand the visual appeal of the original show, and the difference between anime and live-action. Sadly, the design and the writing rarely match what they bring to the table. When the plot is spinning its wheels, spending time with three actors this charismatic goes a long way. Finally, there’s Daniella Pineda as Faye Valentine, a third bounty hunter who was in suspended animation for decades and longs to know the truth about her bizarre past.Ĭho, Shakir, and Pineda really hold “Cowboy Bebop” together. Jet Black has a child he’s always getting pulled away from and is sort of the Han to Spike’s Luke in this dynamic-a realist to balance out Spike’s dreamy ideas. Spike now runs with the captain of the ship called Bebop, a tough-talking fellow named Jet Black (a great turn from Mustafa Shakir). Also known as Fearless, Spike is charming but precise, haunted by the lost relationship with a femme fatale named Julia ( Elena Satine), who is now with Spike’s nemesis Vicious ( Alex Hassell). The charming John Cho plays Spike Spiegel, a bounty hunter who was born on Mars and is considered dead by the group of mercenaries with whom he used to run. What works best about “Cowboy Bebop” is the casting. It’s somehow loyal but wrong at the same time, like a cover song by a band that’s not as talented as the original artists, and who then choose to change a few words of the song in all the wrong ways. I don’t think a live-action show should be a direct copy of an animated one, so my criticism isn’t that they failed the source but that their visual decisions seem almost antithetical to what worked the first time. Most of all, the world of “Cowboy Bebop” has been largely drained of its palette, taking a show that often used bursts of vibrant color and making it mostly drab and dusty. And yet major world-building changes have definitely been made, most of them for the worse in ways that are hard to comprehend. Fans of the original have already noted an incredible fealty between the anime and the adaptation with some scenes copied beat for beat as if the original program was the storyboard for this one.