His presence in the anime is sparse, peppered throughout the series between delightful adventures, bolstering the mystery that exists around him and Spike’s old flame Julia they’re ghosts more than actual human beings, which is what makes them compelling figures. The incorporation of Vicious and the Red Dragon Crime Syndicate as a narrative throughline for the series rather than as a personal, contained arc for Spike isn’t just misguided - it’s flat out stupid. This is, to be perfectly clear, one of the series’ greatest offenses. By contrast, Yost and his writing team have designed live-action Bebop so that practically every on-screen figure must have a motivation that is tied to a grander, cross-season narrative arc involving Spike’s old enemy Vicious. The briefest encounter with the original Bebop crew could be life-changing for these characters, whether they were a group of blaxploitation-inspired bounty hunters trying to catch a hallucinogenic mushroom smuggler (from “Mushroom Samba”) or a whacked-out indestructible assassin that goes by Mad Pierrot (from “Pierrot Le Fou”, its title a nod to Jean-Luc Godard’s film that, for the live-action remake, was bafflingly changed to “Sad Clown A-Go-Go”). One of the anime’s greatest strengths is that, of its 26 episodes, supporting characters rarely showed up more than once, because their appearance in a single episode was enough to make them memorable. Or, say, “Venus Pop”, which takes the anime’s “Cowboy Funk”, strips it of its best character (Cowboy Andy, who was designed as a perfect and hilarious foil to Spike), and removes the humor inherent in sidelining its unhinged antagonist in order to focus on unrelated melodrama featuring the series’ “Big Bad.” Take “Cowboy Gospel”, Bebop’s premiere episode, which takes the plot of the anime’s premiere “Asteroid Blues” and stacks a number of diverging plot lines and scenes alongside it (including the haphazard introduction of Faye to its central duo). It was impossible to not find myself comparing the live-action series to its source text, as each individual episode is a loose remixing of any given animated Bebop episode, stretched beyond their original 20-minute runtime into something twice as long and not even half as interesting. With every single creative decision of Netflix’s live-action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, showrunner André Nemec and writer Christopher Yost prove they have fundamentally misunderstood the series and its characters, butchering it more and more with each passing episode as they try to mimic a series that is, quite frankly, a masterpiece. People constantly float in and out of their lives, some just an amusing dalliance to fondly remember while others etch a deep scar in the psyche, reminding one of how inescapable the past really is. Each episode takes the Bebop crew - bounty hunters Spike, Jet, and Faye child hacker Ed and data dog Ein - on adventures both deeply personal and entirely nonsensical, be it trying to discover what important message might exist on a Betamax tape or gambling your spoils away even in the face of crippling debt. But this “Que Será, Será” attitude isn’t limited to just one character - it flows through the very way Watanabe approaches the series through episodes and incidents that are, more often than not, just random happenstance. It’s said by the protagonist, Spike Spiegel, a man whose entire aura is personified by a certain effortlessness. “Whatever happens, happens,” is one of the most popular phrases from Shinichirō Watanabe’s animated series Cowboy Bebop. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door is just as embedded into the DNA of the live-action show as the anime itself, and when we talk about how great Cowboy Bebop is, it should be included. (Curiously, though, you can stream it on Netflix in Canada - lucky Canadians.) The only reason I was able to rewatch the movie myself was because I still had a physical copy that I made my father buy from a Blockbuster the day it was released. It’s not available on either Netflix or Crunchyroll even though both services carry the show. It does not help that it can’t be streamed anywhere. But amid the surge of Cowboy Bebop news - the live-action show’s soundtrack will launch on Spotify the same day as the show - the movie seems to be missing from the conversation. Twenty-two years after the show’s release, Netflix is launching a live-action adaptation along with making the original anime available on its streaming platform (the anime is also available to stream on Funimation).
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