What was back story through much of the anime is now foregrounded, and the result is that the show hollows out toward the end of the season, with three final episodes of tragic-romantic posturing punctuated by mindless (and indifferently filmed) gunplay and martial arts.Īnd before the show settles in for its grim denouement, the trio’s adventures offer some visual variety and opportunities for appealing guest stars, like Adrienne Barbeau as a scheming eco-warrior and Christine Dunford as a con woman from Faye’s past.
What should bother everyone is that the compression shifts the balance of the story away from episodic adventures on scattered planets, and toward the mechanics of a hackneyed noir revenge fantasy. Getting to that showdown within the first season - in several hundred minutes’ less running time than the anime season runs, not even counting the 2001 “Cowboy Bebop” animated feature - means leaving things out, like the red-haired hacker Radical Ed, and reducing the time given to others, like the lovable and talented corgi Ein.Ĭhanges like those may bother the fans of the original. Spiegel is headed toward a reckoning with Vicious (Alex Hassell), his onetime Syndicate pal and rival for the affections of the show’s femme fatale, Julia (Elena Satine). On their travels, they’re joined by a tough dame going by the name of Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda), whose memory of her actual identity has been erased.
They’re both fallen themselves - Black a disgraced cop, Spiegel a former assassin for a brutal crime ring known as the Syndicate. As jokey, episodic sci-fi action series with visual effects at the cheesy-adequacy level of “Doctor Who” go, it’s even slightly above average, though that’s not a strong argument for sitting through 10 episodes.Ĭho’s Spiegel and his bounty-hunting partner, Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), pilot a ship called the Bebop around the galaxy sometime after the “fall” of the home planet Earth. So what’s a fair, on-its-own-terms assessment of the new “Bebop”? It’s … OK. Replicating that kind of effect in live action requires a singular filmmaker, a massive budget, or both. The appeal of the anime - a laconic, melancholy jewel box of mood and style and gesture, built on a solid foundation of shoot-em-up action and deadpan humor - is a product of the kind of control an artist like its director, Shinichiro Watanabe, can exercise in animation. That kind of compare-and-contrast is beside the point with the old “Cowboy Bebop,” however, and unfair to the new. 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. “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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