Cosplayers at Anime USA 2018 reenact a fan-favorite scene from cult anime “Cowboy Bebop.”
I wrote this review for Den of Geek about Netflix’s terrible horrible garbage live-action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop. The original draft was 9000 words of insane, unfocused ranting. Most of it was not necessary and the final version got cut down to a still large, yet respectable 3400ish words. However, there were a few specific points that got cut that I still NEEDED the world to see, so here are those bits. You really should read the actual article on Den of Geek first because what’s here are just paragraphs I salvaged with no context. I have retained the headings from the article (and restored my brilliant image captions) so that you know where these cut bits would’ve gone, but otherwise they are just pasted in here willy-nilly. SEE YOU SPACE BEBOP OR WHATEVER THEY SAY ON THAT SHOW!!!
The Characters
Nerd alert!
Mustafa Shakir, for his part, is doing an impressively accurate vocal impression of Bebop’s English voice actor Beau Billingslea that makes him sound like a slightly younger Jet. However, he’s not a super-strong actor (or at least he isn’t here), so watching him makes for an uncanny valley situation where he manages to embody Jet with his voice and costume, but that’s about it.
It’s a blessing when Faye becomes a recurring character if for no other reason than John Cho clearly prefers acting off Daniella Pineda. Pineda gives it her all, but she’s the least experienced actor in the bunch and it shows. Overall, nobody’s all that convincing in their roles.
They’ve tacked on some new traits to the characters too. Instead of being only an implied father figure, Jet is now a divorcé with a daughter. I don’t mind the addition of this kid in concept; it obviously fits Jet’s character. However, she gets so little screentime she never amounts to more than a plot device. Any time Jet is lacking in sufficient motivation for a storyline, they outsource it to his plot device daughter. Why is Jet pursuing this risky bounty? He needs the cash to buy a present for his plot device daughter! Why is Jet in a hurry? His plot device daughter has a plot device recital later today! Why is Jet on a rampage, ready to confront Spike about his mysterious past once and for all? They’ve kidnapped his plot device daughter, dammit!
As for Faye, she’s bisexual now. We know this because of the sexy lesbian sex she has in the sixth episode with a character who never shows up again. It’s enough to inspire some social media conversation, maybe a few think pieces, but that’s all, so it’s less a win for bi representation and more a win for Netflix publicity.
The Netflix series actually seems most interested in its side characters, those that only show up for one to three scenes across the entire season. In a way, this is keeping in the spirit of the anime, with its bounty of the week gimmick, but it’s not quite the same thing.
For one, the one-off bounty characters that are taken directly from the anime are lesser, more poorly-characterized versions. The closest to a one-to-one copy is Mad Pierrot, the frightening, hi-tech, murder clown. In the anime, he barely speaks, which is part of why he’s so creepy. He talks a fair bit more in the live-action, at one point delivering the “tears in rain” monologue from Blade Runner in French for no fathomable reason other than “this is a sci-fi show so here’s a reference to another famous sci-fi thing, but in French because ‘Pierrot’ is a French word.” This rendition of him is not scary at all.
But the side characters Netflix is truly interested in are its brand-new recurring ones. Perhaps because they aren’t taken from the anime and are blank slates, the writers seem more at home with these characters we only meet briefly, making them larger than life with dialogue that lets the actors pop in to chew the scenery for a spell. Having watched the entire season, my enduring memory of it is these weird characters—who feel nothing like classic Bebop—hamming it up and cracking awful sex jokes.
Highlights include the aforementioned S&M mistress doing a ridiculous German accent, a Syndicate guy called The Eunuch who eats grapes orgasmically, a guy called The Iron Mink who looks like a teenager with a fake beard doing a ridiculous Russian accent, and two horny old lady characters because it’s funny when old ladies are horny, I guess.
Two characters who were only in the anime two episodes each, Annie (here renamed to Ana and played by Tamara Tunie) and Gren (Mason Alexander Park) have expanded roles, now working at a club that Syndicate members frequent. If their increased screentime greatly deepened their characters, it flew under my radar because they’re just kind of there and I never cared about them.
You’re Gonna Carry That Weight
Don’t believe the hype! This dog is barely in the show!
Even some of the pre-release teasers feel like they were lies, in retrospect. They capitalized on the careful recreation of the opening titles, which is not an accurate representation of the show’s extremely different tone. One of the first teasers was focused entirely around the dog, like this was going to be a show that heavily featured a cute dog. In reality, they didn’t have the budget to have a dog interacting with the actors all the time, so there’s mostly shots of the dog by itself. For one episode they forget to show that the dog is still on the ship at all! And then they write the dog out almost entirely! That’s right! There’s almost no fucking dog!
The production notes talk of how they worked extremely hard to get the yellow couch on the Bebop right, as well as to recreate the cathedral from “Ballad of Fallen Angels” with “extreme detail.” They also stuck easter eggs in everywhere, such as the first episode opening in a scene in “Watanabe Casino,” a reference to Cowboy Bebop creator, Shinichirō Watanabe! Wow!
I feel for the people who actually did work hard on this, but, seriously, what fan cares about this stuff? The easter eggs and shot recreations feel like condescending lip service from a production that made no effort to understand and recapture the tone and quality of the anime. They went to painstaking efforts to get the colors of the cathedral tiles right? So what? Truthfully, if they forgot to put a couch on the Bebop, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.
I love Cowboy Bebop for its tone, pacing, music, storytelling, and characterization. In other words, I love it for all the stuff that’s hard to get to fit together just right more than once. Hell, even Shinichirō Watanabe was never able to produce anything to quite the same standard. They shouldn’t have bothered trying to remake this, but if they were going to, they had to work a lot harder to make something worthwhile, but, obviously, it’s a lot easier to stick in some easter eggs, write a cheap dramedy, and call it a day.
Do you ever look around you and see all the death and destruction and the constant bad news and feel hopeless? “What’s to be done? What can I do? What can anyone do?” you wonder.
Well, not Rivers Cuomo. Rivers looks at climate change, cops killing black people whenever they feel like, Israel doing an ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the millions and millions of pandemic deaths, and he decides “I can make this worse.” And then he releases another Weezer album.
“Hey! I don’t remember sayin’ that…” – Nadia from famous best series Russian Doll
Netflix Originals, from what I’ve seen, are almost uniformly mediocre. Full disclosure: I have definitely watched far fewer of these things than you (“you” is almost everyone alive right now, I think) and have given up on most after one or two episodes, but the same below-average stink rises from everything I’ve seen and, in discussing Netflix series with those who have watched a good lot of them, I find, even though folks willingly binge these things all the way through, once finished they commonly assess them as no more than “fine” or “not bad” (that is when they’re not claiming they’re the best things ever made–for like a week).
In other words, I’m basing the following on very little and,
as I don’t REALLY want to make this an extensive takedown of Netflix because
that would take a lot of work and force me to watch a lot more of their shows,
I’m going to just shit an opinion half-assedly out into the web, much like
Netflix does with their Originals.
The following is an essay I wrote for one of the modules for my English Literature MA. I sort of always wanted to put this essay online for the heck of it, but my MA was nearly ten years ago and I don’t know that I feel too confident about such ancient writing, so just as a bit of preface:
1. I haphazardly threw myself into an English MA not really knowing what the heck I was doing.
2. I got a bad grade on the essay! I still passed though.
3. I did this degree in England so the grammar and spelling is all Britishized. Yuck!
4. This was meant to be cultural criticism so I tried to make it work for the assignment, but I just wanted to do character analysis, which you can sort of tell, I think.
5. I didn’t know how to use parentheses back then. You’ll see.
6. Footnotes have just been plopped under the paragraph to which they pertain. Some of them do help bolster the argument and are probably worth reading.
7. The little blue footnote links do not do ANYTHING when you click on ’em! Enjoy!
8. Rats off to ya!
The more recent news with Tim Schafer and the rest of the folks at Double Fine is a Full Throttle remaster and the Psychonauts sequel they’ve crowdfunded. While these are both very awesome things, let’s not let that overshadow the truly important, groundbreaking, earthshaking game that Double Fine released last year: Day of the Tentacle.
Okay, so it’s just a remaster of one of Schafer (and Dave Grossman)’s older Lucasarts titles so maybe it already finished up all its earthshaking when it was originally released in 1993. But perhaps you made a huge mistake and missed the game back then. Heck, some of you might not have even been alive for the original release, which is kind of a valid excuse, I guess.
But even if you did play it back then, this is an adventure game well worth revisiting because it’s one of the only well-designed adventure games in existence. With the sharp increase in fans-turned-indie-developers as well as the popularity of Telltale’s episodic titles, the adventure game genre has experienced a recent resurgence. It’s too bad so many of the games are poorly designed.
This is something I wrote on Tumblr back in 2014 about how depressing I find the Electronic Entertainment Expo. It was largely just a long-winded way for me to link to past videos I’d made about E3, but I also think it’s some of my better, sadder writing and I tend to share it on Twitter and Tumblr every year because I still feel the same about all of it. I just now decided it might as well go here, too. Enjoy!
I guess E3 2014 is next week, huh? You may not know this about me, but once, approximately 48 years ago, I made videos about video games. In theory, I might even do it again one day! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
I went to E3 last year. I had a horrible time. I’ve been to E3 three times now and have found each time less enjoyable than the previous. The first time I went in 2002 was because I could and it was supposed to be lots of fun and it’s like the Mecca of Gaming or whatever, yeah? I was rather young, with my head certainly not full of wonder, but at least there was still a great deal of ignorance in there, so it seemed like a good idea, like a thing I’d theoretically enjoy, being a gamer and all that.
Probably not enough people know this but Jon Glaser is one of the funniest comedians going. I’m guessing most people who aren’t me will know him as Councilman Jeremy Jamm from Parks and Recreation (I didn’t watch it) but he does lots of great stuff besides. For one thing, he’s Laird, the best non-main recurring character on Girls. Also, he and H. Jon Benjamin did one of the most tedious yet brilliant stand-up bits ever.
However, Glaser’s best work has been with PFFR, the art collective/production company of weirdos responsible for cult classic Wonder Showzen and some of the more divisive, but in frank actuality, best programs on Adult Swim, Xavier: Renegade Angel and The Heart, She Holler, the latter of which featured Glaser as a guy who had his hands replaced with two cans of beer. PFFR then produced Glaser’s Delocated about a douchebag in the witness protection program. It was also really great and is absolutely worth checking out if you missed it.
Now PFFR’s producing another Glaser production, the miniseries Neon Joe, Werewolf Hunter, the genesis of which was apparently some nonsense, imaginary show Glaser invented on the spot during an interview with Jimmy Fallon two years back. Because Adult Swim is nothing if not a network that champions nonsense, this is now a real thing about, well, a werewolf hunter hunting werewolves in a small town known for its abundance of B&Bs. It stars Glaser as the titular character, as well as Scott Adsit (30 Rock and The Heart, She Holler), Delocated alumnus Steve Cirbus, and, oddly enough, Stephanie March, who nobody knows from anything except Law & Order: SVU.
