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
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
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.
