The wife and I have been watching the Netflix live action remake of Cowboy Bebop, and to be honest, I’ve been enjoying it.
There is nothing about it, save one minor character, that feels Woke.
The visuals are great and John Cho does really good action sequences.
I know virtually nothing about the original Anime show and I’ve never seen it.
Apparently, according to the internet, my liking the Netflix remake makes me a bad person, and the show being canceled is a good thing.
I don’t enjoy Anime. First, there are thematic and stylistic aspects of Anime that don’t appeal to me. Many of those are definitely unique to Japanese culture.
Netflix doing it as an American live action softened those aspects and made it more watchable to my American sensibilities.
Second, I hate Anime fans. To me, Anime fans rank just above pedophiles and just below furries. Considering that some of the Japanese themes and styles tend towards pedophilia, you can see why I feel this way.
As someone who attended two small engineering colleges, I have a lot of familiarity with Anime fans and they definitely fall into the class of people who replace a personality with a Fandom.
The Anime fans were almost universally Weebs (Weeaboo) who are total weirdos.
So not just did Anime not appeal to me, Anime fans were a detestable group I wanted no association with.
So much so I was actually reticent to try the Netflix Cowboy Bebop until my wife watched a few episodes and told me to give it a chance.
So I did and I enjoyed it now those incel Weebs pissed and moaned that the Netflix remake was not a faithful enough reproduction of their beloved Anime for them to watch while snuggling their waifu pillows in their parents basements surrounding by weeks worth of stinking empty Maruchan Ramen noodle cups and got it canceled.
All this does is make me hate Anime fans even more.
Unfortunately they’ve canceled it. I like it too and it went the way of Firefly.
I am and always have been a huge geek: comics, roleplaying, wargames, video games, and so forth. Thusly, I was a big otaku in my teens and early twenties, so I know exactly why anime fandom can creep you out. I get it. The majority of the fandom isn’t much more bizarre than, say, comic book fans or Trekkies… But the ones that take it too far are really fuckin’ creepy.
Having said all that, Cowboy Bebop is an amazingly good show. You can find it on Netflix and the English dub is really damn good (I prefer it to the Japanese honestly, since many of the jokes “land” better if you understand the importance of the accents used and I’m terrible at telling Japanese accents apart). Give it a try.
(Note, I haven’t seen the live-action remake yet. I’ll get around to it eventually.)
It’s an anime for people who don’t like anime.
supposedly a lot of the controversy began when one of the actors started crapping on fans before the show even premiered.
She crapped on fans, the source material, preemptively insulted who might not like any part of the show and bragged how woke they were going to make it. It set off all sorts of warning bells with the Fan base even if they had thick enough skin to ignore her actions. It seems however this show was made to try to make inroads for Netflix in Japan so it is no surprise the show was dropped like a hot potato after failing there. The US fanbase might of kept the show alive until it took off but that well was pretty thoroughly poisoned. (Netflix is pretty bad about abandoning ambitious series if they aren’t immediate hits,Just look at Bright-awesome movie but the second and third acts was canceled after only average views) I personally was waiting to see if others said Cowboy Bebop was at least ok before watching it. I had enough of seeing my favorite shows being pissed on after the new Star Wars movies, Ghostbusters 2016 and MIB international.
Yes, anime fans are all weirdos and closet pedos.
Just like all gun owners are misogynistic racists who are also alcoholics with small penises!
Sry J.KB, you’re fallen right into the propaganda trap.
Not defendeing weird Weebos, but it was not “toxic fans” that made Netflix cancel the show. Nor were it “toxic fans” that made the new “Masters of the universe” a flop. Nor “Santa Inc.”. Or some of the dozens others reboots and live action adaptions.
While the show might be not bad, and I heard that more often than the contrary, it was mainly the “toxic” behaviour of some of the cast that drove the fans away – and Cowboy Beebop is an incredible popular anime with a huge fanbase. Pissing even moderate fans of even before the show aired is not a good idea.
Shame tho, I heard Jet’s performance was pretty good.
The propaganda I fell for was the countless YouTube videos and blog posts made by (supposed) fans about how 1) the show sucked and 2) you suck and are too dumb to understand how awesome Anime is if you liked the Netflix series.
“Anime fans” didn’t get the show cancelled. The show got cancelled because it lost nearly 60% of its viewing audience from week 1 to week 2. It didn’t get cancelled because anyone hated it, it got cancelled because nobody liked it.
Damn dude shots fired!
The Cowboy Bebop anime was the anime that got me and lots of other people into anime (I don’t count DBZ or Pokemon etc). It had an uncharacteristically good dub for the time and didn’t suffer from many (if any) anime tropes, animeisms, or anime cutsies, two factors that I think propelled it to the popularity it has and the its status as a classic. These two things helped it appeal to people not already “into” anime.
Anime people definitely can be cringey and weird, I’ve spend a significant portion of my life around them and being one of them. I like to think I have not gone fully cringe weeb as I’ve never felt a real desire to do things like Naruto run, or draw a transmutation circle and attempt a transmutation, though I may have sunk to the depths of buying a Cold Steel katana once…
I began hopeful for the show, then became dismayed and had zero positive expectation after the playful teaser they released, then went back to neutral outlook after the actual trailer for the season came out.
Ultimately, it surpassed my very low expectations and was not good or bad to me, it just was.
To me when compared to the anime it was a soft grey easily digestible mostly flavorless mush that had a Cowboy Bebop! sticker slapped on the container. A small amount of memberberries were mixed into the mush to give you a little hit of nostalgia every time you bit into one. It is just fine for entertainment but lacks the inspiration, flavor, and greatness of the original.
IMO it tried to walk the line to finely between remake of the original material and re-imagining of the original material and failed at both because it did not predominantly stick to one or the other. It also fell into the trap that many live action adaptations have and that is the insane need to combine multiple story and episode elements together for no real reason (the Ghost in the Shell movie is another great example of this combining to seasons and two movies together for no reason); though this is probably more of a consequence of trying to keep old material and add new material.
Casting overall I thought was great and Mustafa Shakir who played Jet Black deserves an award, even though race swapping a dude who has a name that is effectively black black to a black guy kind of seems on the nose to me…. I thought Spike and Faye were cast well and played well even though I don’t really like Cho’s and Pineda’s interpretation and portrayal of the characters. It is tough to say if this is because of writing, direction, or their own take, but their personalities seemed a little different to me and there was too much jokey crew banter. I didn’t really like the change in Jet’s story that much, but it wasn’t terrible, and Faye’s story change was just fine. However, changing Spike and renaming him to Fearless, you want to talk about anime cringelord moves, that is one right there. Every time they called Spike Fearless I cringed.
The writing was overall meh, but that is sadly expected for most material these days. There was only one episode that stood out as really good to me, and I can’t even remember which one it was like a month after watching it. The ending of the Hakim episode with the dog kidnapping was laughably badly written and on par with the Batman and Superman ending their fight because their mother’s both had the same name. I also think Viscous suffered from poor writing and seeing how the series ended, it makes sense they made him such a sniveling bitch and a complete joke of a character. Pierrot le Fou going from being terrified of dogs to the point of allowing the crew to escape their death at his hands to using Ein, a dog, as a tool also made no sense was a bad writing. I could go on and on.
Where they really fucked up to me though is four things.
1 – The sound mixing was terrible. The music should be forward in the action scenes, not the sound effects. In the anime the music is integral to the the style of the series and having the music in the background, especially during the action where the music sets the tone for the action on the screen, was a massive disservice.
2 – The fight choreography was bad. Most of the fight was slow and telegraphed. In particular the fight with Hakim was just really bad.
3 – The guns. They changed the guns! Spike got to keep his Jericho at least but giving Jet a revolver was dumb and destroyed a story element of one of his episodes in the anime. The anime paid particular and close attention to the details of the firearms in them and they were depicted with extreme accuracy; just look at the opening animation of the Jericho firing in the anime. This is something you see in many animes, a loving detail in depiction and presentation given to firearms and it just wasn’t there for me.
4 – No Heavy Metal Queen episode! Clearly this was done for budgetary reasons, that was a nearly 100% space episode, so removing it really saved them money on the effects, but man, one of my favorites.
Ghostbusters Defense /ɡoʊst bʌstərs dɪˈfɛns/ (Verb) The action of preemptively defending or protecting a work from criticism by calling anyone with a negative opinion of the work as Islamophobic, Racist, Sexist, Transphobic, or some other pejorative -ist or -ism.
See Also: Battlefield Prep (noun), HuffPolling (verb), Sarkeesian Harasment (noun).