As one of the few people who unironically loved it when it dropped in late 2021, I have decided to verify its rewatchability before doubling down on my defenses. And I’m glad I did because I’m appreciating it even more this second time around over two years later.
I don’t love all parts of it equally. The conversation about Faye not having Orgasm before I find cringey, and since it’s not getting a season 2 the bleak way it ends doesn’t sit well with me. I’ve said before that my preference for happy endings doesn’t mean I can’t respect the artistic choice to end a story more tragically, but in the case of Cowboy Bebop I really don’t find it justified. So yeah I wanted Bebop to be Bowdlerized. I agree with Mother’s Basement that Netflix Bebop is the less Woke version at least where its take on the Police is concerned, but MB is wrong in thinking Carol and Tuesday is Woke, its ending is fundamentally Centrist.
At least one of those complaints is the opposite of what most hate about this show. To them Bebop is supposed to be gritty and dark and tragic. The truth is the original also had its goofy and silly and kind of stupid elements and this remake also has real emotional resonance. The exact balance between them is different and that’s good. Batman fans have spent almost 20 years now learning to accept that different takes can have very different tones, much wider differences then these two Bebops have.
Cowboy Bebop was always an homage to old American genres like Westerns and Film Noir, and for many that comparison is the first thing they mention when explaining why this remake is so bad and insulting, but the thing is those Genres were never Highbrow or Respectable and they kinda still aren’t.
One specific proof that way too many Cowboy Bebop fans take the original way more seriously than it was ever meant to be taken is how this remake’s take on Faye is responded to. I criticized one scene involving her but the rest I love. The haters hate how in the Netflix version Faye is an awkward Dork who’s actually very Bad at being a Femme Fatale, she is competent at other things but bad at that. And that is exactly how I’d describe her in the original show too, like it’s really obvious to me that that’s always what they were going for. But instead people wearing Nostalgia goggles decided that she actually unironically was the Fujiko Mine of our generation, which is a notion I can’t take seriously.
I think a big factor in why I’m more okay with this adaptation is that I have actually been into American Superhero Comics and their adaptations for longer than I have been into Anime even though now I’m into Anime the most of all my Nerdy interests. Anime fans who are familiar with the source materials of Anime are used to relatively direct adaptations, where even if lots of changes are made it still essentially follows the same basic plot besides the occasional Filler Arc or dreaded Anime Original Ending. Superhero fans are more used to adaptations that take the elements of the source material, characters and settings and lore concepts, and mixes them around, completely reimagining some, to create a fundamentally new story, but that still feels like a love letter to what came before. And that’s what Netflix Bebop is, a new work of art still clearly crafted out of love for the original.
Netflix Bebop is fun, and that’s what Bebop always was, pure fun. I do like the original show, but the Netflix Bebop is more the kind of Fun I enjoy. It actually feels more like an Anime to me then the Anime did.
Now the thing I like most about the show I’m going to save for a different post since it’s kind of an entire thesis statement on its own. So stay tuned.
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