“We put a pretty extensive and expansive list together, and we spent a lot of time really looking at the inspirations,” Nemec says. The Netflix Bebop team looked at Howard Hawks’ Raymond Chandler adaptation The Big Sleep (1946), the classic Sergio Leone spaghetti Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the New Hollywood classic Bonnie & Clyde, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the cop-with-a-gun thriller Dirty Harry, Richard Donner’s defining buddy comedy Lethal Weapon, and even the macabre action drama The Crow to divine the soul of Bebop through the reality of cinema. So Nemec and his writing staff looked beyond the source material to the movies that influenced Watanabe when he began developing the anime with studio Sunrise back in the 1990s. “There are obviously things that we cannot achieve with real people that an anime can,” he admits. But for Nemec, translating Cowboy Bebop meant considering how a live-action treatment could take advantage of live action. The original Cowboy Bebop brimmed with spirit worth siphoning off. “We would look at sets, we would look at props, we would look at costumes, we would look at the edits, we would talk about all of these things, not to ape the anime,” the showrunner says, “but to live in the spirit of the anime.” The chance to cast John Cho ( Star Trek) as Spike, Mustafa Shakir ( Luke Cage) as Jet, and Daniella Pineda ( Jurassic World: Dominion) as Faye only made the high-risk, high-reward prospects more alluring. If Nemec and his team could draw out the core elements of the anime, in theory, they could tell a new set of stories in the show’s exciting, known universe. Instead, to bring Cowboy Bebop to Netflix, the showrunner’s writing team studied the stars that perfectly aligned to make the original version what it was, then dared to realign them. So why remake Cowboy Bebop? Nemec says he wouldn’t dare try. The next 20 years saw the launch and rise of the influential Toonami programming block, the mainstreaming of anime, and the canonization of Bebop as endlessly watchable television.
Audiences got it, too Cowboy Bebop premiered in 2001 on Cartoon Network’s just-launched Adult Swim block, and melted the brains of the night owls who’d never seen anything like East-meets-West science fiction remix. The motley crew made perfect sense in the melancholic action swirl of Watanabe’s anime, where a mishandled heist could feel like Bob Fosse choreography, and a shoot-em-up showdown always landed enough shots to pierce raw human psychology. Then there was Ein, a genetically enhanced “data dog” whose main purpose was looking adorable as the bounty hunter team jumped around the solar system in a souped-up fishing trawler known as the Bebop.
Ed, the kid genius of the group, was also a supernova of personality - who luckily knew their way around a computer. The sharp and often deadly Faye Valentine joined the crew to get hers, and maybe moor her wayward soul to a modicum of stability. His accomplice Jet Black was an ex-cop with a cybernetic arm and a heart of (metaphorical) gold. Spike, Cowboy Bebop’s leading man, was a smooth-operating bounty hunter who could fight his way out of any situation, except heartbreak.
#ONE DIRECTION ANIME IMAGES TV#
The 23 TV premieres to catch this fall Our 11 most anticipated anime of the seasonĪcross 26 episodes and one feature film, Watanabe, screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, animation director Toshihiro Kawamoto, key animator Yutaka Nakamura, and composer Yoko Kanno set a genre-bending story of found family and high-flying adventure to a syncopated beat.