Arts & Life, Film & Television

See you on Netflix, space cowboy

Three, two, one — let’s jam.

Netflix is once again venturing into live-action anime territory despite its apparent failures with every previous attempt. This time, the media company is taking a stab at the 1998 cult classic “Cowboy Bebop,” which is considered one of the best animes of all time by many fans.

In 2017, Netflix released live action remakes of both “Death Note” and “Fullmetal Alchemist,” the former getting the meme-treatment for how awful it was. “Fullmetal Alchemist” got a whopping 5.8 out of 10 rating on IMDB, only slightly better than “Death Note’s” 4.5.  

Because of how bad these previous live-action anime remakes were, I am so scared that Netflix is going to ruin “Cowboy Bebop,” which would absolutely break my heart. Unlike the other two, this remake will be made into a series, which gives the cast and crew working on it more freedom to fully cover the sprawling story of the classic show. Could this be a blessing or a curse? Only time will tell.

Netflix has already started casting the movie, with John Cho reportedly coming on as the main character, Spike Spiegel. This choice made me a little hopeful because Cho is a fine actor, though his other roles aren’t as similar to Spiegel.

I’m also glad that Netflix is not choosing to not cast a whole bunch of white people to play Asian characters like it did for “Death Note,” when it cast Nat Wolff as the Japanese character Light Yagami.

And who could forget the absolute disaster of the live-action remake of “The Last Airbender”? Almost every casting decision was a bad one, for example M. Night Shyamalan chose to cast white, green-eyed, blonde actress Nicola Peltz as unquestionably brown character Katara. However, the blame can’t be put on Netflix for that one as it was produced by Paramount and Nickelodeon.

So far, the cast consists of Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black and Daniella Pineda as Faye Valentine as well as a few others.

Along with a potentially good cast, the original director, Shin’ichirô Watanabe, is going to be working on the show as a creative consultant. That’s another step in the right direction for this upcoming production. If there’s anyone to get on your side, the original director should definitely be it.

According to Screen Rant, the show is going to be 10 episodes and, like many other Netflix shows, the episodes will be available to stream all at once. There is no release date as of yet.

The popularity of the classic anime is no doubt going to excite many fans for this reboot, but I can’t help being skeptical about this one. It’s more of a defense mechanism really. If I don’t get my hopes up, then there’s not much room for disappointment.

It’s a pretty ambitious task, I don’t know what was going through their heads when they looked at one of the most iconic anime series of all time and thought that they could recreate how amazing it was.

For its sake, I really do hope that Netflix can do justice to the iconic series.

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