News Live-Action ‘Cowboy Bebop’ tv series in the works

"Bad" is a judgment of quality. And you're making the wrong assumption about what the purpose of an adaptation is. The word "adapt" literally means to adjust or modify something to suit a new context or purpose. What makes something a good adaptation has nothing to do with how similar it is to the original. The original is not the goal you're aiming for -- it's the starting line, not the finish line. The goal you're aiming for is a worthwhile new version. You do a good job of adapting something if the adaptation itself is good.

After all, the whole point of adapting something to a new medium is to expose it to a new audience. You want to make something that can be enjoyed by people who don't even know it's adapted from something else, or who can't tell one way or the other. You want it to satisfy people for whom it's their first exposure to the work, so that they're judging it purely on its own terms rather than constantly comparing it to something else. Ideally, even people who do know the original should be engaged enough that they just let themselves experience the work in the here and now, rather than distracting themselves with comparisons to something else.

 

As my writing partner says, everyone tries to do Joss Whedon, and even Joss Whedon can't always pull it off.

 

Back to the issue of translation, over the years I've had to work with people in Hungary, Romania, and Japan, etc., and I've head to deal with localization companies to translate texts for games and apps into at minimum the FIGS languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish) and sometimes upwards of a dozen. When you do that you quickly learn how difficult it is to translate things from one language to another. A silly example being one translation group translated "gear" into "equipment" when we meant a "cog". So I ended up adding a "context" field to each row the spreadsheets we put the texts into where we could explain what the text meant in addition to what it said, and sometimes we'd say, "An idiom/expression in this language similar to _____."

A lot of things actually don't translate easily. The Criterion release of Kurosawa's Sanjuro translated one line in the subtitles as "We can't move like this, like a centipede." But a very old trailer also on the disc translated the same line as, "You're following me like a trail of goldfish dung." The dung version is almost certainly more accurate to what Mifune says in Japanese, but does that translation of the joke land easily with English speakers? Or do the translators think Kurosawa is above a ribald poop joke?

And Japanese can be a very punny language, and translating that is hard to do. For instance, you know why Luigi is named that in the Nintendo Mario games? Because 類似 ("ruigi") in Japanese pronunciation is phonetically the same as Luigi and it means "similar", so Luigi = similar to Mario...except he's in green. You can't really translate that.

And some things simply don't translate, especially culturally specific expressions which have no direct or even figurative equivalent.

 

Having kept goldfish, I can confirm that the simile is accurate. In British English, perhaps we'd say "We have to stop acting like we're doing the conga".

 

Just watched episode 6, really dug it, searched for reactions online aaaaaaaaaaaaanddddd

Spoiler

found a lot of people freaked out for the Faye's queer storyline

It figures. But it's not like anything in the original anime explicitely contradict something like that, right?

 

My POV on adaptations changed for good after I listened to author Terry Brooks speak about his experiences in penning the novelization Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace and how George Lucas personally encouraged him to make the story of the film 'his own' and make additions or subtractions (mainly additions) as felt appropriate.

 

1998: Cowboy Bebop is released.

2002: Oh, Firefly is so unique, why can't more shows be original like that?

2021: Why do so many shows rip off Joss Whedon?

Me: Why are we still talking about this guy?

 

Well movie to book would be difficult. You'd get the screenplay, and hope it's the one that was shot, then you write. It would be easier to do if you could see the movie, describe locations etc but the novel adaptation is usually concurrent so they have to guess or make it up. Then add content because a screenplay would make a very short book.

 

@Christopher can speak to this better, but I believe that the goal with most novelizations is to tell the story as seen onscreen as as much of a 1-to-1 translation as possible, and that mindset is how Terry Brooks was initially inclined to write until Lucas kept telling him that he had free reign to alter the story as he felt was appropriate.

Once I heard Terry talk about this, I realized that expecting an adaptation to be a translation was a fool's errand, and that my favorite adaptations are the ones that do actually change something about the story and don't try to mistakenly function as exact translations.

 

Err no. Otherwise, why would I buy the book if there was no added value?

 

That seems to be the preference of studios these days, but it's not the way it used to be. In the 20th century, movie novelizers were often quite free to embellish and adjust the story, often to rewrite it considerably and make it their own. Philip MacDonald's novelization of Forbidden Planet (as "W.J. Stuart") told the movie's story in a very different way, presented as two or three distinct first-person accounts, so large parts of the movie's events were omitted or described indirectly because the narrator of that section wasn't present for them, and a lot of alternate material was added in their place. When Isaac Asimov adapted Fantastic Voyage, he rewrote it extensively to make the miniaturization more scientifcally plausible, and altered the ending to correct a major oversight on the scriptwriters' part. When Vonda N. McIntyre novelized The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, she added a wealth of new material and, like Asimov, reworked some plot points to make them less implausible (e.g. correcting "Ceti Alpha" to "Alpha Ceti," and adding a whole subplot about the new physics that made Genesis possible).

Some novelizations have even been required to alter their endings to hide spoilers. The Dick Tracy novelization simply omitted the reveal of who the faceless villain was, and the novelization of X2: X-Men United rewrote the whole climax so that Jean survived. Which is a change from how it was done previously. The Empire Strikes Back novelization was released a month before the movie came out and included the reveal about Darth Vader. Spoilerphobia hadn't yet become a thing. (After all, many movies were adapted from pre-existing novels anyway, so pre-releasing a novelization of an original movie was seen as a way of getting the same kind of advance buzz. Back then, a lot of people actually read books.)

 

Everything about movies and TV Is an act of adaptation. The director and actors and crew adapt the screenplay to work on camera, and the editors adapt the raw material of the footage into a narrative. Change is happening at every single step. What works in animation does not necessarily work in live action. What works in a novel does not necessarily work at all in a film and vice versa (see the bomb in The English Patient which in the novel is the A-bomb the characters react to as an existential problem whereas in the film there’s a small bomb that affects the them personally).

Not to defend the Bebop adaptation, which I do not think is well-scripted. But I see how it happens.

 

There's probably a shit take for anything that is searched on. There's seem to be whole sites and channels devoted to regurgitating them and going on about whether they're for them or against them. If they don't exist someone will likely make one to fill the void.

 

Outrage sells. A lot of the rage on the Internet is all in service of getting views/impressions/engagement.

 

Interesting discussion on adaptations. Not much to add there - over the years, I've become more about "am I enjoying this thing in front of me right now?" than "how close is this to the original?"

I liked The Watch too.

I both agree and disagree with this writer. Many of us loved Buffy because we already talked a lot like that - "often imprecise in their language, letting sentences trail off as they struggle to articulate themselves. They turn nouns into verbs and vice versa. They say 'thing' or 'thingy' or 'stuff' in place of more descriptive terms. Often these characters metatextually comment on their surroundings or the environments they’re in, usually in a sarcastic or snarky way." Buffy just made us moreso.

In some ways, it's more realistic speech. In others, it was definitely heightened for effect. It's ubiquitous now because that's how those of us who were shaped by it tend to talk now. I don't think the writers are imitating (although I'm sure some are). Plus, the examples she gave seemed wrong to me - less "Buffyspeak" and more how those characters talk. IMO and YMMV.

Thanks for speaking from your experience! I have a friend who speaks enough Japanese that she sometimes helps me watch & understand anime better, and it's always interesting. I remember reading an article by a Mandarin Chinese speaker about the differences in the subtitled bits in Shang-Chi. Some things just cannot be translated exactly without full understanding and immersion in the culture.

 

Thinking about translations I have seen a few fan-made subtitles where they add a context note. So the subtitle is at the bottom but there are occasional notes also on screen explaining it. It's a bit hard to describe but when done right it's neat cuz it can stay closer to the original meaning and you learn a bit about the language/culture but I could see where that wouldn't be for everyone. They have the capability nowadays to offer multiple sub/dub tracks but I'm sure it's cost prohibitive.

 

There’s little realistic about Whedon’s dialog. It’s too self aware. He never had the gift of a Milius who could write dialog that sounded natural but was kind of winking at you.

 

I see it as a stylized realism. He takes the imperfections and clumsiness of everyday speech and combines them with the cleverness of screwball comedy dialogue.

Or maybe he just writes all his characters' dialogue the way he talks in everyday life.

 

The dialog in this show is written nothing like so-called 'Whedon speak'.

The trend of modern snappy dialog can mostly be summed up as a confluence of Mamet > Tarantino > Sorkin > Smith. And if we're talking people of similar pedigree to Whedon who've had a greater overall influence, I'd put both Diablo Cody and Amy Palladino ahead of him.

While it's all become pretty samey, each show/film has its own variation. This definitely takes most of its notes from Tarantino (As the whole tone/vibe of the show borrows a lot from him.) with a few snoochie boochie accents.

And the article even shows an example from Buffy. It reads nothing like anything Faye says. The author was really reaching. They were trying to force some kind of connection, but instead came off as rightly uninformed and out of touch.

 

Also, why is Whedonesque dialogue a bad thing? I've always loved his gift for wordplay. I admire authors who can craft English so deftly, like Whedon or mystery writer Edward Wellen. Or Shakespeare, who did it better than anyone.