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

Let's go back to the topic for a moment :D. Do you think the bounty hunter system can work in a context other than, well, the nineteenth century Western frontier? I mean, the solar system in the series strikes me as a fairly civilized place (with the exception of Earth) and if I were a taxpayer I would be pretty annoyed that my money was used for bounties and not to finance a better police. Truly, in the old and new series it seems like the work of the police is little more than taking criminals over from the bounty hunters and taking them to jail! They wash their hands even for dangerous mass murderers or bombers!
 
Skipper said:
Let's go back to the topic for a moment :D. Do you think the bounty hunter system can work in a context other than, well, the nineteenth century Western frontier? I mean, the solar system in the series strikes me as a fairly civilized place (with the exception of Earth) and if I were a taxpayer I would be pretty annoyed that my money was used for bounties and not to finance a better police. Truly, in the old and new series it seems like the work of the police is little more than taking criminals over from the bounty hunters and taking them to jail! They wash their hands even for dangerous mass murderers or bombers!
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The Cowboys take the place of the gumshoe in this western-SF-noir hybrid. Also, many big city police departments get the lion's share of city budget and they're still pretty much feckless. More money doesn't necessary mean better policing. Just leads to a militarization of the police in weapons, tactics, and military-grade equipment. IMO that's not a good thing.
 
The world building for Bebop has always been a bit fast and loose (as befitting a show built around jazz) so it probably best not to think about it too hard. That said, this all takes place about a generation or two after a massive ecological disaster followed by a mass exodus from Earth that spread humanity across the entire system from Venus, all the way out the Neptune. Any government is going to be tenuous and patchwork at best, while law enforcement (such as it is) seems to be mostly local. So a bounty system for high value fugitives that can be literally *anywhere* by the time a local warrant is issued makes sense, at least as a stop gap.

The wild west analogy isn't a bad one since that was also the result of a period of sudden expansion of settlement, where small islands of civilization directly rubbed up against vast stretches wilderness. See also: the Golden Age of Piracy, with very much the same results.
 
They do have an intersystem police, but from what was shown, it's "for sale" and or may be not funded well. (Think of the pinkertons) So local cops put up bounties for people they can't find or are I'll equipped to find at all. since it seems travel between planets is quite easy.
So you have cowboys.
 
Okay, so why aren't there private security agencies that make up for all the police deficiencies, instead of inefficient and lonely bounty hunters? I am sure that in terms of cost in the long run it would be more efficient and effective than any method they use in the series to maintain public order.

I know very well that the authors want to recreate the feeling of the old West, but if you think about it the whole system doesn't make much sense. The example of Teddy Bomber in the original series comes to mind. Here we practically have a terrorist who keeps detonating in the most civilized place of the whole series (Mars) targets of great importance (like corporate headquarters) and who is not a fugitive. The police basically just put on a bounty and wash their hands. I can understand that a corrupt police can ignore the needs of common citizens, but it seems a little too much that they pretend nothing is happening even when rich and powerful megacorporations are involved! Imagine if a terrorist planted a bomb in the headquarters of Amazon, Google and Facebook. I doubt that even the most inept police in this world would throw in the towel saying "It's not our problem!"
 
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I wonder if we will get a second season. I read that it peaked at #22 on Netflix which is not great. For comparison Lost In Space on it's first day of release was already at #7.
 
When I got on Netflix last week looking for something to watch, the live-action Bebop was listed pretty high (I want to say either #2 or #3) in the U.S. Daily Top Ten (and this would've been almost a week since its release).
 
Starscream2112 said:
I wonder if we will get a second season. I read that it peaked at #22 on Netflix which is not great. For comparison Lost In Space on it's first day of release was already at #7.
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Is that for Netflix in the US only? Or worldwide?

It's hard to tell what that means for a second season's chances if it's only for one region.
 
Getting back to the question of Ed's intended gender, I just got the DVD of Cowboy Bebop: The Movie from the library, and in the bonus features, the character designer says that Ed was originally meant to be a boy, but as he designed the character, he and the director decided the design would be more appropriate for a girl. There's also a scene in the movie where a cross-dressing male prostitute mistakes Ed for a boy and loses interest when Ed says she's a girl. So that's pretty unambiguous.
 
Well, I could've timed it better. I finished rewatching the anime a few days ago and finally watched the movie this afternoon, then went ahead and watched the first episode of the Netflix series this evening... and the opening scene of the Netflix show is a remake of the opening scene of the movie, just changed from a convenience store to a casino (I guess it's amalgamated with a scene from the series). So I saw two versions of the same scene twice in one day.

They're really going in for authenticity so far, right down to the shot compositions, and the story put together mostly from bits of episodes 1 & 3 of the anime, IIRC. But with some new elements added, like Jet's daughter and some more details about Spike's background than we got in the anime. Not bad so far. I find that Cho's and Shakir's voices and attitudes remind me more of the English-dub versions of Spike and Jet than their Japanese versions. But I think Pineda's Faye reminds me a bit more of the Japanese version, though she's maybe somewhere in between the two.
 
That's good. I was wondering if it might be too strange for first timers since it's heavily based on the anime in every way.
 
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