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

Remember the season we got was delayed by injuries and Covid, so the dates scheduled for pickup options might have been far from the originally planned launch.

 

It's weird that Netflix has the series but not the movie. Why not get the whole package? Especially since the live-action series used elements from the movie -- the opening scene of the first episode was based on the movie's opening, and the season-ending cliffhanger implied that season 2's arc would've been based on the movie's plot. So if Netflix wanted to whet interest in the new show by streaming the original, it would've made sense to include the movie along with the rest. (Luckily I was able to borrow the DVD from the library.)

 

I'm a big fan of the OG and was enjoying the live action one a lot.

 

Yes, it sucks when stuff gets cancelled. It could have improved a lot if the lessons of the atrocious Vicious and Julia storyline were learned. However, there's plenty of other stuff available. Maybe someone else will have a go adapting it in a decade or two's time.

 

I thought this was kinda fun.

 

I like hat guy, he knew his stuff xD
(And the ghost in the shell one is very amusing, because Shirow is notorious for all kinds of interesting geo-political stuff in his books, and nations, and having characters from a mix of backgrounds. By the time you get to the animated movie, and Newport is suddenly Hong Kong, and the Majors body is intentionally a mass production model looks wise, all bets are off. But we still had the ScarJo wars, and no one in Japan gave a shit. There’s like four or five different Motokos in various continuities, but we had to have a ‘discourse’. I mean, Robert Downey Jnr has played Londoners at least twice, and he’s American…. )

 

People playing different nationalities, but the same race, isn't really the same as a white person playing a character who is usually portrayed as a different race in other versions of the story.

 

That was fascinating, thank you!

 

That part of the comment is the jokey part anyway. (The Downey Jnr.)
I have no problem with ScarJo playing a cyborg with multiple contradictory origin stories, in an adaptation, the same way I have no problem with Sophie Okonedo playing a Queen of England in a Shakespeare adaptation.
Some people take things much more seriously, and sometimes with some degree of an understandable reason, such as for example the questions about casting in the Memoirs of a Geisha adaptation a while back.


I liked this adaptation of the source material, even if John Cho is not in his twenties etc. That’s the thing about adaptation… there’s always some change to suit a different time or a different medium. That’s why Julia wasn’t fridged I imagine, and given some agency.

Edit:
And just because it really bugs me, the whole GiTs thing, to the best of my knowledge, Major Kusanagi has never had her ethnicity established anywhere, and her nationality can only be assumed because of her job.
In terms of ‘original anime’ the film was produced by companies that included the (then British) Manga Entertainment, and isn’t a case of an existing film being redubbed for western audiences. In other words the ‘western’ voice cast is as valid as the Japanese, in this case. The film also moved the film to HK rather than Japan to a great extent, though Newport remains fictional. It also focused on the nature of the majors body as being a commonplace model.
(Source: I was at something of a launch party for GiTs in the Uk, back in the nineties, and knew people at the company. Wish I had nabbed some of the production cels somehow at the time.)

I have even heard that the western dub has actually been used in Japan for rebroadcast of SAC because it was considered more ‘true’ to the characters. That may just be apocryphal scuttlebutt however.

In other words there is zero supporting evidence for portrayals of this character as any given race (Shirow talks a lot about nationality and ethnicity, but usually more in relation to Appleseed and Deunan Knute.) and the whole furore was manufactured by people who *didn’t know the source as well as they thought* in order to dismiss what was actually an interesting story *talking about identity and consent*. It’s one that reverberates to now, and Bebop, because again we have ‘purists’ who comprehend neither the original work or the process of adaptation naysaying a work.

I hope they adapt some more anime I don’t give a shit about at some point, because am tired of my old stuff going through this every damn time.

 

Oh OK, I didn't realize that about Kusanagi, I had just assumed she was meant to be Japanese.

 

Her name certainly suggests as much, though I think maybe it's not her birth name. Kusanagi is a name rooted in Japanese culture, the name of a sword that's basically the Japanese equivalent of Excalibur.

But the issue of whitewashing in American cinema is not about the ethnicity of any single fictional character. It's about a Hollywood culture that has historically been in the habit of marginalizing Asian actors and shutting them out of lead roles, even ones that logically should go to them. After all, fictional characters don't exist and aren't affected by it one way or the other, but working Asian-American actors do very much exist and very much deserve the same employment opportunities as everyone else. Saying "Well, that character isn't explicitly Japanese" is too often just an excuse for defaulting to white once again and shutting another Asian-American actor out of a job. It hardly works as an argument, because the character isn't explicitly not Japanese either.

 

The film does have the most famous (in the west) living Japanese actor in the film. But Takeshi isn’t quite right for the role of Motoko.
Films are often sold on celebrity status, and this was never going to have an unknown in the lead in the current era of filmmaking.
What it was was a female-led action SF movie, cyberpunk, with an honest to goodness diverse cast of leads (which really added to the overall story… this is not a monocultural Japan, but a future Hong Kong being Niihama.) which was then pilloried on the basis of incorrect perception.
Same thing in some quarters for Bebop.
I am *very* against whitewashing, but it wasn’t that. There was already a backlash against Scarjo at the time to do with soda stream and Israeli politics.

In terms of Asian American actors, yes, Hollywood needs to find more and bring some more up the ranks as it were. But even then, there is background politics to be aware of. (As we see in Memoirs of Geisha, it turns out that actually in Asia a Chinese person is not interchangeable with a Japanese one, and those markets respond badly to the suggestion…)

In terms of anime and adaptation though?
‘Fans’ just don’t get that adaptation brings change. That has killed most western adaptations of anime so far.
Fortunately there’s a few good ones made in Japan, just not often for older properties which I like. Though the two Death Notes were fun.

 

I think it's a thing Hollywood needs to improve anywhere foreign and minority cultures are involved. They're already vulnerable for not being able to stand up for themselves, and a large part of it has to do with Hollywood politics. It's why I'm such a big fan of the Canadian movie The Grizzlies, a movie in which 90% of the cast and crew is indigenous, and which received training in the process of the production.

 

Having watched Trek for a number of years, my understanding is Hollywood barely gets anyone outside of LA right, so what hope anyone outside of the USA? XD

 

You got it pretty on point

 

Adaptation also means thinking through your choices and what elements related to a character ought to be changed if you change the character.

In the anime it's implied that Spike Spiegel is probably Jewish (and maybe German). For one thing, the name, for another, he carries a IWI Jericho 941, an Israeli made weapon. So if you cast someone of Korean descent, do you keep these Jewish/Israeli trappings? Do those things mean anything any more if you leave them? Or do they mean something different?

 

I don't know if Shinichiro Watanabe intended Spike to be any specific ethnicity. Spiegel is just the German for "mirror" but I didn't get any hidden meaning beyond what was probably cool-sounding alliteration. According to Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_Spiegel

 

Maybe. But death of the author and all that.

 

Dudes a Martian. But yes, I often wondered about that too, but more as a part of the overall ‘human diaspora’ feel of the original… which is lessened somewhat in the live action. Needed more voices, like we see in The Expanse with it’s somewhat similar setting.

I liked Cho. But outside of America, if Spike *is* Japanese, there are things that come with casting a Korean actor. And we already know about that, because it was addressed in interviews when he played Sulu.

Bringing that all full circle though, I really liked the older version of Spike here, possibly in pure story terms more than I liked the original. Because the age (let’s take ten years of Cho’s actual age xD) gave the events room to breathe for everyone.
Twenties isn’t exactly time so fit a lot of tragic backstory, and to build back up from that, whereas the age here made things seem more real, which is ironically what you want in live action.

 

What????? The Jericho 941 is used in many countries around the world, including South Korea. Many Israeli-made weapons are used around the world, most famously the Uzi. Rambo carried an Uzi; do you assume he was Jewish? People don't choose their weapons based on their religion or their national heritage. They choose them for their efficacy at killing people, which is something that most religions frown on. I mean, good grief, gunpowder was invented in China, but that didn't preclude Europeans from adopting it.