Cowboy Bebop co-creator on Netflix adaptation: 'It was clearly not Cowboy Bebop'

Snap Stills/REX/Shutterstock Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, Faye Valentine, and Ed in 'Cowboy Bebop'

More than a year after Netflix premiered its underwhelming live-action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, one of the major creative forces behind the original anime has weighed in.

Shinichiro Watanabe, who directed and/or storyboarded many of the key episodes of the original Cowboy Bebop, as well as the 2001 movie, spoke with Forbes about his reaction to the Netflix version.

"For the new Netflix live-action adaptation, they sent me a video to review and check," Watanabe said. "It started with a scene in a casino, which made it very tough for me to continue. I stopped there and so only saw that opening scene."

He continued, "It was clearly not Cowboy Bebop and I realized at that point that if I wasn't involved, it would not be Cowboy Bebop. I felt that maybe I should have done this. Although the value of the original anime is somehow far higher now."

The team behind the Netflix series certainly tried to capture the essence of the original anime. Speaking with EW ahead of its release, star John Cho said, "We were all in agreement that we wanted to honor the material and also contribute something original. What we talked about more than anything else was 'Is this in the spirit of Cowboy Bebop?'"

Many people credit Watanabe with Cowboy Bebop's distinctive blend of Western movie motifs with the hallmarks of anime. In an interview with EW last year, Waseda University professor Roland Kelts said, "I think that Shinichirō Watanabe is the only artist of his generation who has been able to so skillfully play with East and West. He's able to play with them and do pastiches that feel original."

Elsewhere in his chat with Forbes, Watanabe says that Cowboy Bebop was created in the late '90s in part because Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was on the horizon. "That meant Bandai thought another Star Wars boom was likely on the way and spaceships would be key," he explained. "So they wanted to sell new plastic models of original spaceships. That resulted in their order to make an anime where spaceships would show up."

For those interested in exploring the differences between the two versions, the original Cowboy Bebop anime is still streaming on Netflix alongside the live-action adaptation.

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