So, when it was announced that Netflix would be producing a live-action adaptation, you probably had the same question I did: why? Why take something that’s still cool and novel because it’s an Eastern, animated pastiche of Western, live-action cinematic tropes and redo it as a Western live-action production? What’s novel about that? In other words, Cowboy Bebop is an accessible anime to this day, both in terms of its content and availability. And if you want to stream it, you can buy it on Amazon or watch it with a subscription to Hulu, Funimation, or even Netflix themselves (they recently added it). A Blu-ray collection of all 26 episodes is readily purchasable for around thirty bucks. Not only that, a new viewer to Bebop today might very well find familiar parallels to modern productions, as there are now creators whose work is inspired by their growing up with the show (for example, Knives Out and Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson, whose first feature-length film Brickstars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a teenage detective heavily inspired by Bebop’s leading man).įurthermore, it’s not like Cowboy Bebop is lost media from the past. It feels familiar because, even if you haven’t seen any of the films Bebop takes direct inspiration from, you’ve almost certainly seen the conventions these films established pop up in other films and shows. Though animated and sci-fi-set in a dystopian future in which humans have colonized the planets and moons of our solar system- Bebop mostly cribs from classic cinema, primarily Westerns, noir, gangster, and kung-fu films.

However, probably the main reason many people take to Cowboy Bebop so easily is that it speaks in tropes we’re all familiar with. Also, for English-speakers, the dub is so good it’s widely accepted as being as valid as the original Japanese. Yoko Kanno’s jazzy soundtrack swings so hard that people who don’t normally listen to jazz find themselves downloading the soundtrack (guilty!). The beautiful, high-quality animation looks as awesome now as it did when it premiered in 1998. The series was and remains a great gateway title for numerous reasons. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Cowboy Bebop, the anime directed by Shinichirō Watanabe, is what got me into anime. This article spoils much of Netflix’s live-action Cowboy Bebop adaptation as well as the original anime series.

Cowboy bebop series dub