Starting in the late 90s, a handful of anime broke through to the mainstream American market, presaging the far greater adoption here we see today. Cowboy Bebop was one of those in the first wave to cross over. It occupied a peculiar place among its contemporaries. On the one hand, it was always the one show I could recommend to people who had never watched an anime before, and expect them to enjoy it. It lacked many of the off-putting stylizations common to anime. On the other hand, it was not without its warts, some of them I found painfully embarrassing precisely because I loved the show so much.
The Netflix adaptation surgically removed many of these warts. The actress playing Faye Valentine wears a perfectly normal outfit, rather than the teenage boy’s fantasy the animated version was stuck with. The stereotypical Native American mystic out of an old western is notably absent. The villain’s cartoonishly edgy name, “Vicious,” is matched with an old code name, “Fearless,” that protagonist Spike Spiegel had when he was part of the same organized crime family, giving it at least an air of plausibility.
The warts are gone, but what is left is not a work that is actually interesting. It is a shame, really. Unlike previous Netflix adaptations, it was clear to me that the show runners on this one were taking the matter seriously, especially when they brought Yoko Kanno, composer of the original’s iconic soundtrack, on board. I do not believe in judging adaptations based on their faithfulness to the original. I try to take it on its own terms, to ask how it comes across if you had never seen what it is adapting. Unfortunately, I think on its own terms, it is largely boring.
It is worth comparing the two not because of a failure of the adaptation to be the original all over again, but because the real failures of the adaptation are more apparent when we look to the successes of the original. Vicious is a case in point—indeed, the Americans’ attempt to save Vicious from his fate of appealing to edgy teenagers was in some way the undoing of the whole series.
As a teenager watching Cowboy Bebop for the first time, I yearned for more episodes that focused on the conflict between Spike and Vicious. But as an adult I realized that that plot, the one long thread through the series, was entirely besides the point. The show is not about Spike and his past, it is about the Bebop, and its space faring, bounty hunting crew. Each episode is a chance encounter, a new story, in which these overskilled yet luckless losers inevitably end up back at square one, and unable to squeeze out a single red cent for their efforts. Director Shinichirō Watanabe feeds audiences a horror story in one episode, a comedy in the next, and a horror that ends in a punchline in yet another.
Each character has a past that has set them adrift, and that past comes through as something flat, something stuck in place. In the American version, Vicious is a perfectly understandable character, a real person that one might meet or read about in history or true crime books. The petty, abusive, arrogant son of a powerful person. His motives are, again, realistic—and utterly uninteresting. The Vicious of the original is this menacing presence who comes occasionally into view only to fade away again. He makes his first appearance as a reactionary, murdering a member of his syndicate who was seeking to make peace with a rival group. His conflict with the leadership is both more interesting and far less explored than in the adaptation.
The adaptation explores the syndicate side of things to death, and worse, it integrates all the episodic plots into an overall storyline. A particular stark contrast was the treatment of the storyline from one of the original’s great horror episodes, “Pierrot Le Fou.” In it, Spike has a chance encounter with a terrifying madman who seems hardly human at all. What is carefully unveiled over the course of the original episode is spelled out all at once in an extremely awkward scene in the adaptation, as Vicious sets the madman free and gives him the mission to assassinate Spike. The elements of chance and mystery are thereby both dispatched in a handful of minutes, and the rambling explanation of the madman’s characteristics is among the most stilted writing in the entire adaptation. All done with the aim of making it fit into the storyline the adaptation was trying to tell, and to fit with the kind of show the adaptation was trying to be.
Because even with all the aggressive aesthetic appropriation, the Netflix adaptation was not trying to be the eccentric noir that the original was. The Netflix adaptation went for fun and campy where the original had a real edge to it. This was well within my expectations; I expected no more than fun and campy, and intended to enjoy it as such. For a little less than half of the adaptation, I was not disappointed. But as the syndicate storyline became all consuming, the episodes became all boring. I’ve seen the typical campy American crime show before; it is not interesting, it is not even especially enjoyable, and not even a new Yoko Kanno soundtrack can save it.
The good news is that Netflix now streams the original. Whether or not you like anime, or even space westerns, odds are you will find something to like about it. It is a bold work of real genius, warts and all.