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> When its live-action reboot failed last year Did it fail? I enjoyed it! I don’t stay up to date with the critics though. Hope this doesn't mean the second se

• hoten 4y ago
  It was cancelled.
• InvertedRhodium 4y ago
  It was cancelled within a handful of episodes airing. Personally, as a fan of the animated series, I thought it was awful and only made it through the first episode and half of the second.
• the_af 4y ago
  It failed and got canceled by Netflix. Now, I know getting canceled by Netflix means little. I gave this show a chance, after being impressed with the intro sequence remake, but found it to be soulless. Maybe Cowboy Bebop just doesn't translate to live action; what seemed charming in the original was played for kitsch in the remake. I couldn't even make it to the last episodes.
  • porknubbins 4y ago
    I thought Jet was great, Spike and Faye were just ok, Vicious was absolutely terrible and since the main villain was basically played for comic relief it kept the show from having any real emotional impact or gravitas.
    • excalibur 4y ago
      Totally agree. And Ed. She was only shown briefly, but what was there was truly terrible. It was like they scribbled some dialogue, grabbed a kid off the street, designed a costume, and filmed the cameo in a single day. If this series were ever to continue, I hope they would reevaluate their choices here.
      • KennyBlanken 4y ago
        I feel like the live Ed was universally disliked, but everyone seemed to agree that Ed would have been nearly impossible for anyone to pull off in-person without it looking really cringe.
    • echelon 4y ago
      They nailed Jet! I was so pleased with that casting. The problem was the horrible writing and the campy tone. They turned the series into a WB show with cartoon characters. Vicious was laughably cheesy. I was expecting Casino Royale set in space, but young and jazzy and cool. Instead we got standard Netflix wall spaghetti.
  • KennyBlanken 4y ago
    Yep. Everything shouted "see, we did that thing from the anime, everyone! WINK-U FACE-U!" and on top of that, it was a jumbled mess because instead of just adapting the story, they had the audacity to "re-imagine" it. Fans love the series because it's such masterpiece of storytelling and it had amazing production quality. It's like taking pasta, tomatoes, cheese, olive oil, raw chicken breast, etc and throwing them in a blender, tossing the paste into a pan and baking it, and being amazed that you somehow didn't reproduce a mouth-watering delicious chicken Parmesan.
    • CoastalCoder 4y ago
      > It's like taking pasta, tomatoes, cheese, olive oil, raw chicken breast, etc and throwing them in a blender, tossing the paste into a pan and baking it, and being amazed that you somehow didn't reproduce a mouth-watering delicious chicken Parmesan. Funny timing on that simile. Right now I'm watching a Cutthroat Kitchen episode where contestants almost have to do that very thing.
    • the_af 4y ago
      Oh, I don't mind them re-imagining it. A carbon copy would have been no good; after all, Cowboy Bebop already exists. The problem is that they completely botched it. It's embarrassing to watch.
  • kstenerud 4y ago
    It could have been successfully moved into live action, but as the animation was built by creative genius, you'd need the same level of skill for a good live action. Maybe someone like Joss Whedon could have breathed life into it? The show had potential, but the casting was bad, the character design was bad, the writing was bad, the directing was sub-par, and the aesthetic was 75% there which just isn't enough for something like this.
    • dvtrn 4y ago
      Maybe someone like Joss Whedon could have breathed life into it? Joss Whedon has his turn with Cowboy Bebop when it was called 'Firefly' :P
      • NetOpWibby 4y ago
        And that was an excellent show. His work there could easily apply to Bebop.
  • falcolas 4y ago
    I got through it by fast forwarding through all of the scenes containing Vicious and his wife. They weren't good. The rest wasn't really that much better, but it at least had nostalgia going for it.
    • the_af 4y ago
      They really butchered Vicious. Instead of an unpredictable, cold blooded killer they gave us a clown.
  • AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    They basically needed a reincarnation of Bruce Lee to play Spike. They didn't find that person in casting. Series failure inevitable.
• libraryatnight 4y ago
  Show was an abomination. Hard to watch. And yes it's one of Netflix's smarter cancellations.
  • SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Huge fan of the anime and watched the original USA airings… couldn’t make it two episodes into this. Something about it was very off.
    • libraryatnight 4y ago
      I felt exactly the same. It was uncomfortable to watch for me
  • dylan604 4y ago
    Sounds like it would have been smarter to never have greenlit the project to begin with. I wonder how many of these types of shows were passed by HBO, so Netflix jumps on it, or if Netflix took it just so someone else couldn't, or any other number of situations that meant it was getting made not because of true desire to make that project but business
    • libraryatnight 4y ago
      That's true - it really shouldn't have been made.
• jasonboyd 4y ago
  It was cancelled pretty quickly. There was a lot of hate for it. I enjoyed it for what it was and would have liked to see another season.
  • dylan604 4y ago
    It wasn't the worst thing I've seen on Netflix, but I never watched any of the original anime. Kind of like never reading the book before watching the Hobbit. Your opinion of that movie is much different from those that had.
• cyberlurker 4y ago
  I also enjoyed it for what it was. I was easily able to make it through the entire season and also would have liked a second season. The anime is one of the best of all time though, so I understand why people had high expectations.
• jandrese 4y ago
  It was cancelled before most people had a chance to see it.
• pyinstallwoes 4y ago
  The show was racist in its attempt to not be racist. Aside from that, it obviously lacked from the initial perspective.
• beloch 4y ago
  Netflix has a pattern. They have stats from a lot of multi-season shows and know that there's a sharp drop off in viewers the more seasons a show runs for, even if they're all excellent. This makes the first season a great investment, but remaining seasons are subject to rapidly diminishing returns. So, their solution is to put a lot of effort into season 1 and, if it does really well, put vastly diminished resources into season 2. If season 1 doesn't blow their metrics out the window, they just cancel it. Since season 2's produced under this approach are usually pretty rough (e.g. Altered Carbon), there are almost never season 3's. There are exceptions (e.g. Stranger Things), but there are an awful lot of Netflix shows that never get a second season despite a very respectable first season (e.g. Marco Polo). The anime version of Cowboy Bebop is a classic. In general, it's hard to remake a classic and leave fans of the classic happy. When the first shots of the costumes and cast came out I almost completely dismissed the Netfix series. Harold from Harold&Kumar is Spike? Jet looked like a janitor. The hype wasn't there for me. So, I delayed watching the series, heard the grumblings, and went in with low expectations. This is not Netflix's A-game. They did a great job in some respects, but really cheaped out in others. The casting is a mixed bag, but mostly good. John Cho is actually pretty good as spike and Mustafa Shakir is brilliant as Jet. Pineda's Faye Valentine was less good. While Spike and Jet still felt at least somewhat like the anime characters, Valentine in the Netflix series was just off, and far too comical. Ed shows up only in the last episode and, well... Yeah. Let's face it, Ed is a difficult role and has to be played by someone fairly young. If I were directing a series like this I'd definitely want to shoot several episodes from later in the series with Ed before shooting the introduction precisely because of how hard it is to jump into the roll. The actor who played Ed was set up to fail. The effects are good and the Bebop plus Swordfish are very well realized. The action is fairly well choreographed. The sets outside the ship are where Netflix got cheap. The rewrote things to reuse several locations a lot, such as the bar. The same junkyard set stands in for an assortment of locations and seems to pop up every episode, minimally redressed and shot from different angles. The writing is where Netflix deviated from the anime most substantially. The plots of some episodes are almost totally unrecognizable, and generally do not compare well to the anime. The writers chose to flesh out and make explicit more of the syndicate backstory, with far more of Spike, Viscious, and Julia's past shown. The show becomes more interesting because of this. If they'd done a more faithful remake there'd have been less reason to watch the show. I'd have preferred that Ein's treatment was just a little more faithful though. Poor dog got screwed. If you're a fan of the anime, lower your expectations, expect something a little different, and you may enjoy the Netflix series. I'd watch Season 2 even knowing it would be one of Netflix's usual half-efforts with a greatly reduced budget. It's not the anime but, if you like the genre, it's worth watching.