Thread by @heyjenbartel

Honestly I wasn’t going to say anything publicly but now that Netflix Bebop has been canceled, I would just like to point out that the main issue was not Ed, or Vicious, but rather that it recreated a piece of media with defined political statements and removed every. last. one.

In the original series, we’re introduced to a world that, despite being set in a future where humans have traveled to the far reaches of the galaxy, they still face all of today’s inequities—so much so that it’s normal for bounty hunters to compete with one another for a living.

Spike had to fake his own death to escape the criminal enterprise he once was a part of—an insidious organization that quietly causes suffering everywhere its reach extends. We only ever catch glimpses of The Syndicate, but their subtle influence is felt throughout the show.

Jet leaves his police career behind after being betrayed by his partner and discovering that literally every other cop in his department was also corrupt. The original series very intentionally shows that rogue bounty hunters have a higher moral code than actual police officers.

Faye is woken from cryosleep and swindled not only by a con man, but also by the hospital staff who work with him. She's in massive debt because of exorbitant charges that got tacked on to her *medical bills*—revealing an all-too-familiar broken system that ruins people's lives.

Gren is a war veteran who was unjustly imprisoned and medically experimented on, because his (at the time) comrade Vicious set him up. When Gren finally confronts Vicious for this betrayal, he appears to not even remember Gren at all. To The Syndicate, everyone is expendable.

Ed and Ein are the smartest characters on the Bebop, subverting expectations that are based only on appearance, and acting as the glue that really binds Spike, Jet, and Faye together throughout the majority of the original show. Ed's departure is the herald to Spike's demise.

There's a blink-and-you'll miss it moment in the movie with Punch (one of the hosts from the bounty hunter leaderboard show Big Shot, aka Alfredo) admitting to his mother that he's been let go from his job; and he's completely dropped the fake accent he put on for the audience.

The original made it a point to focus on the struggles of poor and working class people within this dystopian future, often spending entire episodes to show how established systems and power structures have harmed not only the main cast, but every single side character as well.

Through these intimate character vignettes, the original series takes a very clear stance on a wide range of socioeconomic + political issues that frankly, in the 25 years since Cowboy Bebop's original release, have been further exacerbated rather than resolved (or even improved)

The live action version of CB erases all of these details, instead prioritizing the exterior "cool factor" of each character, ridding them of the majority of their original motivations—effectively hollowing them out & turning them into shallow, unrelatable versions of themselves.

Jet is no longer the only good cop in his squadron, now there's just 1 bad guy there (his partner, of course) making his reasoning for leaving everything he took pride in feel muddled and removing the original show's statement on police corruption entirely.

Faye in the original show was a capable and crafty femme fatale in massive medical debt who, under an exterior layer of sass, was a compassionate and loyal friend who was desperately terrified of being abandoned. The live action version is written mostly as a capital-G Girlboss.

In the OG, Vicious was sort of like Jaws—we only saw a dorsal fin every now and then and that's all we needed. He was terrifying because of all the blanks we had to fill in ourselves. In the live action show, he's belligerent and incompetent and not a worthy nemesis for Spike.

This version of Cowboy Bebop is a hollow, vapid, sometimes literal shot-for-shot remake that removes most of what made the original series so interesting and endearing to fans. I could go on, but this thread is too long already and I think you get the point: Just watch the anime.

Sorry one more thing—for all the effort the live action show put into surface-level Diversity & Representation (capital D, capital R) it actually somehow ended up less diverse than the anime juuuust saying.

Oops I’ve been informed this actually happens in one of the last episodes in the series, not in the movie. My bad. I do believe it’s both in the Japanese version as well as the English dub though!

https://twitter.com/heyjenbartel/status/1469270182635966464

Wow uh I did not expect this thread to get this much attention. I’m trying to catch up on responses rn but it’s clear to me that one major cause of Netflix Bebop’s issues was a lack of diversity in the writer’s room and at management levels, especially in terms of economic class.

Part of why so much of the writing on this show sanitized the political subtext of the original series & ultimately fell flat was bc it was very obviously filtered through the lens of neoliberal elites who failed to recognize the dystopian parallels between the OG and real life.

Throughout the promotion of this show, there was a lot of talk about representation and diversity—and I don’t want to minimize the importance of that, but without a commitment to a diverse range of lived experiences in the writer’s room, the on-screen talent was set up to fail.

The reason why the OG has stayed so resonant (and relevant) is because Watanabe and Nobumoto very intentionally reflected the real world back at the audience in an effort to make the show feel grounded. It never aimed to be heavy handed because the point was simply to be honest.

Between Squid Game & Arcane, it should be obvious to Netflix that stories about class struggle are resonating deeply with audiences around the world—it’s a shame that live action CB largely avoids this, bc the source material contained so much subtle criticism of unjust systems.

The only way you could interpret Bebop this way is if you yourself are detached from all of the ways in which it reflects our modern dystopian society today. If you are unaffected by systemic injustices in the world around you, you’ll likely also be able to ignore them in media.

https://twitter.com/WIRED/status/1458595164532797447

I know this is a dead horse but I can’t stop thinking about how an animated show that featured a different set of cowboys entirely—or even one that took place decades later, with an older Ed leading the Bebop and building a new crew—would have been so much more interesting.

Even if it *had* to be live action for some reason, the world of Cowboy Bebop was so rich that there would have been a lot of room to do a brand new story that took place in it. You could even have a couple cameos for fans like the Swordfish or Ed’s hacker symbol showing up, etc.