I guess it's time we blow this scene, get everybody and their stuff together... OK 3,2,1 let's jam!
Let me get this out of the way:
I haven't seen the WHOLE season, so far I've seen the first two episodes and my thoughts are based on those episodes.
Jon Cho is too old and not athletic enough for Spike. Some fight scenes look good, but others look like something out of 3 Ninjas. Other than that, he's borderline acceptable as a much older Spike Spiegel... not even once while watching the 2 episodes did the "MILF!" chant cross my mind... neither did going to White Castle with Neil Patrick Harris. While we're at it, Kumar is gay. Kal Penn, the Kumar half of Harold and Kumar is gay. Why am I dropping this here? No idea. I'm just looking for stuff to ramble about that don't involve Netflix's bastardization of Cowboy Bebop.
Mustafa Shakir plays a decent Barret Wallace... with hints of Jet Black. I know that Jet's VA was the same as Advent Children's Barret, but that doesn't mean that Jet js Barret. With that said, he actually gives a good performance despite the material he is given. I mentioned that Jet and Barret shared their VA... did you know that Spike Spiegel is the same VA as Vincent Valentine? Talk about Final Fantasy references... I can make a Naruto version with Spike who is also Orochimaru and Faye who is also Moegi... (and Xianghua, and Haruhi Suzumiya, and Athena Cykes...) which brings us to the worst part of the show.
Daniela Pineda being awful was expected and she did not disappoint... She was awful. They basically took out everyrhing that made Faye, well, Faye and replaced it with a generic SFC. Faye is not a "tough action girl". Faye is more of a smooth talking scammer. Here she goes hand to hand against Spike and is able to fend off his attacks quite easily... Spike who has YEARS of Martial Arts training and general assassination skills from The Syndicate has a tough time trying to fend off a mostly amnesiac girl (more like a grandma teapped in a 30-something body.) who was recently unfrozen from Cryogenic treatment.
The visuals are a mixed bag. Some are very colorful like the anime, others seen to have the color sucked out of them like a Zack Snyder movie... while we're at it, half the time there are some really good sets, the other half, bad green screen work that is too obvious... did they run out of budget while filming? Because half the time the series looks like an actual series and the other half looks like a Student film project.
The writing... I'm already on episode 3 and oh my! The cringy dialogue is strong with this one... couple of dick jokes, plenty of colorful language, they even make a black male blackmail joke. That's not counting how they raped BeBop's non-story with a story...
Jet gets a daughter because reasons.
Spike gets his past catching up to him in the most unsubtle ways that make a certain Kojima seem subtle. They made a cowardly bitch out of Vicious... They also butchered Gren and made him into a character that looks like a cross dressing stereotype instead of a man damaged by the side effects of a medication that pumped ridiculous amounts of estrogen into his body, which feminized some of his features... (mainly boobs)... Live action Gren (who might not have any backstory with Vicious) kinda looks like Andrea Rhodea from FFVIIR... Julia is now alive, married to Whiny Vicious, and is a victim of domestic violence... probably if season 2 is made we'll discover some bullshit about her being the ultimate bad guy who manipulated Spike and Vicious all along. Devoid of color, misses the piint of the original, ridiculously edgier and cringy, and it takes far too long to tell a story that the anime did in 24 minutes? Is this a Zack Snyder series?
I wish I could say it's a totaldisaster or a train wreck, but it TRIES to be Cowboy Bebop a bit too hard and the results end up looking like a cheap parody, then it also TRIES to be its own thing and not follow the anime at a 1:1 ratio, but ends up looking bland, generic and completely misses the mark on what the True Cowboy Bebop was trying to say...
So far there is no Edward, but going by what I've seen of Faye and Julia, I have no faith on what will they do to Ed...
Supposedly, that's the official Netflix version of Ed... I feel sorry for the child actor playing Ed, because I already have a bad feeling that I will hate their take on Ed... I hope Ed is a weird girl and that they don't turn her into a genderfluid non-binary person with over 200 labels whose pronouns are Ed... Before anyone tries to use the usual "conversation ender insults" I don't care is the person playing Ed is a she, a they, or a (ridiculously sounding) zhe or xir. The point is that Edward Wang Hwe Pepel Cybulski IV or was it Edward Wong Hau Papelu Trivruski IV... Françoise Appledelhi is a girl, period. Just because the character's original design was a boy and then turned onto a girl in order to even the sausage to clam ratio on the Bebop, doesn't mean that the character is genderfluid. She's a "Cyberpunk Pippi Longstocking".
I saw a clip on YouTube with Ed... absolute CRINGE... any more cringe and I'd have to point a magic sword at it to see if they change into Battle Cat. That was the big surprise at the end... now to be fair, Ed is supposed to be absolute cringe if she were to be adapted to live action, but something feels off... Ed's cringy weirdness feels rehearsed and fake in the live action.
The thing is that I just can't get past episode 3. I simply have no interest on keep watching the show. I guess you could say I tried so hard and got so far but in the end it doesn't even matter... wait did I just quote Linkin Park?
If you want to watch Cowboy Bebop stick to the anime and don't bother with Netflix's Buckaroo Rocksteady... please tell me that you can see what I did there...
So far this isn't on the Netflix version... Anime Superior, Netflix Inferior...
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