Posted in: Anime, Netflix, Opinion, streaming, TV, TV | Tagged: anime, cowboy bebop, Eden Perkins, Faye Valentine, jet black, netflix, opinion, Spike Spiegel

Cowboy Bebop: Ed, Space Battles, Fight Scenes & More Series Thoughts

Netflix's Cowboy Bebop had to take some creative liberties when adapting the anime to live-action. While the main core characters in Spike (John Cho), Jet (Mustafa Shakir), and Faye (Daniella Pineda) remained true for the most part to their anime counterparts, there were more significant changes to the auxiliary characters like Vicious (Alex Hassell) and Julia (Elena Satine). Here are some other notable differences I found.

Where Are the Space Battles in Cowboy Bebop?

While certain memorable scenes were recreated with its premiere episode in "Cowboy Gospel", which actually recreates the anime's climactic space moment involving fugitives and the series' drug of choice, Red Eye. Other than that for a space adventure series, 99% of Netflix's initial dump of Cowboy Bebop takes place planetside. Sure you have the core characters fly their ships at certain points, but there are hardly any aerial battles. I really hope this gets rectified with its next episode dump now that Ed (Eden Perkins) is in the fold. Speaking of which…

Ed

I get that Netflix is trying to save Ed for their next dump only making her physical debut prior to episode 10's end credits in "Supernova Symphony". She was mentioned only once prior to that. It seems as if she's already an established contact, you wouldn't just shoehorn her in there like that. At the very least, we got a proper introduction in the anime. It just feels forced and inorganic the way she's in the show now. They created the exposition to build off of the main characters, but they dropped the ball on introducing arguably the series' most eccentric and charismatic character. Guess given the lazy buildup, André Nemec and Chris Yost will probably dedicate an episode to establish how they even have a relationship in the first place.

Fight Scenes

The fight scenes were a joy to watch for the most part, but sometimes it felt like the action slows down considerably, like they forgot to speed it up to make it look more realistic. It's not grasping at straws when all you ask for is a little more consistency especially given the work put into the scenes. Cho's fights seem to suffer the most from this compared to Hassell's.

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