Cowboy Bebop (2021) - Series Review

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about the first season of Netflix's live-action Cowboy Bebop! It's also the only season, as the series was cancelled after just three weeks. They worked pretty damn fast there. Much faster than me, I only just finished watching it all.

I have no idea what the viewing figures were like, but I do know how it was rated on sites like IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, and it didn't do great. With critics or users. But I've already written about episode one, Cowboy Gospel, and I really liked it, so is there a chance I'm going to like the rest of it as well? Or am I going to witness it crashing down and exploding into flames? Keep reading to find out!

The season has 10 episodes and I've already seen one of them, so I'll be going through the other 9 stories one by one and then I'll write a bit of about the series overall at the end. There will be SPOILERS here, for this series and maybe the anime as well. What I can remember of it at least.

Cowboy Bebop (2021) 1-01: Cowboy Gospel (Quick Review)

Episode:

1

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Writer:

Christopher Yost

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Director:

Alex Garcia Lopez

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Air Date:

19-Nov-2021

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching the first episode of Cowboy Bebop, again. Though this time it's the first episode of the long-awaited live-action version that finally debuted on Netflix a week ago. This would've actually been filmed at some point in 2019 I think, before John Cho's knee injury put the brakes on filming for 6 months. Still, the timing's not that bad, as it's only two months shy of coming out 20 years after the first English airing in 2001.

Look, they've given me an actual title card to use for the picture, just like the anime did! Though this time the background text is Japanese and the foreground text is English, which is a nice touch. They've also pretty much recreated the classic opening credits sequence and they've flipped the script on that as well. My ability to read katana hasn't improved any in the last few days but I'm fairly sure this says "Cowboy Gospel", as in gospel music. The original series featured music-related episode titles and they're carrying on the tradition here. That's one of the few things that Cowboy Bebop has in common with Castlevania games.

The original anime series lasted for just 26 episodes and a movie, mostly because the creator, Shinichirō Watanabe, didn't want the series to become something like Star Trek that just keeps going on and on forever. Now we're in 2021 and Star Trek and Cowboy Bebop are both airing new episodes this month, so I guess that plan failed. We're also getting new The Expanse, Lost in Space and Star Wars soon, plus there's a new Blade Runner anime, so it's a pretty great time to be a science fiction fan. Well, assuming any of them are any good.

There will be SPOILERS beyond this point, but not as many as you might expect. The entire season dropped on Netflix at once, so I'm sure most people who've seen episode 1 will have also seen episode 10 by now, but I'm watching through them slowly and I don't actually know where the season goes from here. Plus I've forgotten most of the original anime series, so I can't spoil much of that either.