You like bounty hunters? You like space? Take a seat, friend, because I’ve got some good news for you. A live action adaptation of Sunrise’s Cowboy Bebop anime is in the works. Prepare yourself.
Funimation
According to Deadline, Marty Adelstein’s Tomorrow studios is partnering with Midnight Radio to produce Cowboy Bebop for television with the blessing of Sunrise, the studio responsible for the original series. In a public statement, Adelstein expressed his excitement at developing the adaptation for American audiences.
“The animated version has long resonated with audiences worldwide,” Adelstein said. “With the continued, ever growing, popularity of anime, we believe a live action version will have an incredible impact today.”
In the original Cowboy Bebop series that ran for 26 episodes and concluded in 1999, humans have fled an uninhabitable Earth in favour of various colonised planets where groups of bounty hunters make a living tracking down rogue criminals. The series chronicles the adventures of the Bebop, a ship piloted by one Spike Spiegel (a con artist), his partner Jet Black (a former police officer), Faye Valentine (a con artist dealing with amnesia), Ed Wong (a prodigy hacker), and their dog Ein, a superhumanly intelligent corgi.
While Cowboy Bebop has some of the most gorgeous animation you’ll ever see, it’s the series’ soundtrack that people most often bring up in their celebration of it. It will make a jazz fan out of you.
No news about casting or production has been announced as of yet. For now, you’ll have to spend your time debating whether or not this adaptation is actually a good idea (could be) and who you want to see as Spike (Keanu, obviously).
Comments
20 responses to “Cowboy Bebop Is Getting An American, Live-Action TV Series”
for f in {1..100}; do echo “Nope!”; done; echo “So much nope!”
Let me fix that for you:
yes Nope! | head -100; echo “Actually, yes.”
git revert HEAD # While the code is more optimal, the ideas were just plain wrong.
Will Fox cancel this one after one season as well?
Kill me now.
Is Scarlet Johansson going to play Spike?
more serious note. Here’s a thought. Don’t make a Cowboy Bebop series. Make a Sci-fi series INSPIRED by cowboy Bebop themes…and hope it doesn’t fail like Firefly..
^ This! ^
I fail to see why so much time and money is invested into “re-visualising” an old franchise and then expecting the game lightning to strike.
Either just make better remasters (the current BluRay’s don’t count as they are interlaced) or create new IP.
Seriously, if my computer had to be rebooted as many times as some of these franchises I’d just burn the thing.
No… they will miss the whole character development completely and make her Ed. Good luck trying to make people confused if she is a little boy.
Noo……
You know, because the popularity of anime is primarily based on how much live action is in it…
so the probability of a white washing controversy will be…?
None. The main characters are white.
“But the series is Japanese, the creator is Japanese and they speak Japaneeeese!”
There WILL be a controversy regardless of the logic of its existence.
I can honestly say im not keen at all.
Cowboy Bebop is one of the original greats, just leave it alone please…
I can actually see this being done pretty well. I mean, Bebop is a space western. It doesn’t really have many cultural aspects that make it overtly Japanese. I think that they can do it. I also think that this show will be shit on even if it’s good because “m-muh live action anime! You can’t make a classic like Bebop work in live action!”. There is nothing in Bebop that really requires it to be animated.
The Rurouni Kenshin movies are great examples of how well a live action take on anime can be. Especially the first one.
I feel the same. Firefly meets The Expanse, perhaps. It could be enjoyable.
“The Blessing of the Studio”… *facepalm*
In the works and early stages and you got a Blessing… your planning on sinning right away. Not the creator… the studio.
A blessing… not in cooperation… not hiring them for art direction… we showed them a summary plan and a couple bits of concept art (which we could of just taken from deviantart) and we got a “mild approval”
Reading the source, I think maybe Charles has misrepresented it. Sunrise are co-exec-producers with Midnight Radio, so perhaps there will be some decent influence from them.
I think they could pull it off if they take the rough framework of the anime and then make it into it’s own thing. Trying to pull close to the original series is where the problems are going to arise.
Firefly with some noir/pulp detective trappings added on sounds like it could potentially be pretty alright.