If you were like many teenage millennials who spent their late nights huddled in front of a nostalgically box-shaped TV watching Cartoon Network’s after-hours anime lineup endearingly called “Adult Swim,” chances are you came across one in particular called Cowboy Bebop. Many of those lucky souls would become enamored by the one-of-a-kind, western noir-Esque storytelling and come back every week to catch as many episodes as possible. If you fall in such a category and have yet to obtain a high-quality collection of the entire anime, a new chance is about to swoop in from the hyperspace gate. Per a report from Collider, just in time for its 25th Anniversary, a new, limited edition Blu-ray box set of the entire Cowboy Bebop series is releasing on April 4, courtesy of Crunchyroll.
As seen in the pictures below, the series will be available in both a standard and a limited edition set. It also comes with audio commentaries—both in Japanese and English—of director Shinichiro Watanabe and composer Yoko Kanno, cast and crew interviews, and other special clips like “Memo from Bebop: The Dub Sessions Remembered,” “Dinner Aboard the Bebop,” and “Ein’s Summer Vacation.”
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Cowboy Bebop, which first aired in 1998, is set in the still-far-off year of 2071 in the deepest reaches of the solar system. The story focuses on a comically-misfit band of intergalactic bounty hunters that come together via utterly unexpected circumstances and travel the stars aboard their spaceship, the “Bebop.” Each character is unique and rife with their own set of personal baggage. The leader, Spike Spiegel, is a tall, lanky retired ex-crime syndicate member with a powerful sixth sense for truth and Bruce Lee-Esque fighting skills. Jet Black is a former cop from the satellite planet Ganymede that owns the ship and acts as Spike’s foil; hard-working and determined, whereas Spike typically opts for nonchalant laziness. Faye Valentine joins as the literal wildcard, an adept and opinionated con artist from Earth who acts like a thorn in their side but handles herself quite well. Despite this, she’s saddled with enormous debt due to an incident stemming from her past. A young, overly hyper computer hacker named Edward hacks her way onto the Bebop and serves as the computer whiz of the gang, able to break into any level of cybersecurity anywhere. An adorable Welsh Corgi named Ein rounds out the group, though he isn’t quite an average dog, as the show alludes.
As the group travels the galaxy, hunting down criminals and collecting bounties where they can to survive, each of them gradually runs into remnants of their pasts, for better or worse, including the Red Dragon Syndicate that Spike was once a prominent member of. Each episode in the series is called a “session,” and many are named after popular Rolling Stones songs. Shinichiro Watanabe is the original director of the series, and renowned composer Yoko Kanno produced all the music for the series.
Why Did the Live-Action Bebop Fail So Badly?
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Despite the untouchable, immense success and fandom of the original anime, the recent live-action remake of the Cowboy Bebop series, which was highly anticipated by those same fans, crash-landed on the polar opposite end of the spectrum. Right after the first season premiered in full on Netflix, the show was swiftly canceled, ending any prospects of continuing the story.
Extremely mixed to negative reviews that criticized the casting, the changed sequence of events in the story, the vibe that couldn’t measure up to the original material, and the overall lack of cohesion of all these elements weighed down the remake to the point that it just could not hold up. No matter how many years were spent building up the mere potential of a remake of one of the greatest animes of all time, it simply did not seem meant to be. A petition was even started by fans to rescue the remake and let it continue, but the 75,000 signatures weren’t enough to sway Netflix. Perhaps the one-of-a-kind formula of the original is one that can’t be replicated and, like many other attempted live-action anime renditions, is better left alone.