Cowboy Bebop (2021)

Our story opens with a robbery at a casino.  While the robbers threaten patrons, Spike Speigel (John Cho) wanders obliviously into the casino wearing headphones.  Seemingly startled to find the crowd of armed men, he surprises them with his martial arts.  Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), Spike's partner, crashes into the fray while complaining that Spike was supposed to wait for him.  The epic fight sees a hole punched in the casino wall, at which point it is clear that this is a space station; everything starts getting sucked into space.

Spike and Jett are bounty hunters, colloquially called 'cowboys' in the future.  They travel the solar system on the Bebop, Jett's spaceship, and live a hand-to-mouth existence with their meager earnings.  In the first episode of the series, they find themselves working against another cowboy, Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda).  She soon becomes an ally, more out of necessity than desire.  Each character has a tragic backstory that led them to the Bebop.  Spike was a syndicate assassin who had an affair with a colleague's girl.  Believed to be dead by the syndicate, he avoids talk of his past.  Jett had been a cop who was wrongly sent to prison.  He has a strained relationship with his ex-wife and barely sees his 8-year-old daughter.  Awoken from cryosleep with no memories, Faye was scammed by a woman claiming to be her mother.  Abandoned by her 'mother,' she seeks some way of finding out who she was and how she happened to be in cryosleep.

All 10 episodes of the series are mash-up storylines from the original anime series.  Many changes have been made, very few of them that were an improvement.  Ein the Corgi seems to have become a cyborg dog.  Ein was a genius dog but could not project holograms from his eyes in the original.  Faye has become a lesbian and has a faux mother, neither of which happened in the anime.  Her risqué outfit and gambling addiction are gone.  Jett had never been married and had no children.  Also, despite the name, he was not a black.  Radical Edward, who only appears in the series finale, comes across as a Pee Wee Herman wannabe in a crazy outfit.  Spike and his backstory are closest to the source material, though many of the background characters in his past have changed.  Vicious (Alex Hassell), Spike's former partner but now adversary, has married Julia (Elena Satine), Spike's love interest.  Julia's role has greatly expanded in the Netflix version and has a dramatic shift in the finale.

The series is entertaining.  The chemistry between Cho and Shakir is terrific.  However, fans of the original found many of the changes to be vandalism.  Some particularly egregious scenes were when Jett talked of using a restaurant bidet, Faye's afternoon lesbian fling with the mechanic, and Spike's potshot at Vicious which demonstrated Spike was an idiot.  Disappointing.  Though not terrible, it doesn't live up to the anime.

Cowboy Bebop (1998)

Thinking I would watch the live action reboot of the series, I decided to watch the original Anime.  Before I finished watching all the episodes, word came that the reboot was canceled.  Hmm.  Maybe I won't be watching the reboot.  Anyway, the original was some really good stuff.

Spike and Jett are a pair of bounty hunters in the year 2071.  Bounty hunters are colloquially called 'cowboys' in the future.  The pair travel the solar system on the Bebop - Jett's ship - to capture various criminals.  Along the way, they recruit Ein the Corgi, Faye Valentine the femme fatale, Radical Edward the computer hacker.  In their adventures, they visit Venus, Earth, Mars, the moons of Jupiter, various space stations, and asteroid colonies.  Most of the time, the bounty gets away and the crew often goes hungry.  Food, or more often the lack of food, is a regular facet of the show.  Though they all call the Bebop home, they often work against one another, most especially Faye.

Spike Spiegel is the central character, a man with a dark past.  He had been part of a crime syndicate on Mars and that history regularly rears its head.  He has a talent for sleight of hand, is a skilled martial artist, and a daring pilot.  He has a single-seat craft - the Swordfish - that he frequently uses in dogfights.

Jett Black is a former cop who lost an arm when he got sloppy.  Though flesh and blood arm replacement was available with the future tech, he has a mechanical arm to remind him not to be careless.  In contrast to Spike's lithe build and lightning speed, Jett is muscular and blunt.  He is called the Black Dog for his tendency not to let go of something once he sinks his teeth into it.  He is the father-figure of the crew despite only being 36.

Faye Valentine loves to gamble and usually burns through any money she has in short order.  Of particular note, she was born in 1994.  She was frozen in 2014 in the wake of the gate accident and not unfrozen until 2068.  Therefore, she is 77 years old in one sense and 23 in another.  To make matters worse, she has amnesia about anything prior to waking from cryogenesis.  She wears hardly anything and lives for today.

Edward is one of the great computer hackers of the solar system and she is a thirteen year-old girl.  She joined the Bebop by hacking the computer and having it come to her, much to the others dismay.  She is a ray of sunshine among this gloomy group, a happy though often incomprehensible member of the crew.

Ein is a Corgi.  Though outwardly a normal dog, he shows insights beyond that of a normal dog.  In one episode, he managed to hack a system that had frustrated Edward.  Most of the time, he's just a dog.  He bonds to Edward when she joins the crew.

The show is noted for the music and style.  It is very unlike the usual fare in the anime genre.  It is not surprising that this anime had been selected for a live action reboot.  It is also not surprising that Netflix failed to capture the magic of the original.

Highly recommended.