So, the venerable anime Cowboy Bebop recently received a live-action adaptation, courtesy of Netflix. People were understandably skeptical from the moment such a project was announced, and the response once it released was very negative indeed. It was so bad that (consequently, I assume) Netflix opted out of doing a second season of the show, which I understand to be pretty irregular for them.
So, what's the big deal? Expectations.
Cowboy Bebop is, as I said, a venerable anime. It's one of those unassailable classics that you can't criticize without drawing some accusatory looks, like Resident Evil 4 or Super Mario World. So when you tell people you're going to do something new with the property, whatever it is, there are immediately high expectations. The show fell short of those expectations, and people are never going to let Netflix and the production crew hear the end of it. This is a bit problematic to me.
Too often in fandoms, you get cases where people are only able to judge something for what they want or expect it to be, rather than for it is. It happens all the time in videogames, as classics get remade. I struggled with it myself when Ace Combat: Assault Horizon came out, so I understand what it's like to see a beloved property get twisted into something else. But it's really stood out to me with Cowboy Bebop because for as much as I hear about this show, almost none of it has much to do with the show itself but specifically how it fares against the anime. This isn't useful!
ANN wrote a review of Cowboy Bebop, and spent essentially all of it breaking down how it fundamentally misunderstood the source material and was an utter failure as an adaptation. It was an interesting read, but ultimately not useful to me as a review of the show. The problem is that when it came to make a verdict, most of its criticisms were based on its failure as an adaptation. But really, what practical reason is there for anyone to really care about its quality as an adaptation, enough for it to impact a review of the show itself? The anime isn't going anywhere. People can still watch it. This remake doesn't replace it. In such a situation, the matter of whether the remake accurately adapts the original makes for an interesting editorial, a side discussion. But it's ultimately not that relevant when it comes to deciding whether it's a good show on its own. What I ultimately want to know is whether it's a good show, not whether it's a good adaptation.
To be clear, I'm not out to defend the adaptation. I haven't even seen it. The reason why I'm writing this post is because I'm a little frustrated, as someone a bit curious about it, by the fact that all anyone apparently has to say about it is how it fares compared to the anime. I've seen the anime, I can go watch it again, I don't need to know how it compares. Like I said, that's an interesting side discussion but it's not important. It's not useful.
You want to know a situation where I DO care about the quality of an adaptation? When the adaptation is meant to replace the source. For example, this happens occasionally in videogames. Sometimes it's a hard replacement, like what Rockstar tried to do with the recent GTA Remasters where they literally delisted the old versions so they could sell the new ones. That's a case where the quality of something as an adaptation is very relevant, because it's effectively all you're getting. But there are softer cases, too. When a remake comes out of a very old game, one that is otherwise hard to access because it's on deprecated hardware, people also tend to (rightly) care about the quality of the adaptation. For example, if EA announced they were going to remake one of the old SSX games, you can bet your ass I'd be scrutinizing it for deviations, because SSX 3 is not a game I can easily play without emulating. There's practical reason to care about how the adaptation is handled in such a case.
But in a case like this, where the live action sits right alongside the anime? Who cares!
