Fans of the beloved Cowboy Bebop anime series should know that Netflix's live-action series won't be a direct adaptation of Shinichirō Watanabe's genre-defying classic. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Netflix's Cowboy Bebop showrunner André Nemec revealed that the live-action show will not be a direct adaptation, and that it's an "expansion to the canon" that will "add things" to the anime's mythos.
"I promise we will never take the original anime away from the purists. It will always exist out there," Nemec promised. "But I'm very excited about the stories that we're telling. I believe we've done a really nice job of not violating the canon in any direction but merely offering some extra glimpses into the world that was already created."
Nemec added, "We got under the skin of who the live-action characters were going to be. I think that the poetic nature of the anime absolutely allowed for us to mine the archetypal nature of the characters and dig out deeper histories that we wanted to explore — and answer some of the questions that the anime leaves you with. I think to just redo the anime will leave an audience hungry for something that they already saw. The anime did an amazing job. We don't need to serve the exact same meal. I think it would have been disappointing if we did."
Related: Cowboy Bebop Showrunner Teases Ed's Role in Netflix's Live-Action Series
In an interview with Polygon, Nemec said that every episode of the series will nod to the anime in subtle ways, and said that he and his team considered how they could "build out the continuing stories of Spike Spiegel and Jet Black and Faye Valentine while also mining their past stories from the anime".
Netflix's already made one significant change in its live-action Cowboy Bebop series in casting John Cho in a lead role of space cowboy Spike Spiegel. In the anime series, Spike is 27-years-old, and Cho just recently turned 49. This decision sparked some backlast online, and Cho addressed this issue.
Netflix's live-action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop is set to release all 10 episodes on November 19, 2021. For more details about the series, check out everything you need to know about it here, and don't forget to follow our Netflix Rocks My World page on Facebook for the latest updates.
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