The show is telling the audience that this isn’t a show about good guys it’s a show about morally dubious guys killing badder guys.īut it’s never that simple, is it? The casino sequence is just a stylish preamble for the episode’s main action, which sends Spike and Jet to a galactic settlement called New Tijuana and eventually reveals that Spike still has a heart in there somewhere. When Jet objects to Spike’s kill-’em-all-and-let-God-sort-’em-out gunplay, it’s not on moral grounds it’s because they can’t collect a bounty on a corpse. Other than that, the key takeaway here is that our colorful heroes have no problem shooting their adversaries in the head. This is Cowboy Bebop telling you what to expect from Cowboy Bebop: blood, banter, and big bangs (of both the firearm and celestial variety). When one of them finally draws a BFG-style gun and punches a hole in the wall, and it’s revealed that this casino also happens to be a space station - shaped like a giant roulette wheel, of course - Spike and Jet manage to capture Tanaka at the expense of some serious collateral damage to the architecture. Tanaka’s big anti-capitalist monologue is interrupted by Spike Spiegel (John Cho) and Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), a couple of bounty hunters who riff while they blow away a half-dozen of Tanaka’s goons. (Coming right after the Netflix logo, I’d like to imagine this line is a self-aware, cheeky wink at everyone who railed against a live-action Cowboy Bebop, but that’s probably reading too much into it.) They control everything now,” he complains. In a cold open, we’re introduced to Tanaka, a gun-toting gangster holding a casino hostage.
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To be fair, the premiere has a lot of work to do to establish Cowboy Bebop’s characters, premise, and universe (though to be just as fair, the original series did the same job in an episode that was half as long). Most importantly, for both the episode and the season: The soundtrack is loaded with songs from Seatbelts, the Yoko Kanno–led band whose music was so essential to the original show’s style and tone.īut all this reverence does come at a cost: As a stand-alone episode, “Cowboy Gospel” feels just a little wobbly. The plot is drawn directly from “Asteroid Blues,” the anime’s first episode, and some of the original’s most iconic images have more or less been replicated shot for shot.
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![happy tree friends episode 1 happy tree friends episode 1](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51tlbXnGkeL._RI_.jpg)
The show’s entire aesthetic - the opening credits, the main character’s hair and costumes, the interiors and exteriors on the Bebop - are designed to signal a deep reverence for the original. When it comes to existing fans of the anime, “Cowboy Gospel” certainly does its best to win over skeptics.
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Second: It needs to convince those that haven’t seen the anime, but who might take a flyer on a new sci-fi/action series starring John Cho, that this is a TV show worth watching all on its own.
![happy tree friends episode 1 happy tree friends episode 1](https://simkl.in/fanart/20/20291fd6ddeac55_w.jpg)
First: It needs to convince hard-core fans of the anime that this new adaptation understands what was great about the original series. So the premiere of the new Cowboy Bebop really has two functions.