Forum - View topic

INTEREST: Live-Action Cowboy Bebop's John Cho Shares Disappointment Over Show's Cancelation

I don't mean to put words in anyone's mouth, but what I think Puniyo is trying to get at is that there are two competing goals that have always dogged not just live-action remakes of anime, but the entire phenomenon of adapting anime for non-Japanese (or Asian more broadly) audiences. It's fine to say that the original was so popular, etc., but it remains true too that the scope of the audience it appealed to was small relative to a lot of other IPs outside the anime spectrum. They want to make something that won't piss off the anime community, but also that looks beyond that community to all those people who aren't/weren't interested in that anime.

Any remake's purpose is going to be to tap into that, and you aren't likely going to get there by just regurgitating a product that people can already consume, just with a bit of a different look because it's live-action instead of anime. It's not as though they're adapting series that would qualify as lost media that people can't just watch as their original anime. And unlike live-action, in most cases it's not as though the visual presentation of the originals of the series they've adapted have aged all that much - we're not talking 50+ yr old series here. Given the limitations live-action introduces, simply going for a straight remake is destined to fail as well. It may make anime fans happy, but only a small subset, with most not caring at all about their favorite series being live-action, and little the endeavor will do to grow the fanbase of the IP beyond those who likely would have already heard of the series in its animated form.

Well, I can appreciate Cho's enthusiasm and commitment and wish things had turned out better.

For adaptations of something as weird as One Piece, for example, you have to go all the way on its weirdness, because when there's a live-action adapt of anything, anime fans will be drawn first to that product because they want to see how good the thing they love looks like in live action, which is the most simple explanation a lot of people (especially on this very site) fail to grasp when cosidering why fans ask for that kind of faithfulness, and that's why I think (and also hope) that the NF adapt of that manga/anime fails as well.

People who ask for an adaptation to be 1:1 faithful to the source material tend to only do this for validation and wanting any new fans to get the same enjoyment of the material that they got out of the source even when some of that material is legitimately no good or simply wouldn’t work in the adaptation.

The live action Bebop seemed to be a case where they're trying to please everyone but end up pleasing no one by trying to want to do original spin on things but also trying to cater the fans of the original.

Agreed with this - and I'm saying that as one of the (apparently rare?) people who actually mostly liked the adaptation.