Yeah, the first episode was hard for me, then once I accepted how camp it was I quite liked it. I think of it as something like a modern Dick Tracy.
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I actually enjoyed the live action one and took the opportunity to re-watch the anime, too. The casting was fantastic although I felt the characters were a bit off from what they were in the original. But no big deal, I mostly enjoyed it on its own merits. I did wish that Vicious and Julia would have had a grand piano dropped on them maybe 4 mins into the second episode, though. Having them not in the show would have made it much better IMO.
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OK before I was just like “ha its clearly rubbish I’ll not bother” but now am actually angry 
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Have you seen it though?
It’s fantastic, and I rewatch it at least once a year.
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The chimpanzee abuse alone makes it deserve that title.
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I mean, I espouse the opinion that all adaptations are fanfiction (and AU fanfics at that) and one should always approach them that way, but I still have kneejerk reactions while watching the Wheel of Time when something violates book canon in a weird way and have to wrestle my annoyance down.
Hmm, wonder if it’s related to the uncanny valley - something that looks almost right but in doing so highlights the little differences all the more.
I don’t know; it’s personally very strange to me because I enjoy fanfic, even AU fanfic, but “adaptations” where I’m familiar with the source material can grind my gears so easily. Maybe because fanfic is usually not just faithful to canon but wholly dependent on it for context, while an adaptation is nominally supposed to be consumed independently from the source material and is thus free to change things without justification?
…Suddenly I feel like I’ve been wrong, that appraising adaptations as fanfic has been giving the former too much credit. I need to digest this.
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On the other hand, it appears that if people don’t binge-watch a show in the first week or two of its release, then Netflix considers it a failure. So waiting just increases the chances they’ll cancel it…
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I enjoy what I have watched of it so far. It’s very slick and pretty, and I like both John Cho and Mustafa Shakir in their roles. But somehow it hasn’t really hooked me in. It’s beautiful. But having watched the anime like, 30 times, maybe its that it is so faithful to the original.
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I take back what I said; I agree that they do care about “you”; that is to say, they are interested in drawing in a new and different audience from the larger pool of people that are unfamiliar or unsatisfied with the original work, and that any appeal to the fans of the original work is incidental.
I still think it is ethically or morally dubious to market it to fans in an attempt to increase word of mouth or exploit name recognition, and obviously it’s got its own risks in terms of inviting backlash in the form of negative reviews and word of mouth, but at it’s core I can’t see it as morally different from fanfiction in terms of using an existing, proven work as the basis of a new work as an alternative to creating an original work.
Still haven’t figured out what grinds my gears with adaptations well enough to put it into words, but both the linguistic concept of “false friends” and the idea that “what get you into trouble is what you know for sure that just ain’t so” are bouncing about my tiny mind.
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Which brings the question… which DGHDA? The British one which is arguably more faithful to the books or the Netflix show which IMO is better despite being less faithful?
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Yes.
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This is exactly how I feel about it. It’s close enough to be recognisably Bebop, but not sufficiently different enough to be it’s own thing.
Part of the problem is that good shows require time to grow. There are a ton of great shows that took a season or two to properly bed in, but the unforgiving algorithms are robbing us (and Netflix, Amazon et al.) of these shows. Nothing’s allowed to be slow burn anymore.
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To be fair, live-action remakes of anime very rarely succeed, even when entirely produced in Japan. (GTO did fairly well, but both the anime and live-action versions were adapted from the original manga, which is orders of magnitude better than either.)
Anime, as a medium, is free of the constraints that limit live-action productions. As such, live-action remakes can only really add star power, and that rarely withstands the test of time.
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Rrr. At least agree that the live action was an amuse-bouche for the anime. Think of it as working the director up from soy mash instead of born adult prodigy understandable in their own time.
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Controversial opinion here: maybe at least part of the problem is the prevalence of the sort of person who goes out of their way to tell people that they’re wrong and stupid for liking something on its own merits?
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Yeah, that always bugged me. They drive spaceships, fer chrissakes.
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Doesn’t seem so alien to me. ‘By the time I pay my bills, I have enough to pay for gas to work, but I guess I’m gonna have to get by on raman this week…’ Sketchy, yeah, but in the same way economics in every era is sketchy. Just a different mode of transport.
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But if you found yourself in that situation on a regular basis wouldn’t you consider trading in your fishing-trawler for something a bit more fuel efficient? They’ve shown that there are plenty of car-sized spacecraft that other people use. It’s hard to imagine that the fuel and upkeep on a craft that’s way, way bigger wouldn’t cost more.
I need to stretch out. That’s why I drive a Winnebago in center city. Parking be damned!
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