Sure, it’s only a trailer, it’s not the show, but this is great. Netflix has been teasing us with little Cowboy Bebop bits for weeks—the opening credits, the “Lost Session“—but they finally served up an official trailer for the live-action Cowboy Bebop, and it’s stylish, snappy, and sometimes downright gorgeous.
The trailer leans hard into space noir vibes, at first setting Spike Spiegel (John Cho) apart and alone—placing a shot glass on a bar, visiting someone who knows what he “used to be.” Someone tried to kill him. There was a blonde. He goes by a different name these days.
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But the tone changes when Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) and Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) show up, shifting everything into a scrappy, bantery, reluctant-team-up situation in which they have a job to do, but Spike really wants to kill Faye. Maybe just a little bit. Maybe a lot. Can they work together against teddy-bear-costumed figures and evil clowns?
As Netflix puts it:
Cowboy Bebop is an action-packed space Western about three bounty hunters, aka “cowboys,” all trying to outrun the past. As different as they are deadly, Spike Spiegel (John Cho), Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), and Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) form a scrappy, snarky crew ready to hunt down the solar system’s most dangerous criminals — for the right price. But they can only kick and quip their way out of so many scuffles before their pasts finally catch up with them.
Showrunner André Nemec (High Fidelity, Zoo) says the new Bebop is an “expansion to the canon” of the original animated series (which is currently available on Netflix). The trailer makes great use of returning composer Yoko Kanno’s “Tank,” but at this point I think we’re all getting a little impatient to see what else Kanno has in store for the new series.
Cowboy Bebop lands on Netflix on November 19th.
