Cowboy Bebop Creator Couldn't Bear to Watch Netflix's Remake

Poor writing, riddled with bloat and pacing problems, thanks to stretching storylines of 25-minute anime episodes into hour-long live action episodes. Garbled plotlines. Poor performances by miscast actors. Poor attempts to replicate aesthetics of the original.

All in all, it was yet another addition to the growing list of failed attempts to make a live action adaptation of a popular anime. While enthusiasm for the remake was high before its release, upon release it suffered a huge 59% drop in viewership from its first to second week, and never recovered.

And Shinichirō Watanabe, the director of the original Japanese anime series, clearly shares the prevailing sentiment, except his own feelings were, understandably, even stronger, as he revealed in his recent interview with Forbes.

"For the new Netflix live-action adaptation, they sent me a video to review and check," he said. "It started with a scene in a casino, which made it very tough for me to continue. I stopped there and so only saw that opening scene."

Watanabe went on to explain the reason for that and the reason was very simple:

"It was clearly not 'Cowboy Bebop'."

Well, on that we can agree.

While in some aspects of its outward appearance the TV series tried perhaps too hard to copy the anime, the plot at its core, its prevailing mood and its messages, all were vastly, almost irrecognizably different. You can tell the points at which the writers and the rest of the TV series crew mistakenly decided that they could not just adapt the original, but improve upon it.

They seemingly were surprised by the audience's reaction and the resulting cancellation. As John Cho (who played Spike Spiegel) said in an interview: "It's stunning to me…It was very shocking and I was bummed."

At least, for Watanabe there was a silver lining: "Although the value of the original anime is somehow far higher now."

What can we say, that sounds true enough.