Cowboy Bebop (Finally) Rides Again, Thanks to Netflix and John Cho

After he injured his knee, the series lead tried to muscle through the pain—but was soon rushed to the emergency room, where he learned he had torn his ACL.

But now, after nearly a year’s delay and a unique border exemption for cast and crew that saved production, Cowboy Bebop is finally set to premiere on Netflix November 19.

The show became a cult hit, credited with helping introduce American audiences to more adult-oriented anime at a time when Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z were the medium’s banner titles.

In 2008, talk began circling of a live-action Bebop film adaptation from producer Erwin Stoff , starring Keanu Reeves as Spike.

Rather than making Bebop a movie, “the idea was to go there and say, ‘Hey, let us do these for television, and we can get them done and on the air in a year and a half or two years’”—rather than the 10 to 12 years it had been taking to make a film.

He and Allan Poppleton, Bebop’s stunt coordinator, tried rigging up a solution: “Poppleton’s like, ‘If you sit on this stool, and we position the camera here to go from the waist up, you won’t have to put any weight on your knees and you can do this and that,’” Cho remembers with a laugh.

Having your lead actor down for several months—and just as filming is getting underway—is not only a major disruption to a project, but very costly.

“I don’t know that in all of my long producing career, I’ve had that sort of ,” she says.

The long recess became an opportunity for the rest of the show’s cast and creative team as well.

“It was definitely the longest I’ve ever stayed with a character and with a role,” Cho says.

In a chance turn of luck, New Zealand, where Bebop had been filming, remained one of the few places on earth able to contain the virus.

“I think all the Americans came over to New Zealand carrying all the trauma of those first few months in the U.S.,” Cho, who brought his wife and children with him, says.

“There was something very freeing about being in a country knowing that there were zero cases,” says Daniella Pineda, who plays Faye Valentine.

“When I get back to the States, everyone I meet is going to be like, ‘What was your year like? What was 2020 like?,’” Cho says.

In June, Netflix announced that Yoko Kanno, the composer behind Bebop’s iconic score, would return for the live-action adaptation.

“Hopefully a global audience embraces it, because we’ve got a lot more stories to tell,” says Yost, who had already begun planning season two before he wrote season one.

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