On Friday, Netflix released the first season of its live-action Cowboy Bebop series. It is, on the whole, not a very good adaptation. There are a lot of reasons that the jump from animation to live action doesn’t quite work, but the show’s sense of humor—illustrated best in a diner scene used as a promo clip last week—is among the most glaring.
Fortunately, that scene plays a lot better now that Cowboy Bebop has been given the same treatment that every TV show and movie eventually must and found itself mashed up with Seinfeld.
Seinfeld Bebop, put together by a Vimeo user with the handle Smelford Dip, sees Bebop’s Spike and Jet sit together at a diner following a slap bass intro, lines about “fake cheesy bread” and bidet misuse punctuated by a laugh track. Faye runs in to tell a story about eco-terrorists that actually works pretty well as a third Seinfeld character’s introduction to a scene. The “that’s nutbags” line, which sticks out unpleasantly from the whole thing, is turned into a Netflix logo at the end.
The scene isn’t any funnier—or fitting with Cowboy Bebop’s characters as they were originally written—this way, but it does at least play better as a bad sitcom. (It also makes us wonder how Seinfeld’s cast matches up with Bebop’s, given that Jet is obviously George here and Spike is given the Jerry role. Is Faye more Kramer or Elaine?)
Now, we’d like a reverse mash-up where George, Elaine, Jerry, and Kramer’s lives are scored by Yoko Kanno’s mournful blues and upbeat jazz compositions. The internet can obviously make this happen and, if we want to wring whatever enjoyment we can from this crossover, it absolutely must.
[via Digg]
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