Cowboy Bebop: How They Built the Bebop

It’s tough to categorize Cowboy Bebop. The wildly influential jazzy neo-noir space western has become “a new genre itself,“ and doesn’t neatly fit into “science fiction.“ But even with its much bigger ambitions, Cowboy Bebop set a new bar for spaceship design. And translating these iconic animated spacecraft into live action was no easy task for the Netflix Cowboy Bebop show. In this video, we delve into how the ships of the classic anime were recreated for the Netflix series, talking to showrunner André Nemec, production designer Gary Mackay, and visual effects supervisor Victor Scalise to get the inside scoop on their process. For all its artistry and maturity, Cowboy Bebop began the same way as countless other animated projects: as a vehicle to sell toys of, well, vehicles. Creator Shinichiro Watanbe was initially given one instruction. “As long as there’s a spaceship in it, you can do whatever you want,“ he was told. So legendary mecha desig