Samurai Champloo Is The Next Anime That Should Get A Live-Action Adaptation
Netflix finally released its highly-anticipated/dreaded live-action adaptation of One Piece, and the reviews are surprisingly pretty positive — even from fans of the anime. In other words, there’s now proof that a TV series adaptation of a beloved anime can actually be pretty decent or even good. So, with that in mind, maybe Netflix should take a crack at a Samurai Champloo live-action adaptation.
A Samurai Champloo Live-Action Adaptation Could Fix What Cowboy Bebop Got Wrong
Now, most people might have a pretty pessimistic reaction to the idea of a Samurai Champloo live-action adaptation, considering Netflix butchered creator Shinchiro Watanabe’s other masterpiece, Cowboy Bebop. However, this might be exactly the reason this adaptation could work. For one, the creative team behind the adaptation could look at the mistakes Cowboy Bebop made and make sure to avoid them.
Another plus for a Samurai Champloo live-action adaptation is the fact the setting would be much easier to adapt than something like Cowboy Bebop or even One Piece. Samurai Champloo takes place in a fictional version of Edo-era Japan, so it wouldn’t need to adapt something complicated like the unique, singular retro-futurism setting of something like Cowboy Bebop. While that’s no guarantee that the adaptation will be good quality, it at least gives it a better chance of looking similar to the anime.
Samurai Champloo is a fairly straightforward story, though it does veer off into the episodic nature of Cowboy Bebop sometimes for more self-contained stories. This is something that fans of both of these Shinchiro Watanabe animes love, so the creative team adapting it could lean into this fact more this time around, giving fans more of the episodic one-off episodes and letting the plot move forward at a slower pace. The Cowboy Bebop anime was hyper-fixated on moving the story forward, so this is one thing that could be avoided.
While Mugen, Jin, and Fuu are iconic anime characters in their own right, they might be a little easier to cast in live-action than massively well-known characters like Luffy in One Piece or Spike from Cowboy Bebop.
Samurai Champloo follows the characters Mugen, Jin, and Fuu, who are a self-taught outlaw swordsman, a stoic ronin, and a bubbly tea waitress turned traveler, respectively. The series follows these three characters as they end up traveling together in search of the Sunflower Samurai.
While Mugen, Jin, and Fuu are iconic anime characters in their own right, they might be a little easier to cast in live-action than massively well-known characters like Luffy in One Piece or Spike from Cowboy Bebop.
One thing that the Cowboy Bebop series did do right is bring back Yako Tanno and the Seatbelts to make music for the live-action adaptation. Samurai Champloo‘s iconic hip-hop score and soundtrack should also be brought back for the live-action version, though there’s the unfortunate fact that Japanese producer Nujabes has since passed away.
However, that doesn’t mean that Nujabes tracks couldn’t be used and that the other music contributors, Shinji “Tsutchie” Tsuchida of Shakkazombie, Fat Jon, and Force of Nature, couldn’t be brought back to make new music for the series.
Samurai Champloo has everything you could want out of a live-action anime adaptation. Cool characters, iconic music, and plenty of unique, kinetic fight scenes to adapt. If someone was able to capture the feeling of the anime, then it would definitely be a special addition to the good live-action anime adaptation category.
A Samurai Champloo Live-Action Series Was Once In The Works
Interestingly enough, a Samurai Champloo live-action adaptation was announced by producer Kelly McCormick years ago. McCormick, best known for her work on Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, and Bullet Train, would be a great fit for the kinetic action of the anime, but there really hasn’t been any news since that announcement.
Perhaps the failure of the Cowboy Bebop adaptation caused Netflix to question its future adaptation plans, but the success of the recent One Piece adaptations means that we may see this project possibly get back on track in the near future.
