Cowboy Bebop’s Jazzy Netflix opening titles revealed Yoko Kanno

There are perhaps few anime openings so etched into a fandom’s collective psyche as Cowboy Bebop‘s “Tank!”. The elegant silhouette animation was the subject of tribute and parody for decades, but it’s the rhythmic and hypnotic brass and bass of Yoko Kanno and seat belts‘banger of a theme that has convinced webs that they love jazz more than anything else since those years.

At today’s Netflix Tudum event, the streamer gave us a tiny snippet of showrunner André Nemec live action Cowboy Bebop in, well, live-action. But with a little twist: we couldn’t really see John Cho’s Spike Spiegel and friends who roam the space, ready for their next bounty; instead, we got our first look at the sleek, sleek title streak that Netflix will keep asking you to want to skip in just a few months. And this song pays a perfect tribute to the original.

The new opening animation deserves enough attention, of course, not to mention all the quick previews of the series. Bbut what we are really Here are more sheet music from one of the greatest all-time anime composers of the past decades, the legendary Yoko Kanno. Kanno’s work on the original Be-bop is loved for a reason, but its old catalog contains some absolutely remarkable works, like the haunting and rhythmic electro of Ghost in the Shell: autonomous complex; the epic epics of Macross More; and the ethereal choral work and rising strings of the absolutely amazing Spin a Gundam soundtrack. The fact that we are getting Kanno material for this iteration of Be-bop is reason enough to celebrate, but the fact that it is New material — such as the cast and crew of the show reiterated, these are things that are in accord with the spirit of the original anime, rather than just recreating what came before, is really very special.

Cowboy Bebop, which also stars Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black, Daniella Pineda as Faye Valentine and at least Two Very Good Boys as Ein, will be set to blow that scene up when it hits Netflix on November 19. 3, 2, 1 …

Correction 9/25/2021, 2:45 p.m. ET: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated the Bebop theme has changed dramatically. He does not have.

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