Day: October 13, 2021

Yoko Kanno, who scored the original anime, isn’t the only one returning to Cowboy Bebop. The entire, original voice cast is, too, and will be dubbing the live-action Netflix show’s Japanese language track.

That’s right, not just some of the original Japanese language cast, but the entire Japanese language cast. This is the first time the full cast has been reunited in two decades—since the 2001 theatrical feature Cowboy Bebop: The Movie and since the original anime TV series ended in 1998.

According to Netflix Japan, the following voice actors will be returning to do the Japanese language dub: Koichi Yamadera as Spike, Taiten Kusunoki as Jet Black, Megumi Hayashibara as Faye, Norio Wakamoto as Vicious, Gara Takashima as Julia, Tsutomu Tareki as Punch, Miki Nagasawa as Judy, Takaya Hashi as Teddy Bomber, Masako Isobe as Mao, and Kenyu Horiuchi as Gren. Romi Park will also dub Shin, while Hikaru Midorikawa will dub Lin.

It sure is impressive Netflix got the whole gang back together. Well done.

The live-action adaptation of Shinichiro Watanabe’s space noir about a group of bounty hunters stars John Cho as Spike Spiegel, Daniella Pineda as Faye Valentine, and Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black. Will the live-action Cowboy Bebop be any good? Who knows! We’ll find out next month. But Netflix’s record with live-action anime adaptations has been spotty. For example, its live-action Death Note was not well received. Surely, lessons have been learned, and future live-action adaptations will be better, no? Maybe!

It’s good that Netflix got the original cast together (a hopeful sign!), and if you know Japanese, it might be fun to skip the subtitles and turn on the Japanese language option. And if the show does suck, you can just close your eyes and listen along.

Cowboy Bebop beings streaming on Netflix starting November 19.

We keep hearing, and reporting, that the era of the personal flying machine … flying car … air taxi … call it what you will … is right around the corner, with backing from big players like automakers or aircraft companies. In some imaginings, you’d be a passenger while these electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft are flown by a cabbie/pilot. In others, you’d be dead weight (wait, let’s not say dead) being ferried aboard an autonomous drone. But weight and technology being limiting factors here, the job of flying just might come down to you. So maybe you’ve wondered: Could you do it?

We first told you about a Silicon Valley eVTOL enterprise known as Opener back in 2018. And true to the always-just-a-year-away nature of the flying car game, at that time it expected to begin sales of its BlackFly aircraft in 2019, for the price of an SUV. Well, it’s 2021, and though there’s not yet a BlackFly parked in your garage, the one-seater is FAA-certified, and it has been test-flown more than 4,300 times for over 35,000 miles — racking up a stockpile of YouTube videos in the process.

The company now says 25 BlackFly aircraft will be sold this fall.

The craft is meant to be amphibious, landing on water or grass, and its name is derived from the flight characteristics of, well, a black fly, along with the color of its carbon-fiber fuselage. The key to its technology is its Leading Edge Asynchronous Propeller Technology (LEAPTech), a system of eight redundant propellers developed on the NASA Ames X-Plane program. The system allows each of the propellers to turn at different speeds, meaning the plane can hover, turn on a dime or do just about anything a fixed-wing aircraft normally can’t.

And here’s a fun fact: You don’t need a pilot’s license to fly a BlackFly. (You do need to complete Opener’s operator training, however.)

Another fun fact, getting back to the could-you-do-it question: The company won’t let you make a test flight. But here’s the next best thing: watching somebody else with no experience give it a try. CBS Sunday Morning correspondent John Blackstone recently went through BlackFly simulator training, and then company founder Marcus Leng put him in the pilot seat. Check it out in the video above.

Though the landing looks dicey, there was no harm done — Blackstone got BlackFly up and back down again. So maybe the rest of us could do the same?