Yoshihiro Togashi’s legendary manga Yu Yu Hakusho will be a live action series on Netflix! /K4t5eNta9d When Yusuke dies saving another’s life, he’ll embark on a journey across the world of humans, spirits, and demons to return to the land of the living. So you could imagine how elated I was once I woke up this morning and found out that Netflix was making a live-action version of Yu Yu Hakusho as a Netflix Original. I have since watched the series, and it has become one of my favorite anime series of all time. The only reason I knew of Yu Yu Hakusho was that one of my good friends at the time had the Yu Yu Hakusho game for Super Famicom and we played that non-stop. Back in the days of Japanimation, the series that I was aware of were Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, and Yu Yu Hakusho. Kuwabara doesn’t look nasty enough, but that’s fine, because I’ve figured out what I can do: I’ll just recuse myself from watching.Admittedly, I didn’t watch too much anime when I was growing up in the 90s, but there were always a couple of anime series that I knew about back then. Which is why, after all these years and all this pent-up rage, I’m ready to make peace with Netflix and its awful live-action anime. Even if it makes its own version of one of my personal favorite anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, which is currently streaming on the platform, I’ll still be able to watch the original whenever I want. I will always love anime, and Netflix can’t ruin that. I’m going to watch the OG Death Note or Cowboy Bebop, but I’m not sure you will. The mainstream’s exposure to anime is often limited to these abominations, and it grates on me. I have a feeling we’ll see scores of reviews of the upcoming One Piece adaptation, which I expect will be an affront to the series’ zillions of fans. But what does get written up is the Cowboy Bebop show and the Death Note movie. Maybe my issue is this: Anime is a huge, huge industry, yet it often goes unsung by the mainstream American press. Netflix turned Light into someone somewhat likable, as opposed to recognizing that he was one of the worst people ever.Īnd now, Netflix is going to do it all over again, with the Duffer Brothers ( Stranger Things) working on their own live-action take. (Okay, Dafoe was pretty good casting.) This Americanized version of a distinctly Japanese story about a selfish teenager named Light, who can kill anyone he wants by writing their name into his demonic notebook, was almost parodic. That’s the constant battle I’m fighting: I hate that Netflix gobbled up Death Note and spit out its own awful movie, with Nat Wolff as a shrieking sociopath and Willem Dafoe as a CGI demon. Its insistence upon grabbing beloved IP and reshaping them into unrecognizable garbo (that’s Allegra Frankish for “garbage”) is a consistently irritating move to me, a person who can still watch the OG Yu Yu Hakusho if I want to and pretend that Netflix never did a damn thing to it. Not that the streamer has ever shown interest in fidelity when it comes to its adaptations. But what Netflix’s Yu Yu Hakusho does have going for it-it’s actually helmed by a Japanese creative team with Japanese stars, so no whitewashing here, for once!-is obscured by the lack of fidelity to the actual source material, not to mention Netflix’s disastrous track record in this genre. It might not be fair to judge something that doesn’t exist yet. The lack of nastiness is a frustrating sign that this adaptation of one of my favorite anime growing up is going to, well, suck. “Yea not nasty enough,” Patrick wrote back, correctly. “Why is he hot.” I wrote to my friend Patrick, a fellow Yu Yu Hakusho fan, immediately after seeing the casting news. He’s not cute!īut, as I texted my friend earlier today, Netflix’s take on Kuwabara is hot as heck. His face is usually adorned with band-aids. He’s designed to have a square head, sunken-in eyes, and a garishly stiff red pompadour. In the original anime, Kuwabara is the least attractive member of the otherwise very hot cast of characters.
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