Many oldtaku hold Cowboy Bebop and even Trigun to such high regard that they cannot judge a new series at face-value without comparing them
Funnily enough, I recently watched the original Trigun for the first time and thought it was shit (Or, more accurately, the second half is shit. I was actually really enjoying the first half before it retard'd out). The Manga might be better, still gotta finish that. Hoping that the second half of the anime is just the anime itself having a shitty original story because the manga didn't finish before the show did.
You can tell Watanabe wanted to throw this stuff into Bebop and Dandy since forever ago. I can't blame Franco completely for this because sometimes Japanese creators embrace Western autism all on their own it's just more jarring when it comes up because they tend to have their media mostly in their culture. But that's rapidly changing every year it seems. I'm not touching Adult Swim/Toonami anime anymore after they fucked up Uzamaki and that Ninja series seemed promising but ended up being nothingshit. So I'm noping on Lazarus. This is Devilman Crybaby all over again but that was Netflix looks like Cartoon Network wants to crap up anime too. They've been floating the idea to revive The Big O for years can't see that going well.
I disagree. Watanabe's previous work did not really illustrate this in any way. Champloo is a story centered around Christian persecution under the Shogunate and portrays the persecutors as in the wrong, Kids On The Slope has 2 of the main characters be devout Christians despite taking place in Japan. Someone who would have always supported this western Marxist lunacy would not be this favorable towards the main religion Marxism is meant to destroy. That's one.
Bebop and Dandy do not really have any political messaging beyond having people of different races (Or species, in Dandy's case), the stories are universal and hold little to no hints that the creator wanted to replace narrative with politics in the future. The only direction I really saw Watanabe going was in a more bizarre comedy direction, and if it wasn't for James Demarco he would have made another dandynian comedy.
It does certainly feel more like Demarco just gave Watanabe a specific set of quotas that AS wanted him to meet with Lazarus which heavily limited his creativity and he just phoned it in. It's the most likely option to me as the show lacks any of the passion or creativity of his previous work. Even when directing a simple slice of life story about kids playing jazz Watanabe still decided to go the extra mile and made sure that the animation for the instruments matched what was being heard when he could have just phoned it in and did what any other anime would do. That extra level of effort and polish is just completely lost in Lazarus and this doesn't really feel like an issue of skill more than it is an issue of him just not caring. Being animated by MAPPA is not doing it any favors either in terms of animation quality.
Carole & Tuesday came and went and people have since stopped talking about it. Either it's due to fucked attention spans, or the show was actually not that good/memorable.
Lazarus also just doesn't have the hype behind it for whatever reason. Like it was first announced with some fanfare back in 2023, and then it wasn't talked about since. It's likely there were production issues like with Uzumaki but everyone involved kept their mouths shut this time around, and there were no Covid restrictions to give it more time.
Toonami's wanted a second Cowboy Bebop or even a Dandy forever now, but they just haven't learn their lesson from Wolf's Rain, and likely never will.
Watanabe had a general cycle of him releasing a new show, people hyping it up going "DIS IZ LICHURLY GON B NEXT BEBOP", inevitable disappointment, falling into obscurity and later being rediscovered and praised. Happened to Champloo, happened to Dandy, happened to Bebop itself even, sorta (It only really got popular after it aired and not during its airing). Though with every other show he made that I've seen, I could appreciate it on their own merit on my first watch, Lazarus is the first one where I really went "wow, this is shit"
Granted, I have not seen Carole and Tuesday myself. So no clue if it truly is a good show or not. Heard mixed things about it, apparently the two main characters are lesbos? If that's so, I'm very skeptical indeed. I hate seeing lesbos even more than seeing faggots in my japanese cartoons somehow.
