Hey, anime fans: That thing you hate is happening again. According Netflix’s NX Twitter account, the streaming service is moving forward with a live-action adaptation of popular shonen manga (and anime series) Yu Yu Hakusho. That tweet is the only information we have to go off of, so we don’t know anything about this other than the implication that it will follow the same basic premise as the manga, but surely Netflix will find new and creative ways to shake things up. (Let’s not forget, the service’s live-action Cowboy Bebop looks like it’ll have some bizarre divergences from the original anime.)
For those who don’t follow manga or didn’t catch Adult Swim’s initial anime blocks two decades ago, Yu Yu Hakusho is about a teenage troublemaker named Yusuke who gets hit by a car and dies after trying to save a kid. As it turns out, the rulers of the afterlife weren’t prepared for Yusuke to die at that point, so they offer him a chance to return to his old life by hunting down rogue demons who are causing trouble in the real world. His big shtick is shooting magic by doing finger guns, which is pretty cool, and he makes a bunch of rad supernatural friends—like his old rival, Kuwabara, who has funky hair and can make magic swords, and Hiei, a former villain with a third “evil eye” in his forehead that can control people. Compared to Cowboy Bebop (and of course One Piece, which Netflix started working on in January), it seems like it should be relatively easy to make a live-action adaptation without having to sacrifice too much of what made the original books and show good. Then again, the same could’ve been said about Dragon Ball, and that movie was a disaster—not that Netflix had anything to do with it.