Cowboy Bebop (2021)
A live-action restaging of one of the most admired title sequences in animation, shot-for-shot against Yoko Kanno's original arrangement.
Cowboy Bebop (2021) opens with a main title sequence of 107 seconds.
At 107 seconds, it opens well above the 58-second median for sci-fi sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on Netflix in 2021, when Top Boy, Big Mouth and Cobra Kai were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
107sThe only season's sequence, recreating the 1998 anime's opening with actors.
More sci-fi opening titles from the 2020s
1 sequence
Pluribus
Vince Gilligan's first series after Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, opened in twenty-one seconds of white dots on black that settle into the title and hold nothing else — no cast, no footage, no colour.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Fallout
Retro-futurist advertising for a world that ended — the games' Vault-Tec aesthetic reproduced exactly, and varied per episode.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Severance
A man walking through his own head, drawn as a corporate-training diagram that keeps folding back into itself. Oliver Latta's animation, and the best argument in years that a title sequence can be the thesis.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequence
Silo
A cross-section of the silo, descending. The camera falls the length of a buried structure the characters spend the series failing to understand, which tells you the shape of the thing before the plot does.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Foundation
Mathematics rendered as architecture — the Prime Radiant's equations building and dissolving structures across millennia.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAlice in Borderland
An emptied Tokyo shot as architecture — Shibuya with nobody in it, which is more unsettling than anything the games do.
- Season 1