Hi, I'm Robin.

Last night, my dad and I finished watching all of Cowboy Bebop, the original anime series to be exact. We watched the English dub since it came highly recommended to me by my friends and my dad hates reading subtitles. I've gotta say, I really do understand why it's been considered a classic now. I don't think I can really talk about this show without diving into spoilers, so I recommend you wait to read this until watching the show itself if you haven't already. Seriously, I wish I'd watched this years ago after seeing it all. Needless to say, I greatly enjoyed the show. So without further ado, why don't we start off with that iconic killer opening theme?

(Watch the opening here.)

"I think it's time we blow this scene, get everyone and the stuff together... OK, 3, 2, 1, let's jam!"

These are the only words spoken in the song "Tank!" by The Seatbelts. The only thing prior to and after those words being spoken is pure jazz with a fast paced rhythm that works oh-so well with the visuals. Spike Spiegel smoking his cigarette as the manifesto of the series' intended purpose flies behind him is the perfect start to the series after a brief flash of the title card that lasts just seconds. You only catch glimpses of it. It's there for a bit, but not too long for you to really think about it in the moment. You see him running before stopping to turn to the camera, and then a space ship flies by, specifically, the Swordfish II. You're slowly introduced to each character in the series. The legs and brief look at the face of some femme fatale character and another ship, the Red Tail. The ships fly past each other, and then the silhouette a guy holding a cigarette shows up. The same guys is shown running with some kind of metal under his eye as we see another ship, the Hammer Head.

In less than a minute, we have seen three of the main characters and the ships they'll be piloting throughout the show. That's three out of five of the main characters that appear as the Bebop crew, and they're all just as mysterious as they are in the show itself. Radical Edward does show up at the end, but since they have a smaller role in the show they don't get much focus. Ein doesn't show up at all, but he has an even smaller role in the series than Ed does. What I'm trying to say is that this opening is really effective at making you wonder who all of these people are and what they're like. Spike, Faye and Jet are presented with little context as to who they are, more often being seen from a distance or surrounded in shadows, much like how their history isn't known to us for the majority of the show's runtime. The spaceships tell you not only does each character have their own that they pilot, but that the show will largely consist of space battles, but you know it won't only be space battles, because we get a shot of all three of them firing their own gun. As far as anime openings go, I think this is certainly one of the best in terms, of visuals, music, and conveying the show's themes and characters.

World Building and Setting

(A modified N.A.S.A. Space Shuttle Columbia taking in flight in Session #19: Wild Horses)

Set in the year 2071, Cowboy Bebop follows a crew of broke bounty hunters journeying through space. This show does a really good job of establishing the world it's set in. We start the show with a character who wants to go to Mars, an episode where a former soldier thinks back to a war he participated in that took place on one of Jupiter's moons, Titan, and passing references other places in the solar system, such as Ganymede, another one of Jupiter's moons and the largest moon in the entire solar system. What little we see of planet earth makes it clear that it's kind-of... well... a wasteland. Meteors are constantly striking the planet, permanently changing it's landscape. There are several ruins of civilization, the world has been flooded and seems to be lacking in ice caps. We can infer that perhaps the world flooded and societies were destroyed due to the melting of the ice caps and in a desperate attempt to survive, most people left for other planets such as the nearby Mars, leaving behind only those who were too poor to afford a ship off the planet. Mars has a criminal organization called The Red Dragon Syndicate that is so powerful, it's influence extends to other regions of the solar system and the police can't control them.

Another way the show does a good job of establishing it's setting is through technology. VHS and Beta tapes are an old, severely dated form of technology that only one man in the series is shown to have a lot of, that being a one-off character obsessed with 20th century technology who runs a store dedicated to it. The character of Faye Valentine being a fish out of water character helps show how much technology has advanced as well. She wakes up after being cryogenically frozen for 54 years and mistakes a washing machine, a face cleaner and a bio thermometer for a monitor, hot water pot and cellular phone respectively due to their visual similarities. The fact that guns and swords still exist as they did in the 90's shows that aside from the laser canon on the Swordfish II, there isn't much futuristic weaponry. What I'm trying to say is the show does a good job of conveying it's setting in a believable manner.

I think my favorite thing they do to show off the time frame is in the 19th episode, "Session #19: Wild Horses." In this episode, the Bebop crew are pursuing a group of space pirates that launches virus bullets from their ship, which infect any ship they hit with a virus that stops the ship from functioning properly. Spike leaves to get the Swordfish II fixed up by a the ship's creator, a man named Doohan alongside his assistant, a baseball fan named Miles. In this episode we learn for the first time that Spike's ship is an older model that requires expensive older parts to keep well maintained and he's constantly pushing it to it's limits. Faye and Jet fail to capture the pirates and call upon Spike for assistance. To avoid getting picked up on the pirate's radar, they use old radio waves to communicate, interrupting the radio broadcast of Miles' baseball game, which is what alerts him and Doohan that they're in trouble. So to rescue Spike, they take off in a ship described as "an old piece of junk." This ship is shown to be none other than the Columbia Space Shuttle, something that both my dad and I were surprised to see. It's shown almost immediately by the fact both Doohan and Miles are needed to pilot this insanely complex set of switches and dials that the space shuttle- a symbol of space travel in today's age- is far, far outclassed when compared to every other ship we see in the show.

The Characters

(The Bebop Crew.)

Despite not knowing much about the actual history of the characters in the show, I think the Bebop crew is one of the strongest I've seen in a show. Spike has this air of mystery around him. Where'd he learn judo? Did he join the Syndicate or was he born into it? How did he meet Jet? We never get proper answers to any of these questions. All we know is he and Vicious were like brothers, he fell in love with Julia, then Spike decided to leave the Syndicate and Vicious saw this as betrayal, which led to him threatening Julia to kill Spike and Spike assuming she'd left him. What I like about all of this is that Spike doesn't spend the whole show moping around about Julia. That's not to say it doesn't bother him, when the possibility of her entering his life again pops up, he always drops everything to pursue that lead, but it's not always on his mind. In others shows with this kind of lost love angle, the character is often constantly wondering what could've been and being sad and mopey for half the series. Spike gets like that sometimes, but only three or four times, and he when he does get like that it comes with a piece of his backstory we didn't know prior.

Jet Black is an ex-cop who lost his arm on a mission and got it replaced with a cybernetic one. In his time, he was known as "the black dog who bites down and never lets go" because of how effective he was at getting criminals. After that, he left the force and became a bounty hunter and at some point met up with Spike. Aside from that, we don't know much about him. It's revealed later on that his old partner was a corrupt cop and was the one responsible for him losing his arm in the first place by leading him into a set-up. I think Jet is my favorite character in this show because he feels like the straight man of the group. He's not some ex-criminal who can do Judo moves and cheat twice when fighting his former brother. He's not someone from 2014 who got into an accident while on a spacecraft flight and became a bounty hunter with a gambling problem. He's not even an eccentric hacker nor does he have some kind of supersonic hearing like Ein. He's just an ex-cop who felt it was time to leave the force and ended up becoming a bounty hunter. Actually, in a way he kind of shared Spike's lost love angle, but that got resolved the same episode it was introduced in and he learned to let go of the past, something Spike never did.

Faye Valentine was introduced into a world she knew nothing about. She'd forgotten everything, even her last name. The name "Valentine" comes from the song "My Funny Valentine." She was unfrozen as part of an insurance scam and occurred a great debt. We don't really learn a whole lot about Faye's past besides the explosion, though what little we do know actually comes from one of my favorite episodes. She gets sent a package from someone that had apparently been in shipping for a long while and she runs off thinking someone had come to collect on her debts. The crew finds out that what's inside it is a Beta tape, something none of them have ever heard of given the fact by the time the show is set, beta tapes would've long since fallen out of use. Eventually they find out they need a beta players to use it, so Spike and Jet go deep under the earth through abandoned structures to find an old technology museum, only to come back with a VHS player and not a beta player. Faye happens to come back shortly after they get a beta player delivered to her as well, and when they play the tape they find out it's a time capsule essentially. A video of a younger Faye delivering a message to her future self and quite literally cheering herself on. As Faye watches, it's clear she doesn't remember it, and something about that kind of hit me hard. Even when she does get her memories back at the end of the show, she has no one from her past life left to go to.

Radical Edward is perhaps the most mysterious out of all the Bebop crew. We don't know much about their family life, we don't know how they heard of the Bebop crew, we don't know where Ed even came from. Hell, no one even knows if Ed is a boy or a girl, even their father. What we do know is Ed is incredibly smart, always speaks in third person and no one was joking when they said he just stays on the ship the whole show. Seriously, I thought that was a joke, I didn't think everyone was serious. That being said, Ed definitely had their moments, like when they battled Chess Master Hex in a game of chess, or how they dressed up as Jet's daughter to sneak into the hospital and find the cult leader. While I can definitely see some people finding Ed annoying, they're my dad's favorite character and he was super disapointed when I told him Ed wasn't in the recent Netflix live action adaptation as far as I'm aware. Ein had a small part in the series as well, but I like that he and Ed got along well and made perfect sense to that Ein chose to leave alongside Ed.

Final Thoughts

"Look at my eyes, Faye. One of them is fake, I lost it in an accident. Since then I've been seeing the past in one eye and the present in the other."

Cowboy Bebop is a show that left me with a million questions. Did Faye stick around with Jet? Did Jet's leg ever recover? Did Ed and Ein ever hear about Spike's death? Did the Syndicate fall out of power? What about Doohan and Miles, what ever happened to them? Did that guy ever get compensated for the VCR Spike kicked the shit out of? How did Spike know that fortune teller? So many questions. And you know what? I honestly kind of hope I never get an answer to any of these questions. I like the open ended nature of the series because it fits so well. With characters as mysterious as these, of course we don't get any closure. Spike and Vicious killed each other, just like they seemed to always be on the verge of doing. It's a rather fitting and tragic end and like the end card said, I'm gonna carry that weight. There are so many elements I'd like to explore in this show's universe, so many character I want to come back to, but I really don't know that you can come back to any of these stories. Even ones with loose ends, I think without Spike, Jet, Faye and Ed it wouldn't be the same.

I think this is a show I'm going to be thinking about for a long time, just like how FLCL made me think. Maybe I'll paint a Bebop character next, just like how I painted Haruko. My dad insists we watch the new live action Netflix series and before you tell me it's bad, I've heard, he's heard, we're still watching it. Don't worry, one day I'll make him watch every episode of Chargeman Ken or some other horrible anime I've never heard of until I searched "worst anime" just now like whatever "Vampire Holmes" is as payback. (I know you're reading this, dad. This is a threat.) But even if the live action show ends up not being good, I'll still have the original show to go back to, and that's good enough for me. see you all later, space cowboy.

-Robin.

SEE YOU, SPACE COWBOY...