Like sports, James Joyce, and reality TV, anime is a gap in my cultural literacy I can live with.
This forum needs a Spike button.
Cowboy Bebop has one of the famously better dubs out there. And one of the best soundtracks, not just of anime but any TV series IMO.
As for the questions you have regarding the plot, there is long term arcs that weave in and out, but there is also episodic elements that are in and out. It’s been too long so I don’t remember if that woman’s cargo comes back up, perhaps I should correct that.
Which is of course a scale that tops out at -1.
Also, if Tom keeps watching dubbed past Ed’s arrival on the scene. Well. Stronger eardrums than I, is all I can say.
Heh. Tom has made it as far as I ever made it in Cowboy Bebop. I watched the first episode last year, and I just didn’t have any curiousity at all after that opening episode on what would happen next, so I never went further.
Maybe I should pick it up and watch along with Tom.
I’ve never heard of those two. Are those worth tracking down, anime fans?
Cowboy Bebop is worth watching to the first Vicious episode at least, which is number 4 or 5 IIRC. It really turns a corner there.
If you’re not joking, I’ll expand on this but…probably not?
I just googled them, they don’t look like my thing even if they’re good. One looks like it’s for really young children, and the other looks like mid-90s fan service.
Ill say this for Cowboy Bebop, it has a discrete narrative arc, and it ends on a very satisfying note that is true to the characters, style, and story they set up.
Plus the remix of the ending theme that they use in it is perfection.
I am not one to listen to soundtracks. In the entire history of media, there is basically only single digits number I will listen to on their own.
Lord of the Rings
Bastion
Star Wars
Battlestar Galactica
Cowboy Bebop
And kind of, but not quite fitting the list
The Stemage versions of Metroid songs
And that’s about it. I can appreciate others, Vangelis’ Blade Runner score is rightly held in high regard, but those are the only ones I listen to on their own.
This is the rare show I’d recommend in English. Good call. And even if you don’t end up liking the show, the music is spectacular.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure Hello Kitty has very little to offer adults. Sailor Moon is aimed at like 13 year old girls, but there are certainly older people (and guys) who are into it. Don’t think it’s super likely you’d be one of them though.
They are definitely super-famous, though. Hello Kitty is a merchandising juggernaut round the world, and Sailor Moon is one of a handful of shows that pretty much defined anime for a generation as well as being one of (if not the) seminal works in the magical girl subgenre.
Oh, this will be a fun read. It’s crazy to think that I first watched Cowboy Bebop twenty friggin’ years ago. I remember I was on the road and couldn’t sleep and hit Adult Swim on Cartoon Network and one of these episodes was on. Funny, I don’t remember what the episode I saw was exactly, I just know I was hooked. Eventually, I picked up the whole run on DVD so I could watch front to back, and later imported all the soundtrack CDs I could get.
I’ve never bothered with the Japanese voices myself, though I hear they’re pretty good and I have no reason to doubt. It’s just that the English voices sound so right to me, it just sounds weird hearing other voices come out of these characters’ mouths. I love how loud and colorful and weird the whole thing is. I’ve never seen an anime that came nearly as close to grabbing my interest, but this one had a great setting, a cool bunch of characters, and plenty of riffs on sci-fi tropes I’ve been a fan of my whole life.
Someone mentioned in the Netflix remake thread that it’s redundant, Firefly beat them to the punch, but Bebop is so much better than Firefly. It gets the western-themed science fiction mishmash right, for one thing, but its characters don’t run around throwing Whedonisms at each other too. Bebop is like if Hammett or Chandler were reborn as a Japanese person who decided to write quirky science fiction. It’s got annoyances and entire episodes I can do without, but the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Consider me subscribed to your newsletter.
So this got me to do something I hadn’t done in probably 10-12 years, I watched an episode. The first one in fact.
Yeah, gonna be hard to not just binge the whole thing.
Cowboy Bebop is fine. But if they want to make a live action space western, why not just revive Firefly?
I never got around to Cowboy Bebop but I adored Samurai Champloo, English dub.
I watched that as well, but though Bebop was so much better.
But that’s as much the aesthetic, genre, and music being far more to my interests. So I can’t objectively say Bebop is better, as it so thoroughly pushes many of my buttons.
dude!
Yeah , it was Cowboy Bepop’s theme that didn’t appeal to me. I think I just caught an episode of Samurai Champloo during the Adult Swim days and just stuck with it. I do own and watch Serenity and liked a good junk of Firefly. When I look at the cast of Bepop, like the characters, well that didn’t entice me at all.
Cowboy Bebop was one of the first anime I ever saw on Adult Swim and I loved it. I remember the end credits song would alternate between showing the English translation subtitles and the romaji subtites from episode to episode. I watched the show and read the romaji subtitles so much I ended up memorizing the song, which I still know by heart today.