I have recently finished rewatching COWBOY BEBOP (1998) for the god-knows-what time, and as I went to log it in my media log, I was midway through writing a massive deranged essay and thought y'know what, I just need to make a good long blog post about this instead. I can't keep reiterating the same essay every time I watch this show. we're gonna be here forever if I do.
I found myself thoroughly enjoying myself when I was doing my ridiculous PATHOLOGIC write up as I was playing - it's the first time I'd done anything like that and I do think it really helped me engage with and appreciate the game a lot more than I would have otherwise. I've been telling myself i'll do more silly posts about my fav media - the whole reason I ventured into indie web stuff in the first place is because I felt like I was pissing my friends the hell off with my incessant yapping about Things I Really Love. and it's a fair call! I love my friends dearly but I also understand that there's only so many times you can listen to me agonise over the same tv show over the course of a decade without wanting to knock my teeth out. anyway, point is - in the last two-ish years that I've been tinkering with websites, I just never actually did the whole Yapping Incessantly part, so. time to get it out of my system, I think
first of all: lets talk about space westerns!
I have always loved a good, ridiculous, pulpy narrative. I love stupid bombastic plots, I love shitty tropes, I love absurd worldbuilding. I would like to say the first thing to introduce me to this concept of a space western was FIREFLY (2001), which I fell very much in love with when I was in my early teens. unfortunately, I do think it was technically COWBOYS & ALIENS (2011) - which is a movie I'll defend to the very end. ridiculous. pulpy. Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. its runtime is FAR too long. it's the best movie of all time, probably. the beauty of a space western is that they have all of these ridiculous things mashed together in a setting that just makes sense, because it's space! in the future! you don't know what's going on there!
I couldn't even tell you how I got into STAR TREK aside from general cultural osmosis and having a penchant for soviet-era sci-fi - I'm going to say my interest was piqued circa 2009 when the JJ Abrams reboot movie came out, possibly - but STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES (1966) has been the driving force behind my love for sci-fi for most of my life! it kinda opened my eyes to a sci-fi genre that wasn't just 'What If Resource War...But Space?'
it's almost certainly where my sci-fi aesthetics preferences came from as well as narrative preferences. the clunky retro tech, the muted yellowy greens of screen glow, the big consoles with lots of buttons and panels and dials. phenomenal. it was through my desire to find more stuff like this that I stumbled across FIREFLY and it's 2005 movie, SERENITY - i loved this show because of it’s grimy, grounded take on the future. I liked our little ragtag group of characters, i liked the worldbuilding and backstory, and i looooooved the aesthetics.
over time, as I expanded my circle of friends and interests, I met a few people who pushed COWBOY BEBOP towards me and told me to give it a go if I liked FIREFLY. I know it's like, classic 'baby's first anime' alright, but I would like to say that baby's first anime was like 30% of ATTACK ON TITAN when I was 15, actually, but I was too embarrassed to say that to my friends so I just let them try to tell me that it's a genre and medium worth exploring into. it wasn't really until someone sat me down when I was in a kind of weird period of my life and said "dude, it's a space western about a bunch of outlaws on a little space ship!!" that I was convinced to sit down and watch it. and it is just as wonderfully casual and slow paced and everything else that I loved about FIREFLY! it's aesthetically perfect as well; grounded sci-fi environments, the not too distant future, cassette futurism and that wonderful retro tech aesthetic I love so dearly - but the narrative of BEBOP just sunk it's little fingers into me and did NOT let go.
you're gonna carry that weight, etc. etc.
COWBOY BEBOP is a space western anime set in 2077, 50ish years after the earth was mostly destroyed by asteroids and humanity spread out into the neighbouring solar system. It follows a group of bounty hunters working to make a living, and the trials and tribulations that come with the job. It has probably got one of the LOUDEST openings of all time, but fortunately it’s also a fuckin unskippable banger and i adore it.
loathe as I am to call anything a "comfort show", I find myself coming back to BEBOP all the goddamn time when I'm in a specific weird funk. or just for no reason, really, i don’t need any excuse to rewatch this show. it's probably the first thing most of my friends associate me with. this is one of my favourite shows in the world - and, yknow, it is as good as everyone tells you it is. the art, the animation, the dub, the music, the story. everyone raves about it and it is for good reason. it's a show that's been analysed and adored to death by people much better at articulating things than me, but I can throw in my two cents anyway.
the first time i watched this show, I was in exactly the right position to find value in its core themes - this is probably why I've latched onto it so hard, but i don't think it's lost its value to me over the years at all. It's as impactful and important to me now as it was all those years ago. obviously i'd come into this show decades too late - i was born in the year it was airing, and then i had to bypass the silly mental block i had that wouldn't let me watch animated things in high school - so i was in my, like, early 20s when i finally got around to watching it? and a weird spot in them, too. I think it was a time where a lot of people i had grown up with were all dispersing off into different life paths with radically different success rates, and...idk. I remember feeling very stuck in place, like i’d reached the same wall that everyone else was climbing over but for some reason, i just couldn’t do the same. Watever. What’s important is that i felt stuck, and like the good times were behind me and there was only a long life of isolated young adulthood ahead. it feels so silly to be this attached to a show this much but hey. my brain does what it will and just takes me along for the ride
COWBOY BEBOP explores it’s genres and themes so beautifully and thoroughly - it’s a little bit neo-noir, it’s a little bit western, it’s a little bit sci-fi, it’s a lot of music. It cares so much about the history of all of these things and that’s why it all coalesces together in a way that nothing else i’ve ever watched has done. all of our little cast of characters are unique and individual, they all get their spotlight episodes and focus is shared between all of them. The looming theme of moving on and letting go of the weight of your past actions is present in everyone’s story, and the show does a phenomenal job of bringing together four very different individuals and giving them different ways to come to terms with this. I love the show’s slow paced nature - despite the action sequences, and the spaceship dogfights - and how much of the show takes place in the waiting period between, in these long stretches between heavy plot action. one of my favourite episodes is just a silly nothing episode that barely involves the BEBOP crew at all! I love how damn good the show looks too - the backgrounds and scenery and attention to detail on all these planets and outposts are so good; you can tell where the episode is taking place just based on these little worldbuilding details within the scenery alone. The ‘sci-fi’ element in this show is very realistic and grounded, I found. 2077 is not that far away, i really do think they nailed this overall look of a not-too-distant future created by a humanity forced to get into space with the tech they currently have.
This show is about a lot of things - bounty hunters, space heists, very cool jazz music - but it's also about trying to find meaning in a world you feel displaced in, it's about the value of connection and the loneliness of avoidance. It's about learning that acceptance - of yourself, of others, of your situation, or your past, or your actions - is imperative to make room for progress. It’s about how clinging on to the past will kill you, and you have got to learn to let it go and lean on other people instead. The only way out is through, yknow?
in MILD defence of the live action.
so, in 2021, there was a netflix live action adaptation of COWBOY BEBOP. it was definitely a show, and I watched it!
but for completionists sake, i'll talk about it properly; I watched it a little while after it came out on netflix with my friends, who I had also roped into watching the anime with me just prior to that. we figured it was a good time to follow up with it and we all watched it together, so I will admit I went into it with a tiny bit of malice and hatred in my heart. I was expecting it to be shit and we poked fun at it the whole time but ultimately it was just like, fine. little cringe, very...netflix-y, but incredibly forgettable. I know it's pretty divisive - a lot of people I've heard from either really really hated it, or really enjoyed it - but as with most things, if you just go in with reasonable expectations of any netflix adaptation of anything being hot garbage, you wont be disappointed in the end.
now recently, I'd sat down with one of those friends and we watched aaalll of TRIGUN and it's counterparts together and the natural progression from there is, of course, COWBOY BEBOP. we kind of debated whether it was worth revisiting the live action with a nicer attitude towards it, because we were deep in despair over the dogshit second season of one of our other shows and figured things literally cannot get worse than that, so we said fuck it. it had been years since either of us saw it and, like. I tried, okay. I went into this rewatch really wanting to be wrong.
yeah look it’s still not a great adaptation
The thing is - it’s not even for lack of effort, either. Atrocious CGI be damned; the visuals of the show are really good! I think they’re bang on, and they still keep that grungy retro cassette futurism aesthetic that i adore so much. The music is still great, they utilize tracks from the anime and the opening is wonderful. Casting is also great! and everyone looks really good, I can tell exactly who everyone is even down to the minor side antagonist of the week - except for Vicious who I do not want to talk about right now. The problem stems from the fact that it is so empty and soulless. All aesthetics, zero substance. It feels more like they just made a live action reference show where they go “omg look it’s that moment from the show you like, but on netflix!”
the cast are so endearing though, like look how good they looked!!!
The biggest pull of COWBOY BEBOP to me is this slow and steady work up to earning character backstory. We come into the show as an outside observer in the middle of these people’s lives with incredibly sparse knowledge of what got them there. It’s a slow show. It’s a lot of mild slice of life moments between everything. You are drip fed tiny little nuggets of information based on their actions, or the mini bits of backstory you get to see, or the occasional character-centric episode. The payoff of getting to see their arc resolutions is so much more gratifying when you get to earn it, not just be told what it is and how you should feel about it. The netflix series has 10 episodes of its first season, in comparison to the anime’s 25 eps + a movie, so it makes sense that things had to be a little bit rushed, but like...it’s a little too rushed. They’re trying so hard to pack in the main plot beats, but also adding in their own little worldbuilding aspects. It is a really big injustice to the narrative for the live action to focus so heavily on the syndicate Lore(™), if you will, and fleshing out Vicious and Julia as characters so much just puts a lot of the story focus on Spike. This would be fine IF that's what the original show was all about. It’s not, though - the anime treats everyone with equal weight. They all have fleshed out, interesting backstories and they all get to have their strengths, their time to shine, and their resolutions. COWBOY BEBOP is not about Spike Spiegel And The Edgelord Brothers!!! It’s about unresolved grief and the weight of the past, and how four very different people find ways to lean on each other and move through it!
I am willing to put a lot of this blame onto Netflix. The show really does have that tepid Netflix Flavour™ of writing, unfortunately, and it makes what are already very shallow interpretations of these characters into really grimace-inducing, actively painful moments of characterisation. It’s a warm take, but I think STRANGER THINGS (2016) did irreversible damage to everything netflix produces. I'm sorry. All of their shows just sound Like That now. yknow, the “errmmm, he’s right behind me, isn’t he????” kind of writing.
Alright, now listen close because this is the very mild defence paragraph of this section. I know it was cancelled like 30 seconds into it’s lifespan - which I also personally assume is because it must have had a stupid big budget, and a very poor reception meant netflix instantly saw revenue loss potential and canned it - but honestly, i would have given a second season a chance. It is a dumpster fire of a show, it is a bland rendition of something i hold very dear. I have very little positive things to say about it as an adaptation. But as a netflix show? It’s fun! It’s silly, it’s unserious, it has me rolling my eyes and poking endless fun at it, but i just can’t bring myself to hate it. My rewatch wasn’t miserable, it was just more of an amused disbelief at what i was watching. I am a little fond of it, i’m afraid. It’s an earnest attempt to adapt something so hugely stylised and i just don’t have it in me to fault them for trying.
I would like to talk about the OVERWATCH 2 collab but there’s no natural segue into it from here.
I guess the link is disappointing interpretations of characters?
ok so in 2024, there was an OVERWATCH 2 x COWBOY BEBOP crossover event, which all of my friends fucking dreaded the second i caught wind of it, because these are two things i am so incredibly insufferable about. The event included a bunch of truly heinously ugly skins for characters i do not, or cannot, play, plus some cosmetics and stuff and whatever else. That Spike skin for Cassidy is just soooooooo. man. Ashe as Faye looks great though.
ANYWAY. None of this is important though because what i would like to draw your attention to is the absolutely phenomenal trailer they made for the event. It looks SOOOO GOOD!!! And im not going to talk about the event or the skins any further because they aren’t real and cannot hurt me if i dont think about them!!
it's soooo much fun!! i do love it very much when media reference each other, particularly with this level of attention to detail <3
alright that's all i've got for now because i've been sitting on this post for like 2 weeks, and it never feels complete for whatever reason. feels like i can never get across what makes this show so magical, buuuuut that's the nature of things, i suppose. guess you'll have to watch it yourself and see what i'm on about. thanks for reading!!