released 30 jan 04 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* I had heard that the anime series COWBOY BEBOP had a strong cult following, but when I taped an episode off of CARTOON NETWORK I wasn't impressed, finding the artwork shabby and the story baffling. I watched about half of it and then gave up. It was a pretty small sample and of course a serial story tends to not make much sense coming in at the middle, so I still had an open mind on the matter. When I ran across COWBOY BEBOP BEST SESSIONS (CBBS), a "Greatest Hits" sort of collection with six episodes, I decided to give it a try.
What CBBS amounts to is a nice "starter kit" for the series. The basic story concept involves two bounty hunters or "cowboys": relaxed martial-arts master Spike and older scarred-up Jet, who travel between planets in the Solar System on their spaceship BEBOP (which is interestingly a sort of "flying boat" that lands on water) hunting down bad guys for fun and profit. These two characters are more than slightly similar to those of the LUPIN III series, with Spike as Lupin and Jet as Jigen, and COWBOY BEBOP also steals the "1960s/70s caper flic" style of LUPIN III.
COWBOY BEBOP has its own style, though, adding not only a space-based theme but a bit of a "space western" flavor that predates Joss Whedon's short-lived cult-classic FIREFLY live-action series, and it introduces more distinctive characters, including sexy and wild Faye Valentine, a skinny and crazy adolescent girl named Ed, and the Welsh Corgi dog Ein. How these characters joined up with the BEBOP crew is not really explained in CBBS, no doubt being covered in the "missing" episodes. The scripts, on the average, are tidily written, reasonably intelligent, and snap along nicely, and the production values are generally pretty good.
Although the violence level gets a bit excessive here and there -- this is not a good video for young kids, and violence is only part of the reason -- some of the episodes are stylish, and one, involving Ed sneakily feeding the rest of the crew "magic mushrooms", was in part downright hilarious, with the crusty old Jet communing with his bonsai plant and discovering the Secrets Of The Universe. I was hoping that a coyote talking with the voice of Johnny Cash would have a cameo, but that was expecting too much. Incidentally, this episode involved the crew's ongoing search for something -- anything! -- to eat, a theme repeated in some other episodes. It's an amusing plot gimmick, since traditionally in space operas the crew just gets something from the food replicator or whatever.
The last episode of this set of six turned out to be the one that I had taped and partly watched, and on actually going through the full thing I concluded that my initial impressions had been correct -- its production values really were shabby and the script baffling. It was just my luck of the draw to tape one of the poorer episodes. However, it was a bit suspicious that this episode was included in a "Greatest Hits" collection. This was better than other episodes they didn't include?!
In summary, this collection is a generally competent if not actually brilliant piece of work, and well worth my time. As far as the full series goes, I'm still a bit cautious about picking it up. I'm getting tired of suckering myself into serially buying one volume after the next of an anime video series, hoping it's going to get better, or worse simply being mindlessly strung along waiting for the next shoe to drop.