Cowboy Bebop, the first anime I ever finished
I was never an anime person until a friend from World of Warcraft talked me into one, and the first I watched start to finish was Cowboy Bebop. The best music in the medium, a redheaded hacker kid I loved, and a dish of bell peppers and beef with no beef.
For most of my life I was not an anime person at all. I want to start here, because this is the first anime I ever watched from beginning to end, so this is really the start of that whole part of my story.
How I got here
My first real exposure was through Diana. She was a big anime fan, and I remember her and McKenzie and that whole crowd talking about shows like Inuyasha and Hellsing, with a particular soft spot for any character who was some kind of cat boy. None of it grabbed me. It just was not my thing back then.
What actually turned me around was Craig, my friend from World of Warcraft. He would talk up his favorite anime, and coming from him it made me reconsider whether this was something I should give a real shot. The bigger push came later, when I started learning Japanese and realized anime was a perfect listening-practice resource, something I could relate to and enjoy while training my ear. Honestly, for a long while that was the whole reason I watched: not because the shows were fun yet, but because they were useful. That came later, though. This one came first, on Craig’s recommendation, a while after we became friends, when Cowboy Bebop had already been out for years.
What I think of it
The music is the easy headline. Cowboy Bebop has some of the best music ever made in anime, full stop. Yoko Kanno and her band, the Seatbelts, did the score, and it is a jazz-soaked, genre-hopping masterpiece that carries the whole mood of the show.
The story itself is okay. What the show is really great at is atmosphere, the cool, lonely, lived-in feeling of its world. It is directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, and that sense of effortless cool is the thing it does better than almost anything else.
My favorite character is Ed, the little redheaded kid who is a complete chaos goblin of a hacker. She teams up with Ein, the impossibly smart corgi, and I love the scene where she breaks into another ship’s systems and just takes it over, cackling and flailing with this manic, gleeful energy. So much fun packed into one weird little person.
I also love the two leads, Jet and Spike, and the worn-in, brotherly relationship between them. And I cannot eat Chinese food anywhere near beef and bell peppers, or even beef and broccoli, without thinking of this show, because of the running bit where they are too broke to afford the beef, so it is just bell peppers and beef with no beef. That detail lives in my head rent free.
It is a deeply atmospheric, action-packed show full of technology and ships and space, which landed perfectly for me, since at the time I was a big Star Wars fan and a decent Star Trek fan too. Underneath the bounty-hunting episodes there is a slow mystery about Spike’s past, all the angst and history he carries around, that the series keeps circling back to. The plot is not really the point, though. The point is that it is a lot of fun and unbelievably good at making you want to live in its world for a while.
Image credits
The photos are of real people, shared under Creative Commons licenses from Wikimedia Commons:
- Yoko Kanno, by Dennis Amith, CC BY-SA 2.0.
- Shinichiro Watanabe, by Georges Seguin (Okki), CC BY-SA 3.0.
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