Five Bounty Hunters
VT: "Bounty hunters are all stupid scum."
Spike: "You think so?"
VT: "Yeah! As far as I know, they're all gambling their lives away."
Spike: "Well, maybe so."
The first time I experienced the opening of Cowboy Bebop, I was sold. Accompanied musically by the very jazzy "Tank," the opener is straight out of the 1960s, an Our Man Flint in-the-24th-and-a-half-century visual feast.
Cowboy Bebop is so full of humor, complexity, and emotional content -- with a soundtrack that conjures images of Gillespie, Davis, and 'Trane -- that, for me, it has surpassed everything in the genre, except for Neon Genesis Evangelion. And that is quite a feat!
SPIKE SPIEGEL JET BLACK FAYE VALENTINE
Even the teasers at the end of each session have both humor and drama -- the best being the one when Spike invites the audience to watch Stray Dog Strut, but warns us not to sit too closely to the TV set for fear of epileptic spasms as once happened with a Pokemon episode.
As much as Cowboy Bebop grabs and holds the imagination with its vivid and very fluid animation, there is a story here. The characters have a past, a present, and a future.
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