This video was brought to you by my Patrons, thanks! Content Warning for sexual assault and some
racist imagery, Homophobia and transphobia Also a warning for photosensitive viewers, there’s
some flashing imagery throughout the video, I’ll include some time stamps in the description. And Spoiler alert for all of Cowboy Bebop
and Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on heavens door. And this is your regular
reminder that art is subjective So I didn’t get into anime when it first exploded
in the US in the 90s. Although I think Pokémon are cute I never got into the show or the
films. I didn’t quite understand that Digimon was a different show. And I saw a little Sailor
Moon at a friends but it didn’t really grab me. Then, when I was around 12 or 13, my older sister was all excited to introduce
me to this new show she had just discovered, Cowboy Bebop. It wasn’t actually new, it was a
few years old by this point, but it was new to us and airing on Cartoon Network's late night
programming block known as Adult Swim. The first night we tried to watch it they
didn’t even play an episode. So my first real introduction to anime was an episode
of Inuyasha with a tree that eats people, a sad episode of Wolf’s Rain,
and an episode of FLCL which...I was definitely not prepared for since I’m
not sure one can be prepared for FLCL. But the next night we sat down, we got it
right and those first staccato brass notes immediately pulled me in.
Although my first episode was Ganymede Elegy which by the
by, is my least favorite episode I was instantly hooked by all these boldly
designed characters and stylish settings. It was love at first sight as they say. So without further ado, I think
it’s time to blow this scene, get everybody and their stuff
together, okay 3,2,1 lets jam. Cowboy Bebop first began life when Shinichiro Watanabe, who was already working at Sunrise Inc. was approached by producer Masahiko
Minami, who now runs Studio Bones, and was asked if he had any ideas for a show.
At the same time, Star Wars hype was at its height for the prequel films and
Bandai’s Toy Division wanted to produce a series to sell spacecraft toys.
These two creative forces came together with Watanabe’s only instruction being
"So long as there's a spaceship in it, you can do whatever you want.” But upon seeing the early footage Bandai was horrified saying that this would NEVER sell toys. ...oh the irony. So Bandai pulled out of the project and eventually
their sister company Bandai Visual stepped in along with Sunrise Inc. to produce the show.
Without the need to market toys, Watanabe was given free reign to do
what he wanted and Oh boy did he. I’ll talk more about the creative forces behind
the series but first lets do the rundown. [Singer in the background music] "Now gimme the beat" Cowboy Bebop is set in the year
2071, after the Earth was made largely uninhabitable by a
hyperspace gate accident, humanity flocked to the stars.
And on the spaceship Bebop, four bounty hunters, also known as cowboys, hunt
down criminals for cash to try and make ends meet. Maybe enough to get some bell peppers and beef? [Spike] “There's no beef in here. So you wouldn't really call it bell peppers and beef now would you? [Jet] “Yes I would” And this episodic saga is set against
a tapestry of vibrant jazz, blues, and funk composed by Yoko Kanno along with
the Jazz collective known as The Seatbelts. Now leading our band of outcasts in the show
is Spike Spiegel, a man haunted by his past. He's a smooth talker with a devil may care
attitude that often winds up getting him in trouble. He’s got a good heart but it
often goes against his better judgement. Also it has to be said, he’s
kind of a dipshit sometimes [Spike] “Don't pull that art of war crap on me!"
[Thug] "DROP 'EM"\ [Spike] "And you, you take too long to take a shit!” bless In Japanese he’s voiced by Kōichi Yamadera and in the English Dub we’ve got Steve Blume.
[In English]“Just a humble bounty hunter ma’am.” Next up there’s former ISSP cop, Jet Black.
He’s stubborn and grizzled and also the team dad [Jet] “Maybe they're just too hungry, you know?” “If the girls could eat some sukiyaki with meat than that should--”
[Spike] “--Jet. Faye took off again.” In Japanese he’s played by Unshō Ishizuka
and in English by Beau Billingslea [In English] Oh right, right that's just where I
was gonna put it! Spike I got you now! Then we have Faye Valentine, [Faye] "Why I'm just a gun toting weather girl!"
[Gunshots] this 77 year old badass was cryogenically frozen for 54 years and has no memory of her life before she was revived in the year 2068. In the present day she’s buried under crippling
debt with a gambling addiction that isn’t helping her either. She lies and manipulates with
ease and has very little tolerance for other people’s bullshit. She’s also a massive dipshit
sometimes but she’s very dramatic about it [Faye] “Life is so unfair! Poor me!” She’s voiced by Megumi Hayashibara in Japanese and Wendee Lee in English [In English] “This is a real gun you know.
Playtime’s over, put your hands on your head.” And last of our main quartet is the
idiosyncratic and incredible Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky the 4th. They’re the hacker on this team and also just buckwild all the time [Ed] “Aaaaaall is faaaair in love and waaaaar” I cannot stress this enough, I love this gremlin hacker child. [Police] "Radical Edward! Come out with your hands up!"
[Ed] "HIIIIIIII" Me and my sister have been mimicking them for YEARS. [Me mimicking Ed] “This is
a regular lymphocyte nyah?" "But this one’s not same,
same it’s a twisted sister.” They are voiced by Aoi Tada in
Japanese and Melissa Fahn in English [In English] “Ed found it!” [Laughter] Also on the Bebop is the corgi named Ein
who is a data dog and I’m gonna be honest, probably the smartest member of their crew.
Then there’s the mysterious woman from Spike’s past named Julia voiced
by Gara Takashima in Japanese and Mary Elizabeth McGlynn in English. [In English] “Tell him I'll be waiting for him
there. That's all, he'll know what it means.” And the villainous and ever so subtly named Vicious is voiced by Norio Wakamoto in
Japanese and Skip Stellrecht in English. [In English] “I'm the only one who
can kill you and set you free.” And lastly we have the three old men
Antonio, Carlos, and Jobim voiced by Jinshō Hirao, Toshihiko Nakajima,
and Hiroshi Naka in Japanese and Kevin Seymour and Steve Kramer in English [Carlos] “Is that cold? We
don't want to get a chill now.” [Jobim] “Where are we going
again? To Saturn wasn't it?” [Antonio] “Don’t be dense! this plane
can't go into space it's a crop duster!” Antonio and Jobim are both voiced by Kevin Seymour The three men are named after Antonio Carlos
Jobim, a brazilian songwriter and musician. And these three just keep popping up in
various places throughout the series. They’re always bickering and I love spotting them. Now before we can go further into individual episodes lets talk about the
career of Shinichiro Watanabe Shinichiro Watanabe was born in Kyoto Japan in the year 1965
On the subject of his passion for music he described himself as a life long
‘music freak.’ he was once asked how and when he discovered Jazz and he replied He got his start in anime as a storyboard
artist and episode director in the early 90s at Sunrise inc. he worked on Mobile Suit Gundam:
Stardust Memory, The Afterglow of Zeon, and Visions of Escaflowne among other things. Then
he got to co-direct the Macross Plus OVA in 1994 alongside Shoji Kawamori. That would also be
Watanabe’s first collaboration with composer Yoko Kanno. On that project she was asked for
a mix of orchestral music mixed with tribal, techno, and trance elements.
After Macross Plus Watanabe got his first solo directorial gig on Cowboy Bebop.
Now just to be clear, most interviews and such talk about Watanabe as a director. But in
American terms I believe Watanabe’s role on Bebop and his other shows would be more in line
with that of a showrunner. He writes, directs, and storyboards some episodes across all his
shows while also working with a lot of other episode directors such as Ikurō Satō, Yoshiyuki
Takei, Kunihiro Mori, and Hirokazu Yamada, as well as writers such as Keiko Nobumoto, Dai
Satō, Michiko Yokote, Akihiko Inari, Sadayuki Murai, and character designers like Toshihiro
Kawamoto, Kazuto Nakazawa, and Yoshiyuki Itô I also want to shout out Storyboard artist
Yutaka Nakamura, he worked on Bebop, the show and the movie, and Space
Dandy and in Watanabe’s own words Oh and by the way, the show's original concept
is credited to Hajime Yatate who is not a real person. The name Hajime Yatate is a pseudonym
for the collective contributions of the Sunrise animation staff. This is a credit that actually
appears on a lot of anime series, and it's always original concept or original creator and...That
is strange and confusing to me but go off I guess. There’s very little in the way of citations to
back this up so if Hajime Yatate is in fact, a very prolific real person, I apologize. But on Cowboy Bebop in particular Shinichiro Watanabe wrote two episodes and storyboarded 7 of them. He also described the show as a very unusual production. One that
apparently went massively over budget He said that when he wanted to pump up
his animators he would tell them But in the end Watanabe was correct. The 26 episodes, called ‘sessions’ in the
show, were not the instant hit in Japan that one might expect. In its first run in 1998
from April 3 to June 26 on TV Tokyo only 12 of the 26 episodes were aired due to adult content.
In a 2017 interview with Otaquest Watanabe said The show would finally see the full light
of day from October 1998 to April 1999 on the network wowow. The move to dub it and
bring it to American audiences happened in 2001 where it aired on Adults Swim and the series
was censored once again due to its adult content. Specifically three episodes were not aired in
its initial run. Episode 6 Sympathy for the Devil where Spike essentially shoots a child,
episode 8 Waltz for Venus which opens with the hijacking of a spaceship and episode 22 Cowboy
Funk which shows several skyscrapers being bombed. The last two were considered to be too close
to the imagery of 9/11. In 2003 episode 19 Wild Horses was also briefly banned due to its similarity to the Columbia shuttle disaster. But eventually we all got to
see and fall in love with Bebop. [Ed] "Bebop! Here! Here! Alright! Woohoo!" The follow up film Knockin' on Heavens
Door was released in 2001. It depicts a standalone adventure for the crew of the
Bebop and is set between episodes 22 and 23. After he moved on from Bebop we got Samurai
Champloo in 2004. If you like Cowboy Bebop you will probably like Samurai Champloo.
Its a bit of a sister series in that it fuses disparate genres into a cogent and action packed
story. With Bebop it was Jazz and Sci fi and with Champloo it was hip hop and samurai films. Watanabe said And Champloo based on the word chanpurū is an
Okinawan word for a stew, something that mixes ingredients. The show follows Fuu a young girl searching
for a samurai who smells of sunflowers and her two companions on the journey are Jin,
the soft spoken and serious ronin. And Mugen, a guy who wants to fight everybody all the time [Mugen] “I’ll take all you bitches on!” “Get the hell outta my way!” [Tom Cardy] “You shall not F*CK with me!” On this show Watanabe worked with hip hop
artists like Nujabes, Tsuchie, Fat Jon, and Force of Nature and he also brought in some
traditional Japanese music by Ainu artist Oki and Japanese folk singer Ikue Asazaki
After Champloo he didn’t direct another show until 2012 with Kids on the Slope.
He was still working, his IMDB still has stuff from this period but
it sounds like his directorial efforts didn’t come to fruition for a time.
Kids on the Slope is somewhat unusual in Watanabe’s oeuvre. Its his only work that is a
direct adaptation of another piece, although he has made stuff based on pre-existing works like
Macross Plus or his Animatrix shorts, Detective Story and Kids Story, it seems Kids On the Slope
is the only direct adaptation he has ever done. The Kids on the Slope manga was
published from 2007 to 2012. And even stylistically it appears that the
character designs in the anime intentionally lean closer to the look of the manga.
The story follows three teenagers in the year 1966, Kaouru, Sentaro, and Ritsuko
over the course of three years of high school as they form a jazz band and go through
a lot of romantic and family struggles. While I didn’t actively dislike the show,
I found the pacing to be oddly rushed at times and the ending kind of perplexed me.
But the animation, particularly in the sequences when the kids play music, is a highlight. Those
sequences were the most time consuming to produce and did use motion capture elements for photo
reference so the animation matched with the music. Speaking of...the music for the show was largely
made up of existing Jazz standards but composing and arrangements were done by Yoko Kanno
making this their third collaboration. Then in 2014 he made Space Dandy, which is
by far my least favorite of Watanabe’s work. Largely because Space Dandy, which follows a
Dandy in space, is a show that intrinsically was just not made for me. [Dandy] "They're the ones with the big round boobies and nice shapely asses." [Scarlet] "HEY"
[Boing sound effect] [QT] "Hey, you want to shoot me in the face and see if I wake up tomorrow?" It's hard to criticize the nonsensical, childish elements of the show when they are so clearly intentional. This show
is intentionally absurdist. Often being as puerile as possible on purpose and that made it a show
that was deeply frustrating for me to watch. But I did like the episode with the dog so
there’s that. And as always the animation is vivid and beautifully done. The series is
largely styled as an anthology series with every episode featuring a new directing and art
style based on the individuals working on it. There isn’t really an ongoing story or continuity.
It's just following Dandy, Meow, and QT on their alien hunting exploits and frequent trips to their
favorite chain of ‘breastaurants’ called Boobies. It's classified as a space opera, largely inspired
by other popular works of sci-fi from the 60s and 70s like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Flash Gordon.
The music for the show was actually done by a LOT of artists although Kanno did compose a few
tracks. And it seems the musical identity for this series was inspired by disco. All the musicians
he worked with had one rule which was that Watanabe came out with another series the same
year. One that was tonally as far from Space Dandy as you could imagine. Terror in Resonance was a project Watanabe came up with somewhere between 2007 and 2012 but he had difficulty
getting a studio to agree to produce it due to its politically charged content.
The series follows two boys who go by the names Nine and Twelve and the girl Lisa who gets tangled
up in their plots. The pair are committing various acts of terrorism around Japan and Detective
Shibazaki is the one man who might be able to untangle a complicated web of deception and
political corruption that surrounds these boys. This is another series where Watanabe and Yoko
Kanno collaborated although notably this is the only series by Watanabe without a clear musical
identity, although he says he was inspired in his writing of the show by listening to Sigur Ros. But
as always, Kanno delivered a mix of orchestral, percussion, and electric guitar that is as
memorable as ever even if it's harder to define. I recommend the track ‘lolol’ in particular.
I did like this series, although I think the ending lacked the punch they were going
for, largely due to the 11 episode run of the series not being enough time
to build up all the characters, but I appreciate that Watanabe wanted to do
something dark and politically controversial. Then in 2019 he was chief director on Carole and
Tuesday with Motonobu Hori as his co-director. Carole and Tuesday follows two girls, Carole
and Tuesday, as they meet, become besties, and start a band together. Its largely
slice of life style and often quite sweet, although weirdly intense in a few parts when
most of the show is so tooth rottingly sweet. The music was composed with the Canadian
singer and music producer Mocky, although due to the nature of this show featuring a lot of
musicians, a lot of other musical artists feature on the soundtrack. The musical identity of this
show is largely pop and folk music but again, this show is about musicians so there’s also
hip hop and techno, and a bunch of other stuff. I will also briefly shout out some of
Watanabe’s more well known animated shorts. As previously mentioned he did Kid’s Story
and Detective Story in The Animatrix in 2003. I prefer Kid's Story but they are both sharp
little pieces. And then for Blade Runner 2049 he did one of the three shorts that were released
online prior to the film. Blade Runner Black Out 2022 is about the replicant uprising to take
down the Tyrell corporation and it's pretty cool as a companion piece to 2049. Although
it sounds like all of his work in conjunction with American studios has been somewhat
difficult due to a lack of creative freedom. I do think Watanabe definitely has some
interesting stylistic touches that can be seen throughout a lot of his work. Particularly
characters struggling under capitalist societies. He often writes about outcasts and characters
at the margins of society who are just trying to make ends meet in gig economies, and often the
starvation that comes when they fail to do so. In Carole and Tuesday the two leads eventually
make their way out of total poverty but even then there is still a focus on financial struggles for
them and for other characters within the world. Space Dandy, Samurai Champloo, and Cowboy Bebop are just about people struggling and starving when not making ends meet. And you know...capitalism is hell
so I think it's cool you can see that represented throughout his work.
Also it bears mention that Cowboy Bebop, Space Dandy, and Carole and Tuesday all use
the fictional currency known as Woolongs so people speculate they all take place within
the same universe, just in different time periods. Also the refrigerator from Toys in the Attic,
the one with the mutant space goo appeared in one episode of Space Dandy which is very funny.
And with all that out of the way I do want to talk about the good the bad and the weird when it comes
to Watanabe’s handling of various social issues. So there is a lot to tackle within Watanabe’s
work and I want to make it clear I think he has done some things really well. In Cowboy Bebop there are elements that I think were ahead of their time. Oh and while we’re here let me just quickly state, anime is not a genre, it's a
medium with many genres within it, just like with other animated shows and
films. Also Japan makes more than just anime, J Dramas and Akira Kurosawa films. For instance
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 horror classic 'House,' Kinji Fukasaku’s action thriller from the year
2000 'Battle Royale' or the 2018 drama 'Shoplifters' by Hirokazu Kore-eda. If you think all that comes
out of Japan is anime please expand your horizons. Anyway, on the subject of Shinichiro Watanabe,
let's start with what is probably the obvious, let's say low hanging fruit. There’s a lot of male gaze in about half of Watanabe’s work. Carole and Tuesday,
Kids on the Slope, and Terror in Resonance, are actually much better about it
which proves its quite intentional. Again its so intentional with Space Dandy
it hardly bears mentioning. Like you don't come up with 'breastaurants' by accident.
Now to be clear, when I talk about male gaze in his works, I am talking about how the camera
is placed (as it were) and how disproportionately women are drawn. Also jiggle physics. As somebody
with tits I promise you they do not wiggle as much as anime would lead you to believe.
And in anime specifically I think Watanabe is far from the worst offender when
there are shows out there like THIS The biggest name in Japanese animation,
Hayao Miyazaki, has been very critical of a lot of these trends. The meme about
anime being a mistake is a misquote but what he has said on the subject is this And When I spoke to YouTuber Lady Jenevia
about this phenomenon she said Also there are women out there making anime who just don’t do this...Rumiko Takahashi, Arina Tanemura, Hiromu Arakawa, and Natsuki Takaya just to name a few. Check
out all these proportionally drawn girls! I mean okay there is Lust but her name is
Lust I think that's fairly self explanatory. It can be annoying, and sometimes alienating
to be enjoying characters like Faye Valentine and then you get a shot like this just to
remind you who this show is for. Recently the actress playing Faye in the live action
adaptation replied to fans who were angry at her very sensible outfit redesign [Daniella Pineda] “But doing stunts in tissue paper...Things disappear, they rip. "Anyway like I was saying, that original costume...uh...they made a couple of them?" "But like I said they got sort of slurped up in
my various crevices, never to be retrieved again." "So we needed to really build something
that could withstand the test of time.” Yeah a real woman shouldn’t have to run around
in shit like this, there’s a reason Margot Robbie nixed the glittery underwear shorts when she came
back for The Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey. What's more, I think Watanabe is extremely aware
of how and where he’s using male gaze to make his shows more marketable. In one interview he discussed the difficulty of getting Terror in Resonance produced and he said In another interview he described his time developing multiple series that didn’t come to pass between Champloo and Kids on the Slope and he said So based on that I think the decision to be
so intentional about ogling women's bodies in his shows says more about the industry than
anything. The fact that we’ve had shows without such pervasive male gaze shows he’s capable of Not
Doing That. I hope he continues to move in that direction, but just know if you watch Cowboy Bebop
or Samurai Champloo there’s a fair amount of that. Now another element that I want to bring
up is the diversity within Watanabe’s work. And a real quick PSA for
everybody who needs to hear this. At baseline you should probably assume most
anime characters are not white, but japanese Trust me, anime tends to Not Be Subtle about
when they are showing you a white person. They tend to make it Very Clear [Mugen] “Do his eyes look blue to you?”
[Fuu] “They are, they're blue!” [Izsaac] “Eyes not blue! I am Japanese born
and raised! Do you not believe I speak truth?” Basically please stop being a dick to
cosplayers out there who are people of color But with all that said, while the world
of anime is very Japanese at baseline it is often a very pale world. Even with
shows set in alternate timelines and futures, even shows set in space tend to often be
very pale. Although full disclosure here, my big anime phase was about 10 years
ago so maybe it's gotten better, but aside from afro samurai most of the recent
stuff I’ve seen is...yeah...quite pale. But by comparison, Watanabe actually presents
a lot of diversity in most of his shows. Cowboy Bebop and Carole and Tuesday in particular, and
even Samurai Champloo and Space Dandy to a degree. Although, I think Watanabe is not always
thoughtful about where he places darker skinned characters in his shows? Their presence
is awesome but in Cowboy Bebop they’re usually criminals. And Carole and Tuesday seems to lean
into cultural stereotypes in a way that none of his previous shows resorted to. Usually
it's for characters who will only be in one or two scenes. And it's clearly meant
to be a joke but I have no idea why they couldn’t come up with jokes that weren’t...this [Singing] “Drop! Drop! Shake your body. What your Mama say, can you feel it?”
[Jiggle sound effects] Also there’s just some scenes that have aged
poorly like Faye pretending to be Romani. [Faye] “And you know what we call someone like you?" "'Gorgio!' That means a bumpkin
who doesn't know which way is up!” Or the character of Laughing Bull based on the
real life Lakota leader Sitting Bull. It's unclear if Laughing Bull is a member of the Lakota or if
they did research for this character? I’m not the person to weigh in on whether he and his friends are good or bad representation
but I suspect this character is doing some tropes? [Laughing Bull] “The red-eyed coyote will appear in the Zona Norte at the far end of town.” And then we have the handling of queerness in
his shows. Cowboy Bebop came out in 1998 and the follow up film came out in 2001 so I think its fair to say a lot of the casual queerness presented is refreshingly ahead of its time. [Woman] “Audrey, my girlfriend? Told me all about Edward. He's a drag queen. Had one of those operations!” Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky
the 4th is a character whose gender seemed to often be in question. What Watanabe had to say on the matter in an interview with IGN is as follows And then there’s the character Grencia Mars Elijah Guo Eckener, nicknamed Gren. From Jupiter Jazz parts 1 and 2 The live action Netflix adaptation has cast Mason
Alexander Park, a nonbinary actor to play Gren. and that was announced with the following tweet. And the show Carole and Tuesday had a
character Desmond who I will get to in a minute, who self identified in the Japanese
as intersex and in the English dub as nonbinary [Desmond] "It's true I'm nonbinary." which just to be clear are two different
things, sex and gender are not the same thing. But I think its fair to assume that
this might have been Watanabe’s original intention for the character Gren.
And my nonbinary friend Aranock had some Thoughts about how they are handled that in the
original series so I’ll let them say their piece. [Aranock] Gren is overall one of the better
non-binary characters in media and I relate to and care about them a lot. For context there's very
little representation of non-binary characters Wikipedia cites only five in all media and mediums
from the 90s. Two of which were from Neil Gaiman, thank you Neil. Their dialogue in particular is
extremely well done, even compared to non-binary representation now. But especially
for the time. This line in particular, [Faye] "Which one are you?"
[Gren] "I'm both at once and I'm neither one." Is something I have heard many other non-binary
people say not in that exact phrasing but with the same sentiment. In my coming out video
before I had seen any of Cowboy Bebop I said that 'I am neither and I am both and I am
so much more.' Gren is able to perform masc and femme presentation without it being
judged by the other characters or the camera. To be honest if you cut a single scene, and a few
lines I would not have any notes. Buuuuuuut.... the reveal that Gren is not a cis man is
well...best described as [Looney tune sounds] and the show plays into a very problematic
and weird trope forced feminization. Gren was subjected to experimental
hormones that they did not consent to, and while they don't seem to mind that they had
them, it is weird to present medical transition as being forced onto them. It's a mixed bag and those
parts leave a bad taste in the mouth but I do still love the character, and I'm really excited
that Mason Alexander Park a non-binary actor will have a chance to hopefully improve upon
the groundwork laid out in the original show. [Me] Thank you friend. Now I will say in Bebop and his other works there
seems to be a tendency to have masculine women be the butt of a joke. Men in dresses and that sort
of thing. Dahlia Carpenter on Carole & Tuesday is treated in a truly baffling way, where her
transition almost seems to be a point of horror for her daughter. I think she's transgender??
And well...the English subtitles call her this Which is considered a slur for intersex people by
the way. And then there's The Mermaid Sisters who seem to be doing the men in dresses played for
laughs thing a dig at drag culture perhaps it's certainly a choice I'll say that although I have
to say their song is the best in the entire series [The Mermaid sisters sing a doo wop
song that's exclusively swear words] Now Carole and Tuesday is a show he co-directed
with Motonobu Hori but according to an interview with Anime UK News Watanabe says he
handled scripts and storyboards so all of these specific directional
choices, are I think his choices since scripts and storyboards really set
the stage for an animated production. And also...this might be more of an issue
with the people who dubbed Kids on the Slope? So there’s this character Seiji Matsuoka. He’s an
effeminate boy and in Japanese he sounds like this in the English dub I can only guess that the direction given to voice actor Blake Shepard was...homophobic. [Seiji in the most stereotypical gay voice imaginable]
"STOP!" "So if I don't stamp my fabulous signature like
this, they'll disappear in a split second." "Now we just need somebody
with really big sticks!" That one isn’t Watanabe’s fault but I had
to mention it because it was truly wild. Also it was one thing for Gren to die in a show
from 1998, again I personally give it a pass on the bury your gays trope due to the time it
came out in, but in 2019 he’s still doing it! ...Uh spoiler alert for Carole and Tuesday but... Dahlia dies and the aforementioned
nonbinary character Desmond goes into some kind of self induced coma. At the end
of the series they come back for the big finale episode where they basically say
they’ll sing this one song and then die! and that sucks pretty hard.
On the one hand there is a lot of diversity in Watanabe’s work, some of it was ahead
of its time, and now some of it is behind the times and like...I don’t know. I want him to keep
trying, but I think he’s made some bad choices. So with all that out of the way lets talk about [Cowboy Andy] "See you space cowboy." So this show is slightly odd to recap compared
to some other stuff I’ve covered because the series is so episodic. With individual episodes
often dipping into different genres like noir or horror. Some episodes are just about the vibes. But this is my bread and butter so here goes
So Episode 1 Asteroid Blues opens on a quiet and solemn montage of a man walking down a rainey
alley and dropping a red rose onto the street. In flashes we see a gunfight, a woman dropping
pieces of a torn up note from a window, and a man smiling as blood drips down his face.
From there we’re introduced to Spike and Jet aboard the Bebop, they’re
broke and annoyed about it. [Jet] "The repair bill for that cruiser you
wrecked, and the one from that shop you trashed, and the medical bill from the cop
you injured. KILLED THE DOUGH." They go hunting for a man named Asimov
Solensan. And Spike ends up meeting his wife Katerina, who wants to escape
the criminal lifestyle and go to Mars. In the end Katerina shoots Asimov
[Katerina] "Adios" and then their ship gets blown up and she dies.
In Episode 2 Stray Dog Strut introduces us to Ein the data dog who ends up being
brought aboard the Bebop by Spike despite his own protestations [Spike] "Get down! No dogs on the table. That's cold!" Episode 3 Honky Tonk Women introduces us to Faye Valentine [Faye] "You know the first rule of combat?" "Shoot them before they shoot you." And then in episode 4 Gateway Shuffle she joins the crew. [Spike] "All right 40, that's my last offer!"
[Faye] "Okay I get the 60" Episode 5 Ballad of Fallen Angels introduces us to the Red Dragon syndicate that Spike was once a part of. And a higher up within its ranks, Mao Yenrai, we also get to meet Spike’s former comrade Vicious, who has Mao murdered in the opening of the episode. [Mao] "If Spike were here, you would never have done this." but the crew of the Bebop don’t know that and there’s a bounty on Mao. Faye is interested in the money so she goes for it and gets herself caught by Vicious and his people [Scary Man] "No need to speak Miss Valentine." Meanwhile Spike goes to see his old friend
Annie to ask what happened to Mao. She thought Spike died three yeas ago, but once the shock
wears off She tells him that Vicious killed Mao and also this happens [Annie] "This one's for Mao." [Spike] "If it's for Mao than I'll drink it myself." Spike still has a lot of loyalty for Mao. So He goes back to the Bebop to stock up on ammo and Jet tries to dissuade him, telling him that its a trap and Mao’s already dead [Spike] "I don't want to do this Jet."
[Jet] "Then why are you?" [Spike] " Let's just say my past is catching up to me." Also they get a call from Faye whose been captured and [Faye] "Either you show up at the place they specify or my life is over." [Spike] "Where are you?" [Faye] "You mean you're really going to come for me?" [Spike] "Well it's possible I've got my reasons, so don't take it personal." So Spike shows up at the cathedral and faces Vicious. This sequence is gorgeous by the way. Vicious tells him that when angels are forced out of heaven they become devils and Spike replies [Spike] "I'm just watching a bad dream I never wake up from." They trade words for a bit but when he hears Faye struggling Spike aims his gun and this guy tells him to drop his gun slowly. Instead Spike shoots the man in the head and
starts tearing up the place while Faye escapes. Back on the Bebop Jet is still angry and Faye
calls him to tell him Spike is in trouble [Jet] "TOUGH!" but of course Jet goes to help him in the end [Jet] "Damn it." Back at the cathedral Spike and Vicious duel it out leading to one of the most
iconic shots in the show. Vicious monologues about how they are both ravenous beasts that hunger
for the blood of others and Spike tells him [Spike] "I've bled all that kind of blood away."
[Vicious] "Then why are you still ALIVE!" And Vicious throws Spike out the window
of the church and as Spike falls we see a series of flashbacks, its all done with
no dialogue, and just the piece Green Bird by Yoko Kanno, its absolutely stunning.
Once upon a time Spike and Vicious were apparently friends. We see those scenes from
Asteroid Blues with the rose and the gunfight. We see Julia with Vicious together and
we see an injured Spike collapsing to the ground and being tended to by Julia. [Spike] "Just like that, sing for me please." Then Spike wakes up to another voice
humming, and it's Faye watching over him. [Faye] "You finally up huh? You sleep
too much, you've been asleep three days." Spike is bandaged head to toe, but alive and back on the Bebop. He gestures for Faye to come closer so she can hear him say: [Spike] "You sing off key." [Spike yells in pain] God I love these two idiots. In episode 6 Sympathy for the Devil we see
some flashbacks to some traumatic procedure Spike once had and in the present there’s this
young boy playing the harmonica in a club. This episode goes to some places but in the end
this little boy is not so little and also is an evil little shit. A strange accident led to him
no longer aging, and armed with a special bullet. Spike goes to face off against him. Everybody
thinks he might not be coming back from this one [Spike] "Yes my dear." [Faye] "I just thought I'd say goodbye, Spike. Since I'm sure
it's the last time I'll be seeing you." but he goes and in the end the two face
off and it's another incredible scene. In the end Spike succeeds. The magic bullet works
and the child ages into an old man before our eyes. He says he feels heavy but
finally at ease and then he dies. Spike picks up his harmonica and says
[Spike] "Yeah I understand...as if" and throws the harmonica into
the air, slowly raising his arm. He points a finger at it and says:
"Bang." Episode 7 Heavy Metal Queen is just a really fun episode. Spike befriends this woman named VT and her cat Zeros. There’s a really cool zero gravity sequence. It’s an awesome episode, go watch it.
In Episode 8 Waltz For Venus, The gang actually successfully catch some bounties and get paid for
once! And Spike meets a young punk named Rocco who is impressed by Spike’s fighting skills and
begs for Spike to teach him. Spike agrees and gets caught up in the kids' mess with some local
gang that's trafficking a rare and expensive plant called Grey Ash. The plant can be used to make a
medicine for Venus disease which causes blindness. Spike ends up investigating Rocco and meets
his sister Stella who is very sweet and also blind from the aforementioned disease [Stella] "Both you and Rocco have something beautiful inside you. It's hard for most people to see it but it's there, I know it is." In the end Spike meets up with Rocco to try
and help, and the bad guys show up and shoot up the place. Rocco successfully manages to
implement the martial arts Spike Taught him and moments later, he is shot and killed [Spike] "Hang on, now don't die! Don't die!" [Rocco] "I wonder if I had met you earlier in my lifetime do you think...that we would have...been friends?" Spike uses the seeds Rocco stole to pay for
Stella’s eye operation and the scene where Spike visits to tell her Rocco died wrecks my shit.
[Stella] "He's dead isn't he?" [Stella] "He's dead isn't he?" And hey breaking news kids, I'M SAD Then we get Episode 9 Jammin’ with Edward where we meet the hacker known as Radical
Edward and they join the crew of the Bebop [Ed] “She promised Ed, that Ed would be a member of Bebop!”
[giggles] Episode 10 Ganymede Elegy is as previously stated, my least favorite episode.
And now is as good a time as any to say... I don’t like Jet episodes? I like Jet as a
character, even if he does make me roll my eyes every time he makes grand statements about women [Jet] "Woman's intuition give me a break." “Betrayal may come easily to women, but men live by iron codes of honor.” “Women are hopeless, they don’t work on reason.” “Well you can’t tell a woman’s age by look at--”
[Grunts in pain] but I don’t know what it is, I find his episodes
to be unbearably dull at the best of times. I am really hoping that the new Netflix show manages
to make his episodes more fun to watch??? Anyway in Ganymede Elegy Jet meets
an old flame of his and she has a new boyfriend who is wanted by the police.
Jet convinces them that the boyfriend should turn himself in and it all works out The End.
Episode 11 Toys in the Attic is a truly insane episode that I love. Spike left some
food in the fridge so long that it became sentient or something and its biting
people? Its incredible. Go watch it. Then Episodes 12 and 13 are Jupiter Jazz
Parts 1 and 2. In it Vicious is in trouble with the heads of the Red Dragon Syndicate
or something. This young man Lin promises to defend Vicious with his life as Vicious goes off
to finish up a drug deal on the moon of Callisto. Meanwhile, Faye runs off with what little
money was in the safe on the Bebop. A truly negligible amount apparently. But also while they
investigate where she might be Ed stumbles across something with the codename Julia. So Spike runs
off to investigate that, which pisses off Jet. He says they need to find Faye and Spike is like
[Cat Valentine] "Don't tell me what to do!" When Spike arrives on Callisto he gets cornered
by some dudes who think he’s Vicious and I don’t know why I find it so funny, but
Spike goes absolutely apeshit over this [Spike] "You think I'm Vicious?
You don't know what vicious IS!" Meanwhile, also on Callisto, Faye befriends
this suave saxophone player named Gren. They’re concerned for Faye’s welfare with her
running around this rough and tumble place alone but Faye doesn’t seem to care much.
She ends up running into those same guys and just... [Faye] "If I don't put these on I just might
chip a nail you know. Okay...here we go." I love that a lot. But Gren shows up
to help and gets her out of there. Spike finds Vicious and tries to shoot him, but
Lin steps between them. Apparently Spike knew Lin back in the day and doesn’t want to kill him. He
tries to get Lin to step aside and Lin shoots him. Meanwhile at Gren’s apartment, Faye opines about her situation and Gren correctly diagnoses the problem in a matter of minutes [Gren] "You were just afraid they'd abandon you so you abandoned them." then when Gren goes to take a shower Faye hears a voicemail from Vicious and panics. She pulls a gun on Gren while they’re in the shower leading to this line [Gren] "I'm both at once and I'm neither one." Afterwards Gren tells Faye how they fought alongside Vicious during the war on Titan. And unfortunately Gren clearly had a thing for this edgelord. After the war Gren was
arrested on suspicion of espionage and Vicious testified against them. During their imprisonment
they were subjected to an experimental hormone therapy which changed their body.
Now they want to confront Vicious and Faye says that will get them killed [Gren] "Death does not frighten me."
[Faye] "You're lying." Faye tries to stop them from leaving but to no avail. Jet eventually finds her in Gren’s
apartment handcuffed in their bed which... it was the 90s, choices were made.
Meanwhile we see more of Spike’s memories. He told Julia he was leaving the
syndicate and wanted her to come with him. There’s some other bits, like Vicious
suspecting someone of betrayal and Julia saying "They're gonna kill you." Then Spike wakes up and realizes he was shot with a tranquilizer dart. [Spike] "Tranquilizer guns, they're mocking me." when he gets back to the Swordfish, Jet
calls and tells him that if he catches Gren, Jet will let him back aboard the Bebop.
And Gren, in disguise, goes to make the deal with Vicious. In the end the
whole thing goes south.Vicious has no satisfactory answers for Gren,
Lin gets shot, and then Vicious shoots Gren’s ship out of the sky. [Machine beeps] [Vicious] "You're in the way." [Wooshing sounds] Spike lands and helps them into their ship. [Gren] "You're the one, aren't you? Your Spike. Julia was always talking about you." And Gren asks if Spike can just help give them a lift to Titan [Spike] "You can't make it there in this condition. It would take too long" [Gren] "I'm not gonna make it anyway. Dying on my way there would be a good way to go." So he helps tow Gren's ship out into space and Gren dies on their way to Titan. Spike returns to the Bebop and Jet lets him come back with very little fuss. [Jet] "What are you bringing in?"
[Spike] "Nothing." [Jet] "Hurry up and get inside, we're taking off."
[Spike] "Hmm" And the episode ends as it began, with Laughing
Bull and this child watch a shooting star fall and Laughing Bull telling the child that, that
is no ordinary star, but the tear of a warrior, a lost soul who has finished
their battle on this planet. In Episode 14 Bohemian Rhapsody, Ed plays chess
with an old man online. This is a vibes episode, with lots of Ed which is awesome. Episode 15 My Funny Valentine gives us Faye’s backstory of how she was woken up in 2068 and quickly conned into mountains of medical debt by this asshole
[Faye] "Whitney Haggis Matsumoto!" She ends up kidnapping him to try and learn
some truth about her history. All she gets is that they gave her the name Faye Valentine
and that the doctor was in on the whole scam [Whitney] "Wait a minute uncle!"
[Faye] "He's your uncle?" [Whitney] "Uh-huh?"
[Gasps] In the end Faye gets her share of the bounty. He
was indeed the smallest of the small fry. And when she mourns the fact that she has no past Spike
tells her that she has a future. It's very cute. Then we have Episode 16: Black Dog Serenade,
which is probably the best of the Jet episodes. I still find it inexplicably kind of dull but
the backstory about his former partner who set him up all those years ago leading to the
injury that lost him his arm is interesting. Episode 17: Mushroom Samba is a drugs episode. Both
Samurai Champloo and Bebop have a drugs episode and a what the fuck episode? And
with Cowboy Bebop's drug episode we have hallucinogenic mushrooms. Basically
the crew is starving and crashes and Ed runs off to find food. They find these
weird mushrooms which um...well Ein eats one and does this
[Squeaking] leading my gremlin child to decide to test the
mushrooms on their crewmates. So Jet, Faye, and Spike spend the episode tripping balls [Frog] "This here is the stairway to heaven, you know that don't you?"
[Spike] "Obnoxious little frog." and Ed gets caught up trying to catch this guy, its absolutely insane and very funny. My favorite
gag is Ein and this cow talking to each other. In Episode 18: Speak Like a Child an unexpected
delivery rocks the Bebop. Its a beta cassette tape and its addressed to Faye but when Jet
demands she pay him back for the delivery fee, Faye runs off again. Meanwhile Jet is annoyed and
decides to investigate this beta cassette which leads Spike and Jet on a long series of ridiculous
escapades to find a beta cassette player. In the end they come back with a VHS player
[Jet] "It won't go in." [Spike] "Push harder!"
[Ed] "That's the wrong one! [Spike & Jet] "Huh?"
[Ed] "You got a VHS!" [Spike & Jet] "Huh?" and then another package shows up with the beta cassette player and everybody sits down to watch.
And it turns out the video is Faye as a child, leaving a message for her future self [Baby Faye] "you're not perfect but you've got a lot to give so remember, I'll always be cheering you on." The warmth of her child self seems to shock
all of them, and Faye tears up unable to remember this version of herself
[Baby Faye] "Do your best! Do your best!" It's heartbreaking.
Episode 19, Wild Horses is mostly a fun vibes episode. Spike is stuck waiting for his ship
to get repaired by the grumpy old man who built the Swordfish. Faye and Jet hunt down some space
pirates. The finale is really rad, go watch it. Episode 20 Pierrot Le Fou is the what the f*ck
episode of Bebop. It stars an inflatable murder clown who I suspect was inspired by The Penguin
from the Batman animated series. The animation in this episode is particularly stunning, and the
content of it is pretty disturbing. Also Spike gets his ass kicked quite thoroughly, again.
Episode 21 Boogie Woogie Feng Shue is the last Jet episode. In it the young daughter of an
old friend ends up crossing his path and the pair try to unlock the mystery of her fathers
last message. Also everybody thinks this child is Jets girlfriend which sucks [Faye] "It's a fine romance."
[Ed] "You Jet's girlfriend? Does he have a thing for you?" [Jet growling] And Jet says this line which also sucks [Jet] "I'm not old enough to be your father all right why if anything I could be your boyfriend!" [Kill Bill Siren sounds] "No wait that would be bad wouldn't it?" Episode 22 Cowboy Funk is a ridiculous episode with this guy called the Teddy Bomber and this shitty Cowboy version of Spike who is annoying and these two just keep fighting each
other instead of catching the bomber. This episode just refuses to be taken
seriously which is amazing in its own right. Then we have the film, The Japanese title of
it is Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, but the English title is just Cowboy
Bebop: The Movie. We’re just basic I guess, I think Knockin' on Heavens Door is a cool title
The movie had the time and budget to be absolutely stunning and also had the space to be more
adult in its content. This movie is bloody in a way the show isn’t. Not only is there blood
flying in these fight scenes, they animated spit and sweat flying around. Like a lot of it
Also the movie contains a scene that I think might be classified as sexual assault
between Faye and the villain?? Basically the plot is that this guy blows up
a tanker truck on a highway, spreading this nanomachine virus that kills people. It also makes
them see these yellow butterflies before they die. Spike Spiegel and the gang first
try to capture him for the bounty [Spike & Jet & Faye] "300 WHAT?"
[Ed] "Nyah?" and then they just try to stop his plan and
save the day. The movie has a lot going on, a kickass opening sequence, gorgeously
animated setpieces, some of my favorite music in the series and one of the most
glorious lines in the history of cinema [Spike] “I love the kind of
woman that can kick my ass” Which...you know what? Mood. [Spike Impersonator Voice] "I love the kind of woman that will actually just kill me." "I want me to" [Laughs] Vincent is an interesting villain and the
character Electra who ends up teaming up with the Bebop crew is really great. The movie has
the time to let characters stop and ponder things. The scene where Electra and Spike talk
about their pasts while they’re both locked in a cell is truly excellent.
[Spike] "I started to think that I wanted to survive. For the first time,
the idea of death began to scare me." Also I do want to point out this is another
instance where Spike really gets his ass handed to him. To this day I do not understand what
Vincent did to Spike with this move? But YIKES Anyway go watch the movie, it rules.
After that we have the episode Brain Scratch where Faye accidentally gets caught
up with a cult trying to catch a bounty. Spike saves her, which is pretty cute.
And now before we can get into how the series ends… we have to talk about Yoko Kanno [Cowboy Bebop Opening] "Okay 3, 2, 1 Let's Jam!" So Yoko Kanno started composing
music when she was a kid, winning music contests in her school so often she
was known as the “contest bandit”. She described herself in that time as a “precocious punk”
She actually majored in literature in university, but joined in a friends band and was
approached to compose music for video games like Nobunaga’s Ambition and the game
turned out to be a hit launching her career. She did two jobs before she was brought
on to Macross Plus with Watanabe. At the time she was still not very well
known. Watanabe said of their first meeting On the subject of bringing her onto Bebop he said I don’t think enough can be said about the choice to blend jazz and science fiction.
The Sonic landscape of sci-fi at the time was basically Vangelis, John Williams,
and the theramin. Jazz in space felt insanely revolutionary and a mission
statement for the show which ultimately said 'what is genre but all other genres combined?'
The opening title sequence set to the absolutely legendary track Tank actually has
a sort of manifesto written in all that text you see scrolling in the background.
This thesis statement is as follows: "Once upon a time, in New York City in 1941...
at this club open to all comers to play," "night after night, at a club named 'Minston's
Play House' in Harlem, they play jazz sessions" "competing with each other. Young jazz men with
a new sense are gathering. At last they created" "a new genre itself. They are sick and tired of
the conventional fixed style jazz. They're eager" "to play jazz more freely as they wish then...
in 2071 in the universe... The bounty hunters," who are gathering in the spaceship "BEBOP",
will play freely without fear of risky things. "They must create new dreams and films by breaking
traditional styles. The work, which becomes a new" "genre itself, will be called... COWBOY BEBOP" In an interview with Red Bull Music Academy Yoko Kanno discussed where the score for Cowboy Bebop came from in her mind with the following And the scoring of Bebop was as unusual as its production Typically anime productions are planned in
advance with actual production being completed week by week as the series airs. Because the
process of composing and recording music can be quite time consuming, usually anime
productions order all the music they need well in advance of the rest of the production.
Often visuals can be adjusted to fit the music. On Bebop, Watanabe said about half the music was
ordered in advance and the other half came from what Watanabe called “Free Sessions,” improvising
on and building off of what was already produced. he said at a 2013 Otakon press conference The opening song Tank wasn't even originally intended for the opening. Kanno said it was
written to be... The loose go with the flow process
for music development created a really interesting working relationship that
they both clearly thought worked well since they collaborated 3 more times with Kids On
The Slope, Space Dandy, and Terror in Resonance. And listening to the two of them interact is
honestly hilarious. On the blu ray there is a commentary track that the pair did on Mushroom
Samba and Kanno spends half of it either making fun of Watanabe or getting completely
distracted and going off on random tangents to the point that the guy who is supposed to be
sort of directing this commentary tracks just gets frustrated with the pair of them. And I cannot stress enough how integral
the music is to the spirit of Cowboy Bebop. There are so many scenes where the
music adds such verve and life. Her tracks are incredibly energetic and
emotional. Sometimes I just have to close my eyes and jam out when tracks like What
Planet is This or Too Good Too Bad play. And Kanno has had an incredible career after
Bebop working on other shows like Wolf’s Rain, Darker than Black, and Ghost in The Shell Stand
Alone Complex. Her collaborations with Origa on the opening Title tracks Inner Universe and Rise
is some of my other favorite work she’s ever done. And for a bunch of years she used the pseudonym
Gabriela Robin when crediting vocals on tracks like Green Bird. Now its generally accepted
as fact that, that was Kanno singing [Green Bird Plays] But as incredible as Kanno herself, we can’t
talk about just her. The Jazz collective known as the Seatbelts has a LOT of members. And
every musician is doing virtuoso work across all the Bebop series and film. Unfortunately I’m
not well versed enough in like...music knowledge to pick out who is doing amazing work on
like...the saxophone versus the trombone? But I can shout out some of my favorite vocalists
like Mai Yamine who you can hear on tracks like Blue, Gotta Knock A Little Harder, and
Rain. Steve Conte who you can hear and Digging and one of the most gut
wrenching tracks in the series, Call Me, Call Me Tulivu-Donna Lynn Cumberbatch who you can hear in the track Mushroom Hunting from Mushroom Samba and The Singing Sea from Ganymede Elegy And Tim Jensen who is not only the vocalist you hear saying
the infamous '3,2,1 lets jam,' he’s also a lyricist who is credited
who is credited on tracks like Ask DNA, Blue, Call me, call me, and so on, and he is a
music producer and regular collaborator with Kanno. And The Seatbelts as a collective have released
about 10 albums worth of music. Not only the music that's in the show and the film, but also music
that was composed for the video game and remixes and just More Music. Also The Seatbelts and Yoko
Kanno canonically exist within the Bebop universe. Yes you heard me, according to the blurb on
the back of the Cowboy Bebop OST album which is credited as “Notes by THE DOG in Back Yard (2071)
The Seatbelts led by Sound producer YK (that's Yoko Kanno), They rose to fame in 2048 in the Solar System Music
Scene, and it is said that members of the band would wear seatbelts while performing...for safety! Furthermore
the Cowboy Bebop OST is from what could be called The Seatbelts ‘bar of sweet potato paste period’
Apparently during the late 2040s and early 50s The Seatbelts traveled around the planets
for the Digging my POTATO concert tour. And the canonical lore gets even wilder when we
turn to the 1999 album “Cowboy Bebop Remixes: Music for Freelance” This album has an
internal narrative following the pirate radio station called Radio Free Mars, and the host
of that station Mr. Martian who sounds like this [Mr. Martian] "They were a maximal band
from 30 years ago, the 2040s." "The track you've been rocking to is from a remix album
by some truly anachronistic lads and lasses." According to this album the in universe
Yoko Kanno was a former pro wrestler, a stellar babe and totally feline. And whatever
she was like she wrote music that kicks rocks. And I love every single word
of all of that insanity. I just cannot stress enough how
much the music transformed this series from an already great show,
to something truly transcendent, and if you don’t believe me, try watching
a scene like this one without the music. It just doesn’t feel the same does it?
Also I just need you all to know that my sister and I built up a habit while watching this show,
where we sort of sang along with the opening, Tank! But specifically this
bit at the end [Me squeaking along with the final notes of the song] So with that lets talk about intertextuality [Spike] "Just a humble bounty hunter ma'am." So Ive discussed intertextuality before,
when I was talking about how studios use it when weaponizing nostalgia. But
intertextuality at its core, is both extremely common, and a neutral phenomenon.
Merriam-Webster defines intertextuality as the complex interrelationship between a
text and other texts taken as basic to the creation or interpretation of the text
Which boy that doesn't really roll off the tongue, but basically, all art is
in conversation with each other. Whether it's through homage, reference,
quotation, allusions, pastiches, or parody. Sometimes intertextuality is not
even something that is being done intentionally, But entire art movements have intertextual roots. Italian neorealism influenced the French New
Wave. And German Expressionism influenced everything from Hitchcock to Tim Burton.
All of art echoes forwards and backwards through time. Always iterating on what has
come before and influencing what came after. Some art is intentionally highly intertextual, with creators wanting you to understand
and pick up on the other pieces that are being referenced. Most of Edgar Wright's
work is highly referential and all of Rian Johnson's work seems to be made with express
purpose of finding new paths into old genres [Benoit Blanc] "A donut hole in a donut's hole.
But we must look a little closer..." "and when we do, we see the donut hole, has a hole in its center." All of Shinichiro Watanabe's works are all highly intertextual and referential paying homage to everything from westerns to Lupin the III So I just wanted to quickly run down some
influences and references you can see throughout the show because, I think Watanabe is masterful at
blending all these influences into something new. The opening title sequence has visuals that are
very influenced by TV opening title sequences from the '70s, as well as James Bond title
sequences in general. The stylized cutouts are something you see a lot in title sequences
from that era. And the dramatic high contrast silhouettes are all over James Bond titles.
As previously stated Lupin the III is a big influence on Bebop.
Not only do Spike and Lupin prefer the same style of footwear, but it seems that
dynamic between Lupin and Jigan was an influence on the relationship between Spike and Jet. Also
Faye and Fujiko definitely have some similar DNA. And you can spot the car that Lupin
drives in one scene in My Funny Valentine. Blade Runner was the other big influence,
although that one seems to be largely aesthetic, there's not a ton of similarities between
the two properties beyond their look. But obviously Watanabe liked blade runner enough
to work on Blade Runner Blackout 2022. Spike's design was also heavily based on the look
of the main protagonist of Tantei Monogatari, portrayed by famous Japanese actor Yūsaku
Matsuda, and his fighting style was based on that of Bruce Lee. Watanabe's also cited Dirty
Harry as another influence on the character. And Bebop was also very influenced by westerns,
obviously drawing on filmic depictions of cowboys from the old stuff like High Noon to the
spaghetti westerns from the 60s like The Good The Bad and the Ugly and Fistful of Dollars
Other influences on the show can be found in individual episodes, like Toys In The Attic
being a riff on the Alien and Predator films, Asteroid Blues referencing Desperado with this
power couple, or Mushroom Samba referencing Blaxsploitation films like Shaft and Coffy.
There's a lot of film noir influence in the Jet episodes. From the world weary voiceover to the
heavy use of shadows in his flashback sequences. And many of the episode titles are just
references, like Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones, Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, or
Pierrot le Fou which is a film by Jean Luc Godard I just think its cool to see how this highly
influential work was highly influenced by so much art that came before.
The work, which becomes a new genre itself, will be called... COWBOY BEBOP
So now lets talk about the end of the series This whole show is chock full of emotions but few
things hit harder than the ending of the series. Episode 24 Hard Luck Women opens
with Faye rewatching that old VHS, still trying to unearth memories.
Ed sneaks into her room and says they recognize something in the video. So Ed and
Faye run off together to try and find answers. It turns out Ed isn’t much use to helping Faye
remember anything. Instead the pair end up at an orphanage Ed stayed in for a time. And the nun
who runs the place has a message from Ed’s father. Afterwards Faye bumps into
somebody who knew her before [Old Lady] " do you know who this nice lady is?
You'll never believe it dear but the fact is that she's--" [Faye] "A ghost from beyond." [Old Lady] "Huh?" the encounter begins to trigger some of Faye’s
memories and then the pair head back to the Bebop. Ed puts a fake bounty of 50
woolongs on their father, hoping Spike and Jet will track him down for them.
And one evening while Faye’s in the shower, it all comes back. The accident that led to her
being put in cryogenic hibernation and everything from before. It shakes her to her core and when
she bumps into Spike afterwards all she says is [Faye] "I have to go." She tells Ed she’s going where she belongs and
that belonging is the best thing. And Ed should look for where they belong.
And just like Ed was hoping, Spike and Jet track down their father.
It’s a very funny sequence. Ed pilots the Bebop right to where they’re all
standing and they reunite like this [Ed's Dad] "Francois!"
[Ed laughs] [Ed] "YEAAAAH"
[More laughter] And then moments after introducing the man to
Spike and Jet, Ed’s father gets distracted by another meteorite and runs off leaving Ed behind.
Meanwhile Faye lands her ship just up the street from her childhood home. As she runs
towards it, she remembers being a child running home. Unfortunately her home is
gone. Whatever family she was hoping to find doesn’t exist. All that’s left is pieces
of foundation that used to make up her home. Back on the Bebop, Ed decides to go find
their father. It’s a beautiful sequence set to that song I mentioned Call Me,
Call Me. My favorite song to cry to! So Ed says goodbye to the Bebop in their own
way, giving Spike a pinwheel and writing Bye Bye with a big smiley face on the ship itself.
Ein senses they’re leaving and follows them. Initially Ed tells Ein he can’t come with
them, but quickly decides Ein can come to. [Ed] "Do you want to come with Ed?"
[Ein Barks] Under the light of the setting sun, Faye draws the
outline of her former home in the dirt and lies down in the square that used to be her bedroom.
Aboard the Bebop Spike and Jet, for all their bluster, are both clearly sad to see
Edward go. They basically spend an evening eating their feelings away with all
the hardboiled eggs they got from Ed’s dad. And as we see Ed and Ein run off to an
uncertain future the final text of the episode is "See you cowgirl, someday, somewhere!" And then we get Real Folk Blues Parts 1 and 2 to stab you in the heart with Vincent's samurai
sword in case you weren’t already weeping The episode opens with Julia walking into her
apartment and hearing a voicemail that says [Shin] "You're in danger." Then we see Vicious getting...I don’t
know...arrested? By the Elders of the syndicate? He tried to pull off a coup but now
they plan to execute him and anyone who knew him. Which makes Spike a target, and Julia too.
Spike and Jet are sitting in a bar pretending they don’t care that its just the pair of them
again when dudes show up at start shooting at them. Jet gets shot in the leg and Lin’s brother
Shin shows up to help Spike and Jet escape. They get Jet to a doctor to fix his leg and we
see flashbacks of Spike leaving the syndicate those years ago. He told Julia that he was
leaving, and he wanted her to come with him. And we see memories from Julia’s perspective of Vicious, holding her at gunpoint
[Vicious] "So you were going to betray me." He told Julia to kill Spike or
else Vicious would kill them both. And we see her tearing up the note Spike gave
her and dropping the pieces out the window. Spike calls Faye and tells her to come back
and meet him at Tharsis. Faye tells him [Faye] "What makes you think, I'm coming
back you take too much for granted!" Also in a bit that breaks my heart, Faye
doesn’t know that Ed and Ein left and assumes they’re there to help out too.
That just messes me up for some reason. And then as she’s dawdling by her ship she sees
a woman in a red convertible being pursued by a car full of goons. And so naturally Faye
shoots at the goons and jumps in Julia’s car the pair successfully take out the men following
them and then have a little conversation. [Julia] "You're a good shot."
[Faye] "It's a plus when you're chasing bounty heads." Apparently Julia knows exactly who Faye is
because she asks Faye to pass on a message [Julia] "If you see Spike again tell
him I'll be waiting for him there." "That's all, he'll know what it means." Back on the Bebop Jet tries to dissuade Spike from
the path he’s on. He tells Spike a story about a man thinking about the past before he dies and
he says he hates that story. Spike says he can’t let this go because there was a woman who seemed
truly alive, she was the piece of himself he had been missing his whole life and now she’s back.
Faye comes back to the Bebop to relay Julia’s message right as some dudes show up and start
trying to blow a hole in the Bebop. Spike and Faye manage to fight the guys off, and once
they’re gone Jet tells Spike to go find JUlia. Meanwhile at the Syndicate Vicious gets
out and kills everybody who opposes him. [Vicious] "My power is the only power," Part 1 ends with Spike and Julia meeting in the
graveyard they said they would meet in all those years ago and Julia holds Spike at gunpoint.
As part two begins Julia tells Spike how she was supposed to kill him all those years ago [Julia] "If I had I would have been free." And then she hugs him and begs him to run away with her.
Back at the syndicate, Shin returns to see the remains of all that slaughter and tells
Vicious he failed to kill Spike or find Julia. Vicious tells him [Vicious] "Do not follow in your brother's footsteps." Meanwhile Spike and Julia go to see Annie,
they find her with a hole in her stomach, minutes away from death. Spike tries to help
but she dies anyway, with her last moments she tells them what Vicious has done, and says
she’s glad Spike and Julia found each other. Spike goes into the back of her shop to
stock up on ammo and wordlessly loads up a shotgun and Julia asks him.
[Julia] "You're staying." she says if he’s staying than she’ll stay
too. That she’ll be with him until the end. Spike says he’s sorry and
[Spike] "I'm gonna make a bit of a scene." Back on the Bebop Jet and Faye wonder if Spike is going to make it. Jet says he doesn’t care
[John Mulaney] "You know, like a liar." Back at Annie’s shop a bunch of dudes
bust in and start shooting up the place. Spike and Julia run out the back and just
when they think they’re safe, Julia is shot. She dies in Spike’s arms, whispering
something we can’t quite hear. Jet goes to see Laughing Bull, hoping
he might be able to help find Spike. Laughing Bull tells him that every life has a
star. A guardian star that watches over them until they die and then that star dies too.
He tells Jet: [Laughing Bull] "His star is about to fall, I have dreamed it." Spike returns to the Bebop and asks if there’s anything to eat. Spike makes him the usual bell peppers and beef with no beef. Spike says it tastes terrible [Jet] "For being so bad you sure eat a lot of it."
[Spike] "They say hunger is the best spice." Then Spike tells Jet a story about a tiger striped cat who fell in love with another cat. Then the other cat grew old and died and the tiger striped cat cried a million tears and died too.
Jet says its a nice story and Spike says he hates that story because he hates cats.
The pair laugh and we realize this is Spikes way of saying goodbye. By eating
one last meal with his friend. When Jet asks him if its for the
girl, he tells Jet that Julia’s dead. As he leaves Faye corners him at gunpoint and
begs him not to leave and throw his life away. Spike tells her that his eyes are two different
colors because one eye is artificial. He lost it in an accident and now he’s always seeing the
past in that eye and the present in the other. Faye tells him that her memory came back
but there was nothing left to go back to and so she came back home and so Spike
can’t go off and just die. Spike replies [Spike] "I'm going to find
out if I'm really alive." As he leaves Faye fires her gun
into the air with tears in her eyes and yes this made me cry and read 30 bazillion
fics about Spike and Faye when I was 13. So Spike heads to the syndicate for the fates
showdown and he absolutely wrecks the place, killing a lot of dudes and getting badly
injured along the way. This sequence is stunning by the way and its set to the music we’ve
been hearing in the credits throughout the series, The Real Folk Blues. Shin comes to try and help, and then he gets shot and dies and Spike goes
to face Vicious who has been waiting for him. Vicious says he’s finally awake and [Vicious] “I’m the only one who can kill you and set you free.” The showdown is brief but bloody, both of them injuring the other before they
accidentally trade weapons. In the final moments Spike
tells Vicious that Julia is dead [Spike] “Lets finish it now.”
[Vicious] “As you wish.” They toss each other their weapon
and Spike shoots and kills Vicious. In the quiet after his death, Spike looks
up and remembers Julia’s final words. [Julia] “Its all a...dream.” As a new day dawns, Spike walks down the stairs to a crowd people who
stand around, shocked by the carnage. Spike stops in the middle of the staircase and smiles, he reaches up, his hand pointed like a gun, and says “Bang.” And falls to the ground. As the credits roll, we slowly pan up to the sky where a star
goes out and we see a picture of Spike. The final words of the series are You’re gonna carry that weight. And OKAY, a couple things here.
First off, when I first saw the ending of the series at age 13 with my sister who, kudos to her,
already knew the ending and didn’t breathe a word. Well I sobbed my damn face off,
rewound to the beginning and watched the episode again and cried some more.
My mom came home to find her wreck of a daughter sobbing on the couch and asked what was
wrong and I told her “SPIKE DIEEEED” And she said but he’s a cartoon
character and I said I “KNOOOOOOOW” Also when I showed this series to my
roommates they turned to me at the end of the credits and said fuck you
So have fun with that knowledge. Second...okay so Shinichiro Watanabe has said
in a few different interviews he wanted this ending to be open to interpretation
and maybe Spike is just sleeping and SIR YOU CANNOT TOY WITH ME LIKE THIS YOU SAID
A GUARDIAN STAR GOES OUT WHEN A PERSON DIES AND THEN A STAR WENT OUT WITH A PICTURE OF
SPIKE! SIR! SIR!! YOU CANNOT SAY SHIT LIKE THIS The fact is Spike’s death is painfully
tragic because of how inevitable it feels. But there is a big huge Julia sized
problem with the finale to this series. Or as I like to call it. The Julia problem.
So Watanabe and co. clearly decided to keep Julia out of the show as like this final twist
reveal. Spoiler alert, turns out she’s a woman. Part of what fails in this ending is that we the
audience don’t know Julia at all. People talk about her on the rare occasion over 24 episodes.
There’s this flashback where she doesn’t speak and not much else until this final two parter.
And yeah Spike does the big yearn. I understand that he cares about her, but this show did nothing
to get me to care about her. She’s just the object of Spike’s affection based on a past we barely
see and in the present they get about 5 minutes together before she dies. I have no reason to care
about her and Spike as a couple because the show never spent the time to develop Julia and develop
a dynamic between the ill-fated lovers. We only care about Julia because Spike does but imagine
if she had been developed as her own character, maybe in the episodes where Vicious shows up,
Julia could be there too and we could see them interact. See their chemistry and their tension.
And then when Julia died we could understand Spike’s grief and mourn with him, and root
for him to avenge her death as he does. As it stands Spike is avenging a memory. He barely
knows who Julia is now, and we know even less. Ocean Vuong wrote in his novel
On Earth we’re Briefly Gorgeous And that is painfully true for Spike.
[A Cover of 'Blue' begins to play] His death hurts but it also feels pointless.
He was fighting to see if he was really alive. To see if he was awake or just dreaming.
He wasn’t dreaming and he left people behind who will grieve him.
And in the words of Jordan Shiveley Each episode of Cowboy Bebop ends with a parting
message. The onscreen text frequently just says 'See you Space Cowboy.' Once at the end of
Toys in the Attic it just said 'The End.' Other times, it times it ends with a joke like My
Funny Valentine where this final shot of Ein with eyebrows drawn on cuts to the text 'Sleeping Beast.'
Or Cowboy Funk where this ridiculous man trades in his cowboy aesthetic for that of a samurai and
so the ending text says 'See You Space Samurai.' Sometimes the text asks us a question. 'Do
you have a comrade?' Jupiter Jazz Part 2 asks. 'Are You Living In The Real World?' The movie asks.
These final words, these epitaphs, speak to the events of the episode and the
characters but they also speak to us the audience, addressing us directly. So many episodes say
'see you space cowboy' and that's a farewell to the characters and to the audience turning off
their televisions at the end of the episode. In Episode 6 Sympathy for the Devil when Spike
shot the boy Wen and he died an old man, his final words were that he felt heavy, but at peace.
Spike didn’t understand then,' but when he died with a smile and his star went out, the final
text onscreen said 'You’re Gonna Carry That Weight.' Those words are for us, Spike’s weight is gone
and he’s at peace.' Those he left behind will carry the weight of their grief and the
loss of a found family that is now gone. And we too are gonna carry the
weight of continuing to live. Because life isn’t a dream, its real, and painful
and full of loss and grief and so much hardship. But the joys are there too. Sometimes
all too fleeting, but still there, and all the more beautiful for their impermanence.
Nothing stays the same and that never gets easier. The weight never gets any lighter
but we carry it all the same. We can only mourn things once their gone
so I try to stay present and not fall into grief for things that aren’t gone yet.
This show always makes me sad but it also reminds me that I’m awake and alive.
So I will leave you with the final words spoken by Prior in Tony Kushner’s
seminal work Angels in America. So see you space cowboy, just like Atlas
before you, You’re gonna carry that weight. [The ending lyrics of Blue are sung]
"Everything is clearer now" "Life is just a dream you know that's never ending." "I'm ascending" So as I’m writing and editing this video,
the Netflix show has yet to be released. I was originally tempted to delve deeper
into like...theories? But then I didn’t! At one point I thought about talking
about the curious dichotomy of the subs vs dubs debate because I like the English
dub of Bebop but I’ve watched other foreign films and shows in their original language
with subtitles...anyway… I was determined to not make another two hour video.
But anyway, thank you to my Patrons who help make videos like this possible and thank
you all for watching I’ll see you on the next one.
I made my own playlist of links of these kinds of vids for personal rewatches love these thanks for posting this new one!
there are a TUN of them on youtube about bebop all really good and all add something to think about the show deeper.