Cowboy Bebop is the greatest anime of all time. As an official anime connoisseur – I’ve watched three whole anime – I can say that with confidence. You can keep your One Piece and your Attack On Titan and your She’s Really 6,000 Years Old So Like, It’s Not Illegal Or Anything; Cowboy Bebop reigns supreme. The live action Netflix adaptation has been one of my most anticipated shows for a while now, and our first look at the cast this week has only made me more excited.
Okay, so perhaps I am not the anime aficionado that I purport to be. I have heard, from some weebs that I know, that watching three whole anime is actually on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to anime fans. Who knew? I am, however, a huge fan of Cowboy Bebop, and consider it to be one of the most important cartoons – yeah, anime are cartoons, deal with it – ever. Certainly, it’s easily the most important one to get the live action treatment, so it’s worth interrogating exactly why Cowboy Bebop still stands up to scrutiny. Oh, and I’ve already written about Faye’s outfit change in the adaptation, so let’s hear no more talk of vagina bones, thanks.
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It’s hard to make a show seem universal. Most lives are essentially boring – that’s why no one wants to hear about the camping trip you took at the weekend, Greg. Television shows, particularly in animation, tend to feature either exceptional characters or exceptional circumstances. They may be the chosen one, they may be royalty, or they may possess magic powers. Either that, or they may be under attack from giant, skinless, naked beasts, or they encounter the chosen one or a magic being. The likes of The Simpsons revolve around a normal, everyday family, but that’s as a backdrop for humour. When animation strives to tell a narrative, they tend to focus on the exceptional. Cowboy Bebop straddles this trend.
As space faring bounty hunters, the characters in Cowboy Bebop are a helluva lot more interesting than your average Joe. Yet in their world, they are average Joes. Space travel is nothing particularly special in the time of Cowboy Bebop, and while both Spike and Faye especially have their own personal narratives, the characters are supposed to be regular, everyday people.
Ultimately, for all the space adventures and action sequences and dramatic storylines, the characters of Cowboy Bebop are defined by one thing – they’re poor. They’re not ‘not rich’, and they’re not saving up for a big MacGuffin. They’re poor. We need this job to live poor. Tap ramen every night poor. Have a nap instead of lunch poor. They’re poor at the start, and that’s when it’s just Spike, Jet, and Ein the dog. Along the way they pick up Faye and Ed (though Ed is not yet confirmed for the live action version), and neither of them bring a sack of cash with them.
This is what makes Cowboy Bebop so universal, and so important. We rarely see poor people on television, unless it’s reality TV, Shameless style poverty porn, or both. Spike’s riches, or lack thereof, are never the punchline in Cowboy Bebop. They’re just his reality. If the Netflix version can capture this properly, it’s already halfway to greatness.
There are other interesting aspects of Cowboy Bebop that will be fascinating to see both modernised and in live action. There is a sense of statelessness to Cowboy Bebop, where the Earth is not discussed in terms of nations. That view of Earth’s future is pretty ahead of its time for the ‘90s, and in our current time, with the George Soros Globalists the bane of every third right wing Facebook meme, it will be fascinating to see how that element of Cowboy Bebop comes into play. Likewise, Ed’s gender being never quite confirmed was kooky and fun in the ‘90s. It has the potential to offer a much deeper story this time around – if Ed even shows up at all, that is. My money’s on Scarlett Johansson playing Ed, if she’s not too busy playing a tree.
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