Cowboy Bebop

• 1. Introduction

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  Cowboy Bebop arrived on Japanese television in 1998 with a tagline its own director would later call an exaggeration: "a new genre unto itself." That self-description, inserted before and after commercial breaks during the original broadcast, turned out to be more accurate than Shinichiro Watanabe wanted to admit. The series ran for twenty-six episodes, each one dubbed a "session," and it asked its audience to hold together science fiction, Westerns, noir, pulp fiction, jazz, and existential philosophy as a single coherent whole. It managed it. What drove a show about bounty hunters drifting through the Solar System in the year 2071 to be called, decades later, one of the greatest animated series ever made? The answer involves a toy company that walked away, a composer who invented scenes before they existed, and a director who decided from the very first episode how the whole thing would end.

• 2. The World of 2071

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  Roughly fifty years before the events of the series, an accident involving a hyperspace gateway rendered Earth almost uninhabitable. Humanity scattered across the rocky planets and moons of the Solar System, and with that dispersal came a rising tide of crime. The Inter Solar System Police responded by legalizing a bounty hunting contract system, placing registered hunters, referred to as Cowboys, in pursuit of criminals for cash rewards. The spaceship Bebop is where the series plants its flag, and the crew who drifts aboard it are all running from something. Spike Spiegel is an exiled former hitman for the criminal Red Dragon Syndicate. Jet Black is a former ISSP officer who lost faith in his old life. Faye Valentine is an amnesiac con artist, cryogenically frozen after an accident on Earth and thawed into a future she does not remember. Edward Wong is an eccentric, abandoned child with extraordinary hacking skills. Ein is a genetically engineered Pembroke Welsh Corgi with human-like intelligence, whose design was initially based on a friend's pet corgi before designer Toshihiro Kawamoto got one himself to use as a motion model. Watanabe envisioned each character as an extension of his own personality or as its deliberate opposite. Every member of the main cast was designed to be, in his framing, an outlaw unable to fit into society. The settings that surround them were drawn from specific real-world sources. The city locations were generally inspired by New York and Hong Kong, and the atmosphere of the planets and their ethnic groups came primarily from Watanabe, with collaboration from set designers Isamu Imakake, Shoji Kawamori, and Dai Sato. Mars appears most often in the storylines; setting producer Satoshi Toba explained that the other planets were "unexpectedly difficult to use" because each had unique characteristics the producers had to account for in every episode.

• 3. How the Series Was Built

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  Cowboy Bebop was Watanabe's first project as solo director. All his previous work had been co-directed, and the pressure of full creative control shaped the way he approached every decision. His original concept was for a film, and during production he treated each episode as a miniature movie. The project had initially originated with Bandai's toy division as a sponsor, whose only instruction to Watanabe was: "So long as there's a spaceship in it, you can do whatever you want." Upon viewing early footage, however, it became clear that Watanabe's vision would never sell spacecraft toys. Bandai's toy division pulled out, leaving the project in development hell until sister company Bandai Visual stepped in. With no toy merchandise to worry about, Watanabe had free rein. He later joked that if Bandai Visual had not intervened, "you might be seeing me working the supermarket checkout counter right now." Watanabe described the finished series as "80% serious story and 20% humorous touch." The comical episodes were harder for the team to write than the dramatic ones, and though their events seemed random, they were carefully planned. The specific guns in the show were chosen through discussion among Watanabe, set designer Isamu Imakake, and mechanical designer Kimitoshi Yamane, because, as Toba recalled, "they didn't want common guns, because that wouldn't be very interesting." Watanabe conceived the ending early, and every episode featuring Spike and his antagonist Vicious was written to foreshadow their final confrontation. Some staff members were unhappy with this, knowing it would make a continuation difficult. Watanabe considered changing the ending but settled on his original idea. His stated reason: he did not want the series to become like Star Trek, with him tied to it for years.

• 4. Yoko Kanno and the Music

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  Composer Yoko Kanno began work on the music before most of the characters, story, or animation had been finalized. She formed a blues and jazz band called the Seatbelts to perform the score, and the result primarily comprises jazz, alongside western and opera. Watanabe described their working relationship as "a game of catch between the two of us in developing the music and creating the TV series." Kanno operated with unusual independence. As Watanabe put it: "She gets inspired on her own, follows up on her own imagery, and comes to me saying 'this is the song we need for Cowboy Bebop,' and composes something completely on her own." Kanno's music in turn inspired Watanabe to create new scenes, which inspired Kanno to write more music, including pieces she had not been commissioned for. Watanabe admitted this would normally be "unforgivable and unacceptable" in any standard production, but in this case it was, as he put it, "a big hit." Kanno was sometimes surprised at how her music was edited into the show, occasionally wishing pieces had been placed elsewhere, but felt none of the uses were inappropriate. The musical style was integrated so deeply that many episode titles themselves reflect it. The full score was released across seven soundtrack albums, two singles and EPs, and two compilations through label Victor Entertainment. Japanese critic Keith Rhee, reviewing the series in 1998, singled out Kanno's soundtrack as "a much-welcome change from all the sugary J-pop tunes of most anime features."

• 5. Broadcast and Reach

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  Cowboy Bebop debuted on TV Tokyo on the 3rd of April 1998, but its first run came with an immediate constraint. The 6:00 p.m. timeslot and the show's depictions of graphic violence meant only a selection of episodes aired in that initial broadcast: episodes 2, 3, 7 through 15, 18, and a special. The complete series aired later that year on satellite network Wowow, running from the 23rd of October 1998 until the 24th of April 1999. The first non-Asian country to broadcast the series was Italy, where it aired on the 21st of October 1999 on MTV, inaugurating a 9:00-10:30 p.m. Anime Night programming block. In the United States, Cowboy Bebop was one of the first programs shown when Cartoon Network's late-night block Adult Swim debuted on the 2nd of September 2001, airing at midnight ET as the first anime on the block that night. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, episodes 6, 8, and 22 were skipped during the original Adult Swim run due to their violent themes; all three eventually premiered by the third run. The series proved durable enough to broadcast repeatedly for four years on Adult Swim, and has aired on the network at least once every year since 2007. HD remasters began broadcasting in 2015. The English dub was particularly lauded and is regarded as one of the best anime English dubs produced. Credited with helping introduce anime to a new wave of Western viewers in the early 2000s, the series earned the designation of a gateway series, meaning it was frequently the first anime that drew new audiences into the medium.

• 6. Reception and Legacy

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  In 1999, Australian magazine Hyper rated the series 9.5 out of 10. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds a 100% approval rating based on 23 reviews. Publications including Paste and IGN named it the best and second best anime of all time, respectively. In 2007, Anime Insider topped its "50 Best Anime Ever" list with Cowboy Bebop, compiled from the votes of industry regulars and magazine staff. At the 1999 Anime Grand Prix awards, the series won first place for best male character (Spike Spiegel) and best voice actor (Megumi Hayashibara for Faye Valentine), then repeated both wins at the 2000 ceremony. In the 2000 Seiun Awards, it was recognized as Best Media of the Year. A 2004 poll in Newtype USA ranked Cowboy Bebop second on its "Top 25 Anime Titles of All Time" list, behind only Neon Genesis Evangelion. American filmmaker Rian Johnson cited the series as a visual influence on his 2005 film Brick. Writer Orson Scott Card called it "better than most sci-fi films out there," praising its relationship-based storytelling, moody visual style, and "really smart dialogue." One of its main animators, Tensai Okamura, drew on the experience when he created his own anime, Darker than Black, in 2007, structuring its narratives in two-episode arcs similar to Japanese dramas. In May 2020, composer Mason Lieberman partnered with Sunrise and Funimation to produce an official charity track for COVID-19 relief, which brought back original composer Yoko Kanno, the Seatbelts, and forty additional musical guests, released on vinyl.

• 7. Adaptations and Spin-offs

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  Two manga series based on Cowboy Bebop were published by Kadokawa Shoten, both serialized in the shojo manga magazine Asuka Fantasy DX. The first, Cowboy Bebop: Shooting Star, illustrated by Cain Kuga, began serialization in October 1997 - before the anime even aired - and ran until July 1998, collected into two volumes. The second manga ran from November 1998 to March 2000 and collected into three volumes. Both were licensed by Tokyopop for North American release. A film, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, was produced with the original television staff and crew, set between episodes 22 and 23 of the series. It was released in Japan in September 2001 and in the United States in August 2002. A live-action American adaptation was developed by Tomorrow Studios for Netflix, with John Cho, Mustafa Shakir, Daniella Pineda, and Alex Hassell cast in leading roles. Production shut down in October 2019 after Cho sustained a knee injury, setting the schedule back by more than six months, and further delays followed a COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand. The series released on the 19th of November 2021 to mixed-to-negative reviews, and on the 9th of December 2021 Netflix cancelled it due to poor ratings and reception. A separate live-action film for 20th Century Fox, with Keanu Reeves set to play Spike Spiegel, entered development but encountered repeated budget problems; as of an October 2010 interview with producer Joshua Long, the project had been stalled, and Watanabe himself stated at the MCM London Comic Con in October 2014 that he did not know how it would proceed. In 2024, character skins were added to Blizzard Entertainment's Overwatch 2, and in 2025, skins based on Spike Spiegel and Faye Valentine were added to Epic Games' Fortnite Battle Royale.