Cowboy Bebop: Adios for Starters

Watch Cowboy Bebop (the original, not the idiotic live action adaptation)

Spoilers implied.

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If Cowboy Bebop's fame should save me the trouble of an introduction it may still be worthwhile, after a quarter century, to try remembering why this show made such a splash in the first place, why it came as such a revelation to those of us catching it in '99. While I won't be taking it episode by episode, the first installment helps clarify that issue.

For one thing, anime at the time was still occasionally called "japanimation" in the U.S. and had rightly earned its (still fitting) reputation as low-budget, lazily dubbed, mass-produced 2FPS schlock for six-year-olds: loud, colorful, over-emoted, distorted, goofy, simplistic, etc. Akira raised a few eyebrows but quickly faded from conversation, and though Princess Mononoke argued this point rather pointedly a year prior, most of us teens simply did not consider anime worthy of continued attention, and even if we'd watched Gundam and so forth, did not consider them part of a larger subculture. Bebop spurred conversation to a large extent for NOT matching anime thereto seen in the west.

For another, in Disney's second golden age animation in general was still derided and discounted as inextricably childish, with The Simpsons only very gradually shifting public attitude on the matter. While the '90s moved beyond '80s over-the-top heroic goofiness with the more sober Batman / X-Men cartoons or especially Gargoyles, these still narrowly catered to a tween audience.

 

For yet another, television as a whole has never earned much respect for its obnoxious attention-grabbing (this was the heyday of Urkel after all) shallow comedy dominated the airwaves and drama fixated on a handful of topics like murder mysteries or cop shows with a growing side interest in hospitals thanks to ER. Shows stuck to strict formulas, usually a core cast of two or three reiterating the same weekly plot with the same running gags for as long as their ratings held up.

 

For yet yet another, Science Fiction itself was considered a fringe interest to which few would openly admit, not helped by the antics of Trekkies and the like. If you wanted TV SF your choice lay primarily between Star Trek or X-Files, whose quality varied wildly to put it mildly.

So, into this media landscape enter Cowboy Bebop #1: Asteroid Blues.

We're introduced to Spike and Jet looking for a paying job, broke enough to scrimp on food, a recurring theme over the show's course which would eventually form an emphatic bookend with the end of Hard Luck Woman toward the series finale. The future looks dingy. Spaceflight does nothing to change human nature; monkeys in space are still monkeys. The solar system benefits from interplanetary FTL travel but true to cyberpunk themes most of society wallows in its disrepair. Asteroid Blues makes an oft-overlooked mark in deliberately setting the series' tone without simply establishing an episodic formula.

 

Characters in serial works too often prove pirates who don't do anything, their original occupations, quirks or life histories thrown to the wayside as each installment focuses on the way their lives diverge from a norm the series failed to establish in the first place. See ST:TNG's first episode after the pilot, The Naked Now, for the confusion that can cause. Here we get a deliberate first impression of Spike and Jet's "cowboy" lifestyle set among the general criminality making it a necessity, plus the Bebop itself and Spike's martial prowess, but it's the world itself which receives most of our attention, refraining from the impulse to over-populate the cast from the get-go. Where normally the pilot would serve as a "you all meet in a tavern" moment fixing the core cast, Asteroid Blues teases the audience halfway through during the female mark's conversation with Spike, appearing for a moment ready to join our heroes on their adventures.

Then it ends. She and her male companion die. Brutally and unfairly, as they lived. He by her own hand to cease his suffering and struggling against the inevitable.

 

"adios"

Not until late in the show's second half would the audience learn why the couple's plight put Spike especially in such a thoughtful mood, but even ignoring personal symbolism, opening with a bitter end established overall mood, and the mood meant business. To say mercy kills did not feature prominently on television (even in the goth '90s) would be putting it mildly, and I'd bet they still do not. Hollywood's obsession with happy endings and heroic triumph precludes such unpalatable choices. But the eagerness with which many youths across generations have leapt on Cowboy Bebop for 25 years witnesses the need for such themes to be acknowledged in entertainment.

 

The next several episodes adopt a distinctively more lighthearted atmosphere, but the tone had been quite skillfully set, and it was nothing like what we'd seen before.

Adios, space cowboys, and welcome to the show.