Hacker Cinema
Cowboy Bebop
カウボーイビバップ
1998 · TV series · 25 min episodes · 1 season
AnimationActionAdventureScience FictionFantasyWestern
In 2071, roughly fifty years after an accident with a hyperspace gateway made the Earth almost uninhabitable, humanity has colonized most of the rocky planets and moons of the Solar System. Amid a rising crime rate, the Inter Solar System Police (ISSP) set up a legalized contract system, in which registered bounty hunters, also referred to as "Cowboys", chase criminals and bring them in alive in return for a reward.
30 positive5 negative23 neutralfrom 58 commenters
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67 comments on Hacker News
This reminds me of the episode of the old anime series Cowboy Bebop where the crew explore an abandoned museum in a buried city searching for a Betamax player: https://cowboybebop.fandom.com/wiki/Speak_Like_A_Child
The danger of "more" is that it dilutes the purpose and voice of the original. "Cowboy Bebop" fits in this same realm, I think. It had a single season. They did a movie. They said everything they needed to say and left it at that.
I'm excited I think of the Cowboy Bebop episode (Jamming With Edward) where they hunt down a rogue satellite to get data off it.
Also think it would be crazy to have a worm spread across the servers/starlink
Babylon 5 is at the beginning of the uncanny valley of computer graphics so it looks funny (I think they used Amigas) but if you pretend that those effects are of current cinema quality, everything else is good. They travel with hyperspace portals (maybe you saw Cowboy Bebop) so they don't have to perform many unphysical motions in normal space. It's still a great show. Less of a space opera compared to the Expanse, more like a Star Trek DS9 with ETs way more powerful than earthlings.
Going back I dumped all the streaming platforms as most of their new programming was not at all interesting. Turns out I was watching reruns of shows I downloaded years ago that were still sitting on my server. So I made my own cable channel by dumping every downloaded TV show into a single playlist then turn shuffle on. I have a low power PC hooked to my TV running Debian. The power is low enough that I just turn the TV off and leave the PC running.
Since I mostly put the TV on to have background noise this solution works perfectly. It's really nice to turn the TV on and see random x-files, mst3k, max headroom, cowboy bebop, futurama, and so on 24/7. And most of it is in SD or ripped from TV/VHS which doesn't bother me at all, in fact, it adds charm and character via those artifacts of the past.
Seconding Fullmetal Alchemist. I hear the remake (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood) is usually regarded as the better version. More suggestions: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Death Note, Sousou no Frieren, Cowboy Bebop, Nichijou, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Bakemonogatari. There's also quite a few good movies, anything by Studio Ghibli is great, and so are Akira, Perfect Blue, and Ghost in the Shell.
Your friends might be overselling it. Even as an anime fan myself, most anime is mindless drivel with works that leave a lasting impression few and far between.
Hard to make a recommendation without knowing what genres you like but the recent "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End" was a very well done story told from the perspective of a member of a fantasy-style adventuring party who outlived her fellow party members that reveals its tale through her memories of her friends and the changes their party's travels left behind on the lives of ordinary folk.
Cowboy Bebop (the 1998 anime series, not the dreadful recent live-action movie) and Trigun are considered classics in the space western genre, with a solid mix of drama and occasional humor.
As others have mentioned, the movies from Studio Ghibli are rightly regarded as classics, although I would personally limit that to their pre-2002 movies; their later movies have somewhat of a more mixed reception. To western audiences, Princess Mononoke is probably the most well known. If you want something less fantastical, Kiki's Delivery Service might be worth looking at.
In terms of rom-coms, I'd suggest the less well known His and Her Circumstances, despite its incompleteness. A lot of its humor and drama is conveyed through energetic visuals that wouldn't really be feasible when filming human actors.
I don't feel that their data supports the assertion that Netflix films are categorically worse. User-reported opinions have very wide error bars.
Netflix's motivation is different from that of theatrical-release studios. The latter rewards each movie individually; did people see it? Netflix just needs you to keep subscribing to the service; it's much harder to attribute success or failure to a picture.
The spending budget graph is more interesting: Netflix spends less, while reaping huge overall profits. I'm glad that they're spending that making a huge variety of films. Often, they're targeted to audiences who aren't me. Which means that they also sometimes make films for which I am the perfect target audience. I've loved several things that everybody hated. (Cowboy Bebop comes to mind; there were others.)
Just need to watch that one cowboy Bebop episode where they visit original earth.
I really respect that, if anyone can speak to this it would be a devoted reader like you. I might even be willing to consider it in a new light after reading what you have to say.
I’m not an adaptation hater, I mourn the cancelation of the live action Cowboy Bebop, I loved it, despite that being an unpopular opinion. That being said…
There was a scene towards the end of season two, where the dark one was lobbing bad CGI fireballs at Egwene, and Moraine was down on the beach and launched a bad CGI dragon? to like even out the fight. And I could just feel the writers being completely lost there and just punting it over to the CGI department to figure it out…
> Another aspect is that of this is that Western culture is beginning to inspire Japanese creators.
I just want to mention that "beginning to" is selling it short a bit
Japan has been influenced heavily by Western culture for a very long time
Dungeons and Dragons was huge in Japan for a while and inspired things like Record of Lodoss War. Famous composer for Final Fantasy Nobuo Uematsu has talked about one of his biggest inspirations being Elton John. Many episodes of Cowboy Bebop are titled after popular American classic blues-rock songs, and the whole show is very "American". After all, Cowboys and Blues Rock are very American
This may be becoming more prevalent as time goes on but it's been a shift that is happening for a long while
Unrelated: Cowboy Bebop episode about rogue satellite AI carving these into the Earth to amuse itself
> What I find the most interesting is that there is clearly something that makes anime stand out as being its own thing, distinct from the majority of other animated TV, but it's hard to put a finger on exactly what that attribute is and where to draw the line.
On the higher quality end of the spectrum, I think one of the main differentiators is just how seriously the staff takes the production. They lean into the cinematography, storyboarding, directing, music, choreography, etc just as much or more as one might expect from western live action prestige TV. This is exceedingly rare in TV animation in the US and is only really seen in our animated movies (which are rare these days, at least in 2D form).
The other thing is that high quality anime is exceedingly good at building atmosphere and creating vibes. Half of the enjoyment of Cowboy Bebop for example is just basking in the ambience.
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
Your Name
Violet Evergarden
Perfect Blue
Paprika
Metropolis
There's a bunch of great animated movies.
If you're referring to series then among the best Seinen classics are shows like:
Berzerk (1997)
Monster (2004) [My personal favorite]
Cowboy Bebop
Steins:Gate
Vinland Saga (newer)
Frieren (newer)
There's a lot of Shounen classics as well, my favorite probably being
Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood
granted there's several tropes in it that aren't going to be as enjoyable to watch on repeat for older folks. But the storytelling and plot is practically like Breaking Bad but in anime form.
I also get the vibe that digital cloning will be popular. Maybe some extremists will think its unholy and some addicts will lose sense of reality, but for the vast majority of people, I think it's just a user interface - maybe to some particular piece of information in the chatbot-as-librarian role, or puzzle boxes that eventually reveal information once you ask the right question, like Will Smith in I Robot.
What I don't like is that the better it gets the more a radical contigent will start to believe that you're performing brain uploading, and people will want to protect these simulations as people with rights, or ban it to prevent conscious mini-mes from being booted into a simulation and psychologically tortured like the guy in Altered Carbon. Then of course theere's the suicide cults like in the Cowboy Bebop episode "Brain Scratch" - leave your aches and pains behind !
I pray it doesn't get that weird! But if I had kids I wouldn't be raising them to talk to ghosts!
>From the moment we rise in the morning to the instant our weary heads hit the pillow at night, the inescapable struggle of labor consumes our lives.
Sounds like someone doesn't like their job.
The whole post is amazing -- it reads like stereotypical cult propaganda straight out of science fiction. I definitely expect they'll one day be posting about how we can digitize our consciousness à la "Scratch" from that one Cowboy Bebop episode [1].
[1] https://cowboybebop.fandom.com/wiki/Scratch
Thank you for creating this little treasure and maintaining it. It's a time capsule from that era!
>>I do still have a lot of unfinished areas of the site that I tell myself I need to get done, but it has been 20+ years now, so you can see how well that's going (I see you, episode summary sections).
Maybe ChatGPT could help create episode summaries for the Cowboy Bebop live action series? At least as a placeholder until you have time to write it yourself?
One thing I love about Cowboy Bebop is how each episode's name matches the genre of the episode's music. It only occurred to me the second time I watched the anime, and it was a whole new experience. A great work of art in more ways than one.
> He found 2001: space odyssey kind of slow and tedious
Oh man, have you rewatched it lately? I had very fond memories of 2001, like I’m sure many people here, but I watched it again and found it slow and tedious and then some. The first act with the apes and wailing operatic singing went on forever. The stuff on the moon is forgettable. I was really surprised to find out that everything I remember about the movie, where they’re near Jupiter, starts halfway through. The ending is so weird I’d forgotten most it that too. There’s no question about 2001’s influence and place in movie history, but by today’s film standards, for kids who are used to modern film, 2001 is harder to appreciate. Or I don’t know, I looked up the critical reception and maybe it was then too… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film)#Reception
I have made the mistake of showing my kids films that I loved from my childhood way too many times. It has backfired and made my kids not want to watch movies with me, and most of the time they’re right and the films I loved just aren’t that good by today’s standards. My youngest is also afraid of watching space movies, especially with me, because I liked a lot of them and maybe started trying to show him when we was too young. The quality of films and shows has gone up, though, and my kids helped me see it. Once I completely stopped pushing the movies I liked, the kids started sometimes finding them on their own, but they also show me movies they live that I wouldn’t have considered. It is also surprising how often movies I like haven’t aged well in terms of social dynamics, my kids are fairly sensitive to mildly racist or sexist dialogue, and there’s more than we remember from movies made in the 70s-90s.
Sci fi movies my kids have loved: Villeneuve’s Dune, The Last Mimzy, A Wrinkle in Time (non-Disney version), Cowboy Bebop (anime), Interstellar, Arrival. (Will add more if I remember)
Day or two after that happened, it occurred to me to scan back through the Cowboy Bebop episode "Wild Horses" and see which shuttle it'd featured, because I couldn't recall.
It was Columbia, of course, so that episode joined seemingly every movie made between '73 and '01 and set in NY (that was still pretty fresh, too, mind you) in being a bit of a distracting watch, in a way that was not originally intended.
This could be an amazing resource once it gains critical mass. I finally learned about the specific style of music I really enjoyed (bebop, hardbop, postbop) and now I can start creating more intelligent searches for playlists.
Funny how something like Cowboy Bebop suddenly makes so much more sense after someone else turns the light on in the room!
I enjoyed the Bosch tv series but always suspected it was mostly for the jazz music
I wish there was someone out there that would curate a station for me
Aside of who's casted, I hope the director/producer is a strong figure with artistic liberty.
I'm gonna sound like a grouchy old man, but streaming services are completely killing cinema. TV shows spanning +8 seasons, with all different producers/directors.
I'd like this to be a short series (4 episodes TOPS) with one very strong director that can set their foot strong and don't comply to Apple to make it extremely mainstream (like what Netflix did with Cowboy Bebop's adaptation, couldn't pass the first 15 minutes).
Wow, this is like the Cowboy Bebop pilot episode.
Reminds me of the "Asteroid Blues" episode from Cowboy Bebop.
> PsychoPass, Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Attack on Titan.
I totally agree with everything on this list, except Akira and NGE. And I am saying that as someone for whom NGE is the all-time personal favorite piece of animated media (and I like Akira a lot too, just not as much).
Akira and NGE are pretty much deconstructions of genres, and are really heavy on at least some basic level of previous exposure and understanding of the context. I am fairly certain that if you make someone without much previous exposure to the context watch Akira, you will get a very resounding "what the fuck did you just make me watch". Watched it in a movie theater myself around 5 years ago, and it was definitely a wild ride. With NGE, I rewatched it many times, partially because I almost always discovered something new on subsequent rewatches.
The rest of the ones you've mentioned are great for easing-in though, and are not shallow even in the slightest. I would also add Ghost in the Shell: Stand-alone Complex series to the list of recommendations.
There are quite a few recommendations for the classics, but if someone doesn't enjoy the slow burn of those deep books, maybe they should start with something lot more dopaminergic: animes and movies!
PsychoPass, Akira, Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Attack on Titan.
So, movies. I only saw The Shawshank Redemption a few years ago, and it's really really good. Classic. Human. Touching. I'm not even sure how to characterize it except yes, really go see it, it's really at the top of the power distribution of movies.
12 Angry Men. At this point it's the cliché of old but good movies. At this point it's a satire of a socially interesting movie due to its naivete, yet for someone who seems a bit close minded it might be just the right thing. (Or not? :D)
The Pianist. Again, simple. Brutal. Or the recent Joker.
. . .
But really when it comes to AI and fiction.
Blade Runner. If that's not fiction that's worth investing time into, then what is? Even typing this I've got the chills thinking about Roy Batty.
Animated movies that I often rewatch (in no particular order):
- Spirited Away
- Grave of the Fireflies
- Finding Dory
- Up
- Tokyo Godfathers
- Akira (NOT the English dub, which completely changes the story and dialogue for the worse, and for no good reason)
- Mononoke Hime
- Ghost in the Shell (the original one)
- My Neighbor Totoro
Animated series I'll rewatch:
- Guardian of the Sacred Spirit
- Castlevania
- Futurama
- Archer
- Arcane
- Cowboy Bebop
- Ergo Proxy
- The Dragon Prince
- Hakaba Kitaro
- Star Trek: Lower Decks
I have a lot off issues with the adaptation, but I was ready to put them aside and enjoy the show. However I felt that to much weight had been put on Vicious/Julia. AFAIR background story in the original had a slow build up. Something from the past looming in the darkness. With low budget it looked ridiculous.
It is hard. For example I'm not exactly Tarantino fan, but I recognize his stylistic approach and find it good. If someone would like to copy Tarantino they could easily arrive at a mediocre straight to DVD B movie. The difference is hard to describe. I feel it was the same with Cowboy Bebop.
>I don't see much of a difference between calling it a Japanese cartoon and an anime. In English they're called cartoons, so I think that's a non-issue
It's a huge issue. Cartoons are silly. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are cartoons. Cartoons are for kids. Spike Speagal is not a toon. You know the distinction, please don't pretend you don't know.
>As I said to the other reply, I'm not saying cartoon = silly, I'm saying cartoon = not reality. Even if it were dubbed with serious Japanese voice acting, do you think normal Japanese people talk that way? No.
No movie or cinema = reality. Everything is made up. So this is actually a non-issue.
Second, you're not stupid. Many animes including cowboy bebop are drawn like comics. With a more realistic style. You understand this concept, please don't pretend you don't. You know exactly what I mean when I say this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=cartoon
Is less realistic then this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=spike+speagal
You see the difference visually right? If not then I can't help you. If you do see that the realism is increased in the second link, then I have to tell you, the voices also need increased realism to match or many people wouldn't be ok with it. I have a friend who is similar to you doesn't even notice bad acting, he likes shows with laughable acting like the flash on the WB. I think you might be like him.
>Cowboy Bebop has funny moments and it has serious moments, I think the funny moments come through better in the dub, and the serious moments are portrayed excellently too.
Your definition of "better" does not include good acting. Since anime is not reality and movies and basically everything you see on TV is not reality.... it seems to me you just don't care for good acting in general. It's a non-issue to you. So the shitty acting in all dubbed anime, cowboy bebop included,... you wouldn't mind seeing all the weird ass "Huh?"s and pauses I see in dubs in a Hollywood live action movie. Or is there a difference here? You tell me.
>Even if it were dubbed with serious Japanese voice acting, do you think normal Japanese people talk that way? No.
Most anime has over stylized voices. Cowboy bebop is NOT such an anime. The voice actors are realistic and representative of how real Japanese talk.
But even so the stylized voices need a certain level of realism so the japanese people can be drawn into the story. No American dub hits that level of realism at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLmsVBgZiak
I mean if you can watch above and say the voice acting passes because it's a "cartoon" and not real I think we're just too different.
Comical in the wrong sense, as in it's so bad it's funny.
The sub is more serious sounding and is a reflection of what the directors vision was. The english version is a mangling of what cowboy bebop was intended to be. Heck Faye in japanese sounds like a 25 year old woman while in the English version she sounds 40.
> also don't see why it needs to be like how normal people talk, because it's literally a cartoon.
You realize that anime is a genre in itself that can be as serious as anything else out there? Japanese voice actors are the best in the world. Cowboy bebop has comedic elements but the genre is NOT cartoon, it's science fiction noir with a jazzy element and kung fu. Nowhere in there is "cartoon."
I think you like cartoons. And you like the warped version of what cowboy bebop was not intended to be. Or is this really true? The ending was serious. Was the ending still cartoony to you?
Maybe it isn't that you like cartoons. Maybe you're just use to the voice actors and can see past the horrible acting. Or maybe you're not use to subs. Even so the fact that you can hear the bad acting from the dub shows that you're preference is less than objective. The Japanese version has definitively better acting.
I can't accept the dubbed versions level of acting in a regular Hollywood movie, so I can't accept it if it's in an anime too. The bar doesn't lower for me just because it's an animation, but I guess it does for you.
I first came across Cowboy Bebop because I bought the movie on Universal Media Disc (UMD) for a Sony PSP! I had no idea what it was about other than I heard the series was good, and I quite liked anime at the time. Was hooked ever since.
Good times.
Episode 9 of Cowboy Bebop features an abandoned military satellite that becomes lonely and starts drawing geoglyphs with its constellation of laser weapons.
https://cowboybebop.fandom.com/wiki/MPU
Oh I wasn't implying I was worried about it. It was an indirect reference to a Cowboy Bebop episode (sentient satellite they connect to from decades ago).
Don't worry I'm not an Elon hater
A lot of "Americanization" sucks.
But I want to point out some counter-examples.
1. Digimon Season 1 English Dub is far superior to the Japanese original. Many people choose Cowboy Bebop as the "Better in English" anime, but... Digimon S1 is night-and-day. Stronger script with better jokes/puns, cooler attack names (English "Pepper Breath" vs the Japanese "Baby Flame"), everything is straight up better in English.
2. Cowboy Bebop is probably the better known example in anime community.
3. Final Fantasy VII -- Perhaps it is more obvious that "Cloud" and "Earth" would have a doomed romantic relationship if we stuck to the original Japanese. But "Earth" was chosen as a name for the Japanese audience because English sounds exotic. To return that feeling of "exoticness", they transliterated it into "Aeris", and suddenly we return back to the original exotic feeling name.
4. Power Rangers -- Okay, I don't know how to think of this one. Power Rangers took the original Japanese stuff and changed it so much, it no longer looked anything like the original Super Sentai.
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Saban Entertainment knew how to do dubs / Americanizations. (Digimon S1, Power Rangers, Samurai Pizza Cats, Dragonball Z '96).
Just because other companies failed where Saban succeeded doesn't mean that "Americanization" is bad. Its that "bad Americanization" is bad.
Maybe, but I'd pay for better content and UX. Many movies above that royalty threshold just aren't available. Also Netflix must die because they canceled Cowboy Bebop.
About time anyway. Always next version of the business they put out of business. That's the way it works, especially with the deflation threat of technology. If you're a tech business and you can't maintain a margin so you have to raise rates, then something is up, broke, stockholder greed, personal greed, etc.
Why aren't Apple's shows (and movies?) appealing to you? If you dropped them on HBO I wouldn't know the difference. There are lots of different genres, great actors, and compelling stories.
We have Netflix (via T-Mobile), Hulu, Prime, HBO, Disney+ and Apple TV. Some of these (Disney/Hulu) are from family or friends. WE only pay for Prime (probably the lowest quality of all of these) and Apple TV (because of Apple One subscription).
HBO and Apple TV and Disney+ have the best quality content IMO. Netflix is kind of around there sometimes but a lot of just pure garbage (Looking at you Cowboy Bebop). Hulu isn't bad. Comparable to Netflix but less content. Prime is just bad for the most part. If Wal-Mart had launched it instead it's about what I'd expect it to be.
> But Netflix’s quarterly subscriber growth is now slowing in spite of spending more money than ever on content
To me the problem is the content. They now seem to produce shows for particular niches that are never my niche. Some of these extremely expensive shows are laughably low quality on all fronts: story, acting, stylistic choices, cinematography/direction... everything.
Take the new Cowboy Bebop: it's obviously not made for fans of the original. Is it made for new fans? For adults? For children? I couldn't tell.
Half the tentpole movies of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s were my niche, so it's not as though I'm a difficult audience.
If Netflix produce shows with particular political or cultural slants, they need to make sure there's an audience of people who watches shows for their politics & cultural slants, rather than for being, er, good.
I watch shows with compelling stories and solid characters. I'm not interested in race, gender, sexual orientation, identity, etc, except inasmuch as it makes for interesting stories and adds to a character's personality or motivations.
There's an audience of people on Twitter who defend/malign Netflix shows, and people on Youtube who make/consume video essays about them, but is anybody in that group actively watching that original content with joy and getting more value from their Netflix subscription than they got the previous year?
I wish I were, but I'm not.
I think there's a decent chance they inspired Cowboy Bebop's episode about the tech cult SCRATCH: https://cowboybebop.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_Scratch
...although Japan has had several really wacky cults that also could have inspired the story.
When I review the list of original series that came out in 2021[0], the only thing I was interested in watching, watched to completion, and thoroughly enjoyed in 2021 (excluding children's programming) was Arcane and Black Summer (I know the latter is controversial but I enjoy its arthouse take on the genre even when the writing/plotting has its holes). Seinfeld and Cowboy Bebop (the animé) have been nice for nostalgia but I don't pay for re-runs. I finished The Witcher but the writing took a step back from season one.
Meanwhile, HBO had multiple quality series release this season both new and old. Highly recommend Station Eleven.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Netflix_original_programming
You pay for netflix yet you can't watch stuff you want. You search for a film and it shows up on the search autocomplete and yet it's not there. Why? Copyright bullshit nobody cares about.
Films that used to be in your list mysteriously disappear. You swear it was there but it's not. It's like netflix is gaslighting you. Sometimes you try to watch something only to be greeted by an ominous "last day to watch on netflix" notice. You thought you were paying for a subscription but it was really a long term rental that you have no idea when it expires. They simply take stuff away. Whenever something new shows up instead of being excited you now wonder how long it will take for them to take it away too. Cowboy Bebop? I wonder how long that's gonna last.
Whatever scraps and leftovers you do get is ruined by quality issues: extremely compressed encodes, shitty video player software, cropping, changes, sometimes they can't even get the episodes in the correct order which means I'd be watching it backwards. You now wonder if what you're watching on netflix is the best version. You now wonder if the netflix version is censored or altered in any way. I find myself searching for reddit discussions on a series to see if netflix screwed it up.
You entertain the notion of paying for other services as well but you discover their apps are even shittier and they still don't have what you want to watch. You remember facts such as amazon's non-existent customer service and the industry's tendency to profile you based on what you watch. You realize that paying money to these people is a lot like being in an abusive relationship.
Maybe you are right, I want to be able to talk and discuss topics with friends and peers. I feel that is hard sometimes to know what others are watching and how it matches my taste. I enjoy as much watching and reading media as I enjoy sharing that experience with others.
If you do not enjoy sharing experiences with others, whatever you see is good if you like it.
> rather than as an attempt at gaining social cachet then it's fine.
At least for me, I do not think that watching iZombie, Dune or Cowboy Bebop makes me look better, but it allows to share good moments with friends. To explain the complete plot of a movie or several episodes from a TV show just for a pun or a quick observations is not what we like.
I am ok with you watching just for yourself, but it seems that you do not approve that I or others like to share opinions and talk about media. Why is that?
All the stuff from before you were born is curated for you by society. It's pre-filtered, the cruft has been removed and for the first few years of your life you have no control over the filter.
Then, as agency is attained, you get increasing exposure to the great unfiltered, and you find hidden treasure and trash and you learn what you actually like and dislike - in preparation for the filter you apply to your own children - which helps to define you, to yourself.
Then you get a job, partner, mortgage / rent, kids, and, just the requirements to being able to afford all that goes with that, removes the time required for 'agency' and so you're locked in a fairly tight decade-era of culture for the rest of your life unless you actively choose otherwise; seeking out the alternative, following rabbit holes, opening yourself to the full spectrum of colour that is within surprisingly easy reach, following threads that your natural tendency for the easy path would be to drop.
Most of my favourite music that I listen to now is recent. My old favourites are from when I hadn't heard my new favourites. Some of my new favourites are contextual around life stages and activities I hadn't reached or participated in earlier.
I missed Mad Men, tried to start it a couple of years ago, realised it's 92 hour-long episodes, and worked out that I didn't have the enthusiasm for it after getting through a few episodes because the combination of my friend-base and entertainment value I was getting from it didn't add up to being worth 92 hours of my time.
Recently watched Berserk upon the recommendation of a work colleague. Worth it.
Squid game, worth it. For me anyway.
Live action Cowboy Bebop, enjoying it a couple of episodes in, will continue.
Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. But first, you gotta know yourself.
Listen to music you don't like to better calibrate what you do like. Watch the occasional blockbuster movie to help your appreciation for real film.
Can't see, hear, taste, or do it all, find your own channel but make sure to rub up against the edges regularly enough to determine if you need to change channels but didn't realise it yet.
Culture is about stories from which life lessons are learnt, and there are a lot more TV shows, movies, and songs than there are life lessons, so as long as you check those edges occasionally, you'll be pretty well covered.
The Wire destroyed and rebuilt my view of the world, and work, and government, and leadership and morality. The song King Kong as covered by Tom Waits recalibrated my musical brain (which was already uniquely calibrated by Mr. Bungle in the late 90's), The Mighty Boosh and Rick and Morty have been journeys into imagination like I never dreamed.
No. There's not too much culture.
probably write it as a virus that jumps from webserver to webserver, doing nothing malicious but adding your HTML to a pre-determined route
it will have to be a strong AI virus so it can keep rewriting itself as new software updates come along so you’re risking a skynet situation - oh! reminds me of the cowboy bebop episode where a hacked satellite entertains itself by drawing geoglyphs in the desert-definitely do that.
> charming mistakes
One character being played by three different actors (either that, or three characters being so similar I confused them as the same character despite being three different actors) is hardly charming IMO.
Longer form stories, such as Game of Thrones (where Azor Ahai, and other such plotlines are literally killed off) are probably more entertaining. It sucks to see a fan theory turn out to not matter at all, but not everything ends up being relevant to the conclusion.
I don't think a 2 or 3 hour movie has any room to dwell on unimportant details. Anime and miniseries do have that time. We can watch Goku mess around with Princess Snake or Krillen get his Namekian power up (which doesn't matter for any fight, but is good development for the character in isolation).
That's probably the charm of Cowboy Bebop. There's so much detail and none of it really matters. The interesting story happened like 10 years ago (in universe time). That's be my pick for a show / story with very little Chekhov gun going on.
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Chekhov gun is probably contrasted with Red Herring, which is explicitly a detail that not only doesn't matter, but purely exists to mislead the audience. Any Chekhov gun heavy plot needs red herrings to balance things out, otherwise it's too predictable.
There is still a void, which various artists could fill these days. Sadly, if they did I don't think I would hear about them due to the volume of content on streaming platforms.
Japanese studio anime follows a formula that you might have noticed. This formula is still unnecessary to western audiences, which has learned to tolerate it. It includes characters with certain hair colors having certain behaviors and relationships to the protagonist, it includes a filler episode at a sauna.
Something like Cowboy Bebop would be a hit in the west, for the same reasons that The Expanse - which is not anime - is a hit. But Japanese studios gravitate towards portraying fantasies only relatable and comfortable to a socially awkward viewer, while Western studios don't invest heavily enough into what fans of the medium and anime art-style would like, and still target children.
If you haven't watched End of Evangelion and the sequel movies, those are my favorite parts of the series.
Gurren Lagann is a wonderful homage to other mecha series. The series evolves in a REALLY interesting way, it blew my mind. Is worth sticking it out to the end!
Berserk (2016) is awesome, though I go back and forth on weather it transcends it's own violence. I'm probably just being a prude though, since nobody else seems to care haha.
DevilMan Crybaby(2018) is worth a watch. It is a gorgeously animated edgelord anime, run through a modern filter to make it more palatable.
Dorohedoro (2020) is bizarre and nihilistic and is written by a female author which is cool.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (2012 - present) suffers from being the product of a "less woke" 80's and 90's but man... I love it so much. It is so dumb and fun. There is a LOT of it but you just have to go along for the ride.
One Punch Man (2015) is great fun.
I tend to follow individual studios and directors.
Hiroyuki Imaishi has been consistently excellent.
Satoshi Kon is a legend, pick ANYTHING by him and you will not be disappointed.
Shinichirō Watanabe. I'm especially fond of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo.
Studio Trigger makes great stuff.
A month or so ago I finally watched the Neon Genesis Evangelion series after hearing about it for more than 20 years. After slogging through a few episodes of predictable awkard-teenagers-pilot-giant-robots-to-save-the-world it finally reveals itself as a stunning exploration into the minds of troubled youth who are, effectively, subjected to a barrage of traumatic crises. It's a deep, rich world with complex characters, all with Herculean responsibilities and human weaknesses.
I'll have to watch Lain now, thanks to your comment.
I enjoy the usual suspects: Akira, Ghost in the Shell (including Standalone Complex), and Cowboy Bebop immensely. I like Robotech, though much of it is nostalgia. But I've found straying from the essentials to be challenging for my very Western tastes.
I tried to watch Stein's Gate and thought it was very clever, but the awkward romance and over-the-top characteristics of the main character were a bit too much. Knights of Sidonia and Attack on Titan got too weird, too quickly. I was too old for Dragonball. There's a lot of Western-focused, Japanese-animated options out there, but they almost universally lack the depth of their anime counterparts.
I'd love some recommendations if you have any, whether they be newer stuff or classics that I've overlooked.
Serial Experiments Lain is everything wonderful about anime. It is violent, dark, scary. In summary: ADULT.
Anime tells stories in a visual format that for years and years you simply could not get anywhere else. Adult genre fiction was not well represented in American media. Even today, adult American cartoons are almost entirely "sitcom" format. They don't want to ever end, and they do not want to tell a story, they want to make more episodes.
Today, people are spoiled with their options for genre fiction. Cowboy Bebop blew my mind as a kid. Berserk was also one of my favorites. I did not think anything could be cooler than Vampire Hunter D. This was before Game of Thrones or The Expanse or any number of other amazing science-fiction or fantasy media we have today. Coming from a small town, it felt like a secret that nobody else knew about and I loved immersing myself in this grim, beautiful, foreign worlds[0].
A lot of anime has a lot of gross "fan service" that objectifies their female protagonists, and that is something I was never a fan of. It was something you tolerated because there wasn't anywhere else to go.
Lain is a great example of all of this. Where else are you going to get a gorgeously rendered cyberpunk-horror series?
0: Probably at a younger age than I should have been allowed to. Though honestly I don't see myself censoring everything from my kids. Part of the draw was the adult nature and feeling like I was getting away with something.
> I can just imagine the monk explaining COVID to these cows, and just getting a "Moo" in return.
They need Ein from Cowboy Bebop. See specifically episode/session seventeen, "Mushroom Samba".
> Would people like it if it didn't have the star wars backdrop? Does the star wars backdrop even make that much sense?
The bulk of the plot would work fine if it were space-bounty-hunter-with-angry-people-after-him, plus friends and a macguffin. Star Wars flavoring seems like the main way that this differentiates it from Cowboy Bebop (space bounty hunter in the solar system, hops between planets...).
A big part of why the show is good is the mysterious "what's under the mask" aspect. We've had Boba/Jango Fett for decades, but it's really neat to see the expansion of this lore about the mandalorian culture -- why they always stay masked, etc. SW nerds like me often find lore tidbits delicious.
The Mandalorian also happens to have ridiculously good production values compared to most shows -- I'm watching a movie in serial form. (See also Altered Carbon.) It also has interesting characters that I am curious about (both heroes and villains), with backstories I'd like to hear more about. THAT part doesn't need to be Star Wars. It could be samurai, or space privateers, or drama on a space station (DS9), and as long as it's done well, I'll want to watch it.
Honestly I wouldn’t recommend Patlabor to someone who only likes the GITS movie and Cowboy Bebop. It’s going to feel too slow and cheezy (in a way many anime fans including myself enjoy).
I’d probably suggest Rurouni Kenshin (Samurai X) or Gundam Zeta instead. They have interesting themes, are more adult and have amazing art.
Cowboy Bebop is a great show with nothing else like it. I feel the same, but I still enjoy CB, Princess Mononoke, Grave of Fireflies etc. My immediate association with anime is a over sexualized cartoon with way to many episodes (knowing that's not true for the anime I have watched).
Felt the same. The few french dubs that are feeling "ok" are mostly biased from nostalgia by being the first things we were exposed to. I know i feel that way with the Cowboy Bebop dub (and i won't take into account the Miyazaki movies as they are exceptions for many reasons).
The few other dubs i was exposed to later in life weren't good experiences either and you could feel the limited cast (in quality and quantity of actors) failing at not butchering things along the process.
Like you said animation and dubbing it wasn't taken seriously at all in the past, and is still limited nowadays in France as i understand it (short discussions with actual french dubbing actress and few articles).
People absolutely talk about great more recent animated movies, like Your Name, Into the Spider-Verse, and Kubo and the Two Strings.
Princes Mononoke is actually my favorite movie, I obviously agree that it's really excellent, but objectively I think Spider-Verse is just as good, even if it doesn't fit my preferences quite as much.
For TV series, Mob Psycho 100 is absolutely top tier, I'd put it against Cowboy Bebop easily. Loved Bebop, but I think MP100 is the better series overall, both for story and animation quality.
This is a combination of rose-tinted glasses, plus things accumulating social value over time. Eminem didn't rap about playing N64 games until long, long past the N64's heydey; it wasn't cool to mention that back in 1998. Pokemon is mainstream with adults now, but it was for real (young) nerds and dorks back when it started. Retro games are currently cool with those who scoffed at them when they were new. This phenomenon is especially prevalent with 'cult hits', like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, which has a much more positive reputation now than it did at its own launch.
Not sure about that. I remember that in the late '90s - early 2000s people were really hyped up about the animation movies of that era, and rightly so, we're talking about the early Pixar movies, Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away", Satoshi Kon's "Paranoia Agent" and "Perfect Blue" or about "Cowboy Bebop", people knew that they were contemporary with really, really great animation movies/series. Almost 20 years have passed since then and nothing similar is being done anymore, at least not in the mainstream.
The TV series that was broadcast just a little before that was also pretty remarkable [1], it involved Miyazaki, Isao Takahata (who later made "Grave of the Fireflies") and Masaaki Osumi, who was in charge of the first few episodes which have a really special jazzy and cool feeling, which I've only seen reproduced at the same level in "Cowboy Bebop" which was made more than 20 years later.
Also, the opening scene of the even later Lupin the 3rd TV series dubbed in Italian will forever be one of my best childhood memories. I don't know how they managed to do it but sometimes the Italians were able to create opening scenes that were even better than the original ones in Japanese, a very hard feat to accomplish as the latter were also very good.
[1] https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=886
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095327/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKmzwpALHg4
The USA and Japan have a very strange relationship.
As far as Asian countries are concerned, Japan has fewer immigrants to the USA than Philippines, China, Vietnam, Korea, and India. But Japan sticks out despite the relatively low migration rate.
* The USA in general does have a sense of "the importance of the foreigner" or outsider. Foreigners invite new thought, new culture, and new experiences.
* Japan seems to make an ideal outsider. They're physically on the other side of the world. Their history is basically isolated from "The West" for hundreds, or even thousands of years.
* Yet, with all of that, modern Japan has integrated very finely into the culture of the West. Japanese brands are well-liked (Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Mazda). And as far as I can tell, Japan also likes a number of USA brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, 7-11, Disney, Levi Jeans, McDonalds, Star Wars).
* The media empire of Japan (not movies necessarily, but Japanese anime and Japanese video games, which are popular in the USA) has a lot of synergistic play / counterplay with USA. For example, the "RPG" genre has been shaped by both cultures heavily. While the USA can claim the big-daddy Dungeons and Dragons, as well as Rogue, Diablo, Bauldur's Gate (Canada, but still "Western"), World of Warcraft, and Skyrim... Japan has the Final Fantasy series, Dragon Quest, Legend of Zelda (including Breath of the Wild). There's a lot of influence and synergy between the "JRPG" and "WRPG" genres.
In short: Japanese culture is both familiar and foreign.
Cowboy Bebop is perhaps the best example of what I'm going for. Its a hardcore scifi space opera filled with Jazz: the American-influence on the anime cannot be ignored. But its still an anime with big eyes and the unique "Japanese" drawing style.
The familiarity allows American audiences a degree of comfort, while the Japanese tropes entice us with their exoticness. Its both familiar and different.
And from my understanding: the opposite occurs in Japan. The Jazz and "Americanisms" in the anime are designed to give a bit of an exotic feel for Japanese audiences and entice them. While the Anime tropes are there to give them familiarity.
And that's why its synergy. Familiar to us is exotic for them, and vice versa.
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EDIT: And then there's "Power Rangers", the weirdest thing to ever happen between the USA and Japan. Its neither fully American nor fully Japanese. Its clearly "Super Sentai" footage, but the "American Parts" with Johnny / Kimberly / Jason are still core to the series.
Its not just "Power Rangers" either. Transformers, and Sonic. Sonic is a Sega-owned video game character... but a lot of the animation was... American/France. How's that for a change? Outside of the "Sonic X" anime--- Sonic SatAM, The Adventures of Sonic, Sonic Underground, and Sonic Boom are all primarily animated in the West. With the comics done by Archie.
Reminds me of the Cowboy Bebop movie opening: https://youtu.be/ofSLCFxJ8Jo
IIRC Cowboy Bebop was developed explicitly with western audiences in mind. It’s success informed later shows (in a similar way to how thr Chinese market is influencing Hollywood movies) so it really is a landmark show, even if it wasn’t as well received in Japan.
I don't know where to read, but it seems to me that end of the 90s, TV shows (real and anime) became less episode based but got a whole story arc, like we know from current TV shows like "Game of Thrones", "Breaking Bad" or "The Wire".
I always hear people talking about how "The Sopranos" was the first TV show that did this, but anime like "Neon Genesis Evangelion" and "Cowboy Bebop" came out years before it.
I don't think that Firefly is a show for nerds, I don't do 90% of the stuff that are considered "nerdy". I'm not into comics, I'm not into anime, I enjoy good scifi and fantasy because they are good not because of the genre.
Firefly is one of my favorite shows, but I can also see it's many flaws, and I honestly don't know if a 5-6 season Firefly would've been even as remotely good as the "Firefly" that fans imagine.
Firefly was very entertaining as a show and it set up a universe that allowed people's imagination to run wild with fan theories and fanfiction, but it doesn't mean that the show would ended up being half as good as the short preview we had.
The airing of the show was abysmal the episodes aired out of order and created a mess it was mishandled on every step but I can nearly guarantee you that if it would've went on the end result would've been considerably worse than the would be show the fans imagine in their heads.
Firefly is your highschool crush that you never had a chance of dating, it been put onto such a high pedestal that I could never live up to it's expectations, and when the fan base did get another chance with Serenity it flopped.
Serenity wasn't a bad movie, it was pretty well in line with the show in terms of quality of writing and performance, and the budget was considerably better but after years of imagination people just didn't came to watch it.
They got a movie that made 25M domestically (The DVD sales of Firefly made more), and about 14-15M world wide, it barely covered it's budget it made like 300K over the production costs which means that it most likely ended up losing money.
If Serenity would've been a huge success Fox would've greenlit additional movies (it's been 11 years since it came out so don't cry about spoilers) or even a renewal or spin off of the TV show even tho several characters died in the film.
But the fans pissed all over it, so I would have to say it's a good show but we all have a major selection bias because of our cultural bias, your mom might like the show but I can guarantee you her tastes are probably closer to yours that you might think since at least some part of your own cultural bias came from your parents.
And again I absolutly love Firefly, and I chuckle at the Firefly references and jokes in Castle (another show that was dragged way past it's lifespan) I do find the whole western/space opera theme extremely cool (one of the few animes I not only love but can actually bring myself to watch is CowBoy BeBop), but I'm not sold that it would've been a perfect show and a hit if it would've been let to run a full season or more.
Anime Movies tend to be weaker than their "TV series" counterpart. Like how books tend to be better than their movie version. I love Cowboy Bebop but the movie was underwhelming.
I've enjoyed my fair share of anime, and there are some criminally underrated TV series and movies that should be mandatory viewing for American audiences.
That being said, once the new car smell wore off, I saw that Japanese animation has its highs and lows, just like American productions. Many shows suffer from the same horrible cliches and stale, one-dimensional characters that appear to be copy-pasted from story to story, and eventually you start to notice the same formulas behind some of those intricate plots.
Ultimately, I'm saying that one shouldn't confuse originality with unfamiliarity. As a Westerner, Japanese animation was unfamiliar and amazing. Once it became familiar, much of it became less than amazing, but the good stuff was still just as good.
One final thought is to point out the obvious target audience age difference. Probably due in large part to Disney's influence, Westerners have long associated animation with children, and this makes it an apples-oranges debate. If you challenge me to find an American cartoon with as much depth as Cowboy Bebop, I probably can't. On the flip side, you probably can't find a live-action Japanese show with as much depth as The Wire.
As a category, anime has some unique characteristics you don't (generally) find in other TV or film categories:
1) Strong user/viewer affinity for the category. Generally speaking, you don't find that your typical Grey's Anatomy viewer is a "medical drama fan," who seeks out other medical dramas at every opportunity. Likewise, a rabid Family Guy viewer is probably not an "animated comedy fan," barring a very tiny and borderline-insignificant segment who is. They might be fair-weather fans, but their consumption of those categories is ad-hoc and show-dependent. Anime fans may come to the category seeking a particular show -- Cowboy Bebop, Attack on Titan, or what have you -- but many of them stick around for anime as a category. Someone who likes Law & Order isn't going to seek out other legal procedurals, but someone who likes a mecha show is going to look for more mecha shows.
2) Anime is underrepresented on TV/movie services like Netflix, or in other "mainstream" TV/movie sites and aggregators. (That said, there are anime-specialist players in these markets, such as Crunchyroll and Anime Network.)
3) High fan engagement online, more so than with many other categories of film or TV. Thus, a more addressable user base.
Of course, these factors can also work against you. As another commenter has pointed out, the characteristics that make anime unlike other genres also makes bridging the gap between anime and other genres very challenging. Anime companies are usually in the business of addressing the TAM in the anime category; they seldom find success using anime as a beachhead to attack TV or movies in general. Not saying it can't happen, or that it's never happened. But it's difficult.
is this thing named after Cowboy Bebop? the controller design looks almost exactly like something from that tv show.
In a similar vein, I've been loving the show Space Dandy, which is like Adventure Time's (slightly) older brother from across the Pacific; it's co-directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, of Cowboy Bebop fame.
Bringing it closer to Adventure Time than Cowboy Bebop however, it includes the work of a wide range of artists in different episodes, and isn't too minded by continuity. It also benefits from surprisingly bearable English voice acting and translation in Adult Swim's dubbed version.
Here's a review:
http://www.avclub.com/review/space-dandy-is-more-than-cowboy-bebops-demented-li-201062
> Oh, and cowboy bebop
I think Ein, yes the dog, is my all time favorite character in any series/movie ever.