Two for One

I have a love hate relationship with the genre of space westerns. On one hand there's the whole run-down future setting, which both is stylistically appealing and also can explain why some technology has advanced and some hasn't*. On the other hand there's all the elements from pure westerns that I hate: gruff silent protagonists, fairly dull plots, cowboys.

Why am I talking about this?


Cowboy Bebop is an anime series in the genre of, you guessed it...romantic comedy. The series follows the crew of the Bebop as they hunt bounties throughout the solar system. Each episode has a musical style (and thus mood) attached to it, and all the episodes manage to have some manner of an action scene in it.

The best way to review this series is to compare it to something I'm sure more people are familiar with: Firefly.
Same genre. Same setting. Both shows have the protagonists in a state of essentially perpetual poverty. They even ran for about the same amount of time, as Cowboy Bebop had 26 half hour episodes and a movie, and Firefly had 14 hour long episodes and a movie.

Despite these similarities I have bought the Cowboy Bebop boxset whereas having watched all of Firefly once, I'm content never to watch any of it again. And one major factor of this is the previously mentioned episode length, for it seems that about the same amount of stuff happens in an episode of Firefly as does in one of CB. Which makes me wonder, what the fuck happened in the other half hour? Since the show had only one season there wasn't time for any angst to set in, and since it's set in the future there was no opportunity for pop culture references. I didn't realise how much time was taken up with dry wit, foreign words and Inara being a waste of space. Whereas in an episode of CB, a target is introduced, things will be more than they seem, all the plot points manage to converge into one complex chase/fight scene, and there's plenty of structural damage by the end. All to a jazzy tune.

This was just going to be a review of Cowboy Bebop but since I've managed to say more about firefly than it, I may as well make it about both. In that case, I'll finish up by saying that the only element of Firefly that I particularly like (River Tam) is present in CB in both the characters Spike (kicks a lot of ass) and Ed (acrobatic and not really in touch with reality).

In conclusion, if you like Firefly then you will probably like Cowboy Bebop, assuming you aren't just anti-anime or pro-Joss Whedon. If you don't like Firefly them you still might like Cowboy Bebop. If you haven't seen Firefly then this comparison is obviously meaningless to you, so why are you reading this?

*This is a pet peeve of mine. I hate the way in most science fiction there'll be spaceships and lasers but then there'll be a bald guy reading a newspaper or something.