LogFAQs > #970465721

BONUS. Cowboy Bebop
https://myanimelist.net/anime/1/Cowboy_Bebop
Spring 1998 (26 episodes)
My Score: TBA, MAL Score: 8.75/10
Best Character: Ein
Recommended by: @Celo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL-D9LrFJd4

Premise: Set in the near future, Spike Spiegel and Jet Black are bounty hunters. They travel the solar system in their ship, the Bebop, and try to catch enough bad guys to pay the bills.

The Good: Cowboy Bebop is a sci-fi action anime. It's episodic for the most part, usually involving them tracking down a bounty or dealing with a personal problem. Still, I liked how the characters and their growth/relationships always carried over between episodes even if the individual plots did not. They picked up new crewmembers along the way, including a mysterious woman named Faye, a genius child hacker named Ed, and a cute scientifically enhanced dog named Ein. The crew of the Bebop had a fun dynamic most of the time. I was pleasantly surprised at how funny a lot of episodes could be! The episodic nature of the series meant I could watch each one as its own little fun adventure. Some episodes were obviously better than others, but there were only one or two that I outright disliked. If I had to pick a favorite, it'd probably be Toys in the Attic, the one where they battled a nefarious slime loose on the ship. It was tough choosing a favorite character between Ed and Ein. They both excelled at doing fun things in the background even though the plot rarely focused on them. In the end, I decided I liked the smart dog the best. I really enjoyed how fun this anime was overall.

The Bad: I'm guessing this will be controversial, but the more serious episodes were my least favorite. Anytime anything related to Julia or Vicious showed up, my enjoyment took a noticeable dive. I liked Spike the goofy yet competent bounty hunter, not Spike the guy haunted by his past. It all felt very vague and melodramatic, so I didn't really care about it. I wanted more episodes like Ed and Ein wandering around looking for food and less like Jupiter Jazz or the finale.

Overall: Cowboy Bebop was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. Most of what I'd heard about it over the years made it sound like a gritty crime drama, and the few episodes that were like that weren't my favorites. I wasn't expecting to have so many fun stories like Spike battling a showboating killer in an amusement park, or one episode spending significant time just trying to figure out how to play an old video tape. Thanks for recommending this, Celo! I'm not sure when I'd have gotten around to this otherwise. It'll probably wind up falling somewhere around average in my final ranking, but that isn't a bad thing. I'm glad I finally watched it.