Cowboy Bebop Retrospective Part 4

For the past few posts I've gone on about what makes Bebop so special: from the themes and settings to the strong characters and excellent score and dub. For the final post, I'll examine its legacy, how the series has aged, and why we need another like mainstream success.

In the ten-plus years since its creation, Cowboy Bebop has aged like wine: incredibly well. Ask most mainstream viewers what their favorite anime series is, and they'll list this along with other like series with western themes such as Trigun or Ghost in the Shell. The most hardcore, sub-only otaku will admit that, yes, dubs can work because of this series. Bebop transcends fandom lines: hardcore and casual fans alike will all agree that this is a exceptionally good series and their favorite. This is our Batman: The Animated Series: an animated series that even those who’ve outgrown “cartoons” can look back fondly as being an excellent series. So in short the series has aged...but the legacy hasn't.

Let's look at Bebop's immediate successor: Samurai Champloo. Created by Shinnichiro Wantanabe a good five years after Bebop, Champloo continues the theme of taking two completely unrelated forms of media and mashing them together with better-than-expected results: Kurosawa-inspired samurai drama with American-style hip hop and rap. The characters are similar, in that we have a headstrong skilled martial artist (Mugen) pared off with a patient, stoic experienced warrior (Jin) and a girl who's trying to find out her mysterious past (Fuu) with a cute pet (Momo). All the like elements are there...and yet Champloo falls flat. I've seen it frontwards to backwards and compared to Bebop, Champloo just doesn't match up. The characters are less developed and complex compared to Bebop's beloved cast. The story's episodic and with weaker characters the individual plots come off as lacking. That’s the problem with making such a groundbreaking series: setting the bar so high. Given the similarities between both Bebop and Champloo, it’s apparent that Wantanabe tried to bottle lightning again and failed. Champloo is a good series, but it just doesn’t hold the Bebop magic.

In my humble opinion, Bebop’s true successor is…Black Lagoon. We have a crew of misfits including a stoic, imposing and bald leader who’s frequently frustrated with the crew’s enforcer; a violent, anti-social sociopath who’s dark past broke her into the bitch she is today. They are accompanied by a hacker who provides basic intel and communications for the job at hand. Together they add on another member and go around on jobs offering a service seen as reserved for the lowest of the low: pi-ahem…courier service. The main differences aside from the setting and the specifics of the job is one the violence. Lagoon’s level of violence is what Bebop was back in the day. While Bebop is John Woo meets Sergio Leone, Lagoon is John Woo meets Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez. In upping the violence to ultra-violence levels Lagoon successfully progresses off of Bebop much like how The Dark Knight did from Batman. When a medium progresses it’s given more leg room and often times grows more violent, and done well it’s an incredibly good thing.

The second difference, and a welcome one at that, is the wildly-different leads. Rock isn’t a hype-capable badass like Spike: he’s an ordinary salary man abducted by pirates and eventually drafted into their crew. He’s a pacifist and what he lacks in combat skills he more than makes up in his diplomacy skills. He’s the only one in the Lagoon company capable of solving problems outside of violence and has the skills to do it. He’s also, much like a newcomer to anime, a fish out of water. He finds himself in a completely alien concept and tries his best to adapt. While he’s trying to figure out what’s going on, we’re doing it with him. This makes him much more relatable than Spike, but it doesn’t make him a better character. Both characters suit their respective series’ needs: Spike’s a badass who we can’t exactly relate to but it doesn’t matter because we’re too busy cheering him on as he kicks epic amounts of ass while Rock is a pacifist who we can relate to since Revy’s the one kicking ass and he’s the witness like we are.

Lagoon’s Tarantino -inspired action and surprising depth from its very human characters and their philosophies (one quotes Jean-Paul Satare for crying out loud!) would of made it the next big thing since Bebop…and yet it wasn’t. What happened? To put it simply, it was a victum of circumstance: the right series in the wrong time. Lagoon was distributed here in the states around ’08, when we were knee-deep in the Great Recession. Companies were taking fewer risks and the price of producs went up. Geneon, Lagoon’s producer went belly-up in ’09 and thankfully the series was salvaged by Funimation. But Lagoon never received the same amount of marketing or exposure that Bebop did: it was never aired on Adult Swim or any other channel to the best of my knowledge. It was simply dead in the water: doomed to ironically lie adrift at sea.

The sad tale of Lagoon is an active symptom of the anime industry today: take fewer risks and try to capitalize off the established audience as much as possible. This is a sound decision in hard times: companies don’t have the funds to market themselves to the mainstream so they focus on the fanbase. Unfortunately, much like comics in the 90’s the industry anime is in that same transitional period and is dangerously close to crashing and becoming loss to obscurity. With comics it was grim and gritty with the success of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns while with anime it’s otaku-ness with the success of series such as The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The industry just isn’t learning: while otaku-favorites like Inuyasha kept fans going back in the day it was mainstream hits like Bebop that brought them in the first place. If the industry wants to maintain itself then they have to do a better job at finding a mainstream hit and marketing it further: spend more money on market research and extensive group testing. If we as fans of anime want to keep our medium alive then we have to do our best to promote the more mainstream-friendly classics like Bebop or Ghost in the Shell or even Trigun.

So what’s the next move? Well outside of a third season of Lagoon (fingers crossed, yo!) and the proper marketing, the industry should make do with what it has. Baccano is a worthy prospect and Adult Swim should probably invest a few hours into it. As far as creating a new Bebop, let me keep it nice and simple: classic western themes and conventions thru an exceptional eastern perspective and adaptation. Bebop, Shell, Lagoon, Trigun, and Baccano all share the same theme and are/were destined for mainstream success…they just need or needed a little bit of love.

That ends my Cowboy Bebop retrospective. Bebop was more than just an anime: it was our Batman: the Animated Series: an animated series that transcended fandom lines and mainstream sensibilities and became an instant classic and huge success. However, progress marches on, and it’s only a matter of time ‘till someone, somewhere finally produces our The Dark Knight…and hopefully we’ll be there to enjoy the ride. Thanks for reading, and, oh yeah:

See you next time, Space Cowboy.

Movie Review: Inception

As an English major and an appreciator of good stories, it's been hard to keep myself positive about finding good stories in today's age of 3D gimmicks and reality TV. I'm a child of the 90's, I grew up watching shows like Batman: the Animated Series, Animaniacs, and Pinky and the Brain: animated series with sophisticated stories and great action that kept kids entertained and adults interested. I moved on to anime and found series like Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell which provided equally sophisticated stories. Years of this and what do we have now? American Idol, Seltzer and Friedberg, and Michael Bay.

It's enough to make me cry sometimes....

...until I saw The Dark Knight, and I regained faith.

Christopher Nolan has proved to be a consistently good director in the field of Speculative fiction (AKA comic book films and Sci Fi) and his latest work Inception was his baby: his pet project for ten years. Those ten years have delivered. This is without a doubt the best original film of the year and the decade so far. A film that combines a deep, think-heavy story with literally lucid and visceral action that tops The Matrix as a cyberpunk film.

The film is set in not-to-distant future where specialized heist teams called Extractors can intercept a mark's dream and steal valuable information from their subconscious. Di Caprio plays Dom Cobb: an extraction master on the run and dodging extradition from the states by hopping between Japan, France, and Australia. A Japanese corporation owner, Mr. Saito ( Ken Wantanabe) approaches him with an offer: plant an idea into his competitor's subconscious and he will make it possible that all US charges will be dropped against him. Desperate to see his children again, Cobb assembles a crack team, each with their own role: Cobb as the extractor, Arthur (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) as the point man, Ariadne (Ellen Paige) as the Architect (I see what you did there, Nolan...) Eames (Tom Hardy) as the Forger, and Yusef (Dileep Rao) as the chemist. Sabaauging their efforts is Cobb's own subconscious guilt over the death of his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) which manifests itself regularly to sabotage his efforts. How are they going to pull the plant? By creating a dream within a dream within a dream: 3 levels of dreams! Reality is relative and perception is warped in its more promoted scenes in the trailers.

The effects are so visceral because real world factors actively alters the subconscious: if the body is off balance the physics are off balance, and yes, they do establish that if you die in a dream you wake up. I haven't seen a film with such ambition and grandeur since Nolan's previous film The Dark Knight which was a morality tale writ large. Inception is an old-school Noir heist film twenty minutes into the future as crafty subconscious safe crackers. As a speculative film, the implications are terrifying: how do you defend something you have little to no control over? The question of their own sanities also come into play with Cobb's own deep-seated guilt issues actively sabotaging his efforts. It's a grand cyberpunk heist film served straight, no frills and I loved every minute of it.

Film experts and critics have been asking if this film is too deep for the average filmgoer: well, yeah! Did anybody understand The Matrix the first time around? No! But if you set off enough fireworks it'll keep audiences busy enough to where they won't get confused. Don't see it to understand it the first time through: see it to have fun and to see how far a film can go with the right imagination. Christopher Nolan is without a doubt the Stephen Spielberg of our generation: no other director has delivered so much visceral consistency in years, and I salute him for reaffirming my faith that good stories do have a place in Hollywood today.

Final Rating: A. Go see it right now. Support the efforts of a true visionary and show Hollywood and the rest of their ilk that we do want originality and good stories in our media. This is Ghost in the Shell meets James Bond and Nolan pulls it off as epic as it sounds.

Cowboy Bebop : A retrospective (part 3)

In my previous post I described Bebop as an episodic series and by its nature strong characters are a necessity to make up for a loose story Each episode functions as its own plot and outside of a key arch or two there is no real story. The characters therefore have to be strong to make the most out of the plot. We see this in most comedy and crime fiction series such as The Simpsons and Law and Order in that each episode stands on its own but the characters are so relatable and iconic that we’re willing to overlook the paper-thin story or even weak plot. Bebop is no exception as while the main cast and the secondary characters are based on tried and true tropes and archetypes it’s Director Wantanabe’s take on said archetypes that make these characters so damn fun. In general terms we can spot the tropes each character represents a mile away: Spike’s the stoic antihero with a dark past; Jet’s the old-fashioned parental figure obsessed with keeping order in an otherwise chaotic environment; Faye’s the bitchy femme fatal who uses her…ahem…talents to woo men to her advantage; Ed’s the mischievous kid genius who acts as the team hacker and intel gatherer; Ein’s the team pet, obviously. What should be flat, two-dimensional characters, however, are turned into strong and relateable ones in the hands of an expert character creator.

Spike is a former Syndicate enforcer partnered with brother-in-arms Vicious until a girl, Julia, got between them. Betrayed by Vicious, Spike is on the run from his former employers and his psychotic ex-partner who’d like nothing more than to disembowel him himself. Spike’s stoic and focused demeanor are undermined by his chaotic nature as he deals with most if not all his problems with violence. As much as a badass he appears to be, he’s trying to run away from a past that’s actively trying to kill him and still holding a torch for the woman he loved. Jet’s the least liked character of the crew with his uptight attitude and old-fashioned ways make him less of an aging badass and more of a crotchety old man in the eyes of some if not most of the fanbase. For me, he reminds me of Mel Gibson’s partner, Rodger in Die Hard: both were played by Black actors, both were/are cops, and both have to deal with over-aggressive and over-confident younger partners. An old-fashioned sort who still belives in honor, he’s the sole voice of reason amongst the selfish and/or crazy other member. A true renisane man, he’s the ship captain, cook, mechanic, and an aging hipster who enjoys jazz and blues while tending to his bonsai. Faye’s more than just a manipulating, selfish bitch: she’s also a troubled soul. A fish out of time-space water, Faye was put in cryo-freeze and knows absolutely nothing about her past. Her first love since waking up turned out to be a con who faked his own death and left Faye with debt up to her eyeballs. She’s convinced that humans are inherently selfish creatures and uses that as her excuse to cheat, con, and seduce anyone to get her way. Underneath it all is just a hurt girl looking to belong. Hacker child prodigy Ed combines both Doc Brown’s eccentricity with Calvin’s mischievous nature and animal partnership (Ein). She is an odd, adorable, and fun character who’s feline nature and habit of singing random songs make her one of the most fun and memorable characters in anime history. This is pure magic, folks: thanks to director Shinichiro Wantanabe and writer Keiko Nobumoto who put exceptional effort in turning two dimensional tropes and archetypes into living and breathing characters that are nothing less than iconic.

On the technical side of things, the animation is crisp, smooth, and fluid old-school anime animation. We're talking the turning point of anime technique: when CGI was first experimented in traditional hand-drawn anime and Bebop was on of the first to experiment. The CGI was minimal: the space gates and a few other small scenes here and there. In today's world where practically any and every anime series incorporates CGI into overuse (the late Studio Gonzo, Kyoto Animation, et all), this minimalist use of CGI is nothing short of refreshing. The non-CGI animation is gorgeous and still holds its own even in today's CGI saturated landscape. The dub is simply the greatest dub in anime: even better than the original Japanese. The reason being that the main cast simply added on to the character's personality. Steve Blum gives Spike an added Eastwood-esque edge while Wendee Lee adds more sexy and even a much needed vulnerability to Faye. Beau Billingslea adds a more paternal tone to Jet and Melissa Fahn provides a more mischievous Ed. This dub is what launched the careers of both Steve "Spike" Blum and the Hardest Working Man in Dubbing Buisness herself Wendee Lee, who currently holds 300+ voice acting roles. and is our version of Megumi Hayabshibara. Directing the dub was Mary "The Major" Elizabeth Mcglynn who's also the velvet-smooth voice behind Major Kusanagi of Ghost In the Shell. When you bring this much talent to a dub, you know it's going to match if not outdo the original. And the soundtrack? One of the best and most revolutionary soundtracks in anime history. No other anime used jazz and blues so extensively in their soundtrack, and it includes other genres such as heavy metal, big band swing, and everything in between. The uniting theme as I stated in my previous post is that every genre used was a counter-culture one to match the equally misfit crew. You can listen to the soundtrack on its own, but its one of the rare ones where its designed to move specifically for the show, as it moves along with the action like partners in a flawless ballroom dance. All these elements combine to complement the already solid characters and plot.

Cowboy Bebop is not just an anime but as it likes to refer to itself "a genre unto itself". This revolutionary series was our Batman: the Animated Series: what we could point at as proof that our medium can not only be mainstream but sophisticated as well, and the go-to we used to introduce our non-fan friends into the madness that is anime. Where other series pushed the boundaries or even added unto the genre, Bebop succeed in where they didn't: bringing a whole new generation into anime. Kudos, Sunrise, Wantanabe, and all the rest of the cast.

Well that's it for the show itself. For the finale, I'll examine the Bebop legacy: how its aged, its rightful inheritors, and why we desperately need a series with like mainstream appeal.

My 2 cents: Roman Polanski

Just recently Switzerland denied extraditing Roman Polanski: Oscar-winning director famous for Chinatown and The Pianist. As other fellow Bloggers have pointed out, notably Moviebob, the case has been used as a political football: conservatives using him to crucify Hollywood for being so immoral that they'd defend a ephebophilic (like a pedophile but for post-pubescent kids and not pre) and liberals defending him for being a tourtured soul who's expectant wife was murdered by a member of a Manson Family and accusing the right as being a bunch of intolerant apes.

Uggghhhh....Can we stop the political bullshit? The point is that Roman Polanski was charged and accused of sexual abuse despite the fact that the victim allegedly forgave him after all these years. Trust me: after 30 odd years you're better off forgiving and forgetting because this kind of thing can and will eat away at your soul. The fact is that Polanski has to stand trial for his charges despite if he's innocent or not. That's how the justice system works: under the principle of Habeus Corpus every person regardless of citizenship has the right and the responsibility to represent him or her self in a court of law for whatever crime they've committed here in America. Polanski's responsibility, therefore, is to come to America and face his charges. The accusations that LA wants to use him as a scapegoat is complete bullshit: this is California where as long as you're famous and can pay for a Cochran you can get away with anything from pedophillia to murder to anything in between. I'm a native Californian, and this is one of the many reasons why I hate my state. For the record: yes there are worse states (I'm looking at you, Arizona).

The real reason why Polanski is skirting justice is because he knows that 1) he's guilty and 2) his odds are between Robert Blake and Phil Spector. He's committed a heinous crime and it is an imperative that he show up here so that justice can be served. Switzerland is not just spiting us, but justice as well. Personally speaking, while I don't know the man well enough to hate him, I will say this: Rest assured that there's a deeper pit in hell reserved for the next guy, and there's a spot reserved for you, Mr. Polanski. 30 years with this kind of guilt eating away at your soul is the least that you can suffer thru.

Just my 2 cents....

Next post: Cowboy Bebop retrospective Vol. 3. Yeah, I've got to get my procrastinating ass on this.

Cowboy Bebop: A Retrospective (Part 2)

In the previous post I discussed the landscape that was present for anime fans back before Bebop. How anime was still for the most part an obscure medium and an underground hobby save for the children series that were so easy for certain dubbing companies to bowdlerize (*cough-cough 4 Kids cough-cough*) to hell and back. If anything was going to break our hobby out of the mold It'd have to be something that would not only appeal to a wider demographic, but one that would appeal to one in a different nation. For today's post I'll examine the setting and theme in Bebop and how it was a success here in the US.


Before I begin, I'd like to state one important caveat. Just because I say "western" does not mean it's dumbed-down or of a lesser quality than its eastern counterpart. Yeah, unlike some of the more...ahem...vocal fans of anime, I'm not a weaboo. You won't see me arguing that subs are better than dubs because as an English major I'd rather watch the dub if it's good. I have no disillusions or biases based on cultural conventions. As long as the story's good I don't care where it's from or how it's made.

Anywho, let's take a look at the setting of Bebop. The science-fiction setting is exceptional in that it's less fiction an more speculation. Science fiction falls under the umbrella term of "speculative fiction" in which a different reality is predicted. Science-fiction speculates upon the future, and generally the more realistic, natural, and organic the future is, the better the story. As I've mentioned before, one of the clear influences of Bebop was Alfred Bester's magnum opus The Stars My Destination. Both settings feature technological advancements and settling on distant planets. The idea of expansion beyond the planet earth is one very appealing to an American audience since space exploration is a program we take pride in...or at least did when we actually had competition. Much like Stars, however, despite the technological advancements humanity has become worse off. Bester described it as an "...age of freaks..." and that pretty much sums up the state of humanity as crime has gotten so out of hand that the Inter-Solar System Police (at least I think that's what the nonsensical acronym means) is stretched to the limit. To cope, the ISSP has authorized bounty hunting and extradition laws to not apply on a inter solar system scale. Ah, bounty hunting: what's more American than trusting the extraction of dangerous criminals with the vigilante-suspect public? Seriously, we're the only nation that allows criminal extraction as a private enterprise on a large scale. Since the days of the old west the common man has done his best to take in criminals for pay, and the series expresses this ethos especially well, as they're even called "cowboys" in-universe. For Bebop, the outer space is the new Wild West and its 300K cowboys are living out The Man With No Name's legacy on a wide scale.

Now for the themes. Probably the most apparent theme in the show is redemption. Each member of the crew has some deep and dark past that despite their best efforts to try to evade it still catches up with them. Spike's past as a syndicate enforcer is actively out to kill him; Jet's skeletons as a former ISSP officer are marching out the closet: Faye's trying to figure out her own; Ed's just trying to find her Dad. During the series each character is forced to come to terms with his or her own past. Spike's past is the active myth arc in the series and produces the best episodes as it involves a jilted love, a psychotic rival, and a criminal syndicate, effectively establishing a very noir theme in a decidedly space western series. To add to these themes is a decidedly counter-culture undercurrent from the music which encompasses all counterculture music from jazz to heavy metal to blues to everything in between. The characters themselves are misfits from a former mafia enforcer to an ex-cop to a con woman to a mischievous androgynous hacker kid. This is a very heavy cocktail and if taken straight all at once it might give people headaches. Fortunately series writer Keiko Nobumoto opted to pen the series episodically: each episode standing on its own so that realtive newcomers to the series and/or genre can dive right in and not have to worry about continuity. The series therefore plays more like an old-school detective show like Magnum PI or Hawaii 5-0 as opposed to a continutiy based series such as Lost. Much like their profession each episode is just another bounty job and we're just along for the ride. This series is one very much tailor-made for western audiences as its themes and settings are more fitting to an American audiences than to a Japanese one: Bebop is arguably more popular here in America than its native Japan because of how it defies the established anime conventions into a coherent and refreshing take on the genre.

The problem, however, with an episodic story is that the characters have to make up for a light story. So are the characters strong enough to hold the series? That's for next time in Part 3 where I'll examine the characters and the technical aspects of the series such as the animation and the exceptionally good soundtrack.

Cowboy Bebop: A Retrospective (Part 1)

I think it's time we blow this scene, get everyone and this stuff together...okay, three, two, one, let's jam!

Thus began Cowboy Bebop: one of the most popular anime series in the world, particularly here in the US. I've often joked to my friends that Bebop was one part Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, two parts John Woo, one part Spaghetti Western, and a splash of one of the best jazz soundtracks courtesy of Yoko Kanno. Any of these elements would do well on their own: combine them and you've got a unique and surprisingly tasty cocktail that goes down smoother than milk.

The question is why this series is so popular even to this day. How is it that a ten year old series even today still maintains mainstream success? What about it made Adult swim the House that Bebop built? Why is this one of the very few series that even today non-anime fans cite as their favorite anime series? Well let's take a look at not only the series itself, but its competition. For part one, I'll examine the series itself in relation to what was around before in why Bebop is arguably the most popular and best anime series to date.

First, let's take a trip down memory lane. It was the early 2000's: that magical period between the beginning of the new century and 9/11. The 90's hadn't ended yet and if you were an anime fan you were watching Toonami (RIP '97-'08). It was the first of its kind: a programming block devoted to airing a nice blend of anime series besides Pokemon and other fan-favorite western animated series. We got Gundam, Tenchi Muyo, and Dragon Ball Z and Batman: the Animated Series in the same programming block. Texas-located distribution studio ADV (RIP '92-'09) took a chance on a little known series called Neon Genesis Evangelion. Thanks to its phenomenal success, ADV became known as "The House that Eva built”. All of these series were popular, but none of them had mainstream success in older and more sophisticated viewers. Why?

Series such as Dragonball and Pokemon were children series to begin with. That's not to say they weren't good, just that they were inherently for younger audiences. For the older anime fan wanting something more for our sophisticated sensibilities, we had Gundam and Eva. Why didn't our non-anime fan friends take to them? Why wasn't it easy to introduce our friends to anime thru these popular series? For one thing, Mech series are a rather alien concept her in the US. Sure, we had Transformers, but they were full-on robots and not true mechs. A true mech is piloted rather than fully automated and sentient. To most western audiences, and even me, if you're riding around in a mech, you might as well be riding in a tank. To compensate for the high mobility, mech armor has to be thin: so thin, that a tank shell would blow clean-thru it. Eva was a deconstruction of the mech genre and something different than the garden-variety series, but it had three strikes against it. Disturbing religion-based imagery, copious and equally disturbing gore, and bat-shit crazy characters. Come on: Asuka was a violent, possibly perpetually-menstruating little bitch, Rei was intended to be designed on the wrong side of the uncanny valley, and Shinji? Dear God, Shinji! I haven't seen a whinny bitch this bad since Spiderman during the Clone Saga, and even then he got over that while Shinji was always an annoying little whiner*.

Biases aside, this was the reality for anime back then. No mainstream success aside from the children series meant that if something didn’t happen soon the media we know and love would be forever pigeonholed as “for kids” for years to come without the chance of a renaissance. The hardcore fans or otaku as they’d rather be called can whine and reason ‘till they’re blue in the face but the reality is that good things can come from mainstream success. Most if not all of our most cherished past times have only gotten better after the mainstream accepted their legitimacy: how many of us ten or even five years ago would’ve predicted that a Batman film would’ve not only won an Oscar, but gain so much prestige that most non-comic fans consider it one of the best if not the best of the previous decade? It’s because after years of being bastardized thru the God-awful camp that was the Adam West show the mainstream came to accept Batman and comic books as well as a legitimate form of media. West begat Burton’s Batman which begat the awesomeness that was Batman: the Animated Series which begat the film we all know and love: The Dark Knight.

The same rule applies to anime, and the years between ’98 and about ’03 were a reckoning for the industry. Either we were going to get a series that we could finally show our friend that wouldn’t weird them out and they’d actually like or anime would be doomed to years of painful obscurity before its eventual death. The question was where would it come from and what would that series be? What was going to be our Batman: the Animated Series? The series we could point at as irrefutable proof that the medium can be both sophisticated and be enjoyed by just about anybody? A little animation company named Sunrise and a director by the name of Wantanabe during the late 90’s would answer the call and create something magical.

Well that’s part one. Stay tuned for part two where I’ll examine how the themes and setting of Bebop succeeded in winning an audience beyond the otaku here in America.

In the mean time: for you older fans out there, please sound off in the comments on how you tried to introduce your friends into anime before Bebop.

*Nothing against Eva fans: I don't hate Eva, it's just the kind of thing that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.