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.
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