If it hasn’t become obvious yet, the easiest ways to get a piece of media to be my favorite is to either:

1. Hand me a sadboi snark fest
2. Have enough ambiguity and character moments that I’ll spend the foreseeable future thinking about it
3. Some distinct gimmick

To the surprise of no one, Cowboy Bebop has all three.

The Pitch: four bounty hunters must try to survive if never thriving in a future where humanity has gone out into the stars.

When I first watched the show in the ninth grade, I was fascinated by it, and immediately tried to make all my friends watch it so I would have someone to talk to about it. They did, but none of them got as invested in it as I did, which I don’t hold against them, but thus became a show that flitted in and out of my head from time to time. Then it came to iTunes some years later and after hearing me mention it, my dad asked if I wanted it and I responded with a “why yes, of course,” and I did the first of many full proper rewatches; and every time I do I get a new chew toy for my brain to overthink for the foreseeable future.

Sometimes it’s the big, thematic stuff (how to handle one’s past, connecting with others and the occasional failure to do so, meaning of life), sometimes it’s the character stuff (Spike’s cybernetic eye, what exactly he and Vicious did for the syndicate, Gren and Ed’s blatant middle finger to gender in the context of both 1992 when the show was made and 2071 when the show was set), to the really pedantic, worldbuild-y stuff that does not matter to the story they’re trying to tell, but I, a known lore gremlin at heart, cannot get my brain to shut up about (where is Tijuana in this show, how does the government structure work, how do the weather control hubs of each city on each planet decide on a climate, what the hell was the war on Titan??)

You get the idea.

In a similar vein to M*A*S*H, I’m going to assume I’ll stop having thoughts about Bebop when I’m dead and then it’ll be my reaper’s problem to deal with my still swirling brain, but like… why, y’know? Why this specific one season anime from 31 years ago?

I’ll preface this with saying I’m not really big on anime as a medium. Just… not my scene, and more power to you if it is yours and art continues to be subjective. But maybe it’s the still mostly hand drawn style with that aged feeling even on the digital version. This show still looks good, that’s why it’s used for all those edits. This show still looks good, still feels futuristic even if we spend an entire episode looking for a beta tape player because that’s how far we thought tech was going to come.

The ships, the cities, the hologram ads, the commercial television, the clothing of the characters that went to the “classics never die” school of futuristic fashion so they don’t get so outlandish,  or even the fact that the projector screen still looks like it has the fuzz of a CRT TV, everything feels grounded. Even if we’re on a spaceship traveling through lightspeed gates. There’s a magic in all of it that sticks with you.

The aesthetics of it all are aided of course by incredible character work. The joke about Bebop is famously that it’s all fun and games until the last two minutes of the episode where you get sucker punched by previously unexpected melancholy. The aforementioned beta tape hunt? It results in a viewing of a video from an amnesiatic character’s past, a note from a younger version of herself to her older.

Melancholy is typically the tone you’re going to get out of people when asked about this show (that or ennui, it was the 90s after all). But, maybe because I’ve seen it so many times , the ennui is never (well, rarely never) what catches my attention. What does then? It’s the little moments of humor and humanity. Spike lighting a cigarette poorly with a flamethrower, Faye eating dog food because it’s all they have on the ship, Ein’s little hops in “Mushroom Samba” (or hell all of “Mushroom Samba”), Ed’s… everything. These misfit idiots built something here, even if they don’t always, if ever, want to acknowledge it.

It takes until the final episode for Faye to express the fact that “I care about you idiot” is an emotion and sensation extended in Spike’s general direction. So used to dodged questions, she’s started asking rhetorically, and that of course is when she gets answers. And of course, like real life, it’s just a smidge too late.

Overthinking the small stuff is why thousands of angry Youtubers are making bank off of adsense and click bait titles. I try very hard not to be that, or if I do it’s for comedic and the effect of it all. But once and a while, the small stuff is where the magic lives, so looking into it isn’t always so bad.

And it’s occasionally where you find the evidence to support the theory that the protagonist did actually survive the finale even if it is more “thematically resonant” that he died.