Cowboy Bebop is one of the best anime series ever translated into English. The mental chain of association, in case you were wondering, is the klepto gambler character Faye Valentine. The feel of the show is based on 1940’s American jazz tropes. The characters are far more detailed and deeply realized than your standard wide-eyed ass-kicking girl or tentacle rape masterpiece. The lead character is a bounty hunter ex-mobster named Spike Spiegel who has a poetic soul. If that is not recommendation enough, once you get far enough into the series, you neet Spike’s arch enemy and ex-friend Vicious who has that brutal and cold-hearted femmey anime boy thing going for him. Of course, the two fell out over a girl, but now they have to hang a bunch of morals on their differences. This series is so well-written and well-translated that it is almost inconceivable that it was originally created for the Japanese market.
When Cowboy Bebop first aired, the Japanese station it was on inexplicably ran a random assortment of episodes and did not show the whole thing. It later ran in its entirety on a Japanese satellite network. In America, Cartoon Network took a bit of a risk including the Cowboy Bebop series in its Adult Swim programming. With Cowboy Bebop’s quality, I don’t think they took much of a risk, but, given how television execs think, this was quite a leap of faith.
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