BW Media Spotlight

Well, here’s a Showcase I never thought I’d have, even for a brief time. Thank the folks who run the Throwback Toons YouTube channel. That means this is officially licensed and everything. Of course, if that does go down (they stopped carrying the Iron Man anime for example), you’ll have to find it online elsewhere, and it looks like I can’t simply embed it like I though, but tonight is a special night.

Forget that disaster Netflix tried to pass off as an adaptation, nothing beats the original Cowboy BeBop, an animated series clearly designed with animation in mind, but since it came from Japan it doesn’t have to be “underground” or “indie” to not be a kids show. If you’re reading this you probably know the story already. In this future setting, “cowboys” are bounty hunters bringing in “bounty heads” around the galaxy. The crew of the BeBop consists of Jet Black, a former cop turned bounty hunter, Spike Spiegel, a former mob enforcer who grew a conscience, Faye Valentine, a woman who was trapped in hibernation following a warp gate accident and was comatose for most of her childhood, Edward, a teenage girl hacker whose kind of screwy, and Ein, a “smart dog”. Our heroes, or as best as we could get under the circumstances, are beloved around the world and that live-action demake showed how little they understood any of them.

Knocking On Heaven’s Door, known in the US as Cowboy BeBop: The Movie, puts our group in their most dangerous adventure yet, when terrorists start creating a dangerous situation on terraformed Mars.  I’m not sure when this takes place in the show’s timeline (it might not, much like the DragonBall Z movies), so it’s still a question of whether or not our crew will come out of this alive. Forget everything you learned from the Netflix show, because they ignored everything that worked about the anime. Enjoy…although apparently it’s age-restricted so they make you go to YouTube. I didn’t know that at the time and I don’t have time to replace it! You can also find it on Tubi if YouTube’s nonsense annoys you, and both versions are in English.

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