Cowboy Bebop is that anime that fans watch just for the vibes and music. Sure, the ending is quite emotional but the whole show itself presents a much relaxed but chaotic atmosphere that is fun for any fan of any genre. It’s also one of those anime that is added in a starter pack along with Death Note and for good reason.
The creators took a lot of inspiration from Star Wars for sure. The whole space-theme and battles of Spike Spiegel with Galactic thugs and Syndicates are definitely a nod to Luke Skywalker and his battles with Darth Vadar and the Galactic Empire. But fans will not believe the main intent behind Cowboy Bebop‘s creation and it’s more tied to Star Wars than they think.
The reason for making Cowboy Bebop
According to an interview with Forbes, Cowboy Bebop creator Shinchiro Watanabe reveals the real reason why the show was created. And it all began with Bandai Namco wanting to make money off of Star Wars’ fame.
The timing for Cowboy Bebop was when Star Wars was coming back with The Phantom Menace. That meant Bandai thought another Star Wars boom was likely on the way and spaceships would be key. So they wanted to sell new plastic models of original spaceships. That resulted in their order to make an anime where spaceships would show up. So as long as there were spaceships, we could do whatever we wanted.
The ship designs were actually chosen through a competition. Many famous artists, including Kawamori and Hajime Katoki, attended the competition but in the end, Watanabe-san and his team went with Kimitoshi Yamane. This was because Yamane’s designs looked the most realistic—something that could actually exist and people could use. According to him, it wasn’t just about the designs looking cool; they needed to be believable and realistic.
However, things started to look bleak as Bandai came back, saying that the plastic models of this anime would not sell. That made Bandai cancel the project to do spaceship-related plastic models and they withdrew as a sponsor, resulting in Cowboy Bebop getting stuck.
Watanabe-san managed to convince Bandai to take over the sponsor role for the anime because they need the financial support and resources for helping them with the visuals.
Cowboy Bebop‘s creator also revealed how the title for the name “Cowboy Bebop” came to be:
In the original plan, it was called Nagareboshi Bepop, or “shooting star” Bebop, but we ended up unable to use that name due to a trademark issue. So we tried the English version of Shooting Star Bebop, and again we got another trademark conflict. So we thought about the story and its focus on bounty hunters, who could be known as “cowboys”, which is how we ended up with the name Cowboy Bebop.
But the most iconic aspect of the show is its music. Watanabe-san could have worked on it through his own skills but his skills weren’t enough to produce good music. So, he reached out to the staff members of Macross Plus, a four-episode anime OVA and theatrical movie in the Macross series in which he was the director, and he was mesmerized by what he received.
The origins for Cowboy Bebop‘s iconic soundtrack
One of the members in charge of the music for Macross Plus, Yoko Kanno, submitted a demo tape for Cowboy Bebop and Watanabe-san was blown away.
It was unbelievable that just one person could do all of that. That was very impressive, so I got interested in working with her.
Even before the show was made, Watanabe-san already decided that he intentionally wanted to mix jazz and blues with spaceships and he knew Kanno-san was the right person to match his expectations. However, this wasn’t his initial impression of the composer.
When he first met Kanno on Macross Plus, the person that showed up just looked like a cute girl. Everybody was surprised and wondered if she was really the person that had sent us all this amazing music. Basically, he and everyone else thought the girl was either too young or too tender to create such a bombastic piece of music.
Therefore, he wanted to contact the agency she’s from and ask whether there was another person writing for her in the shadows.
We were even skeptical and that there might even be some kind of ghostwriter involved. However, when we went to the recording she handled everything by herself, so we were hugely impressed, but at the same time, her personality was very cute and interesting. So when we worked on Cowboy Bebop we created a character based on Kanno’s personality, but we didn’t tell her this so I don’t know what she thought of it.
Despite its controversial origins, Cowboy Bebop remains one of the best and most recognizable anime in the industry and it’s a must-watch for any watcher, not just anime fans.
Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, and Space Dandy are currently available to watch on Crunchyroll.