The original crew are Spike Spiegel, an exiled former hitman of the criminal Red Dragon Syndicate, and Jet Black, a former ISSP officer.
The series' protagonists are bounty hunters working from the spaceship Bebop. Amid a rising crime rate, the Inter Solar System Police (ISSP) set up a legalized contract system, in which registered bounty hunters (also referred to as "Cowboys") chase criminals and bring them in alive in return for a reward. In 2071, roughly fifty years after an accident with a hyperspace gateway which made the Earth almost uninhabitable, humanity has colonized most of the rocky planets and moons of the Solar System.
#HOW LONG WOULD IT TAKE TO WATCH THE ENTIRE COWBOY BEBOP SERIES SERIES#
Credited with helping to introduce anime to a new wave of Western viewers in the early 2000s, Cowboy Bebop has also been labelled a gateway series for the medium as a whole. Since its release, critics have hailed Cowboy Bebop as one of the greatest animated television series of all time. In 2001, Cowboy Bebop became the first anime title to be broadcast on Adult Swim in the United States.Ĭowboy Bebop was a critical and commercial success both in Japanese and international markets (most notably in the United States), garnered several major anime and science fiction awards upon its release, and received unanimous praise for its style, characters, story, voice acting, animation, and soundtrack the English dub was particularly lauded and is regarded by some as one of the best English anime dubs. Madman Entertainment has licensed it for releases in Australia and New Zealand. In Britain, it was licensed by Beez Entertainment and is currently licensed by Anime Limited.
The anime series was dubbed in the English language by Animaze and ZRO Limit Productions, and was licensed by Bandai Entertainment in North America and is now licensed by Funimation. Its most prominent thematics include adult existential ennui, loneliness, and the inability to escape one's past. Although it incorporates a wide variety of genres throughout its run, Cowboy Bebop draws most heavily from science fiction, western and noir films. The twenty-six episodes ("sessions") of the series are set in the year 2071, and follow the lives of a traveling bounty hunting crew in their spaceship called the Bebop. Cowboy Bebop ( Japanese: カウボーイビバップ, Hepburn: Kaubōi Bibappu) is a Japanese science fiction neo-noir anime television series created and animated by Sunrise, led by a production team (billed as Hajime Yatate) of director Shinichirō Watanabe, screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto, mechanical designer Kimitoshi Yamane, and composer Yoko Kanno.