Amazon.com essential video

Each of the snazzy 25-minute installments from the most popular Japanese animated TV series of 1998 is a satisfying adventure tale about a futuristic hipster bounty hunter. This is an elegant action-comedy anime, with smoothly integrated CGI space-flight elements, gorgeous graphics, blues harmonica and sax riffs on the soundtrack, and a no-sweat post-Tarantino attitude. Despite occasional eruptions of gun-fu Asian-action violence, and some intimations of heavy-duty drug use (in the first of 26 episodes, one especially noxious narcotic is administered as an aerosol spray straight onto the user’s eyeballs), the tone is surprisingly convivial. None of the generic tough elements are grim or mean-spirited. Lanky antihero Spike Spiegel is a planet-hopping freelance hunter with an ex-cop sidekick named Jet, a loopy fellow hunter named Faye, a teenage computer hack, and a genetically enhanced Welsh corgi assistant in tow. The emphasis is on clever twists of plot in an episodic short-story format with as many wisecracks as punches being thrown. –David Chute

Product Description

Meet Spike and Jet, a drifter and a retired cyborg cop. They’ve formed a partnership in a bounty hunting enterprise that specializes in adventure and cash. Using an old converted fishing ship called the Bebop, with the help of the intelligent data dog, Ein, the mysterious and vexing femme fatale, Faye Valentine, and Ed, the genius hacker — Spike and Jet scour the galaxy to clean up space, one bounty at a time.

* Considered one of the best anime of all time in both Japan AND the United States. * Cowboy Bebop is now available as a special DVD collection box set that contains all six DVD’s from Cowboy Bebop packaged with the Cowboy Bebop Original Soundtrack CD in a collectors box.