Cowboy Bebop 01: Asteroid Blues

Episode:

1

|

Writer:

Keiko Nobumoto

|

Director:

Yoshiyuki Takei

|

Air Date:

24-Oct-1998

---

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm watching Asteroid Blues, the first episode session of legendary anime series Cowboy Bebop. Look, they've given me an actual title card to use, it's awesome! My understanding of Japanese is fairly pathetic, but I recognise enough of that katakana to know that it's just saying the words "Asteroid Blues".

I've covered cartoons like Batman: The Animated Series, Justice League and Duck Dodgers before, but this is the first time I've ever written about an anime. Well, unless you count Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which was actually the first article ever published on Sci-Fi Adventures. I have a feeling this is going to be better.

A lot of anime series are based off a manga, like Sunrise's previous space series Outlaw Star, but this one was original. In fact creator Shinichirō Watanabe gave it the tagline "And the work which has become a genre unto itself shall be called: Cowboy Bebop" which would've been incredibly pretentious if the show hadn't then gone and backed it up. This is one of the most well-regarded and important series in anime history, but you don't need me to tell you how famous it is, because... well, it's famous.

The first episode first aired in Japan on 24th October 1998, which is kind of weird as the series started airing back in April. The initial run on TV Tokyo missed out the pilot and half the other episodes, and I have no idea why. The first English airing on Adult Swim missed out three episodes as well, but that was due to it airing during September 2001 and people being a bit cautious about the kinds of destruction they were showing on screen at the time.

The series only lasted 26 episodes and a movie (it was only ever meant to), and I've seen all of them. In fact I've seen this first episode twice! It's been a long while though, so I'm sure it'll have some surprises for me. There'll be no surprises left for you if you keeping reading past this point however, as I'm going to share SPOILERS for the entire episode scene by scene, with screencaps. I'll not say a word about anything that happens in later episodes though.

---

The episode begins with the sound of a church bell and a shot of a man standing in a rainy street having a smoke. Once he's done he starts heading down the road and one of his roses falls out into a puddle.

Seems like the episode is more interested in the rose at this point, as it stares at it for a while, only giving us flashes of what the guy's up to. Flashes of gunfire mostly, as he uses the gun hidden in the flowers to trade bullets with a church full of folks with machine guns. The guy is wounded, he pulls out a grenade... and it cuts straight to the opening titles.

I've only seen the series the one time and it's been a while, so I can't actually remember the context for this scene. Some anime series like to start with a flash-forward showing an event that'll happen way down the line, but this feels more like a flashback. I honestly don't know!

Cowboy Bebop's opening title sequence... has a lot going on. Lots of animated silhouettes and words and illustrations, often divided into strips or boxes. It's trying to be cool and I think it pulls it off. It helps that it's playing "Tank!" by Yoko Kanno, one of the catchiest themes ever heard on television. If you've seen the series you can probably already hear the music in your head. If you haven't, here's a YouTube link to help you out: Cowboy Bebop - Opening Theme "Tank!"

The title sequence makes it pretty clear that the series is all about cigarettes, guns and spaceships, and if you look at the text going by in the background you can spot other clues as well. The episode only features two of the main characters so I was curious if the others showed up in the intro, and yep there they all are, their names are written under the title. Plus the names of their spaceships are written underneath, because they're characters too.

Hey there's the other two, Faye and Ed! I can't talk about them though as they're not in this story.

The text also establishes that the series takes place in 2071, which puts it way before most of the sci-fi covered on my site (except for things like Stargate and Doctor Who). When the series first aired it was set 73 years in the future. Now it's only 50 years, so we'd better hurry if we're going to get everything built in time.

And there's the series' title logo. This Japanese text is a lot harder to read than the episode title, but I'm guessing it probably says something like 'Cowboy Bebop'.

In this universe the word 'cowboy' is a nickname for bounty hunters and bebop is a form of jazz, so they could've called the series Bounty Hunter Jazz. I'm kind of glad they didn't though.

ACT ONE

Act one begins in space, with a long panning shot showing off all the stuff that's around this planet. I mean it's a really long panning shot, much longer than this image. It goes right across the planet.

We get to see a lot of orange rings with ships flying through. There are also some mysterious space installations, but it's hard to make out what they actually are as all we see is just a bunch of fuzzy lines and dots. I want to know what all this stuff is! I'm interested.

Then we get to see the hero ship flying through a nasty mess of compression artefacts. I don't think it looks much better even on the Blu-ray version weirdly. I'm watching the DVD by the way, and I've heard that it's actually superior to the remixed high def version in some ways, which occasionally suffers from missing scenes, replaced sound effects, different songs and absent ambience (though the high def version is definitely higher def).

Inside the ship we see a guy doing martial arts in the dark... well I can kind of see him. He's easier to spot on the Blu-ray version due to its increased brightness.

Even this shot is pretty dark. It's got a bit of a Batman: The Animated Series look to it, which I guess shouldn't surprise me seeing as Sunrise animated a half-dozen episodes of the cartoon, including that one I wrote about a few years back: Heart of Steel. I love the glow effect on that fire by the way.

Turns out the ship is more of a scruffy Firefly kind of operation than a Starfleet one. If the harmonica music didn't give it away, the cooker and the apron definitely does. These people travel in space but they're not exactly astronauts.

The guy shouts to "Spike" and tells him his bell peppers and beef is ready. Then it cuts to outside again to show us the name of the ship.

It's the Bebop (written BeB^op) and it is awesome. I love the design of this ship, even if it confuses me a bit. We see a thin grey section rotating to generate gravity, but the rest of the ship is non-spinny. This is weird because every shot we see of the inside (that I can remember) has people walking around.

Suddenly we're looking at a computer screen.

It looks like a board with lots of screens screwed onto it, but it's just the interface being all skeuomorphic and cool looking. This is Asimov Solensan, he's a major player in the syndicate, wanted for "breack into a bank", "robber", "bodily injury", and "resulting in death." And he's their next target.

Spike's not really paying attention though, as he's deeply disturbed that the bell peppers and beef Jet just cooked for them doesn't have any beef in it.

Jet explains that they can't afford beef, because they spent all their money from the last bounty on repair and medicals bills for all the damage Spike caused in the process. Man, I hope they're keeping a little cash aside for spaceship fuel or else they're going to struggle to go hunt more bounties.

By the way, the camera keeps switching to different angles during the scene and it's great. Makes it look cinematic and expensive, even if there isn't a whole lot moving (besides the ceiling fan).

Turns out that Asimov's group got into a shootout with a rival syndicate, and he decided to take the opportunity to escape his syndicate and make a run for it, killing a bunch of his own guys in the process. Now he's hiding out in Tijuana. Not Mexican Tijuana, SPACE Tijuana, though the episode doesn't explain that.

Spike says he doesn't feel like hunting down small fry, but Jet appeals to his stomach by pointing out that Tijuana has great carnitas.

We hear a bunch of overlapping messages in different languages as the Bebop goes through the last few orange rings, then it emerges into real space through this gate.

The best I can remember, Cowboy Bebop's FTL is a little like Babylon 5's where you enter and exit hyperspace through portals generated by gates. There are a few big differences though, like you can only travel down lanes of rings, and it doesn't seem like they've made it out to other star systems. The gates just let you get between the planets in days/hours instead of months. Also Bebop's FTL comes with a toll to pay.

Damn, a close up just to show the toll getting deducted? They didn't need to throw this in at all, or the shot of the ship getting scanned at the toll booth, but they're painting a picture of the world.

Also now we know that the bounty they're after is worth 333 gate way tickets.

I think the first of these FTL gates was actually built the year I'm writing this. Lots of exciting things happening in 2021 in the Bebopverse.

Now Spike's got his distinctive suit on and he's in the ship's 2001: A Space Odyssey-style rotating corridor. It doesn't seem like it's be spinning fast enough to create gravity, but I dunno. I'm more concerned at how dangerous it is to get through the doors on the left, seeing as they don't move with the floor. You have to grab one as they go by.

Spike's look was inspired by a character called Shunsaku Kudo, who the main protagonist of detective story Tantei Monogatari. I was a bit surprised that they cast John Cho to play a guy called Spike Spiegel in the live-action series, especially seeing as the character's never looked Asian to me. But then I saw a picture of Shunsaku Kudo and I got it. The dude even has the hair.

For the English dub of the anime Spike was played by voice acting legend Steve Blum, who's been in basically everything ever, apparently starting with the role of 'Old Shamanist' in Lupin the 3rd in 1978. He's probably most associated with the role of Wolverine, but he didn't actually start playing him until six years after Cowboy Bebop.

I feel like I need to immediately go and watch more anime from 1998 to find out of if random super-detailed close ups was a thing back then, or if Bebop was doing something different. It's also got super-detailed sound design to go with it; it's really selling me that these drawings are real things.

This is a close up of one of the lights on the front of Spike's personal space fighter, the Swordfish II, as Spike gets it ready for take-off. You know, folding the wings down, taxiing down the runway etc. Wait, how does he roll the the ship down a runway without gravity?

Jet gives the answer away a moment later as he deactivates the magnet deck so Spike can take off.

The series was originally sponsored by Bandai's toy division, who wanted to sell spaceship toys, so I suppose it makes sense that the episode goes out of its way to show off Spike's fighter. It might also explain why the thing has such a distinctive design, as it was in their interests to really spend the time to figure their spaceships out.

Bandai left the project after seeing early footage and deciding there's no way it'd sell toys, but the series found another sponsor and got things going again, with the writers having more creative freedom this time. They still kept all the spaceships though.

Anyway Spike goes flying off to visit Old Man Bull, while Jet decides to talk to the cops for some clues.

We see a lot of mysterious space stuff at the start of this story and I'm still not sure what half of it is, but I'm really certain that this is Tijuana: the asteroid from the title.

The episode has confused the hell out of me every other time I've watched it, it's missing a really good establishing shot showing the landscape under the dome. We do get lots of shots of the city inside though and it looks basically like the modern day. The cars are a bit different, but not totally sci-fi'd up.

There's an interesting mix of languages on the signs for a place called Tijuana though. Seems like you need to understand a bit of everything, especially if you're driving.

The episode eventually finds a bar and cuts inside to focus on three old men playing cards for a while. They're not relevant to anything, but they're here so the episode wants to hang out with them and listen to their conversation for a bit, just slow the pace for a while.

Here's something I've been wondering, is this the bar from the movie Desperado? I mean it's obviously not the exact same bar, as Desperado wasn't set on an asteroid... at least I don't think it was. I'm not sure they ever say. Anyway, I'm wondering if it was inspired by the Desperado bar.

And the answer is...

Desperado

Whoa, it actually was! It has the angled square tables along the left wall, the bar that curves around at the front, it's even got the people playing poker! Plus it seems like they've both got a jukebox in the same place, and there's a ceiling fan above it in both bars.

Fewer cats in the Desperado bar though.

Desperado

Also the bar in Desperado has a lot of boxes stacked up along a wall which this bar doesn't have.

Oh this is Antonio Banderas playing El Mariachi, who maybe bears a little bit of a resemblance to Asimov when he's got his hair down like this.

In fact yeah, that's basically just the same guy. There's absolutely no ambiguity who Asimov Solensan was based on. Which means I guess his pregnant companion was inspired by the Salma Hayek character.

That's about as far as the resemblance to Desperado goes though as this is a very different story. For one thing, El Mariachi doesn't give the bartender the code phrase to indicate he wants to go into the back room and sell some stolen drugs. Uh, spoilers sorry.

The bartender's interested, but he wants to confirm the stuff is legit first. Asimov is going to have to demonstrate that it works... on himself. He raises a vial up to his face, with the needle pointing to his eye...

Oh cool, it's just a spray! Man, I thought he was going to stab it right into his eye for a moment, like in the game Prey.

Meanwhile syndicate goons with guns are pulling up outside and surrounding the place... and the three old men are glaring at the woman's tits. The animators must have really worked hard on that one particular shot, as they even bothered to paint a reflection on the top of the bar.

They put a bit of effort into this cat as well. In some anime series they'll play around and cartoonify faces for comic effect, but Cowboy Bebop keeps things realistic... 99% of the time.

The cat is a little freaked out as syndicate hit men are currently smashing in the windows so they can open fire on everyone inside. It turns out that the back room isn't safe either as the bartender immediately gets a bullet through his head.

They can't hit Asimov though, not while he's seeing red. Turns out that the bloody eye drug he's selling turns you from El Mariachi into Neo, and now he's dodging all their shots and kicking their ass in bullet time.

The woman manages to survive the firing squad as well, and even takes one of them out with her pistol. Those old men are okay too as they found shelter under a table. Anyway all the syndicate goons get killed, fade to black.
 

Meanwhile, in some place somewhere that didn't get an establishing shot, Spike's waiting for Old Man Bull to give him the information he wants about Asimov, or maybe some food. Man, there's so much smoking in this cartoon. I have a feeling that's going to be toned down a bit for the live action version.

Old Man Bull finally tells Spike that the red-eye'd coyote will appear in the Zona Norte at the far end of town, which he apparently saw with his mystic powers. So precognitive abilities are a thing in this world I guess? He continues by telling him that he'll meet a woman and then... death. Spike smiles and says he's been killed by a woman before. We're getting tiny pieces of his backstory every now and then but the series isn't in any rush.

One thing I never noticed until now is that Bull is surrounded by old computer hardware for some reason. That isn't normal for most people! I feel like reaching into the screen and cleaning them up a bit. I want to get them plugged in and see what still works.

It's that cat again, getting drunk off the spilled drinks in the bar. I love all these things the episode stops to focus on for a moment. If they'd slowed down the pacing that might be a problem, but they're just little snapshots to set the scene.

At this point Jet has arrived at the crime scene and I feel like in typical live action series we might see him turn and notice the cat, maybe even get to see his reaction, but here the cat is only for us. Jet's actually more interested in one of the intact bottles left behind the bar.

Just then a pair of syndicate guys arrive and Jet gets himself hidden.
 

He waits a few seconds to eavesdrop on what they're talking about, then leaps up and smashes a bottle across one of them. Then he grabs the other with his robot arm and threatens him with the spiky end of the glass to encourage him to share what he knows about Asimov.

Man, Jet has some powerful eyebrows, and a Seven of Nine eye implant to go with them. He's plenty intimidating even without the bottle.

Spike's currently flying somewhere, the Zona Norte presumably, when he realises that the Swordfish's tank is running as empty as his own is and decides to go get some fuel.

Cut to Spike walking into a bathroom somewhere... and Asimov entering right after him!

Turns out that Bull was right, he did meet him at the Zone Norte! Or maybe this is somewhere else and it's an unbelievable coincidence, it's not all that clear.

Well Spike's found his target... but the guy's not looking too great right now, panting and dripping with sweat. I hope it's not a complete shock to him that the drug he's been taking comes with side-effects. Spike stops to wash his hands in the inexplicable triangular sink next to him and Asimov starts to reach into his pocket. But Spike decides to just walk off and leave him be, to Asimov's obvious relief.

Huh, they left in the ad break cards? You don't get this on Star Trek or Babylon 5 DVDs.

ACT TWO

Spike runs into Asimov's friend outside and decides to bump into her in a cunning attempt to steal one of her hotdogs. This reveals two important things about the character: Spike is skilled at pickpocketing, and he is hungry.

He explains that he's a travelling performer and Katerina is kind of charmed by him (I don't think we ever learn her name, but that's what the internet calls her). We learn a couple of things about him that might actually be true: that he's had his ship for 10 years and he was born on Mars. He says it's a great place to live... if you're rich, and she replies that she should be quite happy there then.

Then he gives away that he's a bounty hunter... and Asimov sneaks up behind and starts choking him to death. Fortunately she talks him out of murdering him, and Spike's able to stay conscious just long enough to pickpocket something he spied him reaching for in the bathroom.

Spike wakes up to find his buddy Jet standing over him, and picks himself up.

Jet thinks they should just give up on this one, because he's learned that Asimov is unstoppable when he's on his drug. But Spike reveals that he met the guy and swiped the drug from his pocket. It's kind of unbelievable that he'd be that good, to swipe an eye spray he didn't know about, from a pocket he hadn't seen, on his way to passing out the ground, but hey I guess the guy has skills. He's great at petty thievery, getting his ass kicked, and letting 'small fry' bounties get away.

Spike shows off the vial and repeats Bull's line "The red-eyed coyote will appear in the Zona Norte on the far end of town". Trouble is I can't tell if he's explaining how he knew to find Asimov here, or where they need to go to find him next.

Meanwhile police space fighters are swarming around... something. My guess is that it's a giant airlock at the top of the dome. That's pretty smart actually: if you know the guy's unstoppable on foot and he's trying to leave the asteroid, then just catch him at the only exit.

Asimov parks his car at a café and goes to meet the second drug buyer on his list, who is actually Spike in Clint Eastwood cosplay. It's pretty obvious too, the collar is a dead giveaway.
 

Okay, assuming this is where Old Man Bull told him to go for a moment, how did Spike know exactly where to sit to imitate the buyer Asimov has come to see? Actually, here's a better question: why are those three old men from the bar back again? It's getting really suspicious how they're always hanging out right next to drug dealers.

Asimov goes to show him a sample and finds that his pocket's empty. So Undercover Spike reveals that he's got it, and tosses it into the air to obliterate it with a dead-eye shot from his pistol

Now Asimov knows who he is and it's time for a rematch. So Spike decides to show off another person his character was inspired by: Bruce Lee.

Spike is all over the place, kicking Asimov's ass without even trying, and without the bullet-time drug in his system all the guy can do is back away and slam into Spike's fists with his nose. It's a great looking bit of TV animation for the time, and the way the camera sways around a bit really sells it and adds energy. There's something a little weird about the way Katerina's gun is moving on alternating frames in between the movement of the fighters, but it's not distracting.

This is only a short episode and they've already fit in a one-sided gun fight and an equally one-sided martial arts fight. The action just escalates from here though as the tables are suddenly shredded by machine gun fire from a pair of syndicate space fighters.
 

I mean they're basically vaporised!

Asimov and Katerina make a run for it, leaving Spike to neutralise all the people driving up to kill them. Then we get my favourite frame in the episode:

Cowboy Bebop goes for realism 99% of the time, but there's the occasional frame where it has a moment of fun.

Asimov and Katerina hijack a spacecraft, but she's hit in the gut by one of the syndicate fighters strafing them...

... and bloody eye vials start spilling out! Katerina wasn't pregnant, she was just carrying a ton of drugs! All of the drugs.

Meanwhile Spike is getting into serious difficulties now, as he's pinned behind a car by machine gun fire.

Fortunately Jet's spacecraft has a claw on the front for picking up cars, and it's so quiet that they didn't even hear him coming! It's called the Hammer Head, so that's another aquatic name to go with the Swordfish. Makes sense as the Bebop is apparently a converted fishing trawler. I mean it was converted for bounty hunting not space travel, it could always go into space. It's an interplanetary fishing trawler!

Spike pursues the two of them in the Swordfish, knocking all the cars around as he takes off. I love the bit of paper caught on his wing, that's a nice touch. They've done a great job of integrating the world and the objects so that they're interacting with each other tangibly.

Firefly's gimmick was spaceships and horses, with a more wild west feel to space colonisation. Cowboy Bebop, on the other hand, is going for a spaceships and hatchbacks feel. You're reminded all the time that this is a futuristic city in space that curves up over itself, but it's also basically the modern day.

There's a chase here, with the Swordfish shooting down two syndicate fighters pursuing Asimov so Spike can capture him alive (or whatever he's planning to do). That means we've had a gun fight, a fist fight and a spaceship fight in the same episode! You can tell this is a pilot episode and they're trying to make a good first impression.

It all looks great in action, but it loses something as a still screencap, so I've gone with a shot of the city instead. I'm still trying to get my head around how this colony works to be honest. Okay, they've made it really clear that the landscape curves around in a ring, like in the Halo games... but it's also in an asteroid somehow.

Oh so there's water all the way up to the edge of the dome? That's kind of weird.

The episode loves showing you the individual pieces of the puzzle, but won't connect them all up for you. I think I've solved it now though:

This colony is basically a sphere built into an asteroid! The top of the sphere is a dome with metal arches leading up to an airlock which lets ships like the Swordfish move between the vacuum of space and the colony's atmosphere. Immediately below the dome is a ring of water, then a ring of landscape, and the gravity comes from the asteroid's rotation. That's my theory anyway.

Unfortunately for Asimov those cops are still waiting at the airlock, and Katerina realises it's hopeless. He's sick from the drugs and freaking out, and the two of them will never get to Mars. So she puts a bullet into his head and lets the police do the rest.

Well, Bull was right about the 'death' part of his prediction. He was just vague about who would be doing the dying.

It's a nice touch, having the bloody eye vials spill out to look like blood. The episode has had some actual blood spilled so far, they weren't restricted by their rating, so they're doing this purely for the art.

This is a tragic ending and not just because the heroes won't get their money now. Spike's reaction shows that he's clearly bothered by what's just happened. The only thing in the episode that's really fazed him up to this point was not having beef in his bell peppers and beef, but this has actually gotten to him.

The episode ends like it began, with Jet cooking on the Bebop, but this time he has to hunt Spike down. The guy's up in the bridge, staring out of the giant windows, visibly affected by Katerina's death. He isn't even bitching about food.

The two of them are standing up just fine though, so now I'm trying to figure out how the gravity on this ship works again.  The bridge definitely isn't in the rotating section, it's above the hangar, so there shouldn't be any kind of gravity here... well, unless they floored the throttle and accelerated fast enough to stand on the back wall. Jet throws over a cigarette, and it floats across the room in zero g, but the smoke still rises after Spike takes it.

Man this episode and its cigarettes. If you took a drink every time they take a smoke... neither of you would be living your healthiest lives. This end credits music is awesome though (YouTube link). Plus the credits sequence is filled with mysterious images of Spike and a blonde woman, along with that rose in the puddle again. So that's interesting.

SEE YOU SPACE COWBOY...

CONCLUSION

---

I can still kind of remember my reaction to Asteroid Blues the first time I saw it. The series had already been hyped up as something special at that point and I was eager to check it out. So I watched the first episode and I was... confused. I mean I could get why people liked it, but I didn't really get what was going on. I couldn't quite get my head around it.

The episode's called Asteroid Blues, but then they're on a planet or maybe an orbital ring? Spike manages to locate his target twice even though he's only been given one lead... from a precognitive medicine man? Spike pickpockets something from Asimov he didn't even know was there? There's a river next to a space dome... how does the geography of this place even work? Then the bounty dies in a hail of machine gun fire, Spike is sad about the woman he talked to for two minutes, no one achieved anything, the end. Uh???

I picked up a bit more on this third watch, I mostly get it now, so I'm a bit more confident in saying it's not all that great an episode on a plot level. When it comes to the visuals it makes a habit of either being so far away that you can't quite make out what you're looking at, or so close up that it's hard to tell the context and how it all fits together, and the same is kind of true about the story. This was definitely Spike's episode, with the cryptic disconnected teaser and the hints of his past, in fact the montage over the end credits implies that it's his series really, but despite that we only really get enough here to make him an interesting mystery.

Though this is the first episode, so making the characters and the world seem interesting is exactly what it should be doing. I wasn't won over by it back in the day, but I did go and put the next episode on just to see more of Spike and Jet. Well, them and the spaceships. The whole setting in fact. It's maybe unfair to compare it to Star Trek: Enterprise, as that's about getting the hell away from Earth space, but this has a much better realised vision of a slightly-used pre-Star Trek future.

Overall my revised assessment of this episode is that it's fairly decent, I like it. You could take the dialogue out and it'd still be worth watching just because of the backgrounds, the fluid animation and that amazing soundtrack. Though I'd rather leave the dialogue in actually. Even the dub's pretty good with this one.

But I still like Desperado a little better.

---

COMING IN DECEMBER

Thanks for reading! I've been meaning to get around to writing about Cowboy Bebop for a while. In fact Sci-Fi Adventures was originally supposed to be covering Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, Doctor Who... and this, so I'm glad that the live-action series finally got made and lit a fire under my ass, inspiring me to give this review a second try after five years. Even if it's just one episode.

I'd tell you what I'm writing about next but I don't know yet. Something good I hope!