Cowboy Bebop

Cowboy Bebop is an anime television series produced by Sunrise that began broadcasting on TV Tokyo in April 1998. The series is an original story created by Hajime Yatate, the collective pseudonym for the Sunrise animation staff. Director Shinichirō Watanabe led the anime alongside character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto and composer Yoko Kanno.

In the year 2071, humanity inhabits colonized moons and planets across the Solar System after a hyperspace gateway explosion damaged Earth. Spike Spiegel works as a traveling bounty hunter alongside his partner Jet Black, an ex-police investigator. The two partners live aboard the converted spaceship Bebop and hunt fugitives to collect bounties paid by the Inter Solar System Police. Their small team grows when they take in a genetically altered Pembroke Welsh Corgi named Ein, followed by fugitive gambler Faye Valentine and child hacker Edward Wong.

The anime consists of 26 episodes in one season. TV Tokyo broadcast 12 episodes and one recap special in 1998, after which the satellite network Wowow aired the entire 26-episode broadcast between October 1998 and April 1999. Sunrise produced an animated film sequel, Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door, which opened in Japanese theaters in September 2001. Cartoon Network aired the English-dubbed series in the United States starting in September 2001. Tomorrow Studios and Netflix released a live-action series of 10 episodes in November 2021.

Japanese voice actor Kōichi Yamadera voiced Spike Spiegel, and Megumi Hayashibara voiced Faye Valentine. Animage magazine readers awarded the anime the Anime Grand Prix in 1998 and 1999. In 2000, the series won the Seiun Award for Best Media at the 31st Japan Science Fiction Convention. Publishing company Tokyopop released two manga series in North America between 2001 and 2002, titled Cowboy Bebop and Cowboy Bebop: Shooting Star. Bandai released a PlayStation action game based on the anime in Japan in 1998, followed by a PlayStation 2 video game in 2005.