Anyone remember Cowboy Bebop? An amazing anime in my opinion. Good plot. Good action. A kick ass theme song.

Had pretty much everything. ^_^

I've been told that every episode name was a song title.

I'm a huge fan of it. I have all OSTs, and they frequently end in my player.

Well, now, that was quite a short reply, but I'll let this mini-thread as CB centric. :)

EDIT: Aw, screw it. Try Samuraļ Champloo as well. Same deal, all OSTs, excellent character, I love the humour.

Cowboy Bebop was wonderful. It was the first real anime I got into, and I've been looking for the next one for me to really enjoy. But I think the music made it work as much as the art or the story.
Samurai Champloo is decent too, but I enjoyed the sci-fi elements of CB much more.
They usually had a new song for each episode and kind of let that theme take you through the story. The name of the episode pretty much doubled as the name for that song. Good music too, but at the time I was also really into jazz.

"Cowboy Bebop" remains, for me, an unparalleled anime experience. It's one of the few series that sounds as good dubbed as it does in the original Japanese. The Adult Swim ubiquity hurt its cachet but revisiting it reveals a program that, while light on overarching plot, is incredibly strong on style and winning characterization. I fell in love with the Bebop crew and happily awaited each new stand-alone mission. The series only falters when it tries to forcibly reconnect with the Julia/Vicious narrative that we never knew very much about to begin with. Otherwise viewers are treated to a gorgeously animated, innovatively scored (dig those Yoko Kanno tunes!), and smartly imagined tale of a not-too-distant future. The jazz-blues-folk-Western-Samurai (and so on) cultural mash-up alone makes the show worth checking out.

Of course being rather aloof when it comes to anime I'm sure I miss out on quality material all the time. I hear Fullmetal Alchemist and Ghost in the Shell: SAC are both excellent. Anyone care to fill me in on the other Big Hits?

mobilesworking:
"Cowboy Bebop" remains, for me, an unparalleled anime experience.

Couldn't agree with you more. I wonder if that's one of the reasons I love Firefly so much. In it's way, it reminds me of it.

Haven't found any other anime I like even close to as much.

Cowboy Bebop, Trigun and Ghost in the Shell are my top three anime series. They leave any competition behind by miles. Personally I consider the dub of CB to be better than watching it with subs, maybe because its setting and characters are so western compared to other anime. Even in Trigun the characters are clearly drawn from eastern archtypes.

Redfeather:

mobilesworking:
"Cowboy Bebop" remains, for me, an unparalleled anime experience.

Couldn't agree with you more. I wonder if that's one of the reasons I love Firefly so much. In it's way, it reminds me of it.

Haven't found any other anime I like even close to as much.

The parallels between cowboy beebop and firefly never really occured to me, but on looking back its quite apparent that firefly is probably as close to a live action beebop as your likely to get.

That said, both shows are brilliant of their own merits.

mobilesworking:
Of course being rather aloof when it comes to anime I'm sure I miss out on quality material all the time. I hear Fullmetal Alchemist and Ghost in the Shell: SAC are both excellent. Anyone care to fill me in on the other Big Hits?

GotS is a sure winner. Both seasons are excellent, and the score is the fruit of Yoko Kanno and many other gifted artists.
I haven't seen the Stand Alone movie though.

Redfeather:

Couldn't agree with you more. I wonder if that's one of the reasons I love Firefly so much. In it's way, it reminds me of it.

Throw in some dust and a dash of Chinese and Bebop does begin to resemble Firefly. And I lurve me some Firefly (and anything else Joss Whedon, for that matter).

Cowboy Bebop is fantastic, and any time a friend of mine gives me the crazy eye when I say that I enjoy anime, I make them watch it. I have to my credit several converts at this point. To whoever said they liked the English dubs, I agree that they did a decent job with it, but I still prefer the subs. I don't feel like the voices they got for Spike and Faye favorably compare to the original voicework. I like to get emotional context from the original track, and pick up my textual meaning from the subtitles. To each his own. It probably has the most to do with what you watched first, and which voice you associated with the characters.

I like Samurai Champloo a lot, but as others said, it is not as good as Bebop. But, when each arc is only 26 episodes (which in many ways I am grateful for), I can't help but to be happy to have a different 26 that maybe aren't as good, but are still great on their own.

Ghost in the Shell, movies 1 and 2, I like. The GitS:SAC series I've seen a few of, and in general, it just seems very slow. I've never seen the SAC movie.

Trigun and Fullmetal Alchemist are both animes that I've enjoyed, but they have more of the bizarre facial expression things that I can live with, but don't like as much when everything else is being drawn with such detail. Both end up being a little more mature than you expect them to be just from watching an episode or two, but they are very good.

And I guess we've hit on the mainstream anime which has managed to hit US shores. There are far more really good animes around, if you know what to look for, but they speak to more varied tastes.

The Firefly - Cowboy Bebop connection: I love things in space, for sure. And both series have awesome, loveable crews. But Bebop is "cowboy" just because its the term they use for bounty hunters, and Firefly is cowboy because they were actually going for an old-west style world, set in space. Aside from the space, and the being awesome, unless someone wants to point out some more solid parallels, I'm going to have trouble associating them beyond that.

EDIT: I highly recommend Hellsing. Badass does not even begin to describe it.

I've heard someone tell me to try Planetes. Anyone heard about it?

Hellsing is cool. The OSTs - same deal. Very great boogy rock jazzy stuff.
The video quality is not always top, but it's more than enough to enjoy it.

A last note on the Ghost in the Shell SAC: they're slow to build up, some episodes complete the main arc, while others stand... on their own. Many are slow paced, but I like that. I don't like my cyberpunk to have erratic pacings. They're also quite brainy, just as much as in the Mamoru movies, but have more humour, like in the manga.
When it comes to the action, it has nothing to envy to the films.

I wonder why Samuraļ Champloo doesn't get that much love. It's curious. It's also one of Watanabe's projects besides Cowboy Bebop.
It's clearly not the same stuff, but damn, when you start watching the episodes... I've gone through a marathon, I couldn't stop.
One of the crucial plot elements behind the show is that the two males (Jin and Mugen) in the band (of three characters) have sworn to help the third character they travel with, a girl (Fuu) to find her father. Then, they'll resume the battle to the death they put on standby in the first episode. So there's a lot of value added to the relations between the characters.
What also gives this show its own strenght is its whole anachronic style, mixing the Edo era with hiphop and lots of humour, finally supported by nifty kengeki action. Sometimes, it feels like SNK's Last Blade. :)
Besides, the opening theme is very good.

I got glimpses of Trigun, and for all what I've seen... it's still a bit too "easty", but the few episodes I got on when zapping on TV, satisfied me enough to have me watch them to the end.
But this is not an anime I'd rush to, though.

As for Cowboy Bebop, everybody has seen the movie, right? It's a hell of an experience, again. The music is, once again, fantastic, and the action sequences furiously exciting, notably the dogfight at 3/4 of the film.
It's also very moving at the end.

About Ghost in the Shell SAC: I've noticed that in the few episodes I've seen. I always feel like I'm caught in the middle of something bigger, never really getting the whole picture with the laughing man. Whereas with Trigun, Bebop, and Champloo, it's easier to drop in and out. Taste a bit, get hooked, and then ride from start to finish. From what I've seen, GitS:SAC is very good, just not consistently hooky when you jump in somewhere other than the start.

And don't get me wrong, I really like Champloo. But I never had the emotional investment to the characters that I did with Bebop. And, personally, I love the closing theme to Champloo. It's an excellent series, and I do think it suffers popularity wise by being in the shadow of it's older brother, but I think Bebop is better. Champloo is just really good too.

I know what you mean about Trigun, but I think it would serve you well to watch the series from start to finish. Or at least, let me pick out some of the more sober ones for you. There's a lot of slapstick, especially early on, but there are some real high points as the story moves along.

And lastly, I hope everyone's seen the Bebop movie. I had the pleasure of seeing that in a theater a couple years ago, and it's awesome. My last runthrough of Bebop I also just stuck the movie in where the wikis estimate it comes in the season arc, which is fun stuff too. Its like 4 extra episodes, makes it last a little bit longer. Never lasts long enough, but at least it's a little.

To get a little more esoteric, a friend of mine had me watch Haibane Renmei [sp?]. I didn't know what to expect going in, and I didn't even know halfway through, but I really enjoyed it.

Admitting you like anime used to be as dangerous as admitting you played video games and to a certain extent still is.

I do like Bebop too, primarily for the music. That's what really drew me in and kept me watching. Part of the reason I think Samurai Champloo isn't as big as Bebop is because the feel of the music really isn't there the same way it was for Bebop. For example, the intro and outro music for that series is great but music that defining almost never plays during the actual episodes unlike with Cowboy Bebop. So while Samurai Champloo is a really good series it just doesn't make use of the music the way Bebop did.

The Ghost in the Shell SAC series is great I actually own the first season on dvd I plan on buying 2nd gig when they release the collection dvd instead of just buying all the volumes like I did with the first.

With S.A.C. you really do have to watch it beginning to end you really can't just jump in and out. That's one of the things I appreciate about this series though, because watching this series also like watching the equivalent to a graphic novel where there is an over arching primary plot where the first 17 or so episodes all contain sub plots that often tie into the primary plot. Like for example if you watch the first 3 episodes of the first season there is almost no mention of the laughing man. The main laughing man plot doesn't really get started until episode four and from then until about episode 20 the laughing man story is treated more like a sub-plot where you have to actually pay attention and hear the connections to the laughing man case. It's an anime that really ask you use your brain and not just turn it off while you watch.

3, 2, 1 let's jam...

love some cowboy beebop. check the avatar. :P

it's so ... moody. don't know how else to describe. and of course, the music was great.

However, it seems that the video game adaptations of all these animes suck.

i only ever watched the cowboy bebop movie, which it thought was really good. Haven't really seen any of the series

i liked it, but i never understood why people were so hardcore about it. i don't see how they consider it the best anime ever.

contraman:
i only ever watched the cowboy bebop movie, which it thought was really good. Haven't really seen any of the series

The series is much better than the movie.

Do yourself a favour and go pick up the box set.

jt2002tj:
i liked it, but i never understood why people were so hardcore about it. i don't see how they consider it the best anime ever.

Do you have another candidate?

Geoffrey42:

jt2002tj:
i liked it, but i never understood why people were so hardcore about it. i don't see how they consider it the best anime ever.

Do you have another candidate?

Ulysses 31.

To some, CB may be not the best anime, but it's surely one of the bestest.

Ah, don't forget Pokemon! It teaches great lessons of life.
Yes, it does.

Arbre:
Ah, don't forget Pokemon! It teaches great lessons of life.
Yes, it does.

Mainly, "Snorlax f***ing owns you."

It was an excellent show. Highly memorable.

Unfortunately, like most anime, it had what felt to be an extremely rushed ending. It's as though the production company keeps churning out episodes, and then is utterly SHOCKED when notified that their show will end after 26 episodes (which is one of the standard runs for an anime), and as a result, put together an ending that disappoints.

I enjoyed a great deal of Samurai Champloo. I'd say it's biggest problem was attempting to force an emotional experience out of each episode. The comments here in general I think have been dead on, I could agree with many of you as to why CB hit that sweet spot.
I'll definately try to take a look at some of the other shows recommended here.
Trigun I really enjoyed, and GitS:SAC I unfortunately dropped out of and Fullmetal I've seen a few episodes of, liked, then promptly dropped out of during their 42nd attempt to find the Philosopher's Stone and the 103rd lamentation over causing his brother's near death for messing with the laws of alchemy.
Tell me though, who has seen Noir, and what did they think of it?
Personally, I thought it had a lot of potential, but was just SO damn confusing and then depressing as hell.
CB could bring you down, but it always managed to bring you up with Ed and Ein's antics or a great plot twist or action sequence. The characters, even the ones that were never seen outside of a single episode were well crafted and had depth.
Don't forget to clean out your fridges!

Arbre:

Geoffrey42:

jt2002tj:
i liked it, but i never understood why people were so hardcore about it. i don't see how they consider it the best anime ever.

Do you have another candidate?

Ulysses 31.

I read the wikipedia on it. Is it really that awesome, or is it as 80serrific as it appears?

"80serrific"? :)
Well, I could tell you that as a child, it was awesome. A golden age of anime, the 80s were.
It had some of the most touching moments I ever experienced, all productions considered.
For a show globally aimed at the childs, some of the stories were definitively as dark as some of Ghibli's productions.
These days, such episodes might be seen as a bit too hard for kids, yet it didn't turn entire generations into sociopaths.

Something like more than 50 episodes were planned. Only more than two dozens got made.
I've read on a fansite, a while back, that even a live action adaptation for the big screen was also planned at some point, with involved somehow, but the project remained in limbo.

It basically did what the likes of Stargate, Ilium, The Scourge of the Gods and The Last Trojan did, only two decades before them.

I loved the character art, just as much as the ship herself. Kickass.

If there's one thing for sure, it's that there's no way my kids will miss that show. :)

And the OSTs... some of the best stuff, a mix of rock, epic, disco and funk. You just have to try it.
Or, at least, listen to the opening theme:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TxatvPjdko (french version, the sound is better, but you can listen to it in its english version here).

While we at it, you may look around to grab copies of some of Laloux' films, namely, Gandahar (called Light Years for the english market, Asimov did the translations) and Time Masters. The ending of this last one in particular will completely shatter you.
Both were great adaptations of books.

I used to really love anime back in middle and high school, but once I hit College I started to get tired of it. I think it hit when someone recommended "Stelvia of the Universe" and I hit the episode where all the little girls were in the same room crying together. Well, specifically, that's when my hatred of the show hit me, but my distaste for anime came after.

The thing is, most anime is similar to most Western television: cheap, unoriginal ideas being copied off of one another.

Cowboy Bebop, however, is one of the few that I watch and can say "man, this is a great television show". It doesn't come off to me as anime at all, but as its own thing. It isn't full of stereotypes, the characters are enjoyable, and overall, the show is just well written.

If you enjoy Cowboy Bebop, I HIGHLY recommend Trigun, though I'd watch the sub. I heard the voice acting, and it just didn't have nearly enough spirit.

Other anime, though they aren't as non-cliche, I enjoy are Full Metal Alchemist, Princess Mononoke, Vision of Escaflowne (it gets good after the first horrible ten or fifteen minutes) and Akira.

mobilesworking:
"Cowboy Bebop" remains, for me, an unparalleled anime experience. It's one of the few series that sounds as good dubbed as it does in the original Japanese. The Adult Swim ubiquity hurt its cachet but revisiting it reveals a program that, while light on overarching plot, is incredibly strong on style and winning characterization. I fell in love with the Bebop crew and happily awaited each new stand-alone mission. The series only falters when it tries to forcibly reconnect with the Julia/Vicious narrative that we never knew very much about to begin with. Otherwise viewers are treated to a gorgeously animated, innovatively scored (dig those Yoko Kanno tunes!), and smartly imagined tale of a not-too-distant future. The jazz-blues-folk-Western-Samurai (and so on) cultural mash-up alone makes the show worth
checking out.

Agreed. It is, bar none, the best anime ever created IMO and has more diversity than any "real" shows i've seen, not to mention its kickass music and artwork.
Plus, it's one of the only animes better in english.

Cowboy Bebop and Akira are the only two animes that don't make me want to have sex with a bear-trap in a pit filled with fire ants. The art wasn't hokey, boring, and predictable; and the music is brilliant.

Geoffrey42:

jt2002tj:
i liked it, but i never understood why people were so hardcore about it. i don't see how they consider it the best anime ever.

Do you have another candidate?

GANTZ. It's one of the oddest (outside of Furi Kuri aka FLCL - definitely the oddest thing ever now and forever), most original series I've seen. Shame it was canceled after only two seasons, as you don't even get any history or info about the GANTZ till the 82nd comic (manga). One word of warning, it is both extremely sexual and ultra-violent. There is nothing they won't show save for all out H-scenes. That was the major reason for the cancellation, even in a 2-4AM time block it was too extreme for Japanese TV. Worth checking out if you're up for something unique.

Here's a run down of the manga and anime - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantz

I now watch only Bebop because I have no time to sift through a mound of refuse to find another gem.
That said, I heard somewhere that the bebop characters are more real than characters in other animes. We are the jilted lover, we are the child in a brave new world, we are all running from our past. And so bebop resonates. I'm sure that's all a matter of opinion, but how do other shows do with that kind of character formation?

My biggest mystery in the whole series is the genesis of the finger point and "bang" from Sympathy for the Devil and The Real Fold Blues Pt2. I see it other places, so it's not original. Can someone direct me to that archetype?

i own all the episodes and the movie. great show.

contraman:
i only ever watched the cowboy bebop movie, which it thought was really good. Haven't really seen any of the series

then you need to get off your ass and see it my friend, cause it's an experience you will never forget.

Evangelion has always been my favorite anime, with Bebop right on its heels for second. third goes back and forth between Outlaw Star and Trigun.
Samurai Champloo is really good too, though i haven't seen the whole series. Hellsing is a classic as is Ghost in the Shell:SAC, though i sometimes loose interest in SAC cause of the incessant talking. but i wish i didn't, cause its a really good series.

as for games from these animes, of course they fall into shittiness as soon as you push "Start Game" cause you can't turn stories like these into interactive adventures. there is too much that is instantly lost in the transition.

but horray for good anime, and may these glories ones mentioned live on for many future generations to enjoy.

Arbre:
However, it seems that the video game adaptations of all these animes suck.

Just like all game adaptations of American movies/ TV shows.

I love Cowboy Bebop. It would be my favorite anime if I didn't love Evangelion so much. (cuz I'm a masochistic freak like that.) You know something is good if every time you watch it you notice something new, both Cowboy Bebop and Evangelion fall into this category for me