Cowboy Bebop (カウボーイビバップ, Kaubōi Bibappu) is a Japanese anime series created by Sunrise and directed by Shinichiro Watanabe consisting of 26 episodes (called "sessions") and one feature-length film. It follows the adventures of four misfortuned bounty hunters travelling on their spaceship, the Bebop, in the year 2071.

In the year 2071, the crew of the spaceship Bebop travel the solar system trying to apprehend bounties. In the slang of the era, "Cowboys" are bounty hunters. Most episodes revolve around a specific bounty, but the show often shares its focus with the pasts of one of each of the four main characters and of more general past events, which are revealed and brought together as the series progresses.

Cowboy Bebop has been strongly influenced by American music, especially the jazz movements of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s and the early rock era of the 1950s, 1960's and 1970's. Many of its action sequences, from space battles to hand-to-hand martial arts combat, are set and timed to music. Episodes are called Sessions (in reference to musicians playing a "jam session"), and titles are often borrowed from album or song names (such as Sympathy for the Devil), or make use of a genre name (Mushroom Samba), and indicate the episode's musical theme.

A poll in the Japanese magazine Newtype USA asked its readers to rank the "Top 25 Anime Titles of All Time"; Cowboy Bebop placed second (behind Neon Genesis Evangelion) on a list that included such anime as Mobile Suit Gundam.

In the U.S., Cartoon Network has regularly rotated Cowboy Bebop in and out of its Adult Swim block line-up several times. The network has also moved Cowboy Bebop out of its anime lineup periodically in order to show other anime features such as Read or Die and Blue Gender. It is currently scheduled to re-enter weekly rotation on July 7, 2007.

In a recent poll by TV Asahi, Cowboy Bebop was 40th for Japan's Favorite Anime of 2006.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia