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Cowboy Bebop - The Perfect Sessions (Limited Edition Complete Series Boxed Set) Customer Reviews (19 - 21 of 53 Reviews)

Trancends Anime
Cowboy Bebop isn't just good anime. You'll read a lot of reviews that compare it to other groundbreaking anime like Akira and Ghost In The Shell, but that sells this excellent series short.

'Anime' describes not just a style of animation, but a collection of story conventions, none of which appear in Cowboy Bebop. There are no tentacled monstrosities, no Megacorporations conspiring to destroy NeoTokyo, no weird nature spirits being corrupted by consumerism.

Instead we're left with one of the best TV series' ever. Almost everything that happens will make perfect sense to the average western viewer, and it all stands up to any modern TV series... Because unlike all of these excellent shows, Cowboy Bebop switches tone, scope, and genre with almost every episode. One episode is slapstick farce, one is romantic soap opera, one is nail-biting action, one is tense psychothriller. And Cowboy Bebop never misses a beat, each episode is finely crafted with a level of detail given each 22 minutes that you'd normally have to watch an entire series of to see on HBO.

Cowboy Bebop also has something all other western shows lack; Yoko Kanno. Her music is sheer genius. She works playfully and seriously in every style, and thus fits these fantastic stories that are sometimes insightful, sometimes meaningful, sometimes sublime, sometimes ridiculous. Cowboy Bebop loves its own soundtrack and devotes one or two scenes each episode to showcase the music. The director intentionally lets Kanno's music come to the fore and orchestrates several scenes with no dialog in order to let the music shine. Few shows do this, and Cowboy Bebop does it well. The emotional impact of each episode is raised to new levels though the use of her music, and you'd be a fool not to buy the soundtrack.

The series is a Sci-Fi romp set in the near future, our solar system. The main characters are bounty hunters (called 'cowboys') onboard a spaceship (the Bebop) owned by an inveterate jazz aficionado who dreams of Charlier Parker. 'Bounty hunter' may evoke dark mysterious characters like Boba Fett, and the main characters here *do* have mysterious pasts and they *are* lethal killers, but they're entirely human, living day to day on the few bounties they bring in. The characters can be serious, funny, sexy, goofy. . .everything you'd expect from realistically drawn characters who are, at the same time, lethal killers.

Don't mistake this for Anime, it obliterates the genre conventions and comes screaming out of the gate with a refreshing collection of stories that will make you pound your cable box and scream "why can't it all be like this!?!" The director and writer are aware of what they've created, these characters are living day by day, achieving nothing significant in their lives, yet they're having a great time and we have a great time with them. We don't want it to end. The main character asks us, "Don't you want to hang out with us and waste your life away?" The answer, of course, is 'yes,' and the writer knew it when he wrote it.

One aspect which is decidedly *not* western, is the ending. This show ends the only way it could, the most fulfilling way possible, and when the credits roll for the final time, you'll feel like you lived an entire lifetime in the past few hours.

And what a lifetime it was...

Boxset review
Well Im going to start off by telling you about the boxset it self. It has the 6 seasons dvd, the first ost, and well the box. This is the coolest box ever. It's like a case, you can open it and close it. Very tough quality, not just boxset where you slide the dvds in like robotech, or die hard. The ost is pretty good, but im not much of a jazz fan so i can't give a review on that.

Cowboy Bebop is probably one of the coolest series to hit the states. It's a lot better then Outlaw Star or Trigun, some may disagree. It's not a series that continues on and on. Each ep has it's own plot. The overall layout is that it reveals each charater's past bit by bit. At first I found the music to be boring, but as it went along, I got with the beat. There isn't much thinking to do, it's pretty much flat out action most of the time.

If you havent watch a lot of anime, or you only watch stuff on Cartoon Network, pick this up. It's probably going to be the first serious anime you will see.

Emotionally Detached Review For Non-Anime Fanatics
If you're not an anime fanatic and are trying to decide if this set is worth your bux, than this review is for you.

I buy an assortment of sci-fi, fantasy and anime so I try to be reasonable about what makes a quality series. It makes no sense spending time and money on hype right? So here it goes...

The animation(think Vampire Hunter D,Bloodlust, Macross Plus or Ghost In The Shell), dvd packaging and dvd features of this set are top-notch. The animation obviously took a lot of work and could be a case study in itself on how to produce a quality anime.

The soundtrack is ok, nothing special. On any other dvd series, the soundtrack would be annoying and/or boring but it works well enough on this set. After finishing the 6 dvd set and hearing the music, I didn't feel like I had missed anything by not having purchased the 6 dvd +1 cd set that had been on sale earlier. If the music wasn't associated with Cowboy Bebop, I don't think it would ever find its own audience, even on the underground scene.

Unless you're obsessive about voice actors, the voice work is pretty good. I thought the character voices matched well enough and didn't detract from the series.

So why 3 stars? Well depending on what you're looking for, this might not be for you. I like "serial" series, like Escaflowne or Record of Lodoss War, where the episodes build on one another and you feel a sense of anticipation and want to watch the next episode. This series, (coincidentally?) reflecting the characters personalities, kind of just ambles along. There are a couple of episodes that are 2 parters but the rest are mostly random storylines. A lot of the episodes have scenes featuring the characters just lounging around on the ship trying to figure out how to make money. This got really boring after a while. How many different times did the writers need to convey that the characters were starving bounty hunters? I think most people would understand the first couple of times.

Don't get me wrong the episodes are fairly decent on their own. It's just the case that if you have 26 episodes in a series, then you expect a fair amount of variation, not just a bunch of stories that do little to flesh out the characters or the world in which they live. I had actually stopped watching this series halfway through because there was no compelling(emphasis on compelling) reason to continue. Farscape, the series, is an excellent example of how to develop characters over time without giving away everything in the first season.

Here's a quick run down of the characters:
The Ed character was the equivalent of Jar-Jar binks from Star Wars. Ed's only saving grace was his(her?) ability to hack the net when the crew needed information. They never fully explain that "data" dog(you'll see).

The Spike character strikes the pose(vogue) constantly and is virtually invulnerable. This takes a lot of the (good) tension out of the fight scenes. If you're going to make a character virtually indestructible, then you need to make the character vulnerable emotionally (a good example of this is D, from Vampire Hunter D or Gul(sp?) from Macross Plus)

The Faye character(scantily clad woman trying to win in a man's world, using her looks to mask her brain) has been done ad nauseum in other series. The Jet Black character is intriguing though. He's painted as a decent man who's just trying to get through life and do the right thing. One of the better episodes sheds light on his past.

So was this series worth the price? With respect to the animation, audio and production values...yes. But for a good story, solid character development and a cool alternative reality go with Escaflowne.

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