Cowboy Bebop

Cowboy Bebop (Japanese: カウボーイビバップ, Hepburn: Kaubōi Bibappu) is a Japanese neo-noir space Western anime television series which aired on TV Tokyo and Wowow from 1998 to 1999. It was created and animated by Sunrise, led by a production team of director Shinichirō Watanabe, screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto, mechanical designer Kimitoshi Yamane, and composer Yoko Kanno, who are collectively billed as Hajime Yatate.

The series, which ran for twenty-six episodes (dubbed "sessions"), is set in the year 2071, and follows the lives of a traveling bounty-hunting crew aboard a spaceship, the Bebop. Although it incorporates a wide variety of genres, the series draws most heavily from science fiction, Western, and noir films. Its most prominent themes are existential boredom, loneliness, and the inability to escape one's past.

The series was dubbed into English by Animaze and ZRO Limit Productions, and was originally licensed in North America by Bandai Entertainment (and is now licensed by Crunchyroll) and in Britain by Beez Entertainment (now by Anime Limited); Madman Entertainment owns the license in Australia and New Zealand. In 2001, it became the first anime title to be broadcast on Adult Swim.

Cowboy Bebop has been hailed as one of the best animated television series of all time. It was a critical and commercial success both in Japanese and international markets, most notably in the United States. It garnered several major anime and science-fiction awards upon its release, and received acclaim from critics and audiences for its style, characters, story, voice acting, animation, and soundtrack. The English dub was particularly lauded and is regarded as one of the best anime English dubs. Credited with helping to introduce anime to a new wave of Western viewers in the early 2000s, Cowboy Bebop has also been called a gateway series for anime as a whole.