Cowboy Bebop [1998]

Cowboy Bebop (カウボーイビバップ Kaubōi Bibappu) is a 1998 Japanese anime series developed by Sunrise. It featured a production team led by director Shinichirō Watanabe, screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto, mechanical designer Kimitoshi Yamane and composer Yoko Kanno. The twenty-six episodes ("sessions") of the series comprise a complete storyline set in the year 2071. It follows the adventures, misadventures and tragedies of a bounty hunter ("cowboy") crew travelling on the Bebop, their spaceship. Cowboy Bebop also explores several philosophical concepts including existentialism, loneliness, and existential ennui.

Cowboy Bebop received widespread critical acclaim and became a commercial success both in Japanese and international markets, most notably in the United States. The series became a cult classic and later came to be regarded as a masterpiece. Cowboy Bebop is now considered to be one of the greatest and most influential anime of all time. It garnered major science fiction awards and has received universal praise for its characters, story, strong voice acting, animation and soundtrack.

The series is set in the year 2071, when the entire Solar System has been made accessible through reliable hyperspace gates. In 2022, an explosion of an experimental hyperspace gateway severely damaged the Moon, resulting in a debris ring and meteor bombardments that eradicated a large portion of the Earth's population. As a result, many survivors abandoned the barely habitable Earth to colonize the inner planets, the asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter.Mars has become the new central hub of human civilization, and interplanetary crime syndicates exert influence over the government and the Inter-Solar System Police (ISSP), limiting their effectiveness in dealing with crime. As a result, a bounty system similar to that in the Old West is established to deal with fugitives, terrorists, and other criminals; the bounty hunters involved are frequently termed "cowboys".The standard currency is the woolong, which is roughly equivalent to the present-day Japanese yen.The world of Cowboy Bebop is filled with anachronisms. The technology is a mixture of the futuristic (cybernetics, jump gates, energy weapons) and the modern (wheeled cars, handguns, zippo-styled lighters), both of which are blended together. Even "new" technology often looks a bit older and battered.