Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is finally here. The bounty hunters (clockwise from top) Jet Black, Faye Valentine, Edward Wong and Spike Spiegel track terrorists. Courtesy of Destination Films and Samuel Goldwyn Films, unless otherwise noted.

Anime fans do not need to be told how good Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is; they have been waiting impatiently for almost two years. In fact, fans have been suffering for the past year squinting at blurry bootleg video copies, or wincing at the pidgin-English subtitles on the imported Hong Kong DVD release. Now it is finally coming to American theaters with a superb English dubbing, co-distributed by Destination Films and Samuel Goldwyn Films. The initial release, on April 4th, will be in seventeen major cities across the U.S. If the box office is favorable, this may be expanded.

Hot, Hot, Hot
Cowboy Bebop has been a controversial favorite since it was created by Japan's Sunrise animation studio as an adult TV series five years ago. TV theme popularity tends to come in waves, and late 1997-early 1998 in Japan looked like the time for "space adventure" shows. Two of the better examples that season were Sunrise's Outlaw Star (an interstellar Treasure Island) and Madhouse's Trigun (a space Western on the planet Gunsmoke).

Director Shinichiro Watanabe crafted the Cowboy Bebop series as an homage to American movies and television. © Bandai Entertainment.

Cowboy Bebop was not just an average TV anime series for Sunrise. It was one that the entire studio got really enthusiastic over and assigned its top talent to. (Cowboy Bebop's creator-of-record is "Hajime Yatate," Sunrise's well-known house pseudonym for a team effort.) The leader of the creative team was director Shinichiro Watanabe, a fan favorite as the director of the futuristic military adventure series Macross Plus and Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. Watanabe wanted to design not just a space adventure series for adolescent boys but a program that would appeal to sophisticated adults. His main inspiration was the Lupin III anime series, which had been mega-popular from the late 1970s through the mid-'80s, about a debonair roguish international jewel thief and his "cool" gang in jet-set locales. They were sympathetic because they preyed upon truly despicable rich villains rather than the innocent.