1. Anyone Who Has a Price on His Head Knows You
For 22 sessions, we’ve watched our plucky crew cross paths with gangsters, assassins, immortal musicians, other bounty hunters, space truckers, analog system salesman, themselves, and convicts on the run. While the show delights in the Bebop crew losing their target, it does feel like there’s more adventures Watanabe and the crew at Sunrise aren’t showing us, the successes and triumphant collars.
What “Cowboy Funk” does immediately is let us know that criminals in the system’s wider world are aware of the Bebop crew. When Spike nabs his current target, a mad bomber, the guys identifies him and says, “We all dread being captured by you, Spike. Or Andy.” Spike doesn’t know who Andy is. The rest of the session plays off Spike dealing with his infamy and growing increasingly frustrated by Andy’s presence.
Cowboy Bebop has loved exploring the consequences of its characters’ actions. Most times, this ends up tragically, but I think the notoriety angle, that sense of being identified, is a clever twist on the show’s own themes.
2. Andy
Andy is introduced as a perfect foil to Spike. He’s like the physical embodiment of how Spike likes to present himself. Andy bursts into the scene on a horse, brandishing some giant revolvers. He has a spaghetti Western theme song and knows how to lasso his target. A literal cowboy, yo. Yet he’s also impulsive and energetic, makes all sorts of unnecessary moves and causes all kinds of destruction. “I trust my gut,” he says upon meeting Spike, who tends to observe most situations before outright diving in. (This doesn’t apply to when Spike’s in the Swordfish II.)
Andy was also registered as a member of the YMCA, the Young Man’s Cowboy Association, but was kicked out for being a nuisance to others.
3. Escalation Station
I think part of what makes this session so enjoyable is how much it commits to its joke. Not just the Andy character and his faux-cowboy get up, but the running gag involving the mad bomber. Spike easily finds Teddy Bomber time after time, and he starts to go on his anti-authoritarian tirade, but Spike loses all interest in whatever Bomber’s saying whenever Andy walks into the frame. This sends Bomber into a tizzy, forcing him to escalate his attacks until either bounty hunter listens to him. Like “Mushroom Samba,” “Cowboy Funk” owes a lot of its enjoyment to how it continually escalates the obstacles; this one, however, features Spike ignoring said obstacles as he becomes more and more obsessed with confronting Andy.
Take the midpoint scene, where Andy enters the dinner party on a horse. After Bomber escapes, everyone gives chase: Bomber in the car, Andy and Faye on horseback, Spike in the Swordfish II. There’s a wide shot of the street as each party zips down it and it’s just so spectacular a gag you can’t help but smile.
Side question, what’s the likelihood Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze were watching this while writing Adaptation.? Because this seems exactly like the screenplay the other Nicholas Cage character was writing.
4. What We Talk About When We Talk About Spike
I’ve mentioned a bit how I think Cowboy Bebop does its best characterization work when it forces the characters to play off someone else. I think we understood more about Jet and his relationship to women in the last session, for instance. Here we have Spike going up against his foil, also the most extreme version of himself. Enough so even Faye’s like, “Yo, the resemblance is uncanny” the whole session. Andy grinds Spike’s gears and we see his temper interfere with his usual methodical and cool approach. We see him obsess over it, be unable to drop the problem all together. He has Teddy Bomber cornered numerous times but by the end of it, Spike’s only using him as a means to lure out Andy.
We’re given all this mostly as a joke here, but I think a lot of the same tendencies and characteristics play out in the finale. Which is coming up a lot sooner than we realize.
5. Exploiting the Environment
This is also a session of set pieces. Teddy Bomber is all about blowing up stuff, so Watanabe and crew make sure to develop locations and environments. There’s the dinner party scene from before, but there’s also the climax on the bombed rooftop, starting with Spike and Andy running up the side of a building, animalistic and insane. The final confrontation takes place on the exposed beams and Watanabe and crew have a blast using them to help Spike and Andy inflict harm on each other.
Anyway, that’s it for this session, space cowboys. Tune in next week as we take on a “Brain Scratch.”
