My oh my, it’s been a while.  But here I am with another installment, which will be spread across two days, because I couldn’t get the whole thing polished in time and these posts tend to be way too long anyway.  For the record, if you’ve been following this series of posts from the beginning, you’ve read just over sixteen thousand words of my natterings about a decade-old TV series, which works out to well over fifty typewritten pages.  Almost a hundred pages, if you use Courier New with wide margins and jigger the kerning.

Before getting to the episodes on Disc 4, let’s take a quick look back over the series so far, which is just, just over halfway done.  (I’m cutting this off after Jupiter Jazz, the literal halfway point.)

Note that when I say focus character, I mean more than just who gets the most screen time.  I say that the episode is focused on a character if we derive significant insights into their motivations or backstory, or if it plays an important part in their character arc.  So while Spike doesn’t do a whole lot more in Waltz for Venus than he does in Gateway Shuffle, his stepping in as a mentor for the hapless Rocco is a really important moment for his character development.

The balance of “light” and “dark” episodes is pretty interesting.  But more significant I think is the way that we get exactly one episode dedicated to each of the main characters other than Spike.  The series thus far is tidy.  It’s not mechanistic or anything, but you could definitely imagine the writing team sitting down to work out this general structure ahead of time (even if, as some of our more anime-savvy commenters have pointed out, that almost certainly didn’t happen).  You could also make a much, much more complicated version of this chart that also includes thematic links between the episodes, like the music boxes that show up in 1, 5, 8, and 12/13, or the big food sequences in 1, 4, and 11, and so on.  But I’m not totally sure that there would be anything to gain from this other than the “Okay, it’s all a dense tapestry” factor.

Anyway, the second half of the series is, for want of a better word, a lot sloppier.  I’m still not quite sure what to make of that.  The individual episodes are still fun, but the stakes just aren’t as high, and the connections between them are a little harder to figure out.  If one were feeling uncharitable, one could suggest that the show had jumped the shark. That the writers had run out of good ideas, and were simply spinning their wheels.  One could also blame pressure from the network censors:  Cowboy Bebop was very nearly cancelled after thirteen episodes because of concerns over adult themes and situations.  And The second half of the series is a lot more, uh, laid back.  Most of the time.  But plausible as they seem, I think that both of these explanations are mistaken — that there’s more to these later episodes than meets the eye.

One thing to note:  in the first half of the series, Jet, Faye, and Ed each got exactly one episode dedicated to their antics.  In the second half – well, I haven’t actually finished it yet.  But on this disc alone, Jet and Ed get an episode each, and Faye gets two.  And I guess Spike just takes a cigarette break, or practices Jeet Kune Do, or something.

Every now and then, we like to take a break from our usual coverage of cyborg movies and dance pop to talk about something a little different.  By which I mean:  every now and then it’s one in the morning on the night before my post is due, and I’ve spent the last two hours frantically scrambling for a topic and coming up blind.  I just haven’t consumed any particularly interesting pop culture in the last week.  Makes it kind of hard to write about the stuff.

So what did I do this past week?  Well, I had a pretty good sandwich… yeah.  Okay, sandwiches.  Let’s overthink this thing.

Although I wasn’t on the podcast this week, I’d like to use this space to follow up on that creepy, misogynistic Dodge Charger ad.  You know, this one:

A lot of people had a lot of interesting things to say about this, but I was most taken by a point that Lee made about how this spot tries to sell something we generally consider lame.  I don’t mean the car—I mean the behavior.  The compound protagonist is a man going through mid life crisis, who tries to recapture his lost youth/freedom/testicles by driving a muscle car.  The motto at the end was “Man’s… last… stand!” but it might as well have been “Compensate… for… something!“ This is not, generally speaking, behavior that your audience is going to want to emulate.  Even the guy who is interested in buying a muscle car to compensate for something probably doesn’t want to think too hard about his motivations.

Are we to understand, then, that the add is targeting mid-life crisis sufferers who are so far gone that they just don’t care anymore?  Or is it targeting aging hipsters who think that the crisis-of-masculinity is going to be the next trucker hat, making this the first ironic muscle car?

No one wants to talk about the Elephant in the room.

The first two DVDs of Cowboy Bebop feel almost eerily self-contained, considering that the show was produced only a couple of years after DVD technology was even invented.  The five episodes on the first disc form a beautiful little arc all on their own.  The second disc doesn’t quite have as much of a shape, but it still feels coherent, with all five episodes sharing the same theme (and to a large degree, the same tone).  Alas, Disc three does not feel coherent at ALL.    Toys in the Attic, far and away the silliest episode of Cowboy Bebop so far, serves as something like a summary coda for the thematic arc that started in disc two, giving us a chance to catch our breath before Jupiter Jazz, a sprawling two-parter that could have very easily been a stand-alone movie.   And then there’s the last episode on the disc, Bohemian Rhapsody, which feels like they just stuck it in because there was space on the disc.  Which they did.  And that’s normal.  The fact that these kinds of aesthetic questions can come up at all shows that Cowboy Bebop is a little smarter than the average bear:  when you watch TV on DVD, how often do you spare a moment’s thought for how the episodes are spaced out over the discs?  I don’t either, usually… but something about Bebop invites this kind of analysis.  (It might just be a function of how perfectly that first disc peaks in the fifth episode:  it feels so planned that it has you grasping at straws for the rest of the series).  Anyway.  Moving on.  This time I tried to just work the analysis in with the plot summaries.  If you preferred the old format, let me know in the comments and I’ll switch it back for next time.

[If anyone was hoping for another Cowboy Bebop post, don't worry - I haven't abandoned the series. But Choose Your Own Adventure came up on one of the podcasts a little while back, and I wanted to get this finished while it was still on my mind.]

In a few hundred years, when people get around to writing a really definitive history of avant-garde literature in the 20th century, I hope they pay enough attention to Choose Your Own Adventure.

I’m not even slightly kidding.  The Choose Your Own Adventure books (and the other gamebook series – Time Machine, Tunnels and Trolls, Fighting Fantasy, and so on) are a far more successful challenge to our received notions of what “reading” is about than any modernist novel I’ve encountered.

And everyone read Choose Your Own Adventure back in the day.  Two hundred and fifty million copies sold between 1979 and 1998, according to Wikipedia, and in 38 languages.  Astonishing.  I have no idea how to figure out how many copies of Finnegan’s Wake were sold during the same period, but I’m guessing less.  And while I hear you saying already that selling a lot of copies doesn’t actually make a literary work successful, it does matter in this case.  A challenge to standard narrative that doesn’t reach a mass audience is not really a challenge at all.  It doesn’t mean the niche stuff isn’t good or important, but to be a really viable alternative it needs to be, uh, viable.

Anyway, the CYOA books would have been pretty radical even if they hadn’t been lucrative.  The earliest gamebooks came out of the French experimental literature collective Oulipo:  in 1967, Raymond Queneau produced a short story in this format which you can still read here, assuming you speak French.  And the idea was in the air earlier than that… “One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with,” Flann O’Brien writes in At Swim-Two-Birds, which sure enough has three beginnings and three endings, if you’re not too careful about how you define the concept.  But I’m not here to try to rescue the artistic purity of reader-driven-narrative from servitude in the brothels of capitalism by pointing out that “serious” intellectuals did it first.  I’m here to talk about the CYOA books themselves, which deserve to be remembered for their own merits.  (But before we leave the topic of brothels, let me just point out that there are apparently a LOT of “adult” CYOA titles out there.  I knew about the one I linked to from working in a bookstore, but while googling it I found out that there are, like, way, waaaaay more than I expected.  And while I don’t get the feeling that all of these are actually pornographic, they’re all selling themselves on a winking hint of sexuality coupled with a healthy (unhealthy?) ladle of nostalgia, sort of like a “Sexy Smurfette” Halloween costume.  Gross.  But then, the cover art on Escape From Fire Island is just perfect.  And I bet no other book has ever had, or ever will have, the Amazon tags “Champagne Toast,” “The Meat Rack,” “lifeguard station,” “zombie epidemic,” and “The Golden Girls,” making Escape From Fire Island another one for the ‘ol ‘Unsurpassed and Unsurpassable’ file.

So, the radical things about Choose Your Own Adventure books.  (Or at least apparently radical.  We’ll get back to that.)

• First of all, although each book has a solitary beginning, they do have multiple endings, and in a way that surpasses anything Flann O’Brian came up with.  For all that At Swim-Two-Birds claims to have multiple endings, they appear in a fixed order, and even a perverse reader who purposely tackles them out of order will read one of them last, making that one the “real” ending.  CYOA books, on the other hand, may have dozens of endings spaced throughout the book, and each is an actual, definitive, end.  (Or not.  More on that later.)
• Second, to increase universal appeal, the protagonist (that is, “You”) has no gender, no race, no religion, no sexual orientation (21st century erotic repackagings of the concept notwithstanding).  No political opinions, no particular skill set… a total blank slate.  I do seem to recall that the protagonist was usually described as a child (the books being marketed to children), but that’s about it.  Eat your heart out, The Man Without Qualities.
• Third, the reader drives the action:  as the title of the series suggests, you get to choose how the story develops.  Just like you can choose whether or not to read the rest of this post.

This is not a parody either, really. It's a... what is the word. Fiasco?

Man.  Writing about The Simpsons is hard.  Even though I’m still a fan, when I sit down to try to talk about the series, I find myself asking, “which series?”  It’s been around for so long… the show itself has changed, and I’ve changed, so the way I relate to the show has changed a LOT.  Trying to talk about all twenty years at once doesn’t even really seem possible.  Note that I’m not one of those people who says that it used to be good and then jumped the shark.  It’s just different now. (And it’s not just one before-and-after difference either.  I can think of at least three or four different phases in the show’s development — or rather, in the development of my relationship to the show?)

I cannot for the life of me figure out a way to celebrate or analyze their 20th season.  So instead I’ll just use The Simpsons as a jumping off point to talk about musical parodies, which have been much on our minds of late.

Today on Cowboy Bebop: Spike Takes a Dump

Welcome back!  I hope you’re in the mood for Bebop.  Take a gander at the introduction or Sessions 1-5 if you need a refresher, and then settle in for some episode recaps.

Howdy, y’all!  It’s good to be back, it really is.  Hope you missed me.  Since it’s been almost a month since the introductory installment, you might want to give it a quick once over, especially if you don’t really know the show. And a quick reminder:  while you can say anything you want about episodes 1-5 in the comments now, don’t go spoiling the later ones.  At least not much.  Like I said last time, I’m not totally sure that Cowboy Bebop is a show that the concept of “spoilers” really applies to.

In typical “Overthinking X” fashion, I’m going to begin with a quick plot summary a long plot summary of the particular episodes in question.  And actually, for the first one, I’m going to go into some pretty extensive detail.  A problem that I can see myself having to deal with a lot, writing about this show, is that a lot of the important stuff is in the details, and it’s hard to talk about the details in isolation.  We could be looking at some mammoth posts here, people.  I’ll try to keep a lid on it in the future.  For today, just settle in.  You might want to get a snack.

Overthinking Cowboy Bebop is on hiatus due to VerhOeverthinking It Week.  Don’t worry, it’ll be back soon!

Back in the days when I was a teenager, before I was a hipster and before I had a website, I used to divide movies by their goodness into two basic categories.

Judgements are subjective. If you loved Night at the Museum 2, you are entitled... to... your... Aghk! I can't say it!

This was simple and accurate, and served me well for many years.  But then I went off to college, where I contracted that most pervasive and untreatable of viral infections:  irony.  (And also plantar warts.  Kids! Wear flip-flops in the shower every time!)  Hardly a week went by in college where I didn’t get together with one group of friends or another to watch a terrible movie for the sole purpose of mocking it.  This confounded my system:  these movies were terrible, obviously, and yet they made me feel good.  Clearly I needed a new category:  the good-bad movie.  (I am not the first one to think of this, although I probably thought that I was at the time.  College students are like that.)  And having just taken Psych 101, I made up a new table which divided the movies that made me feel good into three crudely Freudian categories.

[While Mlawski's analysis of Battlestar Galactica is on indefinite hiatus, another Overthinker is surging into the gap, with another series of posts on a geek-friendly science fiction franchise.]

Cowboy Bebop and I have something of a troubled past.  I had been hearing great things about the show pretty much since it came out (and I mean, like, freaking rapturous things), but I somehow managed to avoid watching it until the summer of 2008.  Even then, all that I saw was the credits sequence.  But what a credits sequence it is:

Judging from that credits sequence, Coyboy Bebop was some kind of hundred-year-storm combination of things I think are awesome.  Jazz!  Kung Fu! Animation! Spaceships! Pop Art! -- and while I prefer an interesting female character to a pin-up any day of the week, I am not immune to the attractions of -- Cheesecake! My appetite was whetted.  Scratch that:  my appetite was honed down to razor sharp keenness in one of those Williams-Sonoma electric home knife sharpener dealies, to the point where I could use it to do all the fancy tricks like chopping a can of tomatoes in half or slicing really thin and perfect slices of bread.  Based on the strength of the credits alone, I was damn near ready to buy the DVD box set one day when I came across it on sale.  But since I don’t have a lot of disposable income (buy a shirt, dammit!), I just decided to Netflix it, one DVD at a time.  And at first, I was glad I did, because when I started watching the series, I was distinctly underwhelmed.