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.

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.

[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.

No Ghostbusters Week could be complete without at least a passing mention of Ray Parker Jr.’s 1984 hit “Theme from Ghostbusters.”

We all know this song—it’s possibly the single most recognizable movie theme song in history—but some of us may not know the inexplicable music video, which is about a woman whose glowing neon house is apparently haunted by the disembodied heads of Chevy Chase and Danny DeVito.  Spooooooky!

(BTW, let me just point out that there’s something predatory about Parker’s relationship with the poor woman in this video.  He’s presumably a ghostbuster, but the ghosts are just his backup singers.  Is he drumming up his own business, like Micheal J Fox in the Frighteners?  And does he really need to hide under her bed while she’s sleeping?  Gross.)

We also probably all know that Huey Lewis sued Parker for ripping off his own 1984 hit, ‘I Want A New Drug.’  This song is pretty famous, but much less well known than the Ghostbusters song, so give it a listen if you haven’t heard it already.

In many cases, a movie’s soundtrack is just another piece of its marketing campaign. But occasionally, a song from a film actually becomes more popular than the film itself. Here are eight you can probably sing from memory (whether you want to admit it or not), from movies you’ve probably never heard of. Consider this a spoiler alert – if you read the name of a film and don’t want the plot described, just skip to the next one.

(NOTE: For a song to qualify, it has to have originally been released as part of a soundtrack. And I decided to stick to movies from the 60’s onward. Otherwise, this list might be all Gershwin and Porter.)

Let’s count ‘em down…