Of Cowboys, Outlaws, Apples, and Oranges

Cowboy Bebop and Outlaw Star:
Two seemingly similar series that are actually distinctly different.

A few days ago, I was riding home on transit with some members of the anime club I'm part of. We'd been discussing some of the series out there, and for some reason or other, I decided to mention one of my recent favorites -an older sci-fi series called Outlaw Star- to another member. He more or less replied that he'd seen a bit of it and thought that it was basically "the Poor Man's Cowboy Bebop." Which, according to my brother, another club member, is pretty much a general concensus about the two shows.

If so, then it's a bit of an unfair one, because comparing Outlaw Star to Cowboy Bebop is a bit like comparing an apple to an orange.

On the surface, the two shows seem like good material for comparisons. They're both sci-fi shows. They were both produced by Sunrise, Inc. They were released about a year apart from each other.

Major characters: Spike, Jet, Ed, and Faye from Cowboy Bebop,
Aisha, Jim, Gene, Melfina and Suzuka from Outlaw Star.

Such similarities, however are largely surface level. When I first saw Outlaw Star, I thought it was kind of similar to Cowboy Bebop. As I've continued to watch it however, I've realised that the two shows are at heart very different.

Cowboy Bebop may have sci-fi elements, but they're used largely as a framework to allow the show to jump between different genres.

Cowboy Bebop, a story about a group of down-on-their-luck bounty hunters in the 2070s, is a genre jumper. For Cowboy Bebop, the science fiction aspect of the show (with its interplanetary travel) is largely just a framework that allows it to do something different every episode (well, almost every episode). The elements of a sci-fi series are there, but they don't do very much -for the most part, they just allows the show's writers to tie some widely disparate material together.

While Cowboy Bebop switches genres, Outlaw Star is
more or less an archetype for a single genre: the Space Opera.

Outlaw Star, on the other hand, is not a genre jumper. Its a simple space opera. What makes it special isn't that it does much of anything new or different, like Cowboy Bebop does, but that it has a lot of spirit and a strong sense of adventure (this is particularly apparent in the awesome Openning Credits sequence). Its a spin off of a sci-fi parody manga* called Future Retro Hero Story, and while its not much of a full blown parody itself, this may explain to some degree why it seems like an archetype for the whole space opera genre. Neither overly silly not overly serious, Outlaw Star is simply a Space Opera adventure that's a whole lot of fun to watch.

*The comic book counterpart to anime. Many anime series are based on manga, though some are original and some are based on books.

And that more or less says it all. Outlaw Star isn't simply the Poor Man's Cowboy Bebop, because its a different type of show from Cowboy Bebop, and its great strengths aren't in the same places that Bebop's are. It should be judged by its on merits, not by another show's.