Forum - View topicWhy Wasn't Space Dandy the Next Cowboy Bebop?
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BodaciousSpacePirate
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Okay, against my better judgement... tell us which six of this season's twelve ANN streaming reviewers only watch "half a dozen shows or so a year". 
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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Yeah I think the article is looking too hard into this. Everything can become big, but it needs to be consistently entertaining. Dandy wasn't. It had some really high high, but it had plenty of low (sometime quite a few in a row). That was by design, by going for more experimental stuff they knew they wouldn't be able to consistently get quality, but that doesn't change the fact you'd leave quite a few episodes thinking that you just wasted your time, and that's not a great recipe for making a classic.
Bebop had a few duds, but some stuff were always on point. So even if one episode was sorta boring, you'd still have a great soundtrack or animation/visual to pull trough (for example the episode about the adult in boy body has a kinda boring plot, but a really strong blues soundtrack makes it worth it). Dandy went experimental on all aspect, so you'd get episode were just nothing works for you. Bringing in Rick and Morty also highlight another problem, continuity. Both Rick and Morty and Bebop have the same structure, with most episode being stand alone but with a few story that push the main narrative forward. But even the stand alone episode have little nibble of plot or character development, which help make the whole thing feel cohesive. Dandy just throw everything out each episodes, a random detail is just a random detail. |
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EricJ2
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My reaction, reading the headline: "Are we even talking about the same SERIES???  "
Bebop was Cool Jazz Noir, Dandy was "Wacky hyperactive pop-culture gags trying for x-treme comedy". If you were comparing the Mushroom Samba episode of Bebop to Space Dandy, okay, maybe we'd actually have something to discuss (ie., "Have Watanabe and Nabeshin ever been seen in the same place?"), but anything else is just Crazy-Talk. That's like the folks who compare Tenchi GXP to the regular Tenchi Universe series. Now, in the article's perspective of "Why didn't Dandy do as well as Bebop for Watanabe as the Next Big Mainstream-Breakout series on Cartoon Network?", that also would be the fault of Shinichi's alter ego being wayyy too goofy, hyperactive, scattershot, and all over the comic map for his own good. (Even if you didn't pick up on the inherent deliberate Yankee-yanking of Hooters and NASA parodies.) Like Akitaro Daichi's series, Watanabe's comedies are a distinctly acquired taste, and either you like them, hate them with a passion, or are completely baffled by them and not in the good way--Which explains why Excel Saga didn't quite survive with main majority of fans as well as it first did back in the late 90's. Me, I thought Dandy was more disorganized, more deliberately "gratuitous-inappropriate" and even less comically disciplined than Excel Saga, and....that's not good. 
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1117 Location: Puget Sound |
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I have to say that I think Jacob is way off base with this one.
It's not the year/era it was produced. It has nothing to do with it not being available to binge (which was still rather new then). Though he was unlikeable (which didn't help), it has nothing to do with Dandy's archetype being unfamiliar in the West. Re-imagining Bebop as a Saturday Night Live skit was never going to work in the first place. It's really that simple. The hype machine promised Bebop, noted for it's writing, plot, world building, and characters... - and delivered a "comedy" that had none of that. The old fans bailed in droves. The new fan, and especially the younger fan, was in an even worse patch. All good SNL skits required a working knowledge of what they were skewering, and since they were almost always topical this was easy. Dandy required a working knowledge of at least forty years worth of SF, literary, and anime conventions and tropes... Anyone under thirty, unless they were very media savvy, were left scratching their heads. Only a fairly small number older were going to be familiar with the first two, and by definition (as new fans) had no knowledge of the past. Dandy was simply too smart for it's own good. And that's setting aside the incoherent plot, the frequent ass-pulls, and constant shifts in tone. The real question in my mind isn't "Why wasn't Dandy the next Bebop?". It's "Who thought this was a good idea in the first place?" |
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Koda89
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This was it for me. I only finished the first cour of the show. I enjoyed some of the episodes but not enough to continue. Hell all of my friends didn’t even finish the first cour. |
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Greed1914
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I liked Space Dandy quite a bit. It helped that I took "from the director of Cowboy Bebop" as a simple tag line than an indication of what to expect. The different episode directors, stories, and art styles also added to the fun because it meant going into each episode with no firm idea on what would happen.
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jrockfreak
Posts: 125 |
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I loved the first season of Dandy but when the second season came out, it just felt like recycled plots from the first season and i dropped it early on. I enjoyed the comedy but i dont feel that it was a comedy anime that could last over time.
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Winger
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I don't like the way you guys use the word "west" to refer only to United States when "west" should include also Canada, Latin America and Europe. And also, Cowboy Bebop was a success in those places too.
About Space Dandy, it's a great show, but it's not for everyone, since it has a lot of experimental stuff that can repel most of the common audience. And like Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, it has some amazing episodes, and others that are not so amazing. Yeah guys, Champloo and Bebop aren't perfect show, and Dandy isn't it as well. The only major difference as other people said, was the continuity. About the point of the topic, Space Dandy is Space Dandy, and not a "Cowboy Bebop 2.0". It's another show with another content. And it was not supposed to be a new Cowboy Bebop. But talking about commercial issues, I actually blame FUNimation. For example, as I said before, Cowboy Bebop was actually a success in Europe and Latin America, because it was distributed by a company that does not foreclose other countries outside US with their licenses. Netflix and Viz Media for example are much better than FUNimation in this point. I mean, FUNimation is not forced to work outside U.S, but damn, you can't even look at their website if you are outside United States. For many times, their licenses are ranged to the entire American continent, but they choose to work only in United States, what harms a lot the latin american anime market. As a brazilian, I can say that mostly because of them (FUNimation), shows like My Hero Academia, Fairy Tail, Assassination Classroom and many others are not dubbed and broadcasted in television channels here, and in Mexico, and in the rest of Latin America. Also, I agree with the article says about the internet era. Toonami was not the best choice for Space Dandy. Netflix would be a much better place for that show. |
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Winger
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Also, Watanabe was not the 'Director', but the 'Chief Director' for Space Dandy. There are some differences between those two staff roles.
The actual director of Space Dandy was Shingo Natsume. Yeah, the same of One Punch Man. |
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Rogueywon
Posts: 260 |
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The show was empty calories. It looked pretty and flashy, but there was absolutely nothing there to sustain a lasting interest. It was, in typical Watanebe style, a guess at what the West wanted from anime. Sometimes he hits, sometimes he misses. A lot of Western anime fans like anime precisely because it is a bit alien and different, not because it is trying to pander to assumptions about Western tastes. I watched four episodes then checked out.
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MarshalBanana
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One very important thing about Bebop, which I think we often overlook, is that it is not just a product of Shinichiro Watanabe.Keiko Nobumoto and Yoko Kanno were also very important staff members(Keikos involvement in Dandy was very minimal)
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one.night.bkk
Posts: 32 |
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I was never a big fan of Cowboy Bebop, and I initially had high hopes for Space Dandy. I guess I hadn't heard/didn't realize it was an anthology series, not a space comedy with an overarching plot, and that turned me partially off right away. I mean, I found Dandy's character hilarious (and yes, I'm a nerd, from a time when nerds were only starting to be accepted), and there were some pretty great episodes- the one where he goes to the high school, the one where he and Scarlet battle Dolph, and the one where they go to Meow's home planet (which seems to be a commentary on the state of modern Japan as compared to how it used to be), among others. On the other hand, a lot of episodes were combinations of creepy, acid trip, or just plain weird.
...but then again, I'm a nerd my early-30s who's essentially stuck in the 80s and hates "serious" stuff, so yeah... |
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RogerSmith2004
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Yes because "great shows" were popular that year like Akame ga Kill, SAO II, Aldnoah.Zero, Tokyo Ghoul, Psycho-Pass 2, Black Bullet, Mahouka, etc. You are being utterly condescending here. Space Dandy was, in my opinion, the best show of 2014. It explored tons of interesting and creative concepts, it looked great, it sounded great, I loved how the cast bounced off each other. I watched tons of good shows that year, I watched tons of bad shows that year. It may come as a shocker to you, but people who watch a lot of anime can still end up loving shows you don't. What's popular isn't going to always be good and what's good isn't always going to be popular. |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Again, speaking as one of the Old Fans, think it was the exact reverse: Old fans knew that Watanabe had an occasional taste for Quirky/X-treme comedy--in fact, it was the cool, posing, fatalistic Bebop that may have been his deliberate creative change of pace--just that he hadn't done one for ten or fifteen years, so we tuned into see whether he still had what made us think Excel was "genius" at the time. As it turned out, not quite. New fans...n-no, wait, hold it a sec, I have to ask: WERE there actually New fans who said "Hey, it said he's the Bebop guy, and he's doing space again, it's going to be just as cool and dark!" If you were one of the "disappointed by comedy" New fans who honestly believed that, I have a nice dinner-ready dog I can sell you.
So yes, in a way, it did help for New fans to have some knowledge of the past--especially anime from the long-ago 90's--to know where the screwball heck Dandy was coming from, and why it became the big hype-misfire that it did. |
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Animegomaniac
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1 Pacific Rim was a poorly written mess that would have been a good movie if it centered on Mako. While Pan's Labyrinth was equally as grabby as PR when it came to its story elements, it comes off as more original how it uses the stuff it steals. 2 One of those was compelling, forcing the viewer to find out what happens in the next episode eventually while the other was not. 3 Dollhouse was initially more successful than Firefly with less reason. People tend to forget how much of a failure Firefly was at first, with episodes not even broadcast in its first fun. Interesting how each of these covers a bit of the CB versus Space Dandy problem. My own view is that I just don't like Shinichiro Watanabe's work. I only ever managed to finish one show of his, Samurai Shamploo, and I just can't get past his own drumbeat of "Aren't my characters cool? Isn't what I like, American movies and jazz, cool? Am I not cool myself?" There are plenty of great anime works that aren't cool, thank you very much.
Now there's a Watanabe I can praise. And why wasn't Nerima Daikon Brothers the next Excel Saga? Oh right, AoA buried it. |
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