To celebrate the start of the NBA 2019-2020 Playoffs, Bleacher Report, a sports news and culture media website, created a video clip in the animation style of Cowboy Bebop. It even includes the opening song, Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts' “TANK!!.” The video features the greatest basketball player of this generation, LeBron James, the “Greek Freak” Giannis Antetokounmpo, two-time NBA champion, Kawhi Leonard, and many other NBA All-Star players.
This isn’t the first time that Bleacher Report has creatively featured NBA players in a popular television series. For the past six years, Bleacher Report has produced the miniseries, Game of Zones, which parodies the popular fantasy drama, Game of Thrones. Game of Zones features all the best gossip and dramatic news that happened during the current NBA season. Some memorable moments include Kevin Durant’s journey through free agency (“KD’s Summer Odyssey”), Kyrie Irving’s farewell message to the Cleveland Cavaliers (“Kyrie’s Farewell”) and the drama behind Anthony Davis going to the Los Angeles Lakers (“The LeBron-AD Trade Deadline Madness”). Every episode is hilarious. NBA and Game of Thrones fans can enjoy this miniseries, even if they don’t have a lot of knowledge about basketball or Game of Thrones.
Much like Game of Thrones is for fantasy fans (rocky final season aside), Cowboy Bebop is considered to be a must-watch by anime devotees. The series has left a legacy that not only inspired many other great anime but has had a lasting impact on all kinds of media around the world -- as evidenced by the NBA. We can accredit some of Cowboy Bebop's success to its genre-mixing of elements that appeal to both Japanese and international audiences, which not a lot of other anime of its era did. In fact, Shinichirō Watanabe, the director of Cowboy Bebop, has gone on to receive commercial success for other genre-mixing series, such as Samurai Champloo and Carole & Tuesday.
The Bleacher Report's referencing of the series is the latest in a string of renewed attention given to the space western by American media. Netflix's live-action remake of the anime, starring John Cho as Spike Spiegel, is still on the horizon. More recently, Spotify announced that the iconic Cowboy Bebop soundtrack is now available on its streaming and composer Mason Lieberman partnered with Sunrise and Funimation to produce a special charity performance in tribute of Yoko Kanno's ending song for the series, "The Real Folk Blues," to fight COVID-19.
Over 20 years after its original release, Cowboy Bebop continues to gain new fans in the most unlikely places.