long before i got into the business of roasting rancid anime garbage diving too deep into silly vr worlds and exposing kooky cults my main hustle was analyzing anime openings picking apart their symbolism and foreshadowing to find themes and messages hidden in plain sight i covered a lot of personal faves and all-time greats in that time but one extremely important opening continued to elude my grasp until now on the surface cowboy bebop's tank seems simple enough a heavily stylized catchy instrumental number meant to set the tone establish the characters and cement them in your mind for the rest of your natural life but director shinichiro watanabe is a meticulous deliberate sort of genius who instills deeper meaning into every facet of his work that he can using every tool at his disposal and he'd never settle for style without substance if he could help it i knew there had to be more to tank than just cool visuals and the cool song it offers few visual clues as to what that might be though and i'm just not a musically minded guy so after doing enough research to peg it as a more refined spiritual successor to the early jazzy openings of lupon iii which also clearly inspired the relationship between bebop's crew and the show itself i hit a wall and gave up but the recent release of netflix's disappointing live-action version of the opening has renewed my interest their take on tank is fun creatively edited and full of genuinely impressive shots and effects and it even explicitly foreshadows many important plot beats from the series yet it also feels hollower than the original somehow and not just for its criminal lack of ed they may have meticulously recreated the look and sound of anime's least skippable opening but somewhere along the way they ripped out its soul and as i was re-watching the anime in preparation for netflix's adaptation the nature of that soul finally became clear to me perhaps it was the subtle incongruity of the live-action op itching at the back of my mind or it may have been the aid of a certain subtly watanabe suggested substance that i'm gonna call g-fuel because most of my audience is in less cool countries than canada and also because this video is sponsored by g-fuel energy formula use promo code basement for NUMBER_TOKEN off an order of any size at g fuel dot com regardless of what brought me here i now fully understand what netflix's editors failed to see bebop's opening is literally perfect a seamless fusion of music and motion that cannot be changed in any way without diminishing its power and it doesn't just set the tone for every episode of cowboy bebop it is every episode of cowboy bebop to explain what that means i will need to provide you with even more context sorry but i promise this is going somewhere really cool and if you stick with this video all the way there's even a crazy plot twist at the end you see when watanabe set out to create cowboy bebop it was his explicit stated goal to birth an entirely new genre of science fiction it says they're right in the broken english manifesto scrolling behind tank and on several eye catches throughout the series the work which becomes a
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN and also because this video is sponsored by g-fuel energy formula use promo code basement for NUMBER_TOKEN off an order of any size at g fuel dot com END_SPONSOR_TOKEN