The Advocate

Has there ever been an anime more perfect than the Space Opera meets Western meets Jazz solo known as Cowboy Bebop ? Rhetorical question. Obviously the answer is no. I started watching circa September 2, 2001, (merely a week, or so, before Nine-Eleven destroyed my nations uniquely American sense of invincibility) on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim . It was the first anime I ever seriously watched an anime. I think it may have been the first time I ever seriously watched anything . And fuck, the show was cool, in every sense the word was ever meant to evoke and invoke. As an awkward teenage boy, the gunfights, spaceships, and frenetic saxophone, mixed with tantalizing bits of fan service captured my imagination in a way perfectly designed to tap that angst and loneliness so pervasive amongst young White men . (Though, being Jewish, I wonder if I was less predisposed to devolve more towards sappy blog posts instead of violent mass murder.) It touched just the right nerve at just t...

Because Adult Swim in the early 2000s was so good, so revolutionary, and so unappreciated for its time that one can't help but wanna fanboy dick-ride it into the dust of hearty nostalgia.   I mean, we're talking the magical line-up to end all magical line-ups! We're talking Space Operas, Old Westerns, straight up Street Fighters, Mecha, Samurai epics, Post-apocalyptic Wastelands a la Mad Max, Historical Revisionary pseudo-homoerotic Pedagogy, Crime Thrillers, Nightmarish Acid Trips, Ancient Japan, Cyber Punk, Sci-Fi, Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi, Comedy, Dramedy, Romantic Fappery, Fantasy, High Fantasy, Demon Fantasy, Detective Mystery, and fricking Comic Books! And the best part? It was all late night. Meaning after the 'rents were asleep, after the ankle-biters were tucked, and when all the kids were out of the pool. It was a hidden gem amongst an endless cavern of coal in TV land. They even showed special full-length features that you couldn't find anywhere outside of Ja...

I was probably the only person in my entire high school/town/county that watched this show , courtesy of Cartoon Network's Toonami programming block. And, honestly, the only reason I even ended up watching the show originally was because I routinely stayed up all night grinding Warcraft 2 multiplayer on Bnet. (Of course, being like 14-15 years old makes it somewhat easy to stay up all night and recover like a damned mutant.) Once I got hooked on it, I had my alarm reset so I would wake up at the lovely hour of 5 AM just to catch each new episode, Monday thru Friday. The first incarnation shown on American television was the "Chaotic Century" storyline, which followed Hero Protagonist -- Van Flyheight -- as he roams the semi-post-apocalyptic wasteland of Planet Zi with an amnesiac love interest named Fiona, as well as his zoid, Zeke. (A zoid is basically a sentient fighting robot thing that humans can pilot. They are serious business.) BT Dubs: the Wikipedia page for...