Toonami Planning Holiday ‘Cowboy Bebop’ Marathon

One of the most popular anime series among fans is Cowboy Bebop, and a lot of that popularity is due to its help in ushering anime on television screens on Adult Swim.

Adult Swim’s celebrating the upcoming holiday season with a major Cowboy Bebop marathon that’s sure to make nostalgic fans happy:

On December 23, Adult Swim’s Toonami block is celebrating the winter holiday with a marathon covering the first 11 episodes of Cowboy Bebop. Running from 10:30PM to 4:00AM, the episodes will air back-to-back. Some fans may be sad at the fact there won’t be a new episode of the Dragon Ball Super English dub, but this is a great alternative.

Toonami often airs marathons celebrating various holidays, with the most recent being Dragon Ball Z Kai: The Final Chapters, but this one is a nice change of pace given its upcoming 20th Anniversary in 2018.

To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Cowboy Bebop, fans can even buy a recreation of Spike Spiegel’s famous suit and those will ship out by March 2018. Cowboy Bebop has a wide range of fans too, even expanding to the creator of Nickelodeon’s The Fairly OddParents‘ Butch Hartman who drew a picture of Spike hanging out with Cosmo in his signature style.

To complicate things even further for anime fans, Sunrise is reportedly working on a live-action television series that’s going to adapt the anime in various ways. Though no further details on this series have surfaced.

For those unfamiliar with Cowboy Bebop, the series was first created by Sunrise in 1998. It was directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, with scripts written by Keiko Nobumoto, character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto, and songs composed by Yoko Kanno. Set in the year 2071, the series explores many existentialist philosophies as it follows the adventures of Spike Spiegel, and a group of bounty hunter misfits aboard the titular spaceship the Bebop.

The series premiered in Japan back in 1998, and ran for 26 episodes until 1999. It was licensed for an English language released by Bandai Entertainment and Funimation, and was the very first anime series to air on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block in the United States. It’s often credited by fans from the 2000s as a major “gateway” show to the world of anime overall and has gone on to major critical, cult, and commercial success.