Good morning--the blog entries and commentaries are beginning to pick up what with the end of the semester on the horizon; that makes it the perfect time to follow this link and catch up on e725 special desert agent Jim Ricker's musings at Vox Clamantis.
I've been a fan of Japanese animation for years now, and one of my favorite things about the genre is getting to view bits and pieces of American cinematic culture refracted and reinterpreted from such a completely different perspective. Jim is absolutely right about the anime Western - though I've not seen Desert Punk, two of my personal favorite shows have much the same vibe. Trigun feels like a classic Western in it's windswept, sandy setting (despite it being another planet), but the outlaw stereotypes are copy-pasted out of a Capcom Streetfighter video game, each with their own unique old-timey fighting style and weaponry, and most of the tension between the characters seems to stem from class differences based on wealth, not race. On the surface, Cowboy Bebop seems further removed from the American western, but once you disregard the difference in setting, all the classic symptoms of the border town start to present themselves on every planet and asteroid frequented by the bounty-hunting crew of the Bebop. In fact, the very first episode takes place on an asteroid called Tijuana, and deals with a bounty on the head of a drug runner who broke his contract and made off with both the stash and a sexy Latina-looking bombshell, whose pregnant tummy is actually the couple's hiding place for their contraband. Talk about bandido stereotyping!
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