82 minutes, 26 seconds.

Good golly, nearly went insane from the monotony of cutting the last few fight sequences (Continuity!), but I’m satisfied I did the best I could with footage that really wasn’t meant to be chopped up like this. The final runtime will probably be a tad shorter as there’s one scene and some scattered lines I’m still thinking of cutting, but no more than a minute or so.

Next step is the sound mix which should be less stressful, but I’ll probably take a day or two to decompress before jumping back in. The score still isn’t final as there are a couple selections I’m not entirely happy with. But the good news is that I’m on a comfortable track towards the Fanime premiere.

Saturday, May 24th, 2008, noonish.

Though I’m still editing, I thought I’d post the list of Bebop tunes I’ll be using in Song which, if you have the soundtracks, might give you an idea of the story’s tone. I’m about 90% certain this list is final.

I suppose you could view the soundtrack page as an indicator of my progress based on how many question marks remain.

When you load up Serenade of Recollection in the PS2, one of the first things that pops up is “Tank!”, Bebop’s beloved opening theme. The friend who first showed me this game (and from whom I’ve been borrowing it for close to a year now) thought I’d get a kick over the game’s spin on the anime’s iconic opening animation. Instead of replaying the intro from the anime, the makers of the game actually recreated “Tank!” shot-for-shot using their cel-shaded character models in real time.

(Anime version is on top.)

Well, almost shot-for shot…

Here’s our first glimpse of Spike in the anime intro:

And here’s the game’s version:

You guessed it, all traces of smoking have been scrubbed from the game’s version of “Tank!”.

Indeed, at no point during the game is any character depicted smoking, making it the most smokeless depiction of CBBB since… Fanboy Bebop, I guess.

More Useless Trivia:
“Tank!” is the only part of the game where we get to see the 3D model they made of Jet’s Hammerhead.

Now that I’m in a rare let’s-put-some-actual-content-on-our-website mood, not to mention wanting to fulfill my wish not to let another near-half-trip around the sun pass before our next update, I figured I’d let loose some articles I’ve been working on for a while:

ReDeath to ReDux is a list of the changes and additions made to the Evangelion ReDeath remaster.

That is Sad - FBBB, 6 Years Later is an essay I wrote about my reflections on the 2007 director’s cut of Fanboy Bebop.

The Nescaflowné Revision History is the sad, sad tale of how many tries it took before Nesca was finally declared finished (SPOILER: 10).

Also, information regarding the content of the ReDeath, FBBB and Nesca DVDs has been posted.

I’m trying to think of other things we could add to this site. I enjoyed writing the FBBB piece and may do similar writings for the other dubs (”Even Jubei?” Uh… maybe if I’m really, really, really bored…). I’ve considered posting the screenplays for our dubs, though technically only two of them were scripted in full which would make the other two more like transcripts. Unused pages from ReDeath and Nescaflowné might be of interest, though the sheer lameness of the deleted material might just keep them hidden away. We’ll see.

Maybe we could do a weekly mailbag kinda thing, though I guess someone would have be interested enough to write us first. Maybe we could interview ourselves about how awesome we are and then enable comments on our posts so you can tell us how much we suck. I’d like to see more color on the minimalist canvas that is our site. If you have some brilliant idea of what we could do to make this page hold your interest for more than 5 minutes, drop us a line, we’d love proof that someone, somewhere is actually reading this.

Closing out this post are some site updates connected to our big (not fake) April Fool’s announcement:

Cowboy Bebop: The Song Remains The Same has been added to the Works page.

The Sokodei FAQ has been updated.