I really did call it “The Wings of Hah-Nuh-Miss”.

I went to Nikaku Animart in San Jose’s Japantown, intent on buying the soundtrack for The Wings of Honneamise (if you weren’t sure, it’s pronounced O-Ne-Ah-Meez), which was and still is my favorite movie. I couldn’t read the Japanese on the CD spines, so I nicely asked the clerk if they had the soundtrack to ”The Wings of Hah-Nuh-Miss”. Somehow the clerk A.) knew what I was talking about and B.) was nice enough not to comment on my horrible mangling of the title (then again, it’s wise not to embarrass your customer when they’re going to spend $35 on a CD). I figured every US anime fan in the infancy of their otakudom had a story like this, which is why I wrote it into the plot of Fanboy Bebop.

More than ReDeath, Nescaflowné or even Jubei Powers, Fanboy Bebop is a product of its time. Or more accurately, a product for its time. Keanu and Ash talk about fansubs being on crappy tapes. They talk about tapes. They talk about titles that were all the rage, or at least still relevant to fandom circa-late 2000 (when I wrote the script) like Escaflowne, Fushigi Yugi and Perfect Blue. They allude to how awful a company ADV was. They complain about dubs.

I cringed much during last year’s FanimeCon screening of FBBB as Keanu and Ash bicker about things that most fans at cons today don’t bicker about. No one gets their anime on tape anymore and a big problem the industry has been facing is that fansubs look too good. Titles produced pre-2000 are now referred to as “classic”. ADV got their game together and puts out consistently good product. Dub vs. sub arguments died out at about the same rate VHS did. 

And yet… and yet, they still came to see it and they still laughed at it. It was when the audience roared at Flynn’s complaint that a convention can’t just delay something for no reason (this particular screening had itself been delayed two hours) that I understood that truly some things will never change. Fanboy Bebop is a time capsule, it is a moment in time, but let’s face it, some registration lines will always be ungodly long. Noobs will always be sneered at by those who should know better. People may not fight over the merits of Dragon Ball Z and Fushigi Yugi much these days but if you’re into these silly cartoons, you’ve probably been involved in that kind of argument at some point.

I believe that’s why FBBB has had as long a shelf life as it has; the lyrics may have changed but the song remains the same.

When I started work on the Fanboy Bebop DVD, I knew I’d be doing some clean-up. Maybe fixing some lip-sync, maybe ironing out some video glitches that slipped past my inexperience at the time…

I ended up re-syncing almost every line of dialogue, of course. Then I found myself tweaking some of the joke timings. I replaced all the VHS-sourced footage that I could (the restored Macross: DYRL “director’s cut” scene is the most notable improvement). I added ambient sound to many scenes to create a better sense of location. And when I got to Keanu and Ripley’s ”sex scene”, I decided that the reappearance of the beenus was clearly the apex of the sequence and removed the remaining twenty seconds of the bit. I liked the sharper punch of the shortened gag and was now determined to trim whatever fat I could from the rest of the video.

The resulting director’s cut of FBBB is not the “this is what I always intended” version. It’s the same video you remember, just leaner and meaner (about 3:20 leaner to be precise). Much like Jet Black with his bonsai, I decided that a little pruning here and there would be an improvement, both aesthetically and for the long term health of the thing. Several scenes, mostly the extended musical bits, have been reduced and one scene from the original cut was removed outright: the last appearance of Chip Zahoy, because a second “action” climax to the story felt superfluous. I prefer the new cut myself, but the original cut is also on the DVD if you like FBBB better with all its branches intact.

Some of its jokes may be hopelessly dated, if you smell what The Rock is cooking, but I remain fond of the characters in Fanboy Bebop. With how much the anime fan scene has changed in the last six years, I sometimes wonder what Keanu and Ash would be talking about today. The day when everyone can find out may or may not come, but for now they continue to speak to us from the recent past, reminding us that, in the end, we haven’t changed much at all.

That is sad. But it’s okay to laugh.

Andrew Hosking
April 2nd, 2008