Imaginary Worlds - Adulting with Cowboy Bebop

Episode Date: October 29, 2020

The anime series Cowboy Bebop is currently being turned into a live-action series for Netflix, but Cowboy Bebop doesn’t need to be Americanized. The original series was already an homage to Western films and movies. Authors Roland Kelts and Matt Alt talk about how Cowboy Bebop fits into a very Japanese tradition of adopting and even improving upon aspects of foreign cultures. Evan Minto of Anime News Network explains why the show was groundbreaking. And Eric Vilas-Boas and John Maher of Dot + Line discuss how Cowboy Bebop had a huge impact on them as kids, even though it took them decades to understand the characters.   See You, Space Cowboy…. Matt Alt’s book “Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World.” Roland Kelt’s book, “Japanamerica: How Japanese Culture Has Invaded the U.S.” Today's episode is brought to you by Acorn TV and BetterHelp. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? We have partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle our advertising/sponsorship requests. They’re great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email [e-mail] or click the link below to get started. Imaginary Worlds AdvertiseCast Listing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I've been a fan of Japanese animation or anime for a long time. When I was in college I used to watch and re-watch Akira, the classic sci-fi anime, on Laserdisc.

That's how old I am. At the time, I really identified with the teen angst of the characters. But anime has always been a very youthful medium, or at least the anime shows and movies that get exported to the West. And as I've reached middle age, I find that I don't connect with a lot of anime, unless it's looking at youth from a more mature perspective. So I've been searching for a new anime series to fall in love with.

And that's when I discovered Cowboy Bebop. I think it's time to blow this thing, get everybody in the stuff together. Okay, three, two, one, let's jam. I know it is weird to say that I discovered Cowboy Bebop because the show has been a cultural phenomenon for over 20 years. I mean, I knew it was a classic. I have no idea why I didn't get around to watching it until now. And it's short. It's only 26 episodes plus a movie. And the show blew me away on so many levels. It's set in the far future when the earth is barely habitable. Humanity has colonized the solar system and everything is grungy and hyper-capitalistic. And by the way, the jazz and bluegrass music I'll be playing is the soundtrack to the show,

which was written by a legendary anime composer named Yoko Kanno. Matt Ault is the author of How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World, and he's lived in Japan for years. author of How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World, and he's lived in Japan for years. I think actually the soundtracks have been one of the big hurdles for a lot of anime to take off among more mainstream audiences in the West because they tend to be based more in Japanese idol sounds and Japanese like J-pop sounds that aren't really what Western people are used to hearing. Whereas Cowboy Bebop has a very both new and kind of comforting and known soundtrack at the same time.

Evan Minto writes for the Anime News Network and other anime sites. He says Cowboy Bebop also came out at the peak of analog animation in Japan. I mean, anime is still hand-drawn, but now it's all put together on computers. And Cowboy Bebop was made in the 90s by a legendary studio called Sunrise. Like, it's kind of them at the peak of their abilities. The animation has aged really, really well. It's 2020 and that show still looks better, honestly, than a lot of stuff that's coming out today. Two other things struck me about the show. First, it felt very adult. The characters have grown up problems like earning enough money to buy food or dealing with relationships in a way that I relate

to now. Secondly, I really connected with the American-ness of the show, which is a strange thing to say about anime. The main characters are a group of misfit bounty hunters with Western names like Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, and Faye Valentine. The nickname for a bounty hunter in this world is a cowboy. And the show uses a lot of Wild West iconography, but it's also a mashup of film noir, in terms of how much the characters are haunted by their past, the grimy cities they visit on different planets are right out of detective films, and the

dialogue is hard-boiled, which sounds even more authentic in the English language dub. Look at my eyes, Faye. One of them is a fake, because I lost it in an accident. Since then, I've been seeing the past in one eye and the present in the other. So I thought I could only see patches of reality, never the whole picture. Don't tell me things like that.

You've never told me anything about yourself. So don't tell me now. The other reason I wanted to watch Cowboy Bebop is because there is a live action version coming out on Netflix next year. Now, the history of Hollywood adapting anime has been disastrous, but the live action version is going to star John Cho, which is a positive sign that they're not going to whitewash it. And that made me wonder, if we look at the history of Cowboy Bebop and how it was made, could the show serve as a guide to how cross-cultural exchanges can work? Cowboy Bebop first debuted in 1998 on a channel called TV Tokyo. Back then, a lot of anime was funded because it was supposed to spawn a toy line.

That's how the showrunner Shinichiro Watanabe got the money. But it wasn't for the characters. It was for the spaceships. Ebi Minto says the show's funders were quickly disappointed. It had a very rocky experience on TV. It was originally aired with just like a couple episodes or just I think about half of the episodes aired on TV Tokyo at a prime time time slot at 6pm. And that was not not cool with TV Tokyo because it turns out like the show was was pretty r has, you know, episode one has, has drug use in it.

So they only aired the episodes that would sort of be appropriate for that time slot. And then it had to get moved. It was like, you know, effectively canceled because the whole show didn't air and got re aired on the cable channel. Wow.

Wow. At a late night time slot. And then it could air everything because it was sort of like, Oh, now it's, you know, 18 plus we can put all the sort of sexual content or drugs or whatever oh and violence i mean there's a lot of a lot of violence yeah there's a lot of gunplay in that so that i mean that that's interesting because i think it sort of disrupted the the kind of marketing and the you know typical arc of popularity it could have had but that set a

precedent that adult orientedoriented anime could air late at night and find an audience. In the U.S., Cowboy Bebop aired after midnight on Cartoon Network in 2001. And the show had a much bigger impact in the U.S. than it did in Japan. It's kind of like the opposite of the old joke, I'm big in Japan, which an American musician would say if they felt underappreciated at home. American anime fans often refer to Cowboy Bebop as the, quote, gateway drug that led them deeper into anime. And you can find so many references to Cowboy Bebop in American movies, TV shows, even video games. You couldn't even like list all of them because it's so infused into like

nerd culture here. It's like tracking down Star Trek references or something all of them because it's so infused into nerd culture here. It's like tracking down Star Trek references or something, right? It's just embedded into being a nerd in the U.S. Roland Keltz is a Japanese-American living in Japan. He also wrote a book called Japan America, how Japanese pop culture has invaded the U.S. He thinks the American appeal of Cowboy Bebop goes back to the showrunner, Watanabe,

who has almost like a Generation X sense of ironic humor. Watanabe's humor, I mean, I think it works for viewers outside of Japan where he's taking things that you expect to see and kind of turning them on their heads. he's taking things that you expect to see and kind of turning them on their heads. Whereas I don't know that the comedy always plays that well inside Japan. That's so interesting that his sense of humor, you know, he's a guy who's very influenced by American culture, although he's not a total America file. I mean, he said that he does not love the idea of American cultural hegemony, but he's still very influenced by American culture.

But it's so funny that his sense of humor would actually play better here than there. I think so. Yeah. I mean, I can't scientifically prove that. But Watanabe is sort of kind of blessed with this very global sensibility and imagination. He certainly loves the music or the music that he does love from the U.S., jazz and hip-hop. Even the fact that Watanabe is into film noir is unusual. Film noir had a huge influence on American sci-fi, like with Blade Runner. But Roland says, When I sometimes have brought up the term film noir in Japan, except for my friends who are in themselves scholars or media scholars, a lot of people aren't quite sure what I'm talking about.

Interestingly, Watanabe's embrace of old Hollywood genres actually ties into a very Japanese tradition of adopting and even improving upon aspects of foreign cultures. Like in Japan, you can get some of the best burgers, blue jeans, whiskey bourbon, or jazz. Japan has this sort of tradition of monozukuri, of making things really, really well, high regard for craftsmanship and form, kind of an exquisite aesthetic perfectionism in terms of craft, to lend Japanese a sort of approach to other cultures in which they'll take an element that really appeals to them

and then kind of try to make it better. It is a fine line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation, which is a serious issue. I mean, just look at the history of Hollywood whitewashing anime or martial arts films. And even Cowboy Bebop may have crossed that line. In one episode, we meet a group of characters that were inspired by blaxploitation films of the 1970s. Watanabe has said that episode was an homage to movies that he loves, like Shaft, but there's been a debate among the fans about how well he handled that genre. I actually have done a couple of talks

about cultural appropriation over here in Japan, because a lot of Japanese have trouble understanding exactly what the problem is. Most people who live in Japan consider themselves Japanese you're not really fighting over a national identity and therefore if you if you go up on stage with cowboy boots and 10 gallon hats and sing badly accented version of bluegrass in downtown Ginza in Tokyo, it's not offensive to the audience at all. It's charming, it can be funny, and if you play a mean mandolin, you get a lot of appreciative responses. And Matt Ault thinks the positive aspects of cowboy bebop and the way it embraces Western music and movies fits into a very long tradition of cultural exchanges. Well, there's this like ping-ponging of influences

going back and forth between Japan and the West forever. I mean, like when the West first encountered Japanese woodblock prints, like it sparked basically the whole impressionism movement. You have people like Van Gogh and Degas and all of these people incorporating Japanese designs into their stuff. And then Japanese see that and it transforms their art and, you know, and so on and so on. I mean, I think those kind of cross-cultural interpretations where you're, you know, taking things from abroad and reinterpreting them through your own eyes, and not in a culturally appropriative way, but in a way because you're a huge fan yourself,

are where you get things that are truly transformative. Like the original Matrix movies. I mean, the Wachowski siblings were obviously huge fans of, you know, Asian martial arts and anime and kind of digested all of that stuff into this weird new form that they made into a hit movie.

Or take the 1954 film Seven Samurai. The director, Akira Kurosawa, was inspired by Hollywood westerns. But Seven Samurai was so popular in the U.S., it inspired the American remake, The Magnificent Seven. Cowboy Bebop actually referenced that feedback loop in an episode where the crew discovered a ridiculous bounty hunter named Andy who put on the full cowboy shtick.

That one was mighty close. Yeah! Get up the guy! In the end, Andy switches personas into a samurai with equally bad taste. Andy! Call me Musashi! Ha ha! Go, Jiromaru!

Jiromaru! Call me Musashi! Go, Jiromaru! For most of the 20th century, when anime was exported to the West, it was supposed to be, quote, culturally odorless. That is actually a term a Japanese scholar came up with. And Roland thinks... It's arguable that Japanese artists back then were a lot more insecure about Japan. To set something in outer space or an apocalyptic or futuristic environment would be almost obvious compared to setting something in Shibuya.

When Cowboy Bebop came to America in the early 2000s, it was the height of anime's global appeal. Around the same time, Miyazaki won the Oscar for Spirited Away, and Avatar The Last Airbender debuted on Nickelodeon, which was the first American-made show to very consciously emulate the style of anime. But in the last 15 years, anime in Japan has changed.

A lot more stories are set in Japan with very specific cultural signifiers. And a lot of anime is influenced by otaku culture, where young men in Japan live vicariously through fantasy instead of taking part in society. It's a much more inward-focused generation. They're not learning English, on the one hand. They're not all that curious about what's happening in the U.S. or even outside Japan, period. I find it really interesting that a trans-cultural show like Cowboy Bebop led the way for anime to become really popular in the U.S.

Because when I talk with American anime fans, now I feel like they're competing to show me how much they get the subtle cultural Japanese references or anime in-jokes that I completely missed. And there's a tourism industry for people who want to visit the locations in Japan where their favorite anime took place. And while American anime fans are more willing than ever to cross this cultural divide, interestingly, the debate about whether you should watch anime with subtitles or dubbed has become more nuanced. For a long time, fans in the West were adamant that you should only watch anime in Japanese with subtitles. But Roland says.

My mind's been shifted by anime artists, actually directors and animators I've spoken to here in Tokyo, who have said on more than one occasion that they really hate it when foreign audiences watch the subtitled version, because when they see a viewer's eyes dropping to the bottom of the screen to read, they're missing all the visual work where they want you to be focused. Matt Ault agrees, and he used to write English subtitles in Japan. But working with the other subtitlers,

some of whom were native speakers of Japanese instead of English, just seeing how much you had to lose to shoehorn it into the eight or 10 characters that you had per second or per two seconds on screen was really was really eye-opening and I think a well now I've definitely gravitated toward the well-done dub for the experience for the entertainment experience once again that change began with cowboy bebop back when American dubs were generally pretty bad the English language dub of cowboy bebop is considered one

of the best ever. Evan says, look at the character of Jet, who's one of the bounty hunters in the crew. Jet also looks racially ambiguous, like a lot of anime characters. I think part of it is it is some like really good casting. I think Bo Billingsley in particular is like a great choice for Jet. And I think it's relevant in the in climate, I'd say, to talk about the fact that like Jet has light skin, but he was cast with a black actor. And a lot of people are like, yeah, that's right. Jet's black. You wanted to know what happened to my arm. Huh? This is what I paid.

Yeah. For being too gung ho and running ahead of the game. You get the point? Paid, yeah, for being too gung-ho and running ahead of the game. You get the point? And for the live-action version of Cowboy Bebop, Netflix cast a black actor in that role. Now, we don't know much about the live-action remake,

except they're still filming in New Zealand, where COVID rates are low. But Matt is not interested. Well, I think that whole, like, we're going to make an American version of it mindset is just so outdated now. It's like I think that especially young audiences are in tune enough with diversity and multiculturalism to be able to appreciate films on their own merits. And I mean look like Parasite won the Academy Award. That's an extremely Korean film. Like it's really it's set like in the midst of Korean society and like you can only really watch it with

subtitles and yet it won. Roland agrees. I don't know that live action can replicate the reasons why you enjoy anime. They're almost a dream world where your mind is maybe faster to turn imagery into metaphor or fantasy. So, you know, if you look at Cowboy Bebop and you think it's great anime, and if you strip that away and you make it live action or even 3D CGI, it's not just retelling the story. It's doing it without part of what made it magic. But Cowboy Bebop is not just about style.

I mean, at the beginning, the show's a lot of fun. It's very action-packed. But the final episodes pack a wallop. In fact, some fans are still trying to emotionally process what happened to the characters in the end. We will get to that after the break. Introducing Tim's new Infuser Energy Beverages, We will get to that after the break. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda.

It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. As I mentioned earlier, one of the things that struck me about Cowboy Bebop is that the show felt very adult, but I couldn't quite figure out why. Cowboy Bebop first aired in America on a programming block called Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. So earlier in the day, kids were watching Powerpuff Girls or Dexter's Lab.

And if they were allowed to stay up after midnight or managed to secretly turn on the TV, they discovered Cowboy Bebop on Adult Swim. Ironically, I never really watched Adult Swim because I was an adult. I had a job I had to get up early for, or I was out late on the weekends. If I had seen Cowboy Bebop, I don't think I would have reacted to it any differently than I did now. But on the show's 20th anniversary in 2018, there were a lot of articles written by people who were kids when they discovered the show. And back then, they loved it for its style.

But then as they grew older, they began to understand the characters in ways that they never expected. Like Eric Villas-Boas, who ran a website about animation called Dot and Line. Vilas Boas, who ran a website about animation called Dot & Line. You know, I've returned to it and still found things that applied to me more or less every two or three years of my life since then. There's always been something new. There's always been some new struggle or some new connection, whether it's being a freelancer, you know, dealing with people who are slow on payments, you know, like dealing with clients, dealing with people who are slow on payments, you know, like dealing with clients, whether it is the emotions of having a young love type situation and like feeling what Spike felt in terms of that

heartbreak, you know, and not being able to get over it. Spike Spiegel is the main character. And the biggest surprise for Eric is that he understood Spike very differently as he got older. As a kid, Eric thought Spike was just the coolest guy ever. Spike used to be part of a crime syndicate until he was betrayed by his closest friend and lost the love of his life, a woman named Julia, who we see in flashbacks. We'll leave here. We'll get out of this. And go where? And do what? Live.

Be free. It'll be like watching a dream. To give you a visual image, Spike has a giant mop of brown hair. He often has a cigarette dangling from his mouth. And he wears a skinny, blue, rumpled, double-breasted suit with his collar popped out and his tie loose. Eric wrote an article about how Spike perfectly embodies an Italian word called sprezzatura, which is very fun to say.

Sprezzatura. Yeah, like it must be said, you know, in as Italian an accent as possible, I think. You know, sprezzatura is sort of this like, you know, the as Italian an accent as possible, I think, you know, sprezzatura is sort of this, like, you know, the idea that you can, you can put yourself together in any number of ways, you know, you can be what some people might, you know, consider perfect within the constructs that we sort of like, you know, that we live and work in, but something might be off, right? Like, you know, a pocket square might be like slightly akimbo. And to my mind, Spike is like Sprezzatura to a T, right? Like he, he projects this image of an almost like calculated ease, right? There's like a laziness about it that is also informed by, by competency. He is not just this badass who beats up, you know, like hordes of bounties and bad guys.

He is also doing it by keeping his eyes closed half the time or by keeping his hands in his pockets. You know, he can sort of continue moving on with the world. Like he can continue going about his day and not forming very deep attachments with people. That makes his life a lot easier. But it's also revealed at the end of the show to be, you know, totally bullshit. Like, totally, like, you know, this, like, armor that he's put up for himself. Whether Spike knows it or not, he has formed attachments. And that's trauma, right?

Like, that's what trauma does. And that's Eric's friend John Marr, who co-founded the site Dot Online. The thing with trauma is you can't run from it. It is always going to come back to you. Schopenhauer or some such coined it as the hedgehog's dilemma, which is, you know, you're a hedgehog and you're covered in spikes. You want to get closer to other hedgehogs, but you don't want to get so close that their spikes will pierce you.

Spikes, right? Spike. Yeah, I was just thinking that. I was like, right, of course, how appropriate. Because you think of spike as just sort of a generically cool name, but it actually has double meanings. It kind of does. And at the same time as this hedgehog that does not want to be pierced by spikes or spines, whatever, you still need the warmth of other hedgehogs to survive the winter. You know, the winter perhaps being your trauma. All the members of the Bebop crew are grappling with their past. Spike's co-pilot, Jet Black, is an ex-cop whose ex-partner was secretly working for the mob.

This is the real world. There's no place for pretty ideals. And that's why you betrayed me. That's why you lied and took me out here. And then there's Faye Valentine, who seems to be a carefree femme fatale, but we learn that she was cryogenically frozen a generation earlier, and she's haunted by the fact that she can't remember her past. I am alone. I don't need any comrades. They're not worth it. I end up worrying about things I don't need any comrades they're not worth it

I end up worrying about things I shouldn't Faye does not want to care about her comrades in fact there's a whole episode where she's confronted with the fact that they are her comrades and she denies it but they are but she doesn't want to get close to them

because her memory is lost and she feels that herself is lost and she doesn't want to get close to them because her memory is lost and she feels that herself is lost and she doesn't want to have another self to lose again. Jet doesn't want to get close to people because he wants to think of himself as the retired tough cop and lost loves and all that. But he has to. He has to get close to people. Spike is the same thing. This all leads to, for him, a boomerang that he can't escape from, that he might have been able to escape from had he simply processed his needs. Major spoiler alert. To talk about Spike's journey, I need to talk about the ending, because that's where the arc of the entire show comes into focus.

In the final episodes, Spike feels like he has to confront the crime boss who betrayed him, even though it is clearly a trap and a suicide mission. Jet is quietly heartbroken, and Faye tries to get Spike to stay. My memory finally came back. But nothing good came of it. There was no place for me to return to. This was the only place I could go. And now you're leaving just like that. Why do you have to go? Where are you going? What are you going to do?

Just throw your life away like it was nothing? As a viewer, I knew that Spike would kill his arch nemesis, but I assumed he'd walk away, very injured but alive. No, Spike drops dead, collapsing on a giant staircase in front of the entire crime syndicate, with all their guns aimed at him. Before he dies, he makes a little gun gesture with his hand and says, Bang! Now, at the end of every episode, they would flash to the words, See you, space cowboy, before the final credits. But after Spike's death, it flashes to the words,

you're going to carry that weight, which is a reference to a Beatles song. John Marr didn't watch the show until he was a teenager. A friend of his lent him the DVDs. And when he got to Spike's death, it struck him to the core because John's mother died when he was five years old. By that point, his father had remarried and his stepmother had adopted him. John thought he had moved on, but... When I finally finished Bebop, I just sobbed. Like I couldn't stop crying.

And of course, my biological mother was nothing like Spike Spiegel, nothing like him. But at that moment, all I could think about was what if something had gone differently? What if something had been fixed? What if something had been avoided? It brought up this wellspring of emotion about my mother's death and what I didn't realize then that I realize now, what I was mourning for, who I was mourning for was me. And I didn't know it because I didn't realize that I was playing out the same drama as Spike. I hadn't processed what had happened to me. I hadn't gone to therapy. I hadn't accepted that

the people around me were going to die. And I hadn't accepted the ways that I needed to move forward to get through that. And I think there was a part of me internally, subconsciously that knew that if I kept moving in the same direction that Spike had, not allowing myself to move on, not allowing myself to accept the inevitable and find a way through it, that I would end up the same way, you know, drinking myself to death or something. It can be a frustrating waste because you see how inevitable it is because Spike chooses not to deal with his shit, right? It's like, you could have done this, man. You're smarter than this. You're whatever. But like, it doesn't happen. And it feels inevitable. And that inevitability is frustrating because the inevitability of this person dying so young, so tragically, shouldn't have been inevitable. Again, Eric Villas-Boas.

People tend to focus on Spike's death. Rightly so. Like, it's this huge emotional gut punch. But, like, it's really unfair. I almost see it as unfair that the death of this family is not just as much a part of the discourse and the discussion around the show. The idea of found family is a common trope in sci-fi shows, like The Expanse or Firefly, where a crew of misfits only belong to each other, and they can roam the galaxy together having adventures. And it's not just Spike, Jet, and Faye on the ship. Along the way, they picked up a girl, a genius hacker named Ed, and a corgi named Ein. So they really did feel like a family for a while.

to Ayn. So they really did feel like a family for a while. But their familial bond began to erode before Spike died, a few episodes earlier when Ed struck out on her own and the dog chose to go with her. You really wanted Spike to live. You wanted everyone to live and to also still be a family at the end of Cowboy Bebop because that like, you know, that would have proven that the experiences that they had had formed them into a family. Like, that's what we want. The ending of Cowboy Bebop is not a happy ending. The showrunner Watanabe has said he did not want Cowboy Bebop to go on indefinitely, which you can do with animation. From a perfectly ruthless perspective, like, you always got to leave your audience wanting more. We would not be talking about the show, you know, 20 plus years later, if it had gone on for another five seasons, which I guess it could have, but they would have just gotten stale. And then we would

just be talking about it like as, as that influential thing that, you know, that sucked after a while, or that went on for too long, like it would always be couched in some qualifier. Whereas now, like we look at, we look back on it and like, oh yeah, it's still a masterpiece after 20 plus years. Holy crap. That's another aspect of the show that's harder to understand as a kid. As an adult, you know that you can mourn the loss of something that ended too soon. And you can also appreciate the beauty of something that was wonderful, too soon. And you can also appreciate the beauty of something that was wonderful, but didn't last. That's why a lot of fans that I talked with are not interested in the live action remake. After you've loved and lost something or someone, you can take pleasure in the fact that they do continue to live on indefinitely in your memories. That's where a lot of fans of the show want Cowboy Bebop to remain.

That said, of course I'll be watching the live action show. I mean, what else is going to be on TV next year? That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Roland Keltz, Matt Ault, Eben Minto, Eric Villas-Boas, and John Marr. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. I put a link to Matt's new book, How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World, in the show notes, along with Roland Kelt's book, Japan America. By the way, if you'd like to hear more episodes about anime, you can look through the show's archive to find episodes on Ghost in the Shell,

Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Avatar the Last Airbender. In my next episode, I'm going to continue looking at cross-cultural translations, including Chinese and Korean sci-fi literature. You can like Imaginary Worlds on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and Imagine Worlds Pod. If you really like the show, please do a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover Imaginary. The best way to support imaginary worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you can get free imaginary world stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full length interviews of every guest in every episode. And there's so much more we talked about from Voltron to Mobile Suit Gundam. You can learn more on imaginaryworldspodcast.org.

See you space cowboy. Bang.