TV Rewind: 10 Years Later, Shinichirō Watanabe’s Space Dandy Is the Kind of Creative Mess We Need More Of
Photo Courtesy of Adult Swim TV Features Adult Swim
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:
On paper, Space Dandy appeared to have everything needed for it to become the next big international hit.
It had a big name attached to it, none other than Cowboy Bebop creator Shinichirō Watanabe, making his return to science-fiction for the first time since his groundbreaking debut. The series would be produced by Studio Bones, a major and respected player in the anime business, with the hopes that this new series would be viewed as a return to form after a lackluster few years without a significant hit. A roster of writers, directors, and animators composed of seasoned professionals and up and comers all waiting to flex their skills on an original series where there would be little to no limitations. There were write ups in both The Atlantic and The New York Times, unheard of when it comes to anime, and it would make history as the first Japanese anime to premiere its episodes in North America before airing them in Japan.
Over the last decade, seeing an anime receive an exorbitant amount of hype before its first episode is almost common, but back in 2014, you would have to be on the level of Fullmetal Alchemist or Dragon Ball Z to generate that much excitement. So when Space Dandy premiered on January 4th, 2013 at 11:30 in the evening on Cartoon Network, there was some belief among the creators, executives, and those that have followed Watanabe’s career that what we were getting was the next big thing in anime—an anime that would provides us with iconic moments and characters we would reference for years to come. However, even with all of the hype and media attention the show received, after 24 episodes split between two seasons, Space Dandy ended up not becoming the next big international hit, but one that its creator would view as a mistake.
In a post on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Jason Demarco, Senior Vice President of Adult Swim and currently the Senior Vice President of Anime and Action Series/Longform for Warner Bros. Discovery wrote in response to a post marking the ninth anniversary of the series: “Still baffled this show wasn’t a hit. Watanabe always brings it up in conversation as a big mistake on his part. I try to tell him it’s a great show and his approach w/r/t to letting each episode director do their own thing was really cool, but he doesn’t believe me. Too bad!”
A decade after its premiere, was Space Dandy a rare miss from one of the most cherished and, at the time, consistent creators in anime? Or a true gem that fell under the weight of impossible expectations?
Space Dandy follows the sometimes bizarre, sometimes uncategorizable misadventures of Dandy, a pompadoured, easy going, surprisingly charming yet dimwitted bounty hunter. Along with his outdated cleaning robot, QT, and slacker Mewoth, a lazy cat-like creature, they travel the stars in search of rare alien species so that Dandy can earn enough income to visit his favorite place in the universe, BooBies, a Hooters-style intergalactic bar and restaurant. Throughout all of his adventures, Dandy and his misfit crew are tracked down by Dr. Gel and Bea, members of the Gogol Empire, who are in the midst of an intergalactic war that Dandy (unbeknownst to him) is at the center of.
After returning to anime in 2012 with the musical coming-of-age series Kids on the Slope, Watanabe was prepared to challenge himself creatively. Never one to repeat himself, he wanted to direct a full blown comedy; a genre his earlier projects had sprinkles of but were overall more serious in both tone and characterization. Watanabe felt that the industry was becoming too toned down for his liking, and needed an injection of excess and style. “Things could be bigger and more extravagant in anime,” he told Anime News Network. “I want to make anime that destroys the norms, something that would be strong even if it is unconventional.”
To truly make Space Dandy a series unlike any other that had aired before, Watanabe decided to give everyone free rein, to allow them to make whatever kind of Space Dandy episode they wanted to make. It was an audacious move by anime’s most bold visionaries, one that would allow Space Dandy to truly separate itself from practically any anime made before it, but is also one of the reasons why audiences at the time never seemed to truly embrace the series.
Space Dandy provides a spontaneity not really seen in anime. It’s not every year that you come across a series where, in its first episode, we see our hero and his supporting cast perish thanks to an explosion caused by our hero himself. Then throughout its run, we see our hero become a zombie (along with the rest of the universe); move so fast he ends up traveling billions of years into the future; travel to countless dimensions where he meets with various versions of himself; destroys the universe as a result of a dance contest; receives (and ultimately rejects) the opportunity to become a god because it would leave him without a body, which means he couldn’t visit BooBies any longer. It’s a series that truly reflects the status quo-breaking creator at its center.
While its imagination and ambition seems to have no bounds, what ultimately hurts Dandy is that, while you’ll be presented with some of the most impressively animated episodes made in the past decade on a per episode basis (and it does sneak in an overarching narrative), the overall product holds little weight, as no matter what happens, everything is reset the following episode, leaving what happened before as inconsequential. If you were able to hit shuffle on your streaming service of choice and play the series in a completely different order, even the final episode taking the place of the first wouldn’t make much of a difference. Because there are so many different directions the anime is going, it’s overall execution is inconsistent at best, and scattered at worst. With streaming, it may not matter, because you can always revisit the episodes you prefer, but back in 2014, where Dandy was seen week-to-week, it seems that a lot of the audience just dropped off before coming across that one episode that really connected with them.
Another factor that perhaps led to Dandy’s lack of success commercially was that it arrived in a much different time than either Bebop or Watanabe’s follow-up Samurai Champloo did. Adult Swim/Toonami was no longer the main destination Western anime fans could watch and follow Japanese animation. Crunchyroll had been around since 2006, going legit in 2009; Funimation began streaming anime that same year, not to mention the dozens of other sites where pressing play either let you watch the latest episode of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure or infected your mom’s desktop with malware. Fans were perhaps too preoccupied with series that have a more streamlined narrative like One Piece, Naturo: Shippuden, Hunter x Hunter, and Attack on Titan to truly give Dandy the time of day.
While re-watching the series for this essay and after seeing DeMarco’s tweet, I constantly thought: was Watanabe correct in thinking Space Dandy truly a mistake? While it did not live up to the lofty expectations placed on it, and would have benefitted from having more engrossing characters, storylines, and arcs, Watanabe’s attempt at comedy was a daring, explosively-creative, big swing. One that the anime industry (along with many others), could stand to do once in a while. It may not lead to commercial success most of the time, but it allows creators to do things the Dandy way, free of both worries and limitations.
Christopher L. Inoa is a freelance writer living in the Bronx, NYC. His work has appeared on Polygon, Observer, Hyperallergic, and more. He killed all his social media accounts last year, with the exception of Letterboxd so you can follow him there
For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.