Cowboy Bebop: The Movie turns 25, and our shelf holds neither half

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie has a new key visual, and a 4K remaster of the film is heading into cinemas. The occasion is 25 years since the film first played in cinemas.

Our index treats a film like that one as a branch off a television series rather than a retelling of it. The relation is recorded directly: our entry for the 1998 Cowboy Bebop television series, 26 episodes, links to Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, which we record as a 2001 film. When a series and its one side-story film sit next to each other on our shelf, what can a reader watch free?

The census

We pulled every television series in our index that links to exactly one side-story film. That comes to 144 series, pointing at 138 distinct films: six of the films are each linked from two different series. We then read what all 282 of those live pages state, sweeping the set twice.

Of the 144 series, 7 state a free episode count, adding up to 145 episodes between them. Of the 138 films, the number that state a free episode count is zero. None of them. So no pair on this shelf has a free film, and no pair has both halves free.

Here are the seven series that do state a count, with the figure each page gives:

• Trigun states 1
• Yu-Gi-Oh! states 9
• Ghost Sweeper Mikami states 45
• Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's states 65
• Beyblade: Metal Masters states 23
• Blue Exorcist states 1
• BLUE LOCK states 1

That is one shelf inside a much larger index, not the whole catalogue.

Cowboy Bebop on our shelf

Nothing. The television series page states no free episode count, and neither does the page for Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. The same goes for two further entries we hold under this name: a 1998 special we record as Cowboy Bebop: Yoseatsume Blues, and a 2012 special we record as Ein's Summer Vacation. Our database holds zero free episode rows for all four, retired rows included, so there is no earlier state in which something was here and later came down.

What a reader can start tonight

For a complete run, here is one on our shelf: Mobile Suit Gundam Wing. We record it as a 1995 television series of 49 episodes at 24 minutes each, and the live page states 49 free episodes, the whole run.

Every row sits on the channel GUNDAM CHANNEL INTL, which does not carry a YouTube verified badge. The rows carry no country restriction, so the run is not region gated. Three episodes were opened today, spread across the beginning, middle and end of the run, and each reports an authored English subtitle track alongside an automatic Japanese caption track: Japanese audio with English subtitles written by a person, not an English dub. The live page notes Japanese audio. Those three run 1,468, 1,467 and 1,437 seconds against the recorded 24-minute length, so they are full episodes. Every upload title carries an episode number, and each one matches the number we store, no video is filed against two episode numbers, and no video is shared with another series.

Source: Anime Corner