Cowboy Bebop ("Kauboi Bibappu") (1998) is a Japanese anime television series and motion picture that follows a band of American-stylized bounty hunters thrown together by circumstance and necessity, but each with passionately disparate private agendas. Each episode tells the story of how the group tracks down wanted criminals in a futuristic setting while dealing with personal issues that arise by location, people they meet, or misgivings about the morality of the subject of their bounty. While every episode, or the movie, stands on its own, the back-stories of the characters and their growing intimacy together make the whole much greater than the sum of its parts.

Cowboy Bebop was popular in Japan and became one of the biggest adult anime hits ever in the United States, opening the genre to an audience that previously considered anything but live action to be juvenile. The unflinching adult themes of the show, along with the cool jazz tracks and political undertones, became a favorite of many Americans tuning into Cartoon Network's new late-night "Adult Swim". Pirated copies of the Japanese Cowboy Bebop movie, Knockin' on Heaven's Door, became available in 2002, dubbed with rough translations. By 2003, Sony Pictures released it to theatres, and eventually DVD, an official version of the movie using the voices of the original English-speaking actors. Two Cowboy Bebop manga comic books were created based on the TV show, and a Playstation 2 video game which as of now is unknown for a future release in the United States. (See also Licensing, authors, and publishers)

Cowboy Bebop is widely respected for its multiple layers and deep characters, combined with a very free-flowing feel to the story itself (heavily influenced by American culture, especially the jazz movements of the 1940s, hence "bebop") and a large number of well-choreographed action fighting sequences (from space battles to martial arts hand-to-hand combat).

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