wild horses cowboy bebop

D+L Podcast: Just What Was “Wild Horses” About, Anyway?

The Cowboy Bebop podcast looks at the bond between bounty hunters and their spaceships.

Session 19: Wild Horses

For one month, The Dot and Line is publishing essays, interviews, and discussions about each episode of Cowboy Bebop, which turns 20 this April.

Episode 19 of Cowboy Bebop, “Wild Horses,” is a definitely a reference to the Rolling Stones classic, but it’s also a riff on several ideas core to Cowboy Bebop: of having the freedom to self-actualize, of a solar system–wide reliance on reliable transportation, and of being tied to something you love whether you can tame it or not. It’s all very manly, and like most of Bebop’s best entries, it’s got a great jazz soundtrack.

Here at the The Dot and Line, we wanted to do something a little bit different given the Space Cowboy Serenade we’ve put together this month. Normally. we’d publish a long, meticulously edited article breaking down all the details you might have missed in “Wild Horses” when you first watched it, or tackle some strange new way to think about the session. Instead, we decided to try something totally new for us: enlist our friends Kevin and Steve to record a podcast about the episode, which you can listen to right here:

That’s right! Smash that play button, Space Cowboys! This conversation breaks down the masculine relationships in “Wild Horses” and what they mean in the larger context of the show’s arc. We also go into the characters’ relationships with their spaceships—the machines they build their livelihoods upon. We also talk about the origin of some of Spike’s best catchphrases. Whether we do a good job of it or not is something you can find out by listening.

So we’ll say it again: SMASH THAT PLAY BUTTON. Thanks for listening, cowpokes.

Credits

Hosts: Stephen Maher and Kevin Conway

Producers: John Maher and Eric Vilas-Boas

Editor: Eric Vilas-Boas

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