This episodes preview plays it pretty straight. Spike, Jet and Faye yell over the top of “Live in Baghdad.”
Session #7: Heavy Metal Queen
Original Airdate: December 5, 1998
Written by: Michiko Yokote
Title Card Song: “Live in Baghdad” – This track features lyrics by Gabriela Robin. I thought the lyrics were just the usual mishmash of Japanese and English, but most sources seem to agree on some very specific English nonsense lyrics.
We open to a heavy metal montage of space truckers at work then we meet this episode’s central character, VT. Otto, the guy trying to guess VT’s name, is modeled after the main character of Torakku Yarō, a series of 10 action-comedy movies produced by Toei in the ’70s.
The movies follow two truckers and their heavily decorated trucks as they travel around Japan. The movies are pretty formulaic. The main character falls for a girl, ends up helping her relationship with another man, and then rushes to reunite the couple on a deadline. This session of Bebop makes lots of references to trucker fiction in all its forms, but it more than winks in the direction of Torakku Yarō.
VT’s name is probably inspired by the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova. Her real name is Victoria Terpsichore.
The three truckers VT talks to get their names from the 1978 movie Convoy.
There’s an interesting little string of connections between VT and Decker, this episode’s bounty head. Decker has Saraswati painted on his ship. Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of art, music, knowledge, wisdom and learning. Terpsichore is the name of the muse of dance and chorus. The Linus Mines probably get their name from Greek mythology where there are several characters by this name, but notably, one of them is a great musician and son of Apollo.
There’s a lot of spaceship porn in this episode. I like the designs of the space big rigs. I also like the modular design of the Swordfish. The show was originally supposed to spawn a toy line, but that went by the wayside. It’s a shame, too, because I’d love to have models of a lot of the ships we’ve seen so far. There are, of course, some models out there, but a Bebop designed like the traditional Millennium Falcon toys would please my inner child and my outer adult.
I’m going to cut this one short. I get a kick out of this episode, but there’s not a lot to dig into, at least not that I’ve found.
SEE YOU SPACE COWBOY.
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