A recent interview with Shinichiro Watanabe revealed that at least one cowboy bebop episodes based on his own real-life experiences. And yes, that’s exactly the episode you’d hope it wasn’t.
In a recent Forbes interview with Ollie Barder, Shinichiro Watanabe talked about his career and the creation of Cowboy Bebop, as well as Samurai Champloo and Space Dandy. While some information has been revealed by Watanabe in previous interviews and conference appearances, one story stands out about one producer. The story follows the creation of the episode “Toys in the Attic”, in which a strange creature begins stalking the Bebop spaceship, attacking each character one by one, until Spike locates his home. it is a refrigerator in the cargo hold of the ship. .
Refrigerator is real
In an interview with Forbes, Watanabe said, “As for the idea behind the Toys in the Attic episode, it came from [Masahiko] Minami’s refrigerator. This started when I was working on Layzner. Minami is also a production manager, more senior than me. One day, Minami asked me to help him move house, and when I got there, his fridge was outside, and he told me it never opened. This is because he left it unattended for so long and he doesn’t know what happened to the food that was left inside. It was wrapped very securely with a lot of duct tape, and we never opened it. So naturally, I always wondered what was going on inside of it.”
In the actual episode, Spike begins to doubt what the creature might be. He keeps a certain type of alien lobster in the refrigerator in a little used part of the ship, hiding it for later. However, the delicacy had been forgotten for a year, so when Spike went to the fridge and opened the door, he found it had turned into a horrible alien nest, as the creature wasn’t quite dead yet. . Spike does exactly what Watanabe says they do in real life: he takes the fridge and throws it out (into space). The episode ends with the last of the four lessons: “Don’t put things in the fridge.” Interestingly, this is not the only appearance of a refrigerator in a Watanabe work; it also appears briefly in episode 8 of Space Dandy, at the beginning of the episode.
The episode is a mix of classic sci-fi horror movies like Aliens or The Thing, but the monster’s origins make it much more silly. For Watanabe, however, the refrigerator is an entirely real horror from his younger days and has managed to lurk in his memory for years to come. How weird the episode can be, but details like these are part of the making cowboy bebop so unique.
Source: Forbes