Character · Cowboy Bebop
Spike Spiegel
Jeet Kune Do, one artificial eye, and a haircut that has survived thirty years of imitation.
In Otakana the clue reads: Lanky bounty hunter with a green afro
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Cowboy Bebop
- Letters
- 5 · Easy
Spike Spiegel fights like Bruce Lee because the animators studied Bruce Lee, and he quotes the philosophy out loud: be like water. He is lanky, bored and fatalistic, and he moves through a fight with his hands low, as though the result has already been filed somewhere. Between jobs he lies on a yellow couch watching a game show he does not enjoy.
One of his eyes is artificial, and he says it sees only the past while the other one sees the present. Before the Bebop he was an enforcer for the Red Dragon syndicate, and he left in a way that people are not supposed to survive. The series parcels that history out slowly while pretending to be a show about catching criminals for rent money.
Koichi Yamadera voices him in Japanese and Steve Blum in English, and both performances are famous enough that American viewers still argue for the dub. Sunrise assembled the series in 1998 with Shinichiro Watanabe directing, Toshihiro Kawamoto designing the cast and Yoko Kanno writing the music. Spike is the reason the poster works.
Spelling SPIKE
SPIKE is five letters and English throughout, so there is no katakana trap here, only a silent E doing familiar work. The tiles want the given name: Spiegel is longer and would need a different row. Watch the vowel order, I before the K and E at the end, and note that a five letter row punishes a wasted guess more than most.