YMMV / Space Adventure Cobra

• Awesome Music:
  • For starters, the opening and ending for the TV series was composed by the legendary Japanese jazz musician Yuji Ohno of Lupin III fame and the score for the show itself was composed by Kentaro Haneda of Super Dimension Fortress Macross fame.
  • Cobra The Animation has "Cobra the Space Pirate" sung by Sasja Antheunis, which is awesome in its own right.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The first three volumes of the manga detail Cobra's quest to find the Ultimate Weapon. The encounter with the Swordian race when the hero arrives on the planet where the relic is located comes out of nowhere, contributes nothing to the scenario and is never mentioned again. No other important sagas, like the assassination attempt on Salamander or the gathering of the Six Heroes, have such a diversion.
• Complete Monster:
  • Lord Salamander, as leader of the Space Pirate guild, is responsible for a great deal of the atrocities they regularly commit across the galaxy, while also hosting violent underground blood sports. His Establishing Character Moment has him skin Dominique alive for no reason, other than to spite Cobra. Desiring to rule over the galaxy, Salamander turns a peaceful religion into a fanatic death cult, while having 12,000 planets launch statues of their goddess into orbit, unaware that they are rigged weapons that will bombard the worlds until they submit to Salamander's rule. Murdering his followers to avoid sharing power, Salamander is barely stopped by Cobra and spitefully attempts to destroy Earth to deny Cobra satisfaction at his victory. His true identity makes things worse, as Salamander is a psychic projection for the crippled body of Adolf Hitler, hungering for conquest after 3000 years.
  • Space Adventure Cobra: The Movie: Crystal Bowie (also known as Necron in the Manga UK dub, and Crystal Boy in the Streamline dub) of the Space Pirate Guild, Cobra's Arch-Enemy, is a massive being made of crystal who desires the power of the world of Myrus. Brainwashing one of the three princesses of Myrus, Catherine, into loving him, Crystal Bowie has her murder her own sister Jane and later hunts down the third sister Dominique, killing her comrades before killing her as well. Using Catherine to unlock Myrus, Crystal Bowie reveals he plans to use its powers to blow up the entire Seventh Galaxy, killing all there as a warning to the rest of the galaxy to never defy the Pirate Guild.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Rock Knight and Parrot Grass, courtesy of Retsupurae.
• Escapist Character: Being a mashup of heroes like James Bond and Han Solo who is a tough-as-nails killer, galactical adventurer and ladies' man, Cobra fits the mold to a T.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Crystal Bowie is often mistakenly referred to as Crystal "Boy", due to a translation error^note one of the Japanese spellings of his name can be read as "Crystal Boy" instead of the intended "Crystal Bowie". His name is in fact Crystal Bowie, since Word of God states he named the character after the late David Bowie. It also doesn't help matters that he's referred to as "Crystal Boy" in the Streamline dub of the movie, and that was a result of an error on Streamline Pictures' part.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • French love Space Adventure Cobra and for good reasons — it was one of the only anime who was not victim of Gag Dub during the '80s. Other reasons include the fact that Cobra himself is physically based off of beloved french actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and that the series is similar to quite a few popular French sci-fi comics, including Valérian and the works of Mœbius.
  • Very popular in Sweden too. Since what tiny anime fandom Sweden had back in the 80s exclusively consumed anime on home video (none of it was shown on television until the introduction of commercial TV in the early 90s) Cobra stood out by mostly avoiding Bad Export for You. The manga was also briefly distributed in an anthology magazine alongside Crying Freeman and Pineapple Army.
• Harsher in Hindsight: A downright spooky example. In the "Hell Crusaders" saga, Cobra is shot in the chest with a time bomb bullet set to explode on a September 8. After two decades fighting cancer, Buichi Terasawa himself died on September 8 of 2023 due to heart failure.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the pilot episode, Cobra is voiced by Michael Bell. It's probably no coincidence that he would later be hired to voice several supporting characters, and even antagonists, in the popular Ratchet & Clank series, which not only has a similar space opera setting to Cobra, but also features a badass protagonist, assisted by an android, no less, going from planet to planet, kicking the asses of other aliens with powerful alien weapons.
• He's Just Hiding: Rock Knight in the Sega CD game gets this a lot. Many fans have declared Fanon Discontinuity on his death. This includes the boys at Retsupurae, who shouted cries of "NOT CANON" instantly after the death scene in question.
• Memetic Badass: Rock Knight in the Sega CD game is a minor character who does nothing of note until he's killed by Hammerbolt Joe near the end of the game, but he was hyped up in a Retsupurae video and the meme stuck. In the original manga, he's just a minor villain who also gets very easily killed by Cobra.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • You don't know? ^note A meme format taken from the final volume of the original manga, where Cobra cooly answers the question "What happens when night falls?" with "You don't know? The sun rises". It's commonly used with online games with a character stating that after server maintenance ends, (another) maintenance begins.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The lightgun arcade game based on the Royal sisters storyline is pretty good and fits the series well. It is a Time Crisis spinoff after all.
• Playing Against Type: Barbara Goodson as Jane Flower in the Streamline Pictures dub for the film. She usually plays little boys, old women, and motherly roles, and here she got to play a sexy Action Girl. Many viewers agreed that her deeper husky voice actually worked well for the character.
  • Same in the Swedish dub were the voice of Cobra is done by Tomas Bolme, who is perhaps best known for voicing Tintin. A far cry from a hard-drinking, cigar-chomping, womanizing Anti-Hero like Cobra.
• The Problem with Licensed Games:
  • There are two adventure games based on the series and the second one saw a western release for the Sega CD. Based on the Royal sisters storyline, it is generally regarded by those who've played it to be pretty bad, with Cobra as a Designated Hero through most of it and every other decision tree having But Thou Must! pouring out of it. It was the subject of a seven hour MST by Retsupurae.
  • Cobra the Shooting for the PlayStation 1 is a third-person action game that better fits the series, but even then, it doesn't play very well either, due to its awkward camera system and sluggish controls.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: In the original manga, Jane appears to be a competent Action Girl bounty hunter but she barely does anything before she is brainwashed and killed off, while in the anime she lasts a while longer but is killed anyway in a failed revenge attempt against Crystal Bowie. She is replaced with Suspiciously Similar Substitute Dominique, who appears in a few more chapters only to also get killed — offscreen at that. At least the anime spares Dominique's life, and the manga ended up following on it by introducing a second Suspiciously Similar Substitute named Secret Sanders who may or may not be an amnesiac Dominique.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Lady is almost killed by a bomb during Lord Salamander's arc and spends a few volumes out of commission. You'd expect her to have some kind of dramatic comeback, but she just returns in such an uncerimonious way in the Extradimensional Race arc that it's almost funny. And she isn't even really involved in that scenario either, as Cobra gets lost into alternate dimensions for most of it.
• Tough Act to Follow: Cobra is the only series from Terasawa that became a successful franchise. Of the author's other series, only Karasu Tengu Kabuto got both a full anime series and an OVA, while Goku: Midnight Eye lasted a few volumes with an OVA adaptation for two of its chapters.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Despite the violence, skimpy-dressed women, and occasional nudity, the original manga was published in Shonen Jump. Also, the movie is rated PG in the UK. Sequel stories like the webcomic Cobra: Over the Rainbow webcomic published in the 2010s are directed at adult readers, but their tone and level of violence and sexuality are roughly the same as before.

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