Big Shot

Aimed squarely at the roughly three hundred thousand freelancers working the star system, Big Shot exists to announce the newest rewards posted on wanted criminals. The presentation leans hard into a ridiculous frontier gimmick, all exaggeration and spectacle. It aired across most of 2071 before falling ratings pushed it off the air, and its final broadcast dealt with Doctor Londes.

Punch, portrayed by an actor named Alfredo, plays the show's genial frontman as a cartoon of an Old West cowboy, complete with a wildly overblown accent and a signature holler of shucks howdy! Between roping tricks and rides on a mechanical horse, he handles the actual substance, walking viewers through the fine print of each bounty and why certain captures fell through, usually at rambling length. Once the series ends, Alfredo turns up as an ordinary man collecting his mother from a spaceport on Mars, upbeat about landing new work and providing for her.

Judy fills the sidekick slot with a chirpy, over-eager act, reacting to each featured target with mugging enthusiasm. Her clingy powder-blue jacket is styled to bare her midriff and chest as blatant fan service, and her role is mostly to lob questions at Punch or echo his points. She offers apologies to the audience whenever a wanted figure dies or slips out of reach. Her attempt to read aloud Teddy Bomber's manifesto ran so long that it was clipped before the closing credits. When the show got the axe, the woman behind Judy dropped the act live on air and marched off in a rage, later said to be engaged to her manager. A handful of similar-looking women afterward billed themselves as her doubles.

English voices come from Paul St. Peter for Punch and Lia Sargent for Judy, with Tsutomu Taruki and Miki Nagasawa handling the Japanese track. The gap between mask and person is sharpest in Brain Scratch, where Judy's performer drops the sugary tone for a flat, much lower real voice and threatens to sic her manager on the production, making clear how little the on-screen bubble resembled her. The broadcast debuts in Stray Dog Strut and recurs through the series and the film, frequently tipping the Bebop hunters to a new target or a clue. Its theme cue is a track called American Money, and the program's credits get a look in Cowboy Funk. The duo take their names from the old British puppet farce Punch and Judy.