The Alien Hunter as Lounge Lizard There's plenty of reason to be curious, even excited, about "Space Dandy," a new anime television series beginning on Adult Swim on Saturday night. Shinichiro Watanabe, credited as the show's general director, is responsible for two of the best Japanese anime series to have made it to American TV in recent years, "Cowboy Bebop" (1998-99) and "Samurai Champloo" (2005-6). The animation studio behind it, Bones, has produced high-quality series like "Fullmetal Alchemist" and "Eureka Seven." So perhaps there's also reason to be patient when "Space Dandy" gets off to a rocky start in its first episode, the only one available for review. Particularly painful is an early sequence in which the pompadoured title character, an intergalactic alien hunter, travels through space to his favorite hangout: a cross between the "Star Wars" cantina and Hooters, where "zero G meets double D." This cringe-making scene is presumably meant as a lampoon of the typical titillating "fan service" aspects of Japanese science-fiction anime, but the satire has been entirely lost in translation. That may be literally the case: Adult Swim is presenting an English-language version of the show, and it's possible that the humor isn't as broad or crude in the original. But it's also possible that Mr. Watanabe and his writers, several of whom worked on "Cowboy Bebop," aren't suited to comedy. His previous series have had comic elements but serious tones: cool and laconic in "Cowboy Bebop," a sci-fi bounty hunter tale that mashed up western and film noir conventions to a jazz soundtrack; acidly bittersweet in "Samurai Champloo," a hip-hop take on Japanese history and traditions of swordplay. Like those shows, "Space Dandy" is both tribute and parody, with the primary target this time appearing to be space opera heroics in the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon vein, as well as later elaborations like Buckaroo Banzai and even Buzz Lightyear. The "Toy Story" connection is made manifest when a villain threatens to chase Dandy "to the far edge of infinity and beyond." The appropriations and allusions to American music that colored the earlier shows are replaced here by lavish visual references to "60s psychedelia and Roy Lichtenstein. And, as the episode moves away from the breastaurant, there are signs that the show could work as a loudly affectionate bubble-gum-colored salute to Saturday morning serials, though there's no telling whether the wit, insouciance and depth of feeling Mr. Watanabe has shown in the past will return. Dandy's tiki-themed spaceship has an amusing two-being crew: a diminutive, child-voiced robot, QT, that spits paper tape after solving equations, and a catlike alien, Meow, with a weakness for human pornography. They're chased by a hapless evil alien who believes that Dandy is the key to a universe-spanning war between rival empires. If they're not charming enough to make you want to check out the second episode - it's a close call - Mr. Watanabe's purely visual inventiveness may tip the balance. Whether it's a woozy, floating, viscous scene after a bad warp-drive jump, or a long chase involving alien worms seemingly dredged from the bottom of the sea, there's usually something striking to see. And it's not always in a halter top. Space Dandy Adult Swim, Saturday night at 11:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 10:30, Central time. Produced by the Bandai Visual Company. Shinichiro Watanabe, general director; Shingo Natsume, director; Kimiko Ueno, Dai Sato and Keiko Nobumoto, screenplay; Yoshiyuki Ito, character design; Thomas Romain, spaceship design; Yasuyuki Okamura, theme song; Bones, animation production. WITH THE VOICES OF: Ian Sinclair (Dandy), Alison Viktorin (QT), Joel McDonald (Meow), J. Michael Tatum (Dr. Gel), Micah Solusod (Bea), Kent Williams (Perry), Alexis Tipton (Honey), Colleen Clinkenbeard (Scarlet) and R. Bruce Elliott (narrator).