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.