The pitch was just that, but Mike Lazzo, Linda Simensky and other people representing Cartoon Network at the time approved of it.Īnyway, as for the unique visual imagery of Samurai Jack-lush, painterly backgrounds along with characters drawn as solid colors without any surrounding black outlines: So he pitched the idea to Mike Lazzo, then head of programming at Cartoon Network over a dinner one night: "Hey, remember David Carradine in Kung Fu? Wasn't that cool?" Like "oh, then he's thrown into the future and there's this wizard, and so on." I knew that I didn't want it to be bound to one world I wanted to do all this traveling.so the story started to come together out of the necessities that I needed to make the show." "I can't really cut anybody and there's no fun in doing samurai action if I can't.so I thought "Oh, what if they're all robots? And I can get away with some, y'know, hard-core fighting?" That's where the whole sci-fi element came from. That kind of graphic violence is taboo according to kids programming standards even in 2001, so Genndy used his fertile mind to solve that issue for his samurai show: I really wanted to do that."īut early on, there was a major problem: there is a lot of swordplay and violence and gore in the Samurai tales of Japan so try make one without any. Genndy Tartakovsky, the show's creator, once said that "I've always loved samurais, I've always been influenced by samurais- Seven Samurai (1954), all that stuff. In the course of Jack's quest, the time-flung warrior encounters exotic civilizations, unusual creatures and modern urban cityscapes with fantastic trappings. Jack has only one goal: to find the time portal and return home to so he can free his people once and for all.īut the future is a very bleak and difficult place, segregated into tribes as well as being policed by Aku's robots and bounty hunters. With his mind and body sharply honed, Jack returns home a man ready to vanquish Aku and end his terrible reign.īefore he can do the killin' blow, however, the wizard gives the warrior the boot to a strange and dark future through a time portal. Jack is a proud Japanese warrior, a man of few words who is determined to overthrow the evil reign of the shape shifting godlike demon Aku.Īs a young boy, Jack witnessed his society's enslavement at the hands of the monstrous wizard and so got sent 'round the world to train among all kinds of warriors from Arabia, to Africa, to Egypt, to Greece/Rome, England's Sherwood Forest, to Scandinavia, to Russia, to Mongolia and the Eurasian Steppes to China. I, Aku, the shape-shifting master of darkness, 10 years after this show was abruptly cancelled, for my third RetroJunk article (after Memories of More Dinosaurs and Timbox’s Top Ten Favorite TV Show Episodes, of course!), I would like to share you ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, one of the great modern masterpieces in the annals of the animation art form itself (and especially one of the non-Disney animation variety): Genndy Tartakovsky's 2001-2004 animated television series Samurai Jack!
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