Samurai Jack

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Samurai Jack is an American action-adventure animated television series created by Genndy Tartakovsky for Cartoon Network. The series follows "Jack", an unnamed samurai sent through time to a dystopian future ruled by the tyrannical shape-shifting demon "Aku". Jack quests to travel back in time and defeat Aku before he can take over the world. The series premiered on August 10, 2001, with a TV movie called The Premiere Movie, before ending in its fourth season on September 25, 2004, without concluding the story. A revival was produced twelve years later, resulting in a fifth season that concluded the series. The fifth season premiered on Adult Swim's Toonami block on March 11, 2017, and the series finale aired on May 20.

All episodes of Samurai Jack are directed by Tartakovsky, usually in collaboration with others. The series has garnered critical acclaim, and won eight Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Animated Program, as well as six Annie Awards and an OIAF Award.

Video Samurai Jack

Premise

Long ago in a distant land, I, Aku, the shape-shifting Master of Darkness, unleashed an unspeakable evil! But a foolish samurai warrior wielding a magic sword stepped forth to oppose me. Before the final blow was struck, I tore open a portal in time and flung him into the future, where my evil is law! Now the fool seeks to return to the past, and undo the future that is Aku!

Samurai Jack tells the story of a young prince (voiced by Phil LaMarr) from feudal Japan, whose father (Sab Shimono and Keone Young) received a magic katana used to defeat and imprison the supernatural shape-shifting demon Aku (Mako Iwamatsu). Eight years later, Aku escapes, and the Emperor sends away his son to travel the world and train so he can return and use the magic sword to defeat Aku. On his return, he faces and almost defeats Aku, but before he could land a finishing blow, Aku creates a time portal that sends the prince turned samurai into the distant future, with anticipation that he would be able to deal with the samurai by that time.

The samurai prince arrives in a dystopian retrofuturistic Earth ruled by Aku. The first people he encounters call him "Jack" as a form of slang, which he adopts as his name. His given name is never mentioned. Most episodes depict Jack overcoming various obstacles in his quest to travel back to his own time and defeat Aku. Each time Jack nears the end of his quest, his chance slips away, forcing him to continue his journey.

Settings

The retro-futuristic world is inhabited by robots, extraterrestrials, talking animals, monsters, magical creatures, and deities. Some areas have advanced technology like flying cars, while others resemble ancient times or industrial conditions. What's more, Aku has brought aliens from other planets to inhabit Earth, while destroying the habitability of the alien planets. Criminals and fugitives take refuge on Aku's Earth. Mythological and supernatural creatures make regular appearances, and coexist among the technologically-advanced inhabitants.

Maps Samurai Jack

Episodes

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Production

Development

Samurai Jack was created by Genndy Tartakovsky as a follow-up to his successful series Dexter's Laboratory. Cartoon Network executive Mike Lazzo recalled Tartakovsky pitching him the series: "He said, 'Hey, remember David Carradine in Kung Fu? Wasn't that cool?' and I was like, 'Yeah, that's really cool.' That was literally the pitch." Cartoon Network billed it as a series "that is cinematic in scope and that incorporates action, humor, and intricate artistry."

Influences and design

The basic premise of Samurai Jack comes from Tartakovsky's childhood fascination with samurai culture and the bushido code, as well as a recurring dream where he'd wander a post-apocalyptic Earth with a samurai sword and travel the world fighting mutants with his crush. The show is meant to evoke 1970s cinematography, as well as classic Hollywood films such as Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia and Spartacus. Thematic and visual inspirations come from Frank Miller's comic book series Ronin, including the premise of a master-less samurai warrior thrown into a dystopic future in order to battle a shape-shifting demon. Similarly, the episode "Jack and the Spartans" was specifically inspired by Miller's graphic novel 300 that retold the Battle of Thermopylae. The Japanese comic Lone Wolf and Cub and films by Akira Kurosawa were also an inspiration.

Broadcast

The network announced the series' launch at a press conference on February 21, 2001. Weeks leading up to the series were accompanied by a sweepstakes giveaway sponsored by AOL in which the grand prize was a trip for four to Japan. The promotion also included sneak peeks of Samurai Jack, behind-the-scenes model sheets, as well as exclusive Cartoon Orbit cToons. Samurai Jack officially debuted on Cartoon Network on August 10, 2001, with the three-part special "The Beginning". The premiere received high praise, including four award nominations, as well as was released as a standalone VHS and DVD on March 19, 2002. Cartoon Network ordered 52 episodes of Samurai Jack, which were aired as 4 seasons of 13 episodes each, as a primetime member of the Cartoon Cartoon Fridays programming block. The final episode aired on September 25, 2004.

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Conclusion and revival

Original ending

The original series was left open-ended after the conclusion of the fourth season. Tartakovsky said, "coming close to [the end of] the fourth season, we're like, 'are we gonna finish it?' And I didn't know... The network didn't know, they were going through a lot of transitions also. So I decided, you know, I don't want to rush and finish the whole story, and so we just left it like there is no conclusion and then [the final episode is] just like another episode". Art director Scott Wills added, "We didn't have time to think about it, because we went right into Clone Wars. They even overlapped, I think. There was no time to even think about it."

Planned film

A film intended to conclude the story of Samurai Jack had been in development at different times by four different studios. As early as 2002, Cartoon Network was producing a Samurai Jack live action feature film, in association with New Line Cinema. Tartakovsky said in a 2006 interview that the live action version of Samurai Jack was thankfully abandoned, and that "we will finish the story, and there will be an animated film." Fred Seibert announced in 2007 that the newly-formed Frederator Films is developing a Samurai Jack movie, which was planned to be in stereoscopic 2D with a budget of 20 million dollars. Seibert said in 2009 the film was being co-produced with J. J. Abrams' Bad Robot Productions. Sony Pictures Entertainment expressed interest in developing a Samurai Jack film in 2012. Genndy Tartakovsky said in an interview with IGN the Samurai Jack movie is in pre-production: "I've been trying so hard every year, and the one amazing thing about Jack is that I did it in 2001, you know, and it still survived. There's something about it that's connected with people. And I want it, it's number 1 on my list, and now Bob Osher, the president, is like 'Hey, let's talk about Jack. Let's see what we can do.' And I go, 'You're going to do a 2D feature animated movie?' and he's like, 'Yeah. Maybe. Let's do some research and let's see.' So it's not dead for sure by any means, and it's still on the top of my list, and I'm trying as hard as I can." Tartakovsky said the loss of Mako Iwamatsu, Aku's voice actor, would also need to be addressed. The feature film project never materialized, and eventually the series concluded with a fifth television season.

2017 revival

Samurai Jack returned to television thirteen years after the fourth season concluded. It began airing on Adult Swim on March 11, 2017. This fifth and final season was produced at Cartoon Network Studios with Tartakovsky as executive producer. It has more mature elements and a cohesive story that concludes Jack's journey. The story takes place fifty years after Jack has been cast into the future, though he has not aged as a side effect of his time travel. Jack (reprised by Phil LaMarr) is in despair from the many years of fighting Aku (Greg Baldwin, replacing Mako) and from Aku's destruction of all the remaining time portals; he is haunted by warped visions of himself, his family and an enigmatic warrior on horseback. Jack lost his father's magic sword; Aku seems to be unaware of this fact, and has started to give up hope of ever defeating Jack, especially since Jack has stopped aging. Ashi (Tara Strong) and her sisters are raised by an Aku-worshiping cult to be assassins whose purpose is to kill Jack. They attack Jack and gravely injure him, but at their next encounter he kills them all except Ashi. Jack persuades Ashi that Aku is evil, and she joins Jack and helps him reclaim his sword. The two become romantically involved as they journey to defeat Aku. Aku is informed that Jack lost his sword and faces him, not knowing Jack has recovered it in the interim. Aku senses that Ashi has part of him inside her, and possesses her body to attack Jack. Jack refuses to kill Ashi, and lays down his sword in defeat. Aku takes Jack prisoner and prepares to kill him, but the people Jack helped all over the planet rally to his defense. When Jack tells Ashi that he loves her, she regains control of her mind. Ashi finds that she has the same powers as Aku and uses them to return the sword to Jack, and open a time portal to send Jack and herself to the past, where Jack destroys Aku once and for all. With peace restored and the future of Aku's rule undone, Jack prepares to marry Ashi, but she fades away as she says "without Aku, I would have never existed". The series closes with Jack secluded in a sun-lit grove of flowering trees, watching a ladybug fly free.

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Reception

Critical reception

In 2004, British broadcaster Channel 4 ran a poll of the 100 greatest cartoons of all time, in which Samurai Jack achieved the 42nd position. The show was ranked 11th by IGN for its Top 25 Primetime Animated Series of All Time list in 2006. IGN also ranked the show 43rd in its Top 100 Animated Series list in 2009.

Matt Zoller Seitz, a film critic for RogerEbert.com and television critic for Vulture, considers Samurai Jack, along with Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars, to be a masterwork and one of the greatest American animated shows on television, mainly for its visual style:

[A]lthough Tartakovsky is a good storyteller, in a silent-movie sort of way--expressing what's happening moment-to-moment through picture and sound rather than in dialogue--I never watched either of these programs for their plots, and I don't re-watch them for narrative, either. I re-watch them for the same reason that I visit art museums, attend live concerts, and pause during journeys from point A to point B in New York to watch dancers, acrobats, or street musicians: because I appreciate virtuosity for its own sake. And that's what Tartakovsky's Clone Wars and Samurai Jack give you, scene for scene and shot for shot .... [T]he plot was never the point. It was always about the visual music that Tartakovsky, his designers, and his animators created onscreen.

Samurai Jack would later be included in Seitz and Alan Sepinwall's 2016 book TV (The Book) as an honorable mention following the 100 greatest television series of all time.

Awards and nominations

Legacy and influence

The distinctive style of Samurai Jack is what drew Lucasfilm to recruit Tartakovsky for the Star Wars: Clone Wars animated series. Much of the signature cinematic style of Samurai Jack is present in Clone Wars, such as lightning-fast combat, extended sequences without dialogue, explosions, epic vistas, etc.

Reviewers of the 3D animated feature film Kung Fu Panda (DreamWorks Animation) have noted that the stylized 2D opening sequence is either inspired by or an homage to Samurai Jack.

Jack later made a cameo on the Uncle Grandpa episode "Pizza Eve".

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Other media

Home video releases

Like other previous Cartoon Network shows, Samurai Jack DVDs were released by Warner Home Video between 2002 and 2007. The DVDs include episode numbers in Roman numerals as they appear at the end of each episode but remain untitled. Season 1 was released on Netflix streaming service in 2013. Samurai Jack: The Complete Series was released on Blu-ray and Digital HD on October 17, 2017, and contains remastered versions of the first four seasons of the series.

Video games

The Samurai Jack world has been seen in the video games Samurai Jack: The Amulet of Time for the Game Boy Advance in 2003 and Samurai Jack: The Shadow of Aku for the Nintendo GameCube and PlayStation 2 in 2004.

Several elements of the Samurai Jack concept were reused in several video games: the MMORPG Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall features Jack, the Scotsman and Demongo as non-playable characters, while Aku is a Nano. The online game Project Exonaut features Jack only as a playable character for the Banzai Squadron. The brawler game Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion for Nintendo 3DS, Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 features Jack and the Scotsman as playable characters while Aku is an assist character, a boss and a playable character.

Samurai Jack is voiced by Phil LaMarr once more for most games, and by Keith Ferguson for Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion. In Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall, the Scotsman is voiced by John DiMaggio and Demongo is voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson. Due to Mako Iwamatsu's death in 2006, Aku is voiced by Greg Baldwin in Cartoon Network Universe: FusionFall and Fred Tatasciore in Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion.

Comics

In February 2013, IDW Publishing announced a partnership with Cartoon Network to produce comics based on its properties. Samurai Jack was one of the titles announced to be published. It was further announced at WonderCon 2013 that the first issue of Samurai Jack would debut in October 2013. The first comic in the series was released October 23, 2013. The final issue came out in May 2015. On October 25, 2016, IDW re-released all of the issues in a compilation entitled "Tales of a Wandering Warrior". Tartakovsky doesn't consider the comics part of the story of Jack.

Jack also appeared in multiple issues of DC Comics' anthology comic series Cartoon Network Action Pack, which ran from July 2006 to April 2012.

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See also

• Cartoon Network portal
• Martial arts portal
• Television portal
• Television in the United States portal
• 2000s portal
• 2010s portal

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References

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External links

• Samurai Jack at the Big Cartoon DataBase
• Samurai Jack on IMDb
• Samurai Jack at TV.com

Source of the article : Wikipedia