It has been 50 years since we last saw Samurai Jack. While he cannot age, he has had to trudge on, watching as ythe evil Aku gains control over the past, present, and future, and waiting for his next chance at victory. Can he continue his quest to defeat the demon and save history?
Can he get back, back to the past?
Samurai Jack returns Saturday, March 11th, at 11:00pm, as part of Adult Swim.
[via io9]
Yes! Now how about an HD rerelease (with 5.1 audio) of the original 4 seasons?
And maybe an Invader Zim revival, while I’m dreaming …
Great to hear Phil LaMarr’s Jack voice again. It’s one of his best roles. I’ll be interested to learn who else is in the cast.
No matter how cool it is, no matter how much I want this, and I really want this without Mako to voice Aku, something will always be missing.
I understand the “Not Aging” bit. It’s told in a 1,000 stories. (to be clear, I don’t know ANYthing about this story). What I don’t understand is why he has the leg of a 19yr old girl.
#2/ChristopherLBennett: I’m guessing the female character in the trailer is voiced by Grey DeLisle, but that could just be because I’ve been rewatching Avatar recently. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Tara Strong — both of them had a lot of roles in the previous seasons of Jack.
@3/wcarter: Yes, Mako was one of a kind. Greg Baldwin tried his best to take over from him as Iroh on Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, but while it was a decent impression, it just wasn’t the same. I wouldn’t be surprised if Baldwin were the one they got to do Aku, because I read that they did go with a soundalike. But I don’t think that was the right choice for Iroh, and I’m not sure it will be for Aku. I would’ve preferred it if they didn’t make any attempt to imitate his inimitable voice and just brought in a new actor who could bring a similar charisma and make the role his own. I thought Ed Asner would’ve made a good Iroh; for Aku, maybe someone like George Takei or Mark Hamill.
There was an episode of the old series that quite bothered me.
Jack had found the portal to go back in time and put things straight… but doing so would have left his companion of the moment to die. So he stepped back and saved the companion, losing the chance to go back in time.
They did not address the fact that, at any time, going back in time would simply have erased all of the “present” people anyway, effectively condemning them to having never been born.If going back would have started an alternate timeline, for the present-day Aku it does not make a difference, so it would actualy be a good way of getting rid of Jack (I doubt he would feel loyal to his alternate-timeline-selfs).
If Jack considered that acceptable, why not to simply go back in time? if its not acceptable, why not concentrate in defeating Aku in the present?
Did Jack as a character not consider this implications, did the authors not consider it, or there is some sort of other interpretation that save everything?
Now, it’s likely expecting too much from a kid show… but it was so excellent in so many other ways, that a thing I would barely take note of in another show, actually bothered me here…
@7/fizz: It’s got nothing to do with its being a “kid show” — I don’t think that characterization really applies to Samurai Jack. Sure, superficially it was under Cartoon Network strictures to avoid bloodshed and death, so the enemies were always robots, but they were always being brutally dismembered and spraying oil and slime everywhere, and it was obvious that the producers wanted to do an ultraviolent, bloodsoaked action show but had to use analogies to sneak it past the censors. As we can see in the trailer, now that it’s on Adult Swim, that restriction is gone and Jack is now fighting living foes and spilling real blood. Which is no doubt the way it was always meant to be done.
This was never just a kids’ show. Heck, my father, who was 68 when the show premiered, was a huge fan of it. He was a musician and classical-radio host who was a big fan of contemporary and experimental music, and he admired the show’s use of music and sound design as much as its use of visuals. He loved how often it would have lengthy, dialogue-free sequences that were purely about establishing mood and atmosphere through imagery and sound. That’s not the sort of thing that small children have the patience to sit through, generally.
So the reason the time-travel logic doesn’t make sense is because this was never a show about time travel. That was just an excuse to put a medieval samurai in a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi/fantasy/Western/cyberpunk/etc. world that would let him fight monsters and villains of all types and wander through an endlessly eclectic mix of settings and genres. SJ was always a show driven more by action, visuals, sound, and music than by story; its paper-thin plots were only there to set up the other stuff it did so spectacularly well. It rarely made any kind of objective or logical sense. I mean, if Aku conquered the world in the distant past, then its history would be totally different from ours, so how come its future is a melange of so many familiar cultural and genre tropes? None of it makes sense, but it’s not supposed to. The backstory is just the setup for a show driven by style and action and genre-blending.