

Phil LaMarr notes that the Jack we meet in these new episodes bears more of a resemblance to the latter-day Clint Eastwood of Unforgiven. This idea of him being lost was really attractive to me. We really get to go inside Jack and see him transform or not transform. "For your whole life to be this one quest, and you start to really realize that never gonna happen, what happens to your mind? That was our in-point for this story," Tartakovsky says. In the show's timeline, 50 years have passed since we last saw Jack, and he's still stuck in Aku's dystopian future, unable to get back to the past. The series' trademark humor and action remain (albeit with more bloodletting, as befits the move to Adult Swim), but the show harbors a darker, more mournful soul. One thing viewers will feel, in this new season, is a perceptible shift in that tone. ", I really dove in and explored how I wanted people to feel." To Tartakovsky, it's the tone that matters.

"We narrowed it down to something we described as a young, Asian Clint Eastwood," LaMarr says with a laugh.
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The show just seemed to breathe different air than other series on the cable grid - air that mingled influences from many different narrative genres and art styles.Īctor Phil LaMarr, who returns to voice Jack in the new season, says it was Tartakovsky's love of Sergio Leone films that originally helped the actor find Jack's singular - if infrequently heard - voice. The story of a samurai flung into a dystopian future ruled by an evil demon named Aku, Jack stuck out from chattier, more frenetic shows like Dragonball Z and Pokemon in its willingness to let long silences and spare visuals drive its storytelling. And all these people were either moving on or moving to different positions, and so it just felt like a very different place, and with Star Wars: Clone Wars looming, we didn't want to rush anything."Īnyone who watched Samurai Jack during its original 2001-04 run knows that rushing was never the show's style. "All of my bosses were changed out, and a lot of my success at Cartoon Network was because of the freedom and the trust and the relationships we had. "The network was starting to go through some changes," he tells NPR. Tartakovsky thought it was time to take some time away from his highly stylized tale of a stoic, time-lost, katana-wielding warrior. He'd enjoyed tremendous success at the network, creating its flagship series Dexter's Laboratory, producing The Powerpuff Girls, and finding himself tapped by George Lucas for a new project to be called Star Wars: Clone Wars. The Way Of The (Temporarily) Peaceful Warrior: Samurai Jack, in repose.īack in 2004, as Cartoon Network's critically acclaimed series Samurai Jack neared the end of its fourth season, creator Genndy Tartakovsky felt burned out.
