Ashi finds the land where Jack rescued the grown up children who where mind controlled by Aku and get to see Olivia old but alive to sing a song to never forget Samurai Jack.
Showing posts with label samurai jack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label samurai jack. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Tuesday, February 28, 2017
Genndy Tartakovsky on returning 12 years later...
Samurai Jack's Darker Season 5
[Source: Yahoo!News] Jack is a haunted man. He hides beneath abandoned ruins, cowering from the pelting rain as enemies search to claim his head. An apparition in the guise of his former self taunts, “How long can you keep this up?… There’s no way home, there’s nothing to fight for.” It’s a stark contrast to the flamboyant villain he faces in a previous episode, frolicking around and saying “babe” too many times.
“That’s my sensibility,” Samurai Jack creator Genndy Tartakovsky tells EW, laughing. “I walk the line, you know, Bug’s Bunny and film noir.”
Jack is indeed back in Samurai Jack season 5, premiering next month — and it’s been a long, torturous wait for fans. More than 12 years ago, the vivid cartoon series about a noble time-displaced samurai warrior and his fight with the shapeshifting demon Aku abruptly capped four seasons with an open-ended finale.
“I didn’t know if I should finish it,” Tartakovsky reflects. “Nobody told me if I should finish it. I didn’t know if we were gonna do more. I was burnt out to a crisp, and the whole crew was. It’s a very grueling show. As much as we all loved it, it was challenging, and on top of everything, we just got Star Wars: The Clone Wars to do. So I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m gonna bust out a giant finale and end Jack’s story however way it’s gonna end, figure all that out, and do Clone Wars on top of that.'”
Tartakovsky served as director and executive producer on the Star Wars animated series, but he hoped to revisit Samurai Jack six months or so after the fact. Pretty soon everything changed as Cartoon Network revamped its programming blocks, and that plan was no longer a reality.
Over the years, Tartakovsky would go on to direct the Hotel Transylvania films and work on shows like Sym-Bionic Titan, but there was hope for Samurai Jack to return as a film. “Jack will come back,” he promised in 2006. The following year, a film was announced with the launch of the indie film production company Frederator Films. The project didn’t come to fruition by 2012, but Tartakowsky said he would keep “trying so hard every year” to make it happen.
Meanwhile, the adventures of Jack were continuing in comic book form, but Tartakovsky confirms they are not canon. “The comics, I really didn’t want them to go into a territory where they were gonna finish the story their way. I think that was wrong of them to do that,” he remarks. “So, it’s not canon, it’s not part of my Jack universe — and I know some people like them, but the show is the show and that should be, that’s what the truth is.”
Because of all the hangups with the film, the creator got the idea to finish out the story where it all began: on television. As he said in a featurette for season 5, he shot an email to Mike Lazzo, vice president of programming at Cartoon Network, and the project was finally green-lit.
Season 5, which began production at the tail end of 2015, was initially planned for a fall 2016 premiere, but Tartakovsky said a mixture of “bookkeeping” and scheduling issues pushed the date a few months. “I was really nervous because we were going too fast and I didn’t think we were gonna be able to hit those dates,” he recalls. “Initially they talked about showing five [episodes] and then waiting two months and showing another five.”
That brings us up to date, where fans are less than a month away from Samurai Jack‘s return, with the first of 10 new episodes kicking off on Adult Swim March 11 at 11:00 p.m. ET. It’s been 50 years since the season 4 finale, and Jack is still trapped in the future. He can’t age and, as glimpsed in the trailer, he’s plagued with memories of the family he can’t return to.
“The biggest thing that we were able to take advantage of is more of a mature style of storytelling, [though] Jack never pandered to really tiny kids anyway,” Tartakovsky explains of the “darker tone” of the story. “But at the same time the most exciting things [are] we get to dive into the madness of Jack right now and where he’s at and that he’s really lost hope and he’s just miserable and that kind of psychosis.”
There’s a lot of blood, new villains, a new motorcycle and armor for Jack, and more surprises Tartakovsky doesn’t want to get into before the premiere. But the show’s mastermind teases, “It’s something that I wanted to do in animation and I don’t think it’s ever been done to this level or the level that I’m hoping that we’re doing it.”
More importantly, Jack has a conclusion — 12 years in the making. “This is it. This is the definitive end, and it’s a great end,” Tartakovsky says. “I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve storyboarded it, and I think it’s super satisfying, and it should close the door for me for Samurai Jack.
However, he wouldn’t object if someone wanted to fill in the gaps. “Now, look, there’s 50 years between season 4 and season 5,” says Tartakovsky, “and if somebody wanted to jump in and do some stories in between, but for me this is the end.”
“Cartoon Network, they loved the show, but maybe it was ahead of its time a little bit?” he says. “They didn’t know what to do with it exactly, and also they were still figuring themselves out as a network back then. They were going through their first big transition and they always moved it around — we never felt like we got the audience that we could’ve had.”
It wasn’t until Samurai Jack left the air for good that the show developed a cult following, especially among artists inspired by its bold, picturesque animation. “It took me a little by surprise, to this day,” Tartakovsky says. “You know, I don’t sense it because we [as animators] are pretty sequestered.”
Meanwhile, the adventures of Jack were continuing in comic book form, but Tartakovsky confirms they are not canon. “The comics, I really didn’t want them to go into a territory where they were gonna finish the story their way. I think that was wrong of them to do that,” he remarks. “So, it’s not canon, it’s not part of my Jack universe — and I know some people like them, but the show is the show and that should be, that’s what the truth is.”
Because of all the hangups with the film, the creator got the idea to finish out the story where it all began: on television. As he said in a featurette for season 5, he shot an email to Mike Lazzo, vice president of programming at Cartoon Network, and the project was finally green-lit.
Season 5, which began production at the tail end of 2015, was initially planned for a fall 2016 premiere, but Tartakovsky said a mixture of “bookkeeping” and scheduling issues pushed the date a few months. “I was really nervous because we were going too fast and I didn’t think we were gonna be able to hit those dates,” he recalls. “Initially they talked about showing five [episodes] and then waiting two months and showing another five.”
That brings us up to date, where fans are less than a month away from Samurai Jack‘s return, with the first of 10 new episodes kicking off on Adult Swim March 11 at 11:00 p.m. ET. It’s been 50 years since the season 4 finale, and Jack is still trapped in the future. He can’t age and, as glimpsed in the trailer, he’s plagued with memories of the family he can’t return to.
“The biggest thing that we were able to take advantage of is more of a mature style of storytelling, [though] Jack never pandered to really tiny kids anyway,” Tartakovsky explains of the “darker tone” of the story. “But at the same time the most exciting things [are] we get to dive into the madness of Jack right now and where he’s at and that he’s really lost hope and he’s just miserable and that kind of psychosis.”
There’s a lot of blood, new villains, a new motorcycle and armor for Jack, and more surprises Tartakovsky doesn’t want to get into before the premiere. But the show’s mastermind teases, “It’s something that I wanted to do in animation and I don’t think it’s ever been done to this level or the level that I’m hoping that we’re doing it.”
More importantly, Jack has a conclusion — 12 years in the making. “This is it. This is the definitive end, and it’s a great end,” Tartakovsky says. “I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve storyboarded it, and I think it’s super satisfying, and it should close the door for me for Samurai Jack.
However, he wouldn’t object if someone wanted to fill in the gaps. “Now, look, there’s 50 years between season 4 and season 5,” says Tartakovsky, “and if somebody wanted to jump in and do some stories in between, but for me this is the end.”
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
The Lone Samurai Returns to Cartoon Network
S A M U R A I J A C K is B A C K
It's been 50 years since we saw Samurai Jack and time has not been kind to him. Aku has destroyed every time portal and Jack has stopped aging, a side effect of time travel. It seems he is cursed to just roam the land for all eternity. Samurai Jack premieres Saturday, March 11th at 11pm ET/PT on Adult Swim.
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Samurai Jack Returns!
SAMURAI JACK SEASON FIVE
A behind-the-scenes video for the upcoming fifth season of Samurai Jack was unveiled at the Toonami panel during this past weekend’s Anime Expo, where production members, including Jack's voice Phil LaMarr, revealed some intriguing new info concerning our time-traveling samurai's return to the small screen.
In the video, Samurai Jack creator and director Genndy Tartakovsky explains that the new season will pick up years after the original series ended, and that there’s no direct connection between the last episode of the series and this new season. If you've been wanting to try the awesome cartoon series but didn't want to watch the previous 52 episodes, you’re in luck. Tartakovsky also says the interim years have changed Jack.
“I think we're going to see [Jack] in a new light, because we're going to see him from a different standpoint. In the original series, he was very heroic person on a very rigid quest. Now, we pick up with him and it's many years after the fact and he's a little bit lost. So, it's a story of redemption and him trying to find who he is, again.”
Switching from the more family-friendly Cartoon Network to the, erm, more adult Adult Swim also represented a “big challenge” for the Samurai Jack team.
“People watch [Samurai Jack] with their kids. You know, through the generations. I didn't want to go full on heads getting chopped off and blood spurting everywhere, but at the same time I also wanted it to be newer and exciting and take advantage of some of those things. The way Jack’s gonna be different, he’s definitely the same, there’s definitely more darkness to it. It’s one story, one episodic story. The action is just as badass as it's always going to be. Probably even more.”
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