But we’re not here to talk about that show, or even the upcoming movie. Instead I want to focus on another of Tartakovsky’s work that never seemed to get the praise it (IMO) rightly deserved.

SAMURAI JACK

Pitched as Tartakovsky’s follow up to Dexter’s Laboratory, the show ran on Cartoon Network from 2001 to 2004. The story revolved around Jack, a samurai from feudal Japan who is whisked away from his time and sent to the future by the evil demon Aku. This is a future that Aku now has complete control off, and it becomes Jack’s quest to not only defeat the demon, but find a way back to his time.

For his second mainstream work, Tartakovsky took everything that made Dexter’s Lab popular and pushed it forward. The action and fighting scenes were honed to a sharp edge, taking inspiration from not only Japanese animation as Dexter had done, but also just cinema in general. There are countless of episodes found through out the series that have almost no dialogue whatsoever, bringing to mind the best silent films of the early 20th centuries. Both wide screen and split screen are used during action scenes to great effects.

But for the most part, of all this was a given. Many already knew that Tartakovsky was a talented director when it came to action scenes. What surprised me, and has surprised others that watched the show is the inventiveness that Jack’s world showed.

Upon first glance, the future that Jack lands in is the same dystopian, brightly colored future that we have seen ever seen Blade Runner. Genndy doesn’t allow himself to adhere to that cliche for long. The setting becomes Genndy’s playground in which he got to throw out as many of his most outlandish and crazy ideas as he wanted to. And the thing was, for the most part it worked. For some reason, a Scotsman with a machine gun for a leg(long before Robert Rodriguez made it popular) fit into the world Genndy created just as well as 300 Robot Spartans.

Something else that must bear mention when talking about animation in general is the voice acting, as that is something that can make or break a show. Samurai Jack though fortunately had talent in spades. Phil LaMarr(yes, the UPS guy from MadTV), already a strong voice actor voiced Jack with just the right amount of calmness, naiveness, and amusement. And the late Mako Iwamatsu greedily bit into every line of dialogue as Aku.

Watching Samurai Jack, it’s easy to see why George Lucas decided that Genndy was the right man to tackle the Clone War minisodes that aired on Cartoon Network in late 2003. While that show garnered much more attention than Samurai Jack ever did, I still personally prefer Samurai Jack. There’s just something about the titular character that becomes even more iconic than Lucas characters. It is a shame that the Clone Wars movie only shares the name and look of the cartoon, but not the director nor any of the same writers.