Genndy Tartakovsky has given us something special with Samurai Jack. The critically acclaimed, award-winning series remains a rare success in the field of animation that embraced avant-garde ideas, pushed non-traditional modes of storytelling, and spanned more than 15 years in order to bring Jack's full, epic story to a satisfying conclusion. It's enough to simply watch Samurai Jack for all its timeless entertainment value, but for the true fans out there, you'll find there is much, much more to the story. And now that Samurai Jack has received a remastered Blu-ray treatment in its entirety, fans can get the full picture at long last.

Following the epic conclusion of its fifth and final season, Adult Swim’s four-time Emmy Award-winning series, Samurai Jack arrives as a complete series on Blu-ray and Digital HD today. Featuring all 62 heart-pounding episodes of the critically acclaimed animated show, Samurai Jack: The Complete Series also arrives with action-packed bonus content including exclusive featurettes, behind the scenes looks and special commentary. Fans will also relive the first four seasons in HD for the first time as each episode has been remastered to perfection. The box set also features a one-of-a-kind metal art print, created especially for the show’s devoted fans.

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Image via Adult Swim

Check out the details below, followed by a bunch of trivia I've gleaned from the fantastic series Blu-ray:

  • Samurai Jack: The Complete Series – Including all five seasons of the highly-acclaimed animated series, the complete series box set showcases 1,364 minutes of high quality animation and never-before-seen bonus features, as well as a one-of-a-kind metal art print created especially for this collector’s item. Available October 17th.
  • Samurai Jack: Season Five Soundtrack – Featuring 22 spellbinding tracks produced by celebrated film composer and producer Tyler Bates and composed by Joanne Higginbottom and Dieter Hartmann for the show’s explosive final season, the emotional and action-filled album awakens the spirit of the Samurai with every listen. Hand-selected to provide fans the ultimate Samurai Jack experience, each track takes listeners back to season five. Available for digital download and streaming October 20th.
  • Samurai Jack: Season Five – Following the conclusion of the series’ epic final season, fans can revisit season five anytime with the release of the complete fifth season on DVD and Blu-Ray. Available on October 17th. (FYI: The bonus features and extras on this DVD/Blu-ray are the same as the disc in the Complete Series set.)
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Image via Adult Swim

Created by celebrated animation director Genndy Tartakovsky, Samurai Jack follows a young Samurai after he is sent to the future by the evil wizard, Aku. With the determination to defeat the wizard and undo his destruction, Jack sets off on a daring journey to return to the past and defeat Aku once and for all. Gathering allies and combatting other villains along the way, Jack battles to accomplish his mission and restore the peace of the past. The intense fifth season concludes the journey of its time displaced iconic star, as he finally completes his mission 50 years after the events of the original series.

Continuing to captivate new fans, while maintaining a loyal following of longtime viewers, Samurai Jack: The Complete Series allows audiences to join their favorite samurai time and time again as he finds his way through the five-season journey. Take a look at just some of the trivia that awaits you behind the scenes of Samurai Jack:

Episode Commentaries

On the Season 1 disc, Tartakovsky and storyboard artist Bryan Andrews revisit Episode VII, in which Jack attempts to get past three seemingly invincible archers atop a tower in order to access a wishing well. Here's just a taste of what the creative duo had to say:

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    Image via Cartoon Network
    This is one of Genndy’s favorite episodes of Season 1.
  • It was inspired in part by a 1970s Batman comic issue featuring the Manhunter. In it was a side story about a monastery where three blind monks lived and trained as archers.
  • Andrews and his brother Mark worked on this episode, their first of many.
  • Pay attention to dynamics, use of music and silence, sound effects throughout, since as Genndy says, this episode is about sound and silence and the contrast between them.
  • The Viking battle horn is an homage to Conan the Barbarian
  • This is the first episode where Jack wears the classic straw hat from samurai film.
  • Animating the arrows proved difficult. They looked to Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler for inspiration.
  • Genndy went with the “Three Blind Mice” concept for the archers
  • Musical inspiration came from the Dust Brothers Fight Club soundtrack plus classical, world DJs, and ethnic music
  • The Andrews brothers also practice martial arts; they wanted to bring the Shaolin Temple and respect for Kung Fu into a sequence in this episode.
  • Designs of Jack’s acute hearing revealing the world around him come from Charley Harper, a 1950s illustrator who drew children’s biology books
  • The archers were trapped by dark magic, so rather than simply kill them, the decision was made to have the archers shoot each other while trying to kill Jack, releasing them from their curse.
  • The ending is an homage of Raiders of the Lost Ark fiery ark shot

The Season 2 disc includes a commentary track from Tartakovsky, Andrews, and art director Scott Wills for the Emmy-winning Episode XXV. This installment featured Jack joining up with the Spartan army against a horde of mechanized minotaurs.

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    Image via Cartoon Network
    Genndy’s love of epic stories like Spartacus and Ben-Hur led to this story, but Frank Miller’s ‘300’ served as the basis of this episode; the idea was 300+1, the 1 being Jack, allowing the Spartans to win the battle. Jack took some inspiration from Gladiator's Maximus, as well.
  • The team wanted to feature an epic-mode widescreen in an episode, so this was the perfect story for it
  • Genndy wanted to bring some operatic music into the piece.
  • When Scott Wills came aboard, the team pushed themselves further than what their Hanna Barbera experience had allowed them to do, i.e. from cartoonish animation to more sweeping, epic backgrounds and paintings; this opened the creative floodgates for the show going forward.
  • The team had almost twice as much content than what the episode runtime ended up being, almost having their own made-for-TV movie. A lot of it included Jack’s training with the Greeks using the sword and the shield; their combat footage was used, however, and there’s clearly an inspiration from Miller’s art style.
  • They shifted the story a bit and allowed Jack to reveal to the Spartans that there was a secret, narrow path they could use to bring down the minotaur facility.
  • Each environment had a different color palette for daytime, dawn, nighttime, inside/outside, much like a feature film.
  • The scenes featuring a clash of the armies is also a nod to Sergei M. Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky.
  • Genndy talks about A, B, and C episodes: A stories get the most resources for animation while B stories get fewer resources, and C stories get fewer still. This was certainly an A episode.
  • Genndy talks about the difficulty in getting good effects done, but this episode has some fantastic explosions in it that he wished could be used on other episodes as well.

There are also fantastic "pitches" or walkthroughs of either an episode's storyboards or animatics. The Season 2 disc has an excellent pitch video featuring Mark Andrews walking through a story with the Scotsman, and the Season 5 disc has 5 episodic pitches in which Tartakovsky himself walks through the beats. It's nerdy fun for animation fans!

Genndy Tartakovsky

You might know quite a bit about Samurai Jack already, but the Complete Series features a few behind-the-scenes videos that fill in more of Tartakovsky's backstory and creation of the animated samurai. Here are a few tidbits from the Season 2 disc featurette, "Genndy's Scrapbook":

  • Born in January 1970 in Moscow to his dentist father a dentist and assistant principal mother, Tartakovsky was originally named Genna.
  • Along with his brother Alex, Genndy lived in Russia for eight years, but the country’s anti-semitism forced their Jewish family’s emigration. They first flew to Italy where they met another Russian family staying across the hall. Genndy was originally pretty bad at drawing but the daughter of that family was a budding artist named Movina (who is captured in some of Genndy’s early sketches); she taught him how to draw starting with basic shapes.
  • Their travels brought them to America where Genndy found a love for comic books at the local 7-11; it drew him into the comic book world and drawing for comics.
  • When the Tartakovsky boys were in their mid-teens, their father died; they moved to government-funded housing in Chicago. Genndy took on three jobs while still in high school in order to provide for the family.
  • Genndy went to Columbia College for advertising classes (his family was pushing him into business) but was too late and all the classes had filled up. He went into animation instead since that was the only class still open.
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    Image via Sony Pictures Animation
    His Columbia College Student Film (1991) is teased in this featurette. “It was a mess,” Genndy says. He credits his work ethic much more than his talent for his success and Barry Young, Genndy’s professor, shares stories of his student's motivation.
  • Arriving in CalArts on his animation ability, he found a way to increase his productivity on the advice of one of his instructors: Every object is a simple shape. Instead of drawing “muscles” he drew shapes that looked like muscles, and so on.
  • Craig McCracken talks about the cartoon camaraderie at CalArts, where Genndy was toying with a "Calvin and Hobbes" idea and was drawing a skinny cartoon ballerina girl that would become Deedee
  • “Changes”, his CalArts student film (1994), was the earliest version of Dexter’s Laboratory
  • After college, Genndy and Rob moved to Spain. Genndy got a job in the Batman: The Animated Series art department but their mother had cancer; Alex told Genndy about this when she was on her deathbed…
  • Paul Rudish at Hanna-Barbera brought Craig McCracken in as art director on 2 Stupid Dogs. Craig brought Genndy and Rob Renzetti in, and they worked out of a trailer in Hanna-Barbera’s lot, not in the actual studio.
  • Cartoon Network wanted to do a bunch of shorts/pilots to see what would stick; Genndy’s ‘Changes’ was pitched (poorly), but the team’s produced cartoon sold the story due to how well-executed the joke was; it took a while for the fame to catch up with Genndy, not until Dexter was nominated for an Emmy.
  • On the success of Dexter's Laboratory, Genndy pitched Samurai Jack to his boss Mike Lazzo over dinner; a highly stylized action show with simple stories and 15 mins of fighting. Lazzo agreed.

Trivia

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Image via Adult Swim, Cartoon Network Studios

There's a lot of general trivia about the making of and history of Samurai Jack throughout the bonus features. Here are some nuggets:

  • Tartakovsky complained about the lack of action in shows, so he wanted a samurai story with a future element and violence against robots.
  • There was no real writing team on the show; the stories were put together by the storyboard artists themselves.
  • Tartakovsky wanted to do a lot of fighting choreography to tell the story through action without much dialogue. To do that, they brought in actual martial artists like Eric Chen to choreograph actual movements and techniques.
  • Tartakovsky looked at 70s cinema (Andromeda Strain, The Longest Yard) for its split screens and visual storytelling, along with cinematic masters like Akira Kurosawa, black and white silent films, and movies as disparate as Akira, Citizen Kane, and Conan the Barbarian.
  • There's a gallery of never-before-seen sketches from the art team narrated by Tartakovsky, including different designs for the alien Bounty Hunters and a ton of unused characters created for the rave sequence. One of the bounty hunters was inspired in part by The Herculoids' Tundro and The Inhumans' Lockjaw. The ravers designs were inspired in part by a Japanese fashion magazine titled "Fruits."
  • Tartakovsky's plan, originally, was to take a break from Samurai Jack when he realized they wouldn't be renewed for another season. He planned to return to finish it in a few years, which is why Episode LII is just another episode. Years later, Tartakovsky finished the series properly with the dark, deep, and mature take on Samurai Jack in the fifth and final season.

If you're a fan of Samurai Jack, do yourself a favor and pick up the incredible Complete Series on Blu-ray now!

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Image via Adult Swim