Friday, April 15, 2005

Samurai MC
Samurai Champloo airs on Cartoon Network (Adult Swim) Saturday May 14th at 11:00pm.

I watched two more episodes (fansubs) last night, which filled in backstory on one of the main characters. Very cool.

Samurai culture is pretty popular and glamorized (why not) in a lot of books movies and anime. Its hard to think of Japan without thinking about ancient samurai and swords etc. I'm a bit of a nerd for it myself.

Lone Wolf and Cub (manga) is one of the best "samurai" interpretations. Its a beast of a series though at about 28 or so volumes at $10 a pop. I read it all from the library and in Borders, and only own issue #1.

Blade of the Immortal is my favorite comic by far. Its a great story, broken up by multi-issue spanning battles which are extremely bloody and nasty. It doesn't hurt that the protagonist Manji is immortal and can lose limbs and keep on fighting. A lot of the swordfighting is realistic, but the characters have pretty unrealistic abilities. No fireballs or any cheese like that, but some unlucky fools have been turned into not much more than blood and chunks.

Champloo fits in quite nicely too. Its not trying to be historically accurate, but rather starts with a realistic Edo era Japan and infuses it with modern culture seemlessly. There's one standout episode where this goofy movie star wannabe samurai runs with a crew that includes a human beat box. Has to be one of the best anime episodes ever.

I was also a big fan of the Playstation Bushido Blade games. It was basically a fighting game with a variety of fighters and about 10 weapons to choose from. It was unique in that you could kill your opponent in one good slice. It made for pretty realistic fighting, except that you could break arms, but only one. Also in the second game you couldn't do leg damage for some reason, so leg hits will knock you down but not keep you down. I don't know why they took it out of the sequel, it was gratifying to win against a standing opponent.

Samurai Movies tend to be a little disappointing. There usually isn't enough action, or the fight scenes are not well choreographed. Seven Samurai is a good movie that avoids those pitfalls, except that it is like four hours long. I watched it once, but probably never again unless someone buys it for me and I can watch it in segments. Yojimbo was good (not great), Way of the Samurai (Tom Cruise) was fun even though it was too much like another Braveheart copy. I didn't like how the one American turned out to be nearly the best samurai in the whole movie either. I don't care much about that stuff while actually watching it though, so its still a good movie.
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