Samurai Jack is an animated television show, created by Genndy Tartakovsky, that airs on Cartoon Network. It tells the story of a prince from the medieval orient, whose father's empire is destroyed by Aku (Japanese 悪 "evil"), a demon who had previously been defeated by the emperor. The prince escapes and begins years of training, culminating with him receiving his father's magic sword, among the few weapons capable of injuring the demon. After freeing his enslaved father, he challenges Aku to a duel and nearly beats him; however, near death, Aku creates a portal into the distant future and sends the prince through it, anticipating that he would be able to amass sufficient power to deal with the prince by then.

The protagonist arrives in a hostile, lawless, futuristic Earth, ruled by Aku and filled with his minions and robots. He adopts the nickname of 'Jack' (his real name is never mentioned) and begins his search to find a way to travel back to his own time, in order to kill Aku before he obtained power.

Samurai Jack is notable for its highly detailed, outline-free, masking-based animation style and also for its pacing, unusual for today's cartoons: the plot is frequently stopped to allow for the building of tension before combat or for the sake of humor. It is not uncommon for episodes to be almost entirely free of dialogue. Many of the battle scenes in the series are gruesome and reminiscent of several samurai movies, but allowed by the censors since his opponents, being machines, 'bleed' oil.

Minorly notable to most and majorly notable to some is how, in a fair number of episodes, Jack's exterior clothes are either taken off or are gradually ripped off, usually in battle. Because of this, the sight of Jack in his underwear is just as well-known to regular viewers of the show as the sight of Jack in his full uniform. There is in fact a fair deal of exposed skin in the show, though it's done tastefully and in such a way that most children can watch the show. Many viewers (mostly women and gay men) regard Jack in his underwear as recurring fan service, evidenced by the focuses of some of the fan websites operated by older viewers.

Samurai Jack won the Emmy Award for Best Animated Television Series in 2004.

This show was abruptly taken off the air, with no explanation, by Cartoon Network, but is still not officially cancelled.

External links

• Cartoon Network | Samurai Jack
• Samurai Jack at the Big Cartoon DataBase
• Google SafeSearch - Samurai Jack
• Google SafeSearch - Samurai Jack Fan