Everything awesome is coming back! In an age of nostalgia-fueled resurgences of beloved TV properties, running the gamut from Mystery Science Theater 3000 to Full House, we have another beloved title that has the best chance of being just as good as it was. It was announced Wednesday morning that Cartoon Network will revive Samurai Jack for all new adventures in 2016.
The sparse press release proclaims that “Jack is Back” and will return to our screens in 2016, as part of Adult Swim’s Toonami block. Series creator and executive producer Genndy Tartakovsky is already hard at work producing a new season at Cartoon Network’s Los Angeles studios. What the press release lacked in verbiage, it more than made up in graphic awesomeness, as this poster can succinctly say.
If we clicked on the poster in the e-mail, we were taken to the video teaser above, which is basically just the same thing.
For the uninitiated, Samurai Jack was an action series which ran for four seasons between 2001 and 2004, comprising 52 individual episodes. The series followed a warrior from ancient Japan, who studied fighting all over the world in order to stop the supernatural evil of the malevolent wizard Aku. However, Aku flung the stoic hero into the far future, where Aku’s evil is law, and he spends his days walking the Earth, having adventures, helping people as he can, and hoping he can return to his own time to stop Aku’s evil before it starts.
The big thing with this reboot, over 10 years after it ended, is that Samurai Jack was canceled but the storyline itself never resolved. We still don’t know how and if Jack will defeat Aku, and by the looks of the poster and teaser, he has not gotten any less angry about it. Likewise, Aku is rightfully looking scared.
The series was an achievement in visual storytelling and art design, combining many different styles and genres into what is very possibly, along with Batman: The Animated Series, the finest American-produced action cartoon ever made. I recently finished the first season of the show for Samurai reJacked, where I review all 13 episodes of the show’s initial run. Naturally, this news has me very, very excited to see what happens next!
Tell me your thoughts about new Samurai Jack in the comments below!
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Image: Adult Swim
Kyle Anderson is a film and television critic for Nerdist.com. He also loves him some cartoons. Talk to him about your favorites on Twitter!
