How A Five-Minute Meeting Convinced Cartoon Network To Bring Back Samurai Jack
Genndy Tartakovsky's 2001 animated series "Samurai Jack" is probably one of the best of its era. The series boasted a peculiar and stoic tone, with the title hero (Phil LaMarr) staying quiet for vast blocks of the show. Samurai Jack was lost in the distant future, thanks to the sorcery of a tricky trickster god named Aku (Mako, then Greg Baldwin), and a lot of the series was devoted to Jack's exploration of strange, new alien settings. "Samurai Jack." also featured a unique, neo-cubist aesthetic; characters didn't have black-line outlines, and backgrounds were often abstract and blocky. Fans will also hasten to add the overwhelmingly awesome action of "Samurai Jack." If one is animating with blocky shapes and abstract backgrounds, the action can be just as stylized. The fight scenes on "Samurai Jack" are the stuff of legend.
"Samurai Jack" ran until 2004, and there had long been plans to adapt the series into a live-action feature film. Sadly, those plans fell through. In 2017, the series was revived for a fifth and final season, set 50 years after the last. Luckily, Jack cannot age thanks to Aku's time travel curse, although fighting Aku and his minions for decades has now left him destitute and crushed.
From 2004 until about 2015, Tartakovsky had moved to other projects. He was the showrunner of "Star Wars: Clone Wars," created the short-lived series "Sym-Bionic Titan," and directed both "Hotel Transylvania" and "Hotel Transylvania 2." As production was wrapping on the latter film, Tartakovsky reached out to Cartoon Network about the possibility of bringing "Samurai Jack" back. According to a 2017 article in Rolling Stone, the revival was almost immediately given a thumbs-up.
The easiest answer
Rob Sorcher was the head of Cartoon Network at the time, and when Tartakovsky called him, Sorcher immediately began making calls. Sorcher put Tartakovsky in contact with Adult Swim. "Samurai Jack" might not have had an open spot on its schedule for "Samurai Jack," but Adult Swim certainly did. Rolling Stone talked with Jason DeMarco, the vice president and on-air creative director at Adult Swim. DeMarco was quoted as saying:
"Making the decision to bring it back was one of the easiest yes answers [we have ever] given a show creator. [...] A phone call from Genndy saying, 'What if I finished the story of Samurai Jack?,' followed by about five minutes of everyone nodding our heads enthusiastically. Genndy is a genius, and 'Jack' was a great show. Bringing it back made all the sense in the world."
Tartakovsky might be credited for giving the Cartoon Network a firm foundation that allowed it to thrive in the 1990s. Cartoon Network was founded in 1992, but began to forge an identity a few years later with the release of Tartakovsky's "Dexter's Laboratory," which debuted next to "Cow and Chicken," "Johnny Bravo," and Craig McCracken's "The Powerpuff Girls," which Tartakovsky worked extensively on. Thanks to the success of "Dexter's" and "Powerpuff," Tartakovsky became a major celebrity in the animation world, and the Cartoon Network took off in earnest.
Luckily, the executives all remembered his contributions and were eager to help with the creator's projects. When the call came to revive "Samurai Jack," there were no questions. Since the fifth season of "Samurai Jack," Tartakovsky has created the caveman series "Primal" and "Unicorn: Warriors Eternal." Tartakovsky's R-rated dog comedy film "Fixed" still had no release dat as of this writing.