Samurai Champloo (DVD Box Set)

I remember watching Samurai Champloo pretty much as it aired on Japanese TV back in 2004-2005. At the time, there were three different "fan sub" groups who worked feverishly to rip, translate and upload the episodes as they came out ... often they would only be a week behind the Japanese air date, and yet most of the translations did not appear rushed and were good quality, even incorporating explanations for Japanese cultural and historical references that would be obscure to Western viewers.

It wouldn't be until about a year later that an official English dub would be produced, and the series would be aired on Cartoon Network in America. It seemed to generate a decent following over here, but nowhere near the smash hit levels that director Shinchiro Watanabe's previous effort Cowboy Bebop reached, and was pretty quickly relegated to the depths of the Adult Swim lineup airing at around 2 or 3 A.M. in most places.

I think a big reason for that is the English voice acting. They decided to go with a "generic comic anime" tone, that really just didn't suit the show. And having Steven Blum, who voiced Cowboy Bebob's Spike Speigel, do the voice of main character Mugen here, was a distraction given the similarity of the character's appearances combined with the voice. The English version is also censored as compared to the original Japanese releases, particularly in terms of language.

So the DVD box set is good, because you can go back to the original Japanese voice acting along with subtitles. I'm not one of those Japanophile proponents of everything being better in the original Japanese - I really thought Cowboy Bebop's English voice acting was better - but in this particular case it really makes a difference.

Lord knows there's a whole lot more bad Japanese animation than good, especially in the stuff released in the last ten years or so, since it's become "mainstream" in the rest of the world. While Champloo isn't as thoroughly awesome as Bebop, it is still very good and still representative of the better examples of the medium. And they've dropped the price of the full box set, non-pirated, to $37 now ... for seven discs spanning 26 episodes with bonus materials, that is really not bad at all.