“Undo the future that is Aku!” That is the whole engine of Samurai Jack, and it has been running for 25 years. Genndy Tartakovsky’s animated science fantasy series aired on Cartoon Network and later on its nighttime block Adult Swim, across five seasons and 60 episodes. It premiered on August 10, 2001, and ended on May 20, 2017. The premise never needed a rewrite, only a warrior stubborn enough to keep walking toward a door that keeps closing.
Trailer, via Adult Swim.
A Prince, a Katana, and the Demon Aku
The story starts in feudal Japan. An unnamed young prince is the son of the emperor, who once defeated and imprisoned the shapeshifting demon Aku with a magical katana given to him by a trinity of gods: Ra, Rama and Odin. Eight years later, Aku breaks free, takes the land and holds the emperor hostage. The prince’s mother sends him away to train around the world so he can return with the magic sword.
He comes back and nearly kills Aku. Before the final blow lands, the demon exiles him to the distant future. The plan is simple: by then, Aku figures, the samurai will be someone else’s problem. It is the cleanest villain logic on television, and it sets up the show’s real subject — a man stranded in a world he was supposed to prevent.
Jack Only Has a Kimono, Geta and a Sword
The future is a retrofuturistic dystopia where Aku rules supreme. The first people the samurai meets call him “Jack” as a form of slang, and he takes the name. His given name is never revealed. He carries his kimono, his geta and his sword. That is the inventory.
The setting around him is a patchwork. Besides humans, the world holds:
- robots, extraterrestrials, anthropomorphic animals, monsters, magical beings and deities
- flying cars in some areas, and conditions resembling ancient or industrial times in others
- aliens Aku brought to Earth after destroying the habitability of their home worlds
- criminals, fugitives and bounty hunters who hunt Jack for a cash reward
- mythological and supernatural creatures living among the technologically advanced
Forests, jungles and mountains remain largely untouched. A few communities, like the Shaolin monks, have been left mostly alone. It is a world with a ruler and no order, and the show treats that as a visual gift rather than a puzzle to solve.
Phil LaMarr Gives Jack Almost Nothing to Say
Phil LaMarr voices Jack. Greg Baldwin voices Aku. Tara Strong voices Ashi, and Grey DeLisle voices the High Priestess. The cast list is short for a 60-episode run, and that is the point: the series leans on LaMarr to hold a face still while everything moves around it.
Most episodes follow one shape. Jack meets an obstacle, overcomes it, and moves on. His quest is prolonged by near-misses in both directions — moments where he almost gets home, or where Aku almost finishes him, undone by something unexpected. Tartakovsky built the show after finishing Dexter’s Laboratory, which premiered in 1996. He drew on the 1972 televised drama Kung Fu, starring David Carradine, on his interest in historic samurai culture in Japan, and on Frank Miller’s comic series Ronin.
That mix explains the show’s patience. It is not a plot machine. It is a series of rooms, each one designed to test the same man.
“undo the future that is Aku!”
The Near-Miss Is the Whole Design
Here is what makes Samurai Jack work, and it is not the sword. The sword cuts through virtually anything. The sword is not the problem. The problem is that the way home always ends up just out of reach, and the show commits to that frustration for years.
A lesser series would have let Jack win early and then invented new stakes. This one refuses. The near-misses are not filler; they are the structure. Every time Jack gets close, the audience learns the same lesson he does — that Aku’s future is not a place Jack can leave, it is a place Jack has to break. That is a harder story to tell, and it is why the ending carries weight.
The world-building does the rest. Aku has destroyed other planets and dragged their survivors to Earth. Bounty hunters work for cash. Monsters and deities share sidewalks with flying cars. None of it is explained at length, and none of it needs to be. The show trusts the viewer to read a dystopia from its traffic.
What the Show Gets Right, and What It Costs
The cost is repetition. Sixty episodes of obstacles, with a hero who barely speaks and a villain who does most of the talking, will test any viewer’s patience. Some stretches of Samurai Jack are more atmosphere than story, and the show’s love of a long silent walk can read as a stall. That is the trade for a series that never cheapens its central ache.
What it gets right is harder to fake. LaMarr plays a man who lost a kingdom and whose father was taken hostage, and he plays it without speeches. Baldwin’s Aku is a tyrant, and the design work moves between eras and species. The action stays legible even when the world does not.
The published critical score for Samurai Jack is 9.3/10, with a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating. That is the right neighborhood. This is one of the few animated action series from its era that improved as it got older, and the 2017 ending gave it something most cartoons never get: a finished sentence.
The part worth watching is not the swordplay. It is the discipline. Tartakovsky built a show about a man who cannot go home and then refused, for the life of the series, to hand him a shortcut. That restraint is the reason Samurai Jack still holds up, and the reason its best episodes feel less like cartoons than like fables with a body count.
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