Two Decades and the Battlecry Still Echoes: Celebrating ‘Samurai Champloo’

Let me set the stage accordingly. It was 2014, and this was still a time where anime wasn’t as readily available via conventional means. Crunchyroll hadn’t quite become a staple in the application library, and Funimation was two years out from existing (rest in peace to the superior application). My anime knowledge pretty much started and stopped at whatever was airing on Adult Swim during middle school and high school, so when I asked my friend in undergrad to get me up to speed, he handed me a USB drive as was the tradition. This USB drive contained many animes. Angel Beats and Gurren Lagann being the main impetus for update of the knowledge, but it also contained the original Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, and crucially Samurai Champloo. For whatever reason, I was in much more of a swordplay anime mood back in 2014, and thus I watched Samurai Champloo and its miraculous twenty six episode run.

And in the intervening decade, I of course have partaken in the other Shinichirō Wantanbe entries in the impressive catalog. And one of the things that I keep coming back to is that Cowboy Bebop is in fact a masterpiece. It’s an anime that I’d recommend without hesitation to someone who wants to get into the genre, a distinction only really shared with Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood. It is an expertly crafted story with a banging theme song, one of the best English dubs to have ever dubbed an anime, and just a riveting charac…