What Samurai Jack taught me

Know what was a good show? Samurai Jack. I miss Samurai Jack. If you've never seen it, Samurai Jack was a show on Cartoon Network back when it showed cartoons, about a martial arts genius who was sent into the future just before he was about to kill the evil Mako Aku, and now either has to kill Aku or find a portal back to his own time so he can kill Aku in the past.

I was watching season 4 the other day and thinking about how amazing it is they managed to tell so much story without a lot of dialogue. Genndy Tartakovsky, the show's creator and also the creator of Dexter's Laboratory and the only Star Wars Clone Wars to be actually good, said he liked action scenes so he wrote a show about action scenes. He didn't want to load the show up with lots of unnecessary dialogue. Action scenes are awesome, so let's have an entire show full of action scenes.

There's definitely something to that. A lot of times I read amateur scripts where people talk. And talk and talk and talk and talk. They talk about their feelings and their desires and their fears and all the things they're thinking. In reality they should just have their characters work out their angst with a sword fight.

Samurai Jack taught me that. Sword fights for everybody.