I may write more on this over Xmas, haven’t quite decided yet. I may need to go back and watch some of it again to get my mind made up.
What I’ll mention today is the abiding thought that I had watching it the first time – it’s a failure.
A really good failure that may be one of the best shows of the decade, but a failure nonetheless. ShinichirÅ Watanabe obviously set out to combine hip hop with chanbara, and that first episode lays down an agenda in how it integrates elements of hip hop not just in the music, but in the visuals themselves. Most notably in the scratch cuts in the editing. Some people really hated those cuts at the time. These people are wrong.
However once he starts handing off episodes to individual directors, the hip hop element ebbs and flows to the point of being completely lost at points. It doesn’t hurt the actual quality of the episodes at all, but few live up to that first episode in terms of expressing the idea that Samurai Champloo was promising.