Popped, locked, and loose.

The presentation for Samurai Champloo couldn’t be any cooler if it tried. The packaging is littered with awesome illustrations that are heavily influenced with modern hip-hop and street culture (such as the use of graffiti) that blends almost seamlessly with old Ukyo-e style illustration of the period the show is set in. Each slim DVD case is clear and the inner jackets all have a different interview with a core member of the Champloo staff, including the great director Shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop) himself. The music scores for the show are completely hip-hop oriented and influenced, with very few exceptions, leaving you really tapping your foot and bobbing your head to every episode. The art style of the show itself is absolutely fantastic with beautiful and often scenic backdrops and sleekly stylized character designs. The DVD menus are very artistic, play an awesome head-bobbing tune, and play brief scenes from the episodes on the disc. The vocal tracks are superb in both English and the original Japanese, but I really found myself listening more to the English vocal cast because voice talents such as Steven Blum really make the characters more relatable and alive to me.

Bustin’ loose.

It’s a pretty confident statement to say that Samrai Champloo has a plethora of extra content that isn’t often seen in anime boxed sets these days. Once upon a time, boxed sets use to be all about extra goodies and even merchandise to entice consumers to pay the hefty price to collect an entire boxed set rather than buy DVDs individually. But the world turned, and it became a safer fiscal decision to just get entire shows into the hands of patrons rather than spend even more money to produce a lot of extra features people may or may not care about. Samrai Champloo attempts to revive those bygone days of fandom in the west with every disc of the set having several extra features. Each disc in the set comes with several Geneon trailers as well as DVD credits for the staff and cast, all the stuff that’s par for course. Most of the discs have art galleries that include line art and concept work for the characters, sub characters, and even weapons. There’s even a gallery of the eyecatches from the show. (Eyecatches are those quick blips of artwork or animation in between an anime episode to segue to and from commercial breaks.) There are trailers for the Samurai Champloo videogame and several different promotional videos for the show. The best extra content, by far, seems to be the staff essays included in the packaging of the DVD jackets, though—it’s always fun to see all the creative minds behind a good show. Really, the extra content for Champloo couldn’t get better unless they added merchandise to the box.

Into the sunset they go forth.

At the end of the day, Samurai Champloo breaks all the barriers of modern pop cultures and Meiji-era drama. There’s enough whirling sword slinging to make a dervish blush, a fairly cohesive underlying plot that doesn’t force itself down your throat, a bit of romance, and a soundtrack every bit as desirable to have as the show itself. Champloo can’t really be compared to any other series for reference because it doesn’t take itself seriously the way traditional samurai shows might, and yet it’s not entirely silly or unrealistic like a typical comedy. It stands alone as a shining example of anime that transcends genre and, like its creator’s predecessor Cowboy Bebop, is worth every dollar and every moment spent watching it.