25 Years Ago, Samurai Jack Was The Closest We Got To Adapting Frank Miller’s Best Work
Gotta get back, back to the past!
If you were to ask any Frank Miller fan what Miller’s best work is, there are a number of highly plausible answers. Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns are excellent takes on the World’s Greatest Detective. Daredevil: Born Again is a masterfully gritty journey for the Man Without Fear. Sin City is a fantastic blood-drenched noir series. While these are all masterful works in the comic medium, his best, most original, and most unique work is the six-issue Ronin, an era-spanning text so mind-bending that several attempts to adapt it have fizzled out or become stuck in development hell. We’ve probably already received as close to an adaptation as we’ll ever get, and it’s all thanks to animation legend Genndy Tartakovsky’s excellent Samurai Jack.
Miller’s Ronin ran from July 1983 to August 1984. It’s set in a dystopian New York, where a telekinetic named Billy finds himself plagued by dreams of a ronin at war with the shapeshifting demon Agat in feudal Japan. When Agat seems to emerge in this post-apocalyptic future, the samurai’s cursed spirit possesses Billy in order to finish the demon with its own magical sword (complete with sci-fi elements that make the tale more complicated in ways I can’t note without spoilers). Following his debut film Pi, Darren Aronofsky was slated to direct an adaptation of the series for New Line Cinema back in July 1998. It was never made, and Aronofsky left the project to make Requiem for a Dream.
But a few years before this failed attempt at adaptation, Genndy Tartakovsky gained considerable popular and critical praise for his creation of the sci-fi animated comedy Dexter’s Laboratory in 1996, its original run ending on June 15, 1998. Between 1998 and 2001, he directed many episodes of The Powerpuff Girls before the creation of his next series, Samurai Jack.
Jack centers on an unnamed prince in feudal Japan (voiced by Phil LaMarr) whose father was gifted a magic katana that could be used against the shapeshifting demon Aku (voiced by Mako in Seasons 1-4 and Greg Baldwin in Season 5). Aku was freed eight years after his imprisonment; the prince was sent away to train, and Aku conquered the land. Upon his return, the prince nearly defeated the demon before Aku sent him into the future, a retrofuturistic dystopia that Aku rules with an iron fist. “Jack” (as he is called in the future) has to find a way to finally defeat the demon, and ideally return to his original time.
The similarities between Samurai Jack and Ronin are fairly easy to see. Initially unnamed samurai protagonist with a magic sword? Check. A shapeshifting demon nemesis with a name beginning with ‘A’? Check. The samurai gets displaced in time and has to fight and defeat the demon hundreds of years later in a dystopian future full of mutants? Also check. Miller’s comic run also features unique sci-fi elements and a twist that clearly differentiate the two, but there’s more than a face-value resemblance between them.
Tartakovsky’s initial inspiration for what became Jack began in a recurring dream since he was 10 about a post-apocalyptic world overrun by mutants, and fighting them with a katana. The idea inspired Tartakovsky when he wanted a series that differed from his prior work. Jack was born, an idea filled out by the classic series Kung Fu and Miller’s magnum opus, Ronin, amidst a smattering of other influences.
Samurai Jack is the closest we’ll get to an adaptation of Miller’s Ronin.
Jack was a wildly successful series, winning a number of Emmys and Annie Awards over its five-season run. While that popularity speaks to the viability of its creative kinship with Ronin, it also may have spelled doom for official adaptations. Following Aronofsky’s axed attempt to take on the property and Tartakovsky’s beloved spiritual sibling, other official attempts to adapt Ronin followed. In 2007, Sylvain White (Stomp the Yard) was similarly attached to the adaptation for years, but it never materialized. Fast forward to 2014, and the trades announced that Syfy would be pursuing a miniseries adaptation that never made it to fruition.
Samurai Jack combined conceptual inspiration from Frank Miller’s magnum opus with other inspirations and Tartakovsky’s brilliant imagination to create a fantastic animated series. Its somewhat shared conceptual core with Ronin showcases the limitless possibilities of these ideas for worldbuilding and memorable set-pieces that stand the test of time. At the same time, Jack is a simpler and more digestible version. It kept the action-oriented elements of Ronin while toning down some of the adult themes and violence that often populate Miller’s oeuvre. At the same time, Tartakovsky builds a more streamlined tale, omitting a handful of brilliant but difficult-to-translate twists in Ronin’s premise.
Unfortunately for the Frank Miller classic, the success of Jack also makes a Ronin adaptation harder to pull off. It would already be a difficult project to land, thanks to complex plotting and an adult-oriented narrative that sets it apart from the comic book films many are used to. It’s hard to say why so many Ronin adaptations failed to manifest, but one thing’s for sure: unavoidable comparison with a beloved, very similar, animated masterwork puts a formal Ronin adaptation in an unenviable spot. An official Ronin adaptation might never see the light of day, but at least we have Samurai Jack.
