5/5 Highly Recommended for Non-Anime Fans, Too
  by Whesandra
Samurai Champloo is a wonderful series, certainly the best anime I have ever had the pleasure of watching and is, indeed, one of the best series I've watched in any animated or filmed medium. As a person who isn't a regular anime viewer, I find this show to be very accessible and enjoyable even to people who aren't familiar with the medium.

The animation is smooth, clean, and fluid, more so than one often finds in anime, and the action is fast-paced and well-choreographed, always interesting to watch and never interrupted by lengthy dialogue. It's easy to tell that the artists worked very hard to create visually interesting and pleasing characters and settings. The animation in every single scene is infused with a sense of care and precision that is never lazy or sloppy. The level of detail ranges scene-to-scene from strikingly intricate to beautifully minimalistic, and yet the two styles blend together so well that neither ever seems out of place. Overall, the visuals are very artistic and colorful, be they contemporary graffiti art murals or traditional Japanese landscapes.

The hip hop themes and other anachronisms seem completely compatible with the old-world samurai setting, as well. The tone of the series, overall, is edgy and contemporary, and no fuss is made about what is and isn't accurate to history, so meeting characters with bleached blond hair, wearing Ray Bans, and beat boxing doesn't come across as all that outlandish.

The music is profoundly eclectic and always enjoyable. There's hip hop, of course, opening and closing nearly every episode as well as underscoring quite a few scenes, but mixed in is also a fine selection of more traditional tunes including hauntingly subdued Japanese folk songs.

And, for the pleasure of the scholars and poets in the audience, the series is packed with metaphors, symbols, motifs, and other references that add a deliciously deeper level of meaning to the goings-on in the characters' lives. Watching the series once will satisfy anyone interested in the plot, but watching it over again in order to excavate and research the references would be well worth the effort. (An excellent and highly-recommended companion to the anime is the Samurai Champloo Roman Album, full of cultural and historical notes as well as information about what inspired the series. Roman Album: Samurai Champloo)

As for this boxed set itself, it's a very nice collection, compact, clean, and handsome-looking on a shelf. Each of the seven discs is labeled and numbered according to its order in the series, and each disc comes in its own ultra-thin case. Each case, furthermore, sports its own unique collage of Samurai Champloo art on the front cover and the disc's episode listings and screen grabs on the back cover. Plus, printed on the reverse side of each case's cover are interviews with many of the show's creators which offer perspectives on different elements of the series' creation, including script writing, music recording, character design, and series direction. All of this is packaged neatly inside a glossy black cardboard box bearing the title of the series and an image of each of the three main characters.

The series has been dubbed in English and will play automatically on this setting, but I recommend going into the setup menu and enabling the original Japanese voices with English subtitles. The series is so steeped in rich Japanese culture and the Japanese actors are so superb that watching the episodes in English seems silly. In fact, the English dubs may even dull the clarity of an otherwise finely-crafted piece of art.

(Note that this collection provides audio in both Japanese and English, but subtitles only in English.)

5/5 Great series... well worth getting
  by Paul O
WOW... I dont think I can say enough good things about this series.
If you are a fan of anime, then just get this... you wont be disappointed.
My favorite episode, hands down, is#23 Baseball Blues on Volume 6

5/5 Samurai fighting to hip-hop music? Cool.
  by lain4ever (Los Angeles, CA)
It's hard to take "Samurai Champloo" too seriously. The series features a breakdancing samurai, hip-hop music, beatboxing and rapping.

But "Samurai Champloo" is a masterpiece in light comedy, action and even a compelling story involving a daughter of a samurai who smells of sunflowers.

As the two samurai heroes say in episode two, there's something silly about a samurai who smells of sunflowers. However, this series truly shows off some of the best battles ever seen in an anime, embellished with the gorgeous environment of ancient Japan. There's a wide variety of stories, from a complex episode about a dying mother, an episode about the origins of Japanese manga and even an episode about a traveling geisha.

There's just one catch--the series is chock full of hip-hop references. Episode 8 alone is a goofy comedy tidbit about a samurai traveling the world with a beatboxing companion. Episode 16 features three samurai travelers rapping rumors they've heard on the road. Episode 18 gives us a closer look at the dangerous life of taggers in ancient Japan.

Okay, maybe this isn't the most realistic period piece series ever made. However, this series has so much fun with blending hip-hop, Christian missionaries and samurai fighting together that one can't resist loving this series.

It's no surprise that this is one of the most accessible action anime series around. Director Shinichiro Watanabe, responsible for the excellent series "Cowboy Bebop," has a flair for creating some of the slickest battle sequences ever made. His storylines might be more simplistic than, say, "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex." However, this is exactly why American audiences enjoy his anime series the most. They are simple stories of men who fight for something they care for.

There's no better time to buy the box set of "Samurai Champloo." The box set is $30 cheaper than the Geneon set, so anime fans have to get this collection. Hands down, this is one of my absolute favorites.

5/5 "...the mental blade cut through flesh and bone..."
  by Antonio Peace
Ok so the "...sharp like the an edge of a samurai sword..." title was already taken! This is one of my favorite animes period, its the perfect blend of action, drama, comedy, and hip-hop! Mugen is hilarious, Jin is real mello and Fuu, well Fuu is Fuu! This is one of those animes thats a must own must see. I also recommend a soundtrack of some sort theres several to choose from 'cause the music in this show is pretty fresh, I own Samurai Champloo Music Record Katana. So while you enjoy the show just remember, "...though my mind's at peace, the worlds out of order, missing the inner heat, life gets colder..."!

5/5 a samurai period piece... and hip hop
  by H. Bala (Carson - hey, we have an IKEA store! - CA USA)
Mugen is a cocky, rebellious, bandy-legged fighter who incorporates break-dancing techniques into his unorthodox fighting style. Jin is more your typically calm and stoic samurai (or ronin, to be more precise), steeped in martial tradition, who finds satisfaction in the perfect execution of his warrior craft. Mugen and Jin aren't friends - in fact, they are contentious and want to test their skills against each other - yet they find themselves joining forces, thanks to Fuu, an insistent and kinda quirky waitress who inveigles the two into helping her search for the Samurai Who Smells Like Sunflowers. For 26 episodes, the discordant trio undergo many adventures, some serious, some hilarious, some just plain out weird. The only constants are the bickerings amongst the three, the scrounging for food, and the intrusion of modern day sensibilities. Oh, and the rampant butt kicking as done by Mugen and Jin.

On the heels of his popular Cowboy Bebop anime series, Shinichiro Watanabe decided to put a new spin on the samurai anime with his irreverent, hip Samurai Shamploo. Shamploo means "stir fry" or a mix, and this is certainly what this series is about, as it fuses the traditional samurai credo and decorum with the unexpected modern day incursions of hip hop attitudes, beatboxing, street tagging, and baseball. The episodes are supported by cool Japanese hip hop music soundtracks and blazing hip hop scratches for scene segues. Watanabe also makes beautiful use of visual metaphors, thereby adding more depth to the shenanigans. The ripping animation and dynamically constructed fight scenes are guaranteed not to disappoint.

Kudos, too, to the voice actors, especially Steven Jay Blum (aka Daniel Andrews, who also voiced Cowboy Bebop's Spike) as the bestial Mugen. Kirk Thornton as Jin and Kari Wahlgren as Fuu are both excellent. The voice actor for the sometimes series narrator Policeman Sakami Manzou ("the Saw") is also very good.

These episodes are definitely rated PG-13. This anime series doesn't hesitate to throw in scenes of drug use and graphic violence. Some episodes even contain mild sexual scenes.

My favorite episodes are "The Art of Altercation" (for the rapping samurai and his beatbox backup), the atmospheric "Cosmic Collisions" (where the trio fight the undead), the hilarious "Baseball Blues" (where the American pitcher couldn't find the strike zone with the dog at bat, and he ends up inadvertently hitting the mutt - not to worry, no animated dogs were hurt in the making of this anime), and the concluding 3-episode arc "Evanescent Encounter" (where Mugen and Jin are challenged to their very limits, resolve their rivalry, and Fuu at last catches up to the Sunflower Samurai).

Here are the 26 episodes (American titles first, with the original Japanese titles in parenthesis):

- "Tempestuous Temperaments" ("Storm and Stress") Episode 1
- "Redeye Reprisal" ("Veritable Pandemonium") Episode 2
- "Hellhounds for Hire" Parts One & Two ("Tacit Understanding") Episode 3-4
- "Artistic Anarchy" ("Utter Indifference") Episode 5
- "Stranger Searching" ("RedHeaded Foreigner") Episode 6
- "A Risky Racket" ("Surrounded on All Sides") Episode 7
- "The Art of Altercation" ("Self-Conceit") Episode 8
- "Beatbox Bandits" ("Evil Spirits") Episode 9
- "Lethal Lunacy" ("Fighting Fire with Fire") Episode 10
- "Gamblers and Gallantry" ("Fallen Angels") Episode 11
- "The Disorder Diaries" ("Learning from the Past") Episode 12
- "Misguided Miscreants" Parts One & Two ("Dark Night's Road") Episode 13-14
- "Bogus Booty" ("Through and Through") Episode 15
- "Lullabies of the Lost" Verses One & Two ("Idling One's Life Away") Episode 16-17
- "War of the Words" ("Pen in One Hand, Sword in the Other") Episode 18
- "Unholy Union" ("Karma and Retribution") Episode 19
- "Elegy of Entrapment" Verses One & Two ("Generous Elegy") Episode 20-21
- "Cosmic Collisions" ("Anger Shot Toward Heaven") Episode 22
- "Baseball Blues" ("Heart and Soul into the Ball") Episode 23
- "Evanescent Encounter" Parts One - Three ("Circle of Transmigration") Episode 24-26