Samurai Champloo is one of the greatest works of Cowboy Bebop Creator Shinichiro Watanabe, brings a similar feel despite a completely different setting and musical tone. The series' initial inspiration came from a surprising place, but it actually fits perfectly with what Samurai Champloo eventually became.
Samurai Champloo follows the adventures of Fu, a young woman accompanied by two bodyguards, the bandit Mugen and the masterless samurai Jin, as she searches for a man known only as “the samurai who smells of sunflowers.” Set in the Edo period, Samurai Champloo incorporates many anachronistic elements into it, primarily in the form of rap and hip hop culture, which also shapes the series’ music. These elements combine to create a story that is as unique as its title. How Watanabe weaves these disparate elements together, and what drives him to do so in the first place, happens to be the perfect source material for the series.
Samurai Champloo was created by sampling
Watanabe's Inspired Musical Techniques Combine Samurai and Hip Hop
The title of the series refers to “chanpuru,” an Okinawan dish whose name means “something mixed,” referring to the variety of ingredients that can be used to create it. As it turns out, this idea of mixing things up was key to the series’ creation from the start. In an interview with Forbes, Shinichiro Watanabe commented on the series’ origins: “… I didn’t want to create something outdated, but instead take a new approach. I also felt that hip-hop and samurai might have some similarities.” In this, the important nature of hip-hop is sampling.. A musician can take old songs and use them as new music.”
The idea of sampling, or reusing segments of old material into a new song, was the starting point that Watanabe approached in creating Samurai Champloo. Watanabe talks about taking inspiration from old samurai films and essentially “sampling” scenes and ideas, combining them with modern things like hip hop and other Western influences to create something entirely new. The ideas of hip hop shape more than just the soundtrack; they are essential to its very creation. The series takes ideas from all eras and puts them into a new context, much like a sampled piece of music.
Elements like Mugen's break-dance inspired fighting style are mixed with more classic samurai ideas (mostly seen with Jin), so when the two of them fight, it's a fight scene unlike anything seen before. The series also takes historical figures, from baseball players to Andy Warhol, puts them in Edo-inspired settings, and sees what happens. The combination of elements allows Watanabe to tell unique stories that wouldn't have been possible if he had taken a more traditional approach to samurai media.
While Samurai Champloo Without actually sampling old works, the idea of sampling was enough to inspire Watanabe to develop a very unique idea, combining two seemingly very different elements together in a seamless way that few others could do.