Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
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“If you want to have a dinner to express gratitude with friends and family, like, I’m all for it… But I would maybe ask that we take some time to remember the atrocities that were committed against my people. And that you make that marshmallow yam thing.”
—Sasappis, a Lenape ghost played by Román Zaragoza (who is of Native American, Mexican, Japanese, and Taiwanese descent), discussing how he feels about Thanksgiving, from Ghosts’s recent Thanksgiving episode
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Someone on Redbubble is selling socks emblazoned with the white triangle that’s on the back of Mugen’s red haori, which was Samurai Champloo’s reference to the triangle that represents Kikuchiyo, Toshiro Mifune’s wannabe samurai character and an orphan just like Mugen, on the flag in Seven Samurai.
Aw, yeah, I just received the socks! I’m wearing them as I write this sentence.
Every Original TV Score Selection of the Week this month has been a hip-hop instrumental that was composed for Champloo because it’s New Dimension November. I named the series of posts after “New Dimension,” one of many instrumental joints Force of Nature composed for Champloo, which was referred to as a ’90s anime in the Couch Avocados comments section a few weeks ago. [Angry Steve Blum voice from Champloo’s English dub.] The show is not from the ’90s!
Champloo first aired in 2004 on Fuji TV, which canceled the show after Champloo’s 17th episode. Yep, like what Star Trek: Prodigy went through in 2023, the Shinichiro Watanabe show, the first show from the now-defunct Manglobe studio, was given the axe, and another platform picked it up. Champloo finished off the rest of its run on BS Fuji in 2005, and its first BS Fuji episode happened to be one of my favorite Champloo episodes, “Bunburyōdō (Pen in One Hand, Sword in the Other),” a.k.a. the graffiti contest episode.
“Bunburyōdō,” a.k.a. “War of the Words,” was written by Dai Satō. He later wrote both Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine’s “The Lady and the Samurai,” the 2012 episode about the first time Fujiko met Goemon (Lupin’s samurai partner-in-crime), and 2014’s “Even Vacuum Cleaners Fall in Love, Baby,” one of my favorite episodes of Watanabe’s Space Dandy.
The final Original TV Score Selection of the Week for New Dimension November—right smack dab on the day when Sasappis, like many other Native Americans, has mixed feelings about what the day stands for while he, according to one of my favorite lines from “Planes, Shanes, and Automobiles,” craves the annual smell of marshmallow yams—is Nujabes’s “Counting Stars.” The Nujabes instrumental has nothing to do with Thanksgiving. But it’s the perfect final instrumental for New Dimension November because it’s one of my favorite Nujabes tracks from Champloo.
“Counting Stars,” which sampled both José Feliciano’s “Affirmation” and Frank Sinatra’s cover of “It Could Happen to You,” surfaced at the end of the 2004 Champloo episode “Daraku tenshi (Fallen Angel)” (retitled “Gamblers and Gallantry” for English-speaking countries). That episode was Champloo’s 11th episode, as well as its most romantic one: Jin, an emotionless ronin, reveals a new side of himself when he falls for an unemployed but talented eel chef who is forced to work at a brothel to pay off her abusive husband’s gambling debts.
Satō didn’t write “Daraku tenshi” (Seiko Takagi did), but the conclusion of its love story is bittersweet, just like the conclusion of the love story in Satō’s “Even Vacuum Cleaners Fall in Love, Baby.” “Counting Stars” is the soothing instrumental that plays during that conclusion.
The Champloo in the show’s title refers to “chanpuru,” the Okinawan word for a stir-fry dish (like goya chanpuru, a bitter melon stir fry). Samurai Champloo is a fitting title for the show because it’s set in an Edo-era Japan that was spiced up by hip-hop culture—even though the culture never existed until the 1970s in the South Bronx.
Like chanpuru dishes, several of the hip-hop instrumentals Nujabes, Force of Nature, Tsutchie, and Fat Jon composed for Champloo are mixtures of disparate elements. The instrumentals range from badass battle music (Force of Nature’s “Sneak Chamber”) to mellow lo-fi beats. “Counting Stars” is one of the more mellow Champloo instrumentals, but what I especially love about it is that it makes my head bounce. It has the same vibe as Slum Village’s “Fall in Love,” which also never fails to make my head bounce. (Not released until 2000, “Fall in Love” was produced in 1998 by J Dilla, who died way too young and was responsible for several of the greatest sample flips ever, just like the late Nujabes. One of those legendary sample flips was, of course, Dilla’s transformation of 1968’s “Diana in the Autumn Wind” by Gap Mangione, the brother of the late Chuck Mangione, into the backbone of “Fall in Love.”)
Today’s prompt is: Because the word “stars” is in the track title, which canceled Starz original show do you wish was brought back to life just like Party Down, one of Starz’s most beloved earlier shows, was a couple of years ago?
Were you a fan of Starz’s short-lived TV version of Blindspotting, which I never watched? (I kind of feel bad about never watching it because I grew up in the Bay Area, and I’m a big proponent of shows like A Man on the Inside that do extensive location shooting in the Bay, although I’m from the South Bay, not Oakland, which was where Blindspotting was filmed.) Or do you think Jonathan E. Steinberg (whose writing I remember from Human Target’s first and only good season, which he showran) should be given the chance to bring back his Starz show Black Sails?
Alan Sepinwall was often trying to get viewers to watch Starz’s Survivor’s Remorse, which he called “Sports Entourage — only, you know, good.” If he answered the question about wishing for a now-defunct Starz show to be resurrected, I wouldn’t be surprised if he brought up Survivor’s Remorse.