Samurai Champloo – Just Another Reason to Love RightStuf and Geneon

I ordered Samurai Champloo from Rightstuf.com a while back when I was ordering some other anime, mostly to push my total high enough for free shipping. One of the things I like best about RightStuf is they don’t charge you for preorders until they actually ship the items. So a few days ago I received an email saying they had shipped Samurai Champloo. I figured it was just an early warning or something since the DVD isn’t due out until the eleventh. Lucky for me, it wasn’t.

Today when I checked the mail, much to my surprise and delight, I found my brand-spanking new, hot off the presses, limited edition, first volume of Samurai Champloo. Excellent. Dustin and I watched the four episodes on the DVD over dinner and I must say I am extremely impressed with the English dub. As a general rule I don’t like dubs, especially when I watched the show in Japanese first. Geneon does an excellent job, though, and there’s not much to complain about. No super-whiny girl for Fuu and Jin sounds awesome. The only tiny little complaint (more like personal preference) I have is that the same guy that voiced Spike in Cowboy Bebop does the voice for Mugen. After four episodes I’m still calling him Spike. If you pay attention you can also catch the voice actors for Jet and Faye doing some of the lesser characters in Samurai Champloo.

The translation, another thing I hate about dubs, is almost dead-on with the original Japanese. In fact, the whole dub is good enough that I would watch the rest of the episodes in English and be happy about it. It may not sound like a big deal, but trust me, it is. Finally! An anime dub that I can be proud of! No more hanging my head in shame when (if?) I see it on Cartoon Network. Thank you Geneon for not screwing it up!