The reason why Samurai Jack takes place in the future is very interesting and now that the fifth season is coming out on Adult Swim, funny in retrospect.

Director Genndy Tartakovsky wanted Samurai Jack to be a cartoon tribute to the Samurai movies he used to watch and was fond of, but there was a problem in the way. The problem wasn’t a creative problem or legal issues, but a problem of censorship.

Those Samurai movies were very very violent. People often had their limbs cut off, and blood was sprayed everywhere. Something that in a children’s cartoon could never happen.

Genndy’s solution was to find a loophole in the censorship and set the show in the future. Because while human guts and blood was unacceptable, robots and aliens being sliced to pieces, with oil, electronics and green goop spraying all over the place, was fine.

And so the plot became that of a time travelling Samurai.

But now, that Jack’s fifth season is on Adult Swim, where the limitations on blood and violence aren’t in place, the setting becomes somewhat ironic.