Posted in: Netflix, TV | Tagged: netflix, preview, Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles, stan sakai, usagi yojimbo

It's Almost Time for Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles Season One

Bleeding Cool television section editor Ray Flook noted to me during an internal chat this morning that Netflix has been surprisingly quiet in the run-up to this week's release of their Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles animated series.  Netflix released some promising key art and a trailer early this month, but nothing since. I'll let Ray discuss the bigger picture of that some other time if he wishes, but in the meantime, a glance at Twitter tells me that there are a lot of Usagi Yojimbo fans who are just now finding out that this is a thing that's about to exist in the world, and some of them won't be hearing about it until it starts showing up in their recommendations tomorrow.  So let this serve as a heads up for all of the fans of Stan Sakai's award-winning saga who might have missed the details from a few weeks ago:  Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles hits Netflix beginning on Thursday, April 28 with a 10-episode season one.

I've known more than a few serious Usagi Yojimbo fans over the years, including a couple of them who each bought one of the 2,000 printed copies of the character's highly prized first appearance in Albedo #2 back in late 1984.  It's a fandom that has traveled well across media formats, as the character has been licensed for a multitude of purposes from almost the very beginning.  The computer game Samurai Warrior: The Battles of Usagi Yojimbo was released for the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64 in 1988, to name one prominent early example that was distributed on cassette tape and floppy disk.  Other uses outside of comics include role-playing games in 1998 and 2005 (this version got a second edition in 2019), appearances on two different Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series, and even a stage play in 2015.

Of course, this is beyond the now 37 collected volumes of the ongoing serialized adventures of Stan Sakai's creation.  All of this serves to explain why a few of my friends have been asking me for months about when Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles is going to hit Netflix. Well, folks, it's almost time. The 10-episode first season drops Thursday, April 28.

Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles follows the teenage rabbit, Samurai Yuichi, descendent of the great warrior Miyamoto Usagi, on his epic quest to become a true samurai. But he isn't alone! He leads a ragtag team of misfit heroes – including a roguish bounty hunter, a cunning ninja, an acrobatic pickpocket, and a faithful pet lizard – as he battles depth-charging moles, metal-tipped winged bats, and monsters from another dimension, all in the pursuit to become the best Samurai Usagi!

Gaumont's Nicolas Atlan, Terry Kalagian, Sidonie Dumas, and Christophe Riandee also serve as executive producers along with Dark Horse's Mike Richardson, Keith Goldberg, and Chris Tongue and Atomic Monster's James Wan, Michael Clear, and Rob Hackett. Mumbai-based 88 Pictures (Trollhunters, 3Below: Tales of Arcadia, Fast & Furious Spy Racers) has been named as the CGI animation studio.

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