NY Comic Con 2009: Afro Samurai: Resurrection

Afro Samurai Resurrection

Afro Samurai kept popping up unexpectedly during this year’s New York Comic Con! First came the big reveal from legendary Japanese director Takashi Miike that he wants to do an Afro Samurai film; then came the hours I spent playing the Afro Samurai video game on the convention floor (sweet!).

Finally came the best bit of Afro Samurai news of all! Comic Con was offering an exclusive screening of the sequel to Afro Samurai, Afro Samurai: Resurrection!

And it was a screening that I will never forget…

…because they totally screwed it up!!!

First mistake: they held the screening in a sixty person room for what turned out to be a crowd of hundreds– most of whom ultimately got turned away. (Do they NOT know that people love Afro Samurai??? Come on! He’s a badass swordsman who maims and kills, smokes crooked joints and has a huge Afro! What’s not love?)

Secondly, I don’t know who was responsible for obtaining the screener copy of Afro Samurai: Resurrection, but that person needs to get their ass kicked AFTER they get fired.

It was like someone had tried to burn a copy of the disc at too high a speed: it skipped and froze so often that finally the frustrated tech geeks started fast-forwarding over entire chapters. And that’s about when most of us in the screening got up and walked out.

I’m not allowed to complain too much, because, you know, I had a free press pass for Comic Con–but I know that a lot of the people I met in the screening DID pay to be there and were rightly pissed about the screw up. And rightly so. This is Comic Con, after all. GET IT RIGHT.

(I would like to take a moment to remind you that they don’t call us Screen Rant for nothing.)

Aside from the total failure on the tech front, the first fifteen minutes of Afro Samurai: Resurrection that I did see were well in line with what fans have come to expect of the series. Can’t wait to see the rest.

Afro Samurai: Resurrection stars Samuel L. Jackson, Lucy Liu and Mark Hamill. You can pick up the DVD in stores now.