It's interesting watching Samurai Jack and trying to figure out what the cartoon violence rules were.

Famously, most of Jack's battles were with robots so the audience rarely sees blood, just oil.

But even with robots: which ways are you allowed to depict them fighting?

Looking at the fight between Jack and The Guardian, a few rules can be inferred.

• Weapon contact with Jack, when it happens, must be brief.
• Ripping Jack's clothes superficially is okay (this is kind of like his health bar.)
• If no one is harmed by the attack (e.g. because it's dodged,) it's okay.
• You can imply that Jack has been hit off camera.
• Avoid wide shots of violence that show the wind up, contact, and aftermath.

Here's a gallery of all the shots in the Guardian fight. The shots in the last third that are outlined in white show Jack actually getting hit.

And here's from a fight with Aku, which is outright Hitchcockian in how you never actually see Jack slice Aku in a wide shot. At most, he's hacking at black fire.

It's impossible to know which rules exist because of content ratings and which are just from Samurai Jack's series bible. Jack never gets shot, but is that because getting shot means a guaranteed PG-13 rating, or because a master samurai can always dodge bullets?

Whatever the answer, I'm grateful Tartakovsky stuck to these rules and gave my formative Children's-Adventure-Of-The-Day show such an experimental visual language.