When we watch a film, looking for melding of multiple film types and cultural inspiration, we can fall into the trap of looking for this in characters and themes. We look and see stereotypical Italian-American mobsters in a film starring a samurai and think that is were the combinations end. We can, however, look further into a piece of film and find that it draws inspiration in areas such as writing styles and character types. Having watched a decent amount of Japanese films, not even samurai films, such as Juzo Itami films and Masayuki Suo films. Watching these and then seeing Ghost Dog it is very difficult to not notice deliberate similarities in dialogue structure. In other words, a lot of the conversations and joke in Ghost Dog are very goofy. The one character acting cooky or strange (singing rap lyrics or making a buffalo noise) while the other characters give him deadpan stares back is a convention seen over and over again in Japanese films and it is shown off in Ghost Dog. Even the man dying of a heart attack rather than a gun shot is something that would be loved in Japanese cinema while maybe getting some looks of confusion from an average American crowd of movie goers. These inspirations are just as over the top as the portrayal of its Italian American Robert DeNiro lookalike Goodfellas impersonators.