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Halloween is upon us, and while we don’t quite have any bona fide horror anime lined up, after everyone gives initial impressions of the Fall 2025 anime season Clarissa reviews the somewhat eerie and entirely too short anime adaptation of Pet Shop of Horrors.
Introduction (0:00 – 43:03)
The new Fall 2025 anime season is underway, so we weigh in on a few series that have started. Since Daryl’s favorite is Tojima [Tanzaburo] Wants to Be a Kamen Rider, this segues into a brief discussion regarding the renewed level of accessibility for Kamen Rider and Super Sentai in the US when for years we could barely get anything legally; given today’s news from TV Asahi, this might be yet another immediately poorly aged take from the AWO though some speculate this is part of some sort of master scheme to get out from under the Hasbro/Saban deal by just not calling them “Super Sentai” anymore, but wouldn’t that be Toei saying that rather than the network? In any case, half a century of continual yearly shows is quite a run, and we’re old enough to remember how Kamen Rider and Godzilla took a few years off before coming back more popular than ever before. For now, check the official channels on YouTube as well as Tubi, the latter of which has a surprisingly high amount of solid classic anime titles free to watch. Gerald thinks the world of SANDA on Amazon Prime, but is disappointed by May I Ask One Final Thing? due to the main character having magical powers. There’s also a new Cat’s Eye reboot streaming on Hulu, and SPYxFAMILY continues to be as great as it’s always been only since we’re all drunk on Haterade we barely elaborate on that final point.
We then touch upon the revitalized state of anime being released in US theaters, but since we recorded this on the eve of Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc’s wide release we were not able to point out that 2025 is officially the first year in which multiple anime films have been number one at the US box office. It wasn’t out at the time of recording, but the third Star Wars Visions anthology is now up on Disney+ and is worth checking out. The mark of a good anthology is when every installment is markedly different from the others, even though this invariably means you’ll likely have a standout favorite and standout least favorite. For the record, Daryl is strongly partial to The Duel and its latest followup The Duel: Payback. We then briefly lament the untimely passing of Tomonobu Itagaki at age 58, but we’d ventured off topic enough at this point…
Review: Pet Shop of Horrors (43:03 – 1:25:51)
For Halloween, Clarissa reviews this four-episode series produced by Madhouse from 1999, originally released in the US courtesy of Madhouse’s long-defunct US distribution label, Urban Vision. A very bare-bones standard definition on Blu-Ray release is available courtesy of Sentai Filmworks, which is the version we watched for this review. They put that out in 2019 and it routinely goes on sale for very cheap. The manga was originally released in English courtesy of Tokyopop, but Seven Seas Entertainment is now releasing much nicer editions(affiliate link) as far as paper and translation quality goes.
Pet Shop of Horrors is the Gremlins-inspired tale of Count D, a beautiful man who sells exotic creatures to people from his store in Los Angeles Chinatown and looks positively faboo doing it. Revel in the anecdotes of Gerald admitting how in the late 1990s/early 2000s, male anime fans would totally watch stuff like this and completely fail to pick up on any sort of fujoshi baiting aspect to it whatsoever. Look, that was COMMONPLACE back then! (For the record, we recorded this before Third Impact Anime released their latest episode in which they also review Pet Shop of Horrors.)
Have you considered Ghost Talker’s Daydream as a horror episode ? The manga is one of my favorite horrors and my fading memory of the anime ( released 2004 no official Australian release) tells me it was pretty good. The premise of the horror , that a spirit will not pass onto the next world until the cause of it death is resolved means the horror is more about the here & now and the earthly cause of the death, that is people rather then the supernatural. The fan service that the exorcist’s day job is a dominatrix plays better then it sounds.
What a throwback! One of the first anime I saw at my college’s anime club. And I’m coincidentally watching the Giant Robo OVA now. Roommate joked about it inspiring G Gundam, but I didn’t realize they have the same director and writer.