WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the Season 1 premiere of Gal & Dino, streaming now on FUNimation.
The Spring anime season is now well underway, offering viewers a diverse line-up of action, romance, comedy and everything in-between to choose from. And when it comes to "in-betweeners," a truer description couldn't be made for Gal & Dino which, in its first episode, is already leaps and bounds ahead of its competition in the weirdness stakes. The premiere is made all the stranger, too, in its closing moments, which feature an unexpected appearance from a real-world face that fans of Pop Team Epic should be very familiar with. Yes, Shouta Aoi, the time-traveling, idol extraordinaire is back!
Based on a four-panel webcomic, Pop Team Epic received a short-lived anime adaptation between 2018-19 and quickly amassed a cult following. Much like Gal & Dino, it had an absurdist sense of humor and a delightfully experimental sense of style, highlighted by the live-action intrusion of Shouta Aoi in the series finale. Appearing as himself, Aoi arrives -- in glowing, Super Saiyan form -- to help Pop Team Epic's Popuko and Pipimi save the day with his powers of time travel, as well as his musical stylings, of course. Western audiences seeing Aoi for the first time were both confused and entranced by him, catapulting him to brief Internet fame among the anime's niche but passionate fanbase.
Now, it seems that Aoi has flown into yet another fictional universe. Gal & Dino is about a girl (Kaede) who wakes up from a drunken night out to discover that she accidentally brought a dinosaur home. And that's... pretty much it in terms of the anime's narrative content so far. The second half of the premiere switches abruptly into live-action to tell a very similar story, except with an older man, also named Kaede, played by entertainer 8467 (Nana Yashiro). The manga series on which the two segments are based, My Roommate is a Dino, written by Moriko Mori and illustrated by Cota Tomimura, has been adapted into both an animated and live-action series that are currently airing alongside one another in Japan. Presumably, FUNimation has simply repackaged them into two-in-one episodes for international streaming.
This medium switch makes Shouta Aoi's surprise cameo slightly less jarring, but still just as perplexing as everything else in the offbeat episode. After Kaede (8467) and his blue, not-so-extinct companion sit down to enjoy some cake together in their shared apartment, Kaede suddenly starts to complain about stomach pains and promptly keels over... dead? (Well, hopefully not, unless we're about to get a change of leads just two episodes in.) After this cliffhanger ending, we're suddenly treated to a close-up of Shouta, sporting the same blue, gloriously high-collared jacket he graced Pop Team Epic in. He's also clutching a matching book marked "schedule," but that's all we see of him before the end credits start to roll. We should add that there's no confirmation as of yet that this is the Japanese idol in the flesh, but if it isn't Aoi, then it's a remarkable lookalike.
Considering that the Gal & Dino anime has Pop Team Epic's Jun Aoki behind it, this crossing of the streams makes sense... almost. For Pop Team Epic fans, it's certainly a good reason to keep watching this bizarre series.