Purely Academic for October! Halloween Trilogy, Astro Bot, PS5 Pro, Nihilistic Anime & More!

Second episode of our new monthly variety podcast!

It’s time for another episode of Purely Academic, a monthly variety podcast hosted by Jonathan Lack and Sean Chapman. Each month, we talk about our favorite video games, movies, anime, and more, having fun and maybe even learning something along the way. You can subscribe for free in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

For the October installment of Purely Academic, Jonathan and Sean embrace the spooky season by talking Halloween – specifically, the recent Halloween reboot/sequel trilogy directed by David Gordon Green and starring Jamie Lee Curtis, with the hosts debating whether these films are muddled messes or interesting revisionist takes on the slasher genre. We break down some recent News, including Sony’s controversial unveiling of the PS5 Pro, several new game announcements including Ghost of Yōtei and Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, and news of Kyoto Animation making an exciting new film and TV series in 2025. In our ‘Show ‘n Tell’ segment, we discuss what we’ve been playing and watching recently, with Jonathan talking about the terrible new Joker movie, his experiences at the Denver Silent Film Festival, and finally finishing Tsukihime: A Piece of Blue Glass Moon, while Sean shares his thoughts on the 5.0 update of Genshin Impact, and we both discuss the outstanding new PS5 game Astro Bot. And finally, in the ‘Monthly Ten’ segment, Sean is challenged by Jonathan to rank the Top 10 Anime That Aren’t About the Power of Friendship.

Enjoy, and we’ll be back next month for an exciting episode reviewing the Heisei-era Gamera trilogy, a series of classic Kaiju films we’ve been promising to discuss for years now. What kinds of things do you think we’re going to learn next time?

Time Chart:

Intro: 0:00:00 – 0:13:20

News: 0:13:20 – 1:03:07

Show n’ Tell: 1:03:07 – 2:22:27

Topic (Halloween!): 2:22:27 – 3:56:06

The Monthly Ten: 3:56:06 – 4:14:20

Outro: 4:14:20 – 4:16:56

Subscribe to JAPANIMATION STATION, our podcast about the wide and wonderful world of anime: https://japanimationstation.com

Read Jonathan’s book 200 Reviews in Paperback or on Kindle – https://a.co/d/bLx53vK

Subscribe to our YouTube channels!

Japanimation Station: https://www.youtube.com/c/japanimationstation 

Purely Academic: https://www.youtube.com/@purelyacademicpodcast

Support the show at Ko-fi ☕️ https://ko-fi.com/weeklystuff

Original Music by Thomas Lack https://www.thomaslack.com/