Best Seat on the Couch

ONE PIECE fans around the world can finally close the book on Eiichiro Oda's 1155-episode first season, with the Elbaph arc kicking off season 2 in April 2026! Okay, people who actually watch this anime know we're on season 21, but it's a funny meme. Alex once again assembles panelists Ayana, Katy, Lony, and Owen to discuss the episodes that aired in 2025 and bounce ideas around some reasonably important stuff like the Knights of God, Scopper Gaban, Imu using the Domi Reversi, and more. We love to see Luffy succeed via the power of friendship, we must deconstruct the God Valley flashback, and we can't finish a ONE PIECE episode on the couch without a couple of theories to cap off the session. Perhaps Iris, Marcus, and Michael might finally have their chance to join in on the fun with the upcoming The One Piece Remake coming to Netflix at the end of this year. Content warning: SPOILERS, strong language.

Alex is thoroughly out-weebed on this week's episode of Best Seat on the Couch, as Marcus, hot on the heels of Love, Death & Robots and Transformers One, arises with a multi-month saga planned around the universe of Mobile Suit Gundam, beginning with 2022's The Witch from Mercury. Longtime Gundam fans may find this choice of a beginner's series questionable, but the show is simultaneously a good primer for some of Gundam's most important thematic tenets while also being a fresh take on the formula (a female protagonist!) wrapped up in all of the bells and whistles of high-quality animation, a great soundtrack, and some sick sound design. Join us as we talk about our favorite characters, character arcs, confusing government bodies, and depressing moments, and stick with us as Marcus takes the gang on a genuinely painful Trivia Corner not at all created in retaliation against Alex's Digimon Trivia Corner. Content warning: SPOILERS, strong language.

After a brief holiday hiatus, the gang is back to the recording studio with another anime about high school girls doing...things! Like our episodes on Yuru Camp and Bocchi the Rock! in years past, this slice-of-life series released in 2017 appears often on top anime lists and provides a genuinely sweet and enjoyable story hidden behind its unassuming appearance. We get travel montages! Antarctica! Penguins! Inter-friend-group squabbling! The friends we made along the way! And a pretty baller emotional catharsis scene in the penultimate episode to cap it all off. Plus, stick around for another Trivia Corner hosted by dual-threat weeb and biology aficionado Alex, and learn more about the continent that almost nobody knows anything about. Content warning: SPOILERS, strong language.

Within the Transformers sphere, the last couple of decades have been owned by Michael Bay's live-action series of Transformers films which are certainly...films. But we don't talk about live-action films on this podcast! Instead, we're talking about 2024's Transformers One, a film that harks back to the G1 days from the 80's and soft reboots the franchise on the silver screen. It's got a star-studded voice cast led by Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry, absolutely gorgeous animation, some fun sequences that make you go "damn that was cool!", and a genuinely interesting take on the relationship between the bots that eventually become Optimus Prime and Megatron. It is pretty clearly a kids' movie, and there probably is such a thing as too much Keegan-Michael Key, but as far as the emotional notes and story beats go, we think this movie does a pretty bang-up job. Content warning: SPOILERS, strong language.

Two and a Half Asians returns to the Couch this week to talk about the legend Jackie Chan, the man who brought the Hong Kong action movie to Hollywood while also infusing a level of comedy yet unseen within that genre. This 2000-2005 childhood animated series pays homage to that style of film while adding excellent characters, well-choreographed action scenes, and a unique mystical element to the mythos of this fictional version of Jackie Chan. While it is firmly a Saturday Morning Cartoon™ and does share some of the same issues as Digimon, and while Alex and Marcus are keenly aware of how rose-tinted their glasses are, at some point you have accept that this love letter of a show deserves its flowers. Content warning: strong language, Yu Mo Gui Gwai Fai Di Zao.

Nearly 3 years after recording our milestone 100th episode of Best Seat on the Couch, the gang returns for another round of patting ourselves on the back and laughing at our objectively hilarious jokes with another 100 episodes in the rear-view mirror. This second centennial caps off a much more streamlined podcast than our first, and the four of us agree that we've collectively leveled up our discussions, our analysis, and even our speaking skills as we've fully hit our stride in the podcasting space. Join us as we talk about some of our biggest hits (and maybe a few stinkers) over these past 100 episodes, like our multi-month sagas on JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and Attack on Titan, excellent singletons like Blue Eye Samurai and Scavenger's Reign, and some memorable standout recordings like Robots and the finale of Arcane. To finish off this momentous achievement, Alex reprises the Anniversary Trivia Corner with another set of questions that really test just how much we remember about this journey we've been on together. Content warning: strong language, unabashed self-indulgence.For those of you who are still with us 200 episodes later, thank you thank you THANK YOU for being there with us and pretending that you might find us just a little bit enjoyable to listen to. We hope that you have enjoyed listening to our stupid jokes and hot takes half as much as we've enjoyed recording them, and if it wouldn't be too much to ask, we hope you'll still be here when episode 300 comes around.

In this episode, the gang (who collectively doesn't listen to k-pop) attempts to understand the nuances of ~i d o l c u l t u r e~ as we tackle 2025's KPop Demon Hunters, from the same Sony Animation Studios that brought us the Spider-Verse series and The Mitchells vs. the Machines. Perhaps the most notable aspect of this film is the music, which is currently charting over actual albums from actual musicians (not to say that TWICE ain't a real musical group), and with a number of us being music theory nerds we get deep in the nitty-gritty of just how well this film/musical comes together. It's a fun film that isn't perfect but very effectively earworms its way into the audience's heads, and I'm sure we can all agree: this is what cinema sounds like. Content warning: SPOILERS, strong language.