…itself remake of the Austrian-Hungarian film "Little Mother" / "Kleine Mutti" (1935) which was directed by Henry Koster & starred Franciska Gaal, Friedrich Benfer, & Otto Wallburg.

P.S. BoJ is remake of the Garson Kanin-directed, Ginger Rogers + David Niven + Charles Coburn starring “Bachelor Mother" (1939), and was…

* - I’ll finish the unfinished ones later (since I had enough to cover what I needed) & will either use them as regular thank you notes or add them to my doodle wall

Proving that I shouldn’t do anything while running on no sleep: I just realized that the ‘noke’ part of the theme’s title (“オトノケ”) uses the ‘ノケ’ of Yamanoke vs the ‘の怪’ of ‘mononoke’. 💀

(And since there’s no edit feature, my oopsie stands.)

• The disc pictured behind Momo & Okarun at the end is a nod to the Voyager Golden Records— a pair of identical phonograph records containing sounds & images from Earth that were included aboard the two Voyager spacecrafts in 1977 in case they were found by intelligent extraterrestrial life forms.

• Okarun and Jiji decide to bust out the famed Carlton Dance from 90s sitcoms “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” while Momo draws inspiration from Rihanna’s 2012 music video “Where Have You Been” for the short dance sequence.

• Okarun does his own version of Akira Fudo’s “Devilman Dash”.

P.S. Aside from characters being possessed by demons, both “DanDaDan” and “Devilman Crybaby” are animated by Science SARU.

Tbf, though, the love letter to Ultraman in the opening isn’t all that unexpected given that the creator of “DanDaDan”, Yukinobu Tatsu, has confirmed that he draws inspiration from the classics sci-fi series.

At one point, MC Momo Ayase even moves in a way resulting in her (glowing) earring moving into a position that resembles Ultraman’s eye.

As for the actual opening:

The dark silhouettes of characters + monsters against colorful backgrounds is essentially a love letter to the opening of 1966’s “Ultraman”.

• “Shyamalan” = M. Night Shyamalan, an Indian-born American filmmaker known for his films that often employ supernatural elements and twist endings

• “Someone opened the Pandora's box”

A story from Greek mythology about Pandora and how her curiosity led her to open a container left in her care by her husband, thus releasing curses upon mankind. (She did manage to close the box in enough time to keep one thing contained within it: hope.)

• “Singin’ to myself, “Sha-la-la (La)” = the fifth opening theme of “Naruto Shippūden”: “Hotaru no Hikari” (“Light of a Firefly”) by Japanese pop duo Ikimono-gakari.

• “If you need purification, bring stacks of bills till the end of time” = Gege Akutami’s “Jujutsu Kaisen”

• “Sword fight with demons” = Koyoharu Gotōge’s “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba”

• “The lyrical chainsaw massacre” = Tatsuki Fujimoto’s “Chainsaw Man” & also the 1974 horror film “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”

• Crossing the open sea” = Eiichiro Oda’s “ONE PIECE”

• “Piling up the stones to the top of top”

Legend says children who die prematurely are sent to Sai-no-Kawara as punishment for causing great sorrow to their parents where they pray for salvation by building stone towers in the hopes of climbing out of limbo & into paradise.

• “Again, today, in the middle of the banks of hell”

Sai-no-Kawara is considered to be the bank area of the river that serves as the boundary between life and the afterlife.

…ominous flowers that grow in Diyu (aka Hell) to guide the dead into their next reincarnation.

Some legends also say that when a person sees someone that they may never see again, these flowers bloom along the path. (A little extra on this below.)