Space Dandy 2nd Season

スペース☆ダンディ第2シリーズ (Space☆Dandy 2nd Season)

8.3(96,728)

MAL Score

Ranked #367

Popularity #1526

Comedy
Sci-Fi
Adult Cast
Space

Episodes: 13
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Jul 6, 2014 to Sep 25, 2014
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Space Dandy 2nd Season continues the cosmic misadventures of Dandy, a self-proclaimed “dandy guy” roaming the galaxy with a towering pompadour and an eye for the unknown. As an alien hunter, he tracks down strange new species for a cash reward—so long as he can reach them before anyone else.

Joined by QT, a worn-down robot, and Meow, a catlike space alien, Dandy bounces from one unpredictable world to the next, meeting all manner of extraterrestrials along the way. The journey stays light on its feet and big on imagination, following their offbeat travels across space and time.

Otaku Consensus

Space Dandy 2nd Season is widely received as the bolder, more elastic half of the project, with Shinichirou Watanabe’s chief direction, Shingo Natsume’s TV direction, and Bones’ visual latitude turning the episodic format into a showcase for surreal comedy, parody, music, and philosophical detours. Its best episodes are praised less as conventional stories than as self-contained animated experiments, while the main complaint is real viewer fatigue: the same anything-can-happen freedom can make some installments feel less emotionally impactful or less consistently polished than the first season.

Why You Should Watch

Watch Space Dandy 2nd Season if you want sci-fi anime that treats continuity as a toy rather than a cage. It scratches a similar experimental itch to FLCL’s visual restlessness and Cowboy Bebop’s genre-hopping cool, but with the self-seriousness stripped out and replaced by cosmic slapstick, musical-theater oddities, alien parody, and sudden philosophical left turns. This is for viewers who like individual episodes having their own texture, tempo, and internal logic, not for anyone demanding a tight serialized payoff. The appeal is watching Bones, Watanabe, Natsume, and a rotating set of writers push a comedy premise through animation styles, tonal pivots, and absurdist sci-fi concepts that most TV anime would reserve for one-off specials.

Key Characters

D
Dandy(VA: Junichi Suwabe)
Dandy is funny because his overconfident self-image keeps colliding with stories that are smarter, stranger, and more cosmic than he is prepared to understand.
M
Meow(VA: Hiroyuki Yoshino)
Meow works as the crew’s slacker id, giving the series a grounded comic counterweight whenever its sci-fi concepts start bending reality.
Q
QT(VA: Uki Satake)
QT’s worn-down robot practicality makes them the deadpan stabilizer of the trio, which is exactly why the show gets so much mileage from putting them in emotionally ridiculous situations.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
The season leans hard into an anthology structure: AniList tags it as Episodic at 92% and Achronological Order at 72%, which matches how episodes can function as discrete creative experiments rather than steps in a linear campaign.
2
Bones’ production is frequently singled out by viewers and critics for high-end animation, with reactions specifically noting episodes striking enough to pause on individual cuts despite occasional complaints that some installments look less smooth or detailed.
3
The comedy is not only gag-driven; AniList’s Surreal Comedy, Parody, and Philosophy tags point to a season that can pivot from absurd alien jokes into conceptual sci-fi without warning.
4
Music and performance are part of the show’s identity rather than background decoration, reflected in AniList tags for Musical Theater and Dancing and in the presence of notable theme performers Yasuyuki Okamura and Etsuko Yakushimaru.
5
The writing credits show how curated the season is: Shinichirou Watanabe personally scripted episodes 8 and 13, Hayashi Mori wrote episode 4, and science-fiction author Tou Enjou is credited on episode 11.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: Shinichirou Watanabe served as Chief Director rather than sole series director, with Shingo Natsume credited as Director, a setup that helps explain the season’s mix of strong overall identity and episode-by-episode looseness.
Fun fact 2: Yoshiyuki Itou handled both Character Design and Chief Animation Director duties, tying the cast’s instantly readable silhouettes to the show’s unusually flexible animation style.
Fun fact 3: Episode 8 has an extra production footnote: Yasuhiro Nakura is credited for Art Design on that episode, while Watanabe is also credited with its script.
Fun fact 4: The opening theme performance is by Yasuyuki Okamura, while Etsuko Yakushimaru performs the first ending theme, giving the season a music profile that stands out even among style-forward sci-fi comedies.
Fun fact 5: Audience discussion repeatedly notes that both the Japanese and English performances work unusually well for the series’ tone, with some viewers treating the sub and dub as equally valid ways to watch.