My Hero Academia: Vigilantes can get really unhinged sometimes. But there’s a perfectly good reason for that. In the spin-off series, one of the major villains is Bee☆Pop (voiced by Sayaka Senbongi in the original Japanese and by Morgan Laure in the English dub), whose entire purpose is to create chaos in Japan. The villain injects people with the Trigger, a drug designed to dial people’s Quirks up to eleven and create instant villains who terrorize the city. In Episode 9, however, the drug reached a new level when it came in contact with an animal.

In the episode, titled “Mom Descends,” a house cat gets injected with the Queen Bee drug just when it jumped and landed on top of a bus. The result is… bizarre. The cat merges with the bus to become a huge, four-wheeled beast, and it starts driving itself down the streets and putting the lives of everyone close to it in danger. The moment would be just another funny and shocking section of the episode if it weren’t for one detail: its appearance bears a striking resemblance to a Studio Ghibli character — more specifically, the Catbus from My Neighbor Totoro.

The funny difference is that, while in My Neighbor Totoro the catbus is a cute and calm being that delicately transports people from point A to B, in My Hero Academia: Vigilantes the Monster Cat is pure mayhem and a vehicle you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near. While it’s unlikely that Monster Cat becomes a recurring character in My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, it was fun to see that the anime series is willing to have fun with some of the references it throws on screen.

‘My Hero Academia: Vigilantes’ Has Been A Parade Of Easter Eggs

If you have been watching or are curious to check out My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, you will be quick to notice that the spin-off series likes to throw Easter eggs in pretty much every episode. The biggest of them are, of course, references to My Hero Academia itself. The show has already featured characters like All-Might (Kenta Miyake/Christopher Sabat), EraserHead (Junichi Suwabe/Christopher Wehkamp), and even future villain Chizome Akaguro/Stain (Gō Inoue/Robert McCollum), who sports a completely different look.

Despite the close connections, My Hero Academia: Vigilantes won’t directly link with the flagship series immediately. The story takes place roughly 5 years before the events of My Hero Academia, meaning that stories like the origins of Stain are bound to keep popping up as the spin-off series progresses.

You can stream My Hero Academia: Vigilantes on Crunchyroll.