Trivia / GARO

• Actor Allusion: Kenji Matsuda gets a lot of this for his role as Wataru Shijima/BARON the Thunder Knight in Makai Senki. He's in a mentor position and uses lightning, like Zanki, and his armor is colored blue and wields a sword, like Kiva does when equipped with Garuru.
• The Danza: Rei Suzumura is portrayed by Ray (pronounced the same) Fujita.
• Doing It for the Art: The franchise makes some money from pachinko, but for the most part it's funded almost entirely out of pocket by Amemiya himself. Garo is his baby and he wants to keep it going. It helps that he was born into an extreme amount of wealth and earned a fortune himself in his career as a director.
• Production Posse: Gonza's actor was previously in a leading role in Tekkouki Mikazuki, also produced by Keita Amemiya.
• No Stunt Double: The series is well known for being one of the few Tokusatsu productions to have its entire cast never use stunt doubles on a consistent basis.
• Spiritual Successor: to KARAS, to the point where the Kanji in the title is similarly stylized to that Karas's. Its been rumored that Karas was one of the original influences on the series.
• What Could Have Been: Garo actually started as another attempt to revive Golden Bat using a more modern design and would have been called Skull Z.
• You Look Familiar:
  • The theme park manager from Episode 10 of the 2005 series (who harasses Kaoru) would later go on to play Ratess in Makai Senki.
  • Kakashi, from Soukoku no Maryu, was portrayed by Yuki Kubota, who previously played the obnoxious idol/actor JURAN in episode 9 of Makai Senki. He was the episode's Victim of the Week.
  • Kouhei Otomo, who was Igari Juzo in Makai Senki, returned in GARO: The One Who Shines in the Darkness as Burai.
  • invokedTakano Hassei, the son of the old couple in Makai Senki #6 eventually became The Quisling to the Horror Ring in ZERO: Black Blood.
  • Thane Camus, who plays Ring himself in ZERO: Black Blood, had re-appeared as another Horror in Episode 5 of Makai no Hana.
  • Keiko Matsuzaka, who played Big Bad Judam in Soukoku no Maryu, reappears as Anna (Gonza's chef girlfriend-of-sorts) in Ep. 10 of Makai no Hana.

---