The scenes in the ending credits are taken from actual abandoned amusement parks.
One of the Friends in the crowd watching PPP in episode 8 is the mascot of Crunchyroll in Friend form, an orange fox girl with a long ponytail. They even had a video message from Serval's voice actress to announce it.
Acting for Two: Three; Aya Uchida voices Kaban, Mirai, and Lucky Beast, as does Suzie Yeung in the English dub.
Colbert Bump: Japanese zoos have seen an increase in visitors thanks to the series, with the serval being a particular attraction.
As shown below, the show was pretty much made with the minimum of budget, with all the merchandising potential dried up already due to a disinterested market. Since the anime came out, that missing fanbase arrived IN SPADES.
How much it did showed in a simple thing... There was a dispute about some shorts done as part of cross-promotions, illegally according to Kadokawa, which saw the director and his team fired and the voice cast basically being thrown under a bus. The fanbase got behind the director and production team, who, in their eyes, did nothing wrong, to such a degree that Kadokawa are looking at reversing some or all of the decisions made "in haste".
Dueling Shows: The second season went head to head with Kemurikusa, Yaororozu's first televised project after their firing.
No Budget: There's a reason for the CGI quality in Kemono Friends - five people working over 500 days with a budget that was so limited that the OP doesn't have spinning wheels for the bus that Kaban and Serval use to travel.
No Export for You: Sega advertises the third installment of the mobile game heavily on their YouTube channel. But if you ever think of trying to download it to satisfy your inner furry, there's a huge chance that you'll end up seeing the dreaded "Not available in your country" error instead.
Likewise, Crunchyroll does not make the anime available in all markets either.
Screwed by the Network: Completely out of the blue, Kadokawa, one member of the group of companies that owns the rights of Kemono Friends franchise, fired Director Tatsuki and Studio Yaoyorozu, following this up with easily disproven claims that Tatsuki had "pirated" Kemono Friends to make commercials without permission and that Yaoyorozu had already resigned weeks beforehand. They then had the voice actresses apologize... to Kadokawa, for inconveniencing the corporation. Given that the anime was a hit primarily because of Director Tatsuki (who rewrote the entire script, redid all the 3D CGI models in his spare time for free, and did so after Kadokawa had written the entire series off as a loss and thus gave them no budget) fans were somewhat less than pleased. After several hundred million tweets and Nico-Nico posts complaining, a rather significant letter writing campaign, as well as several huge names in the anime industry (including Kadokawa's parent company's CEO and the CEO of the largest TV network in Japan) speaking out about it publicly, Kadokawa's CEO made a public apology and has returned to the negotiating table with Yaoyorozu. In the end, Yaoyorozu and Tatsuki will not return for the second season, leading to fans declaring not watching the coming season. While Kadokawa's actions did not turn into a total Franchise Killer for Kemono Friends, it did cause the popularity of the franchise to be reversed.
Sleeper Hit: For a show that's based around a girl exploring a park inhabited by anthropomorphized animals, and which was the butt of jokes before it aired for being based on a mobile gacha game that tanked the month before, it became surprisingly popular; even the director had no clue how it gained the kind of popularity that it did. A lot of it likely has to do with the cozy setting combined with an actual mystery to be uncovered, putting it ahead of the curve of other Slice of Life-esque shows.
Just to give an idea of how popular it is, on Nico Nico Douga, it had achieved the highest number of comments in the history of Niconico Anime Special, almost 1 million higher than the second place, Love Live!. More than that, Kemono Friends trended on Twitter as the top for many days, and was basically a near-national sensation at this point. Near the end of August 2017, Episode 1 of the show surpassed 10 million views, becoming the 15th video reaching this milestone note (the prime contender before was the first episode of Is the Order a Rabbit? which has around 9.5 million views)and the first on-air anime episode doing so. In only a few months.This video explained how the fandom grows (in Japanese).
Another sign: the first two Blu-Ray volumes sold over 120,000 units combined (about 60,000 apiece). Granted, they were bundled with guidebooks for the show and sold at a lower than average price point, but that's still huge numbers for an anime.
The only reason it didn't sell more initially is it completely sold out the entire print run! More were soon printed.
Even its MyAnimeList rating jumped from a low 4.00 at series start to a 7.45 immediately after the show ended.
to announce it.