A Pikachu Idol Group Is Coming to Pokémon Horizons, Played by CUTIE STREET
CUTIE STREET, who already sing the show's current ending theme, are stepping from the credits into the episode itself — and while Horizons isn't free here, 455 episodes of Pokémon are.
By June Maravilla · AnimeSphere staff · July 22, 2026
An idol cameo in a franchise built on theme songs
Anime News Network reports that members of the group CUTIE STREET will appear inside **Pokémon Horizons: The Series** as a Pikachu idol group. CUTIE STREET are not strangers to the show — the current ending theme is theirs.
That is the entirety of the confirmed news, and it is worth resisting the urge to inflate it. But it lands in a franchise where music has never been incidental. Pokémon's openings and endings are the part a generation of viewers can still sing from memory decades later, and the series has leaned on musical set-pieces and performance segments for most of its run. A group crossing from the credits sequence into the episode itself is an extension of that habit, not a break from it.
What the segment will actually look like is unknown, and we're not going to guess. No air date, song title, or member details have been confirmed in what's been reported.
Why fans will care
The interest here is mostly about overlap. A tie-in like this reaches people who follow Japanese pop music and people who follow the anime, and those are not the same audience — which is usually the point of doing it. Whether the cameo is remembered a year from now tends to come down to whether the ending theme itself sticks, and nobody can call that in advance.
Worth noting for readers outside Japan: theme-song sequences are handled differently across regional releases of this franchise, so the version being discussed online is often the original broadcast cut rather than the one you'd see locally.
The Pokémon you can actually watch free on AnimeSphere
Straight answer first: **Pokémon Horizons: The Series is not free on AnimeSphere.** We carry zero episodes of it. We'd rather say that plainly than let you go hunting through the site.
What we do have is a genuinely enormous slice of the franchise — all official uploads from the Pokémon TV YouTube channel, English dub, viewable in the US:
- **Pokémon** (the original 1997 series) — 269 episodes, numbered 1 through 269. This is the run that built the theme-song culture the Horizons story sits inside.
- **Pokémon the Series: Ruby and Sapphire** — 182 episodes. The Hoenn era, and a far less intimidating entry point than starting at episode one of a 269-episode series.
- **POKÉTOON** — 4 animated shorts. A quick watch if you want something outside the main series format.
That's 455 episodes with no paywall and no account required. If this news put you in the mood for Pokémon tonight, Horizons isn't the one we can hand you — but the show that made any of this matter is right there, from the first episode.
*Source: [Anime News Network](https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2026-07-17/cutie-street-members-guest-star-as-pikachu-idol-group-in-pokemon-horizons-anime/.239730)*