It's another Mizuki Shigeru franchise (although not his best-known) and Tomoko prefers it to GeGeGe no Kitarou. She watched this too when she was young. Akuma-kun isn't friends with an evil character like Rat-Man, although Cat-Bat's voice makes him sound similar. Some of them are even cute, e.g. Hyakume.

Personally, though, I found this TV series forgettable. It's a children's show. Lovable heroes have adventures. It's likeable, but it didn't particularly grab me. It's easy to watch in the background, but I found it deceptively hard to give it my full attention. Individual episodes can have points of interest, but ultimately everything's filler and nothing really matters in the long run. It almost never digs deep into the characters. No one's seriously tested. There's no dramatic stress. Instead, it's fun and nice.

Mind you, this is surprising for a show about devils from Hell. The word "Akuma" means "devil" and our (human) hero got this nickname because he spent all his time performing satanic rituals to summon demons. You could perhaps argue that it's not really the Christian Hell and they're not really devils, but Shigeru's spotlighting iconography (e.g. a character called Christian, Tarot cards, twelve apostles) and it's hard not to call this Mizuki Shigeru's equivalent of Devilman. (Although Shigeru wrote this manga nearly a decade before Go Nagai's version.) Both have spawned an old children's anime series and a modern Netflix adaptation. Both play mischievously with the idea of heroic devils and have wacky demonic character designs. There's even similarity between their supporting casts, e.g. both Akuma and Akira have a close relationship with a bird-woman (Tori Otome and Sirene).

Akuma-kun's a thoroughly nice chap and his friends from Hell mean well. Hyakume is adorable and I was amused by all the children treating him as just another classmate, even though he's green, has floppy dog ears and 100 eyes all over his body. (And is Satanic.)

The show looks at other religions too. Ep.22 does Egyptian mythology and imagery, while other episodes tackle religions that are active today. But with space rockets and aliens. There's a Women's Lib episode (ep.32) with a villainous witch, but it doesn't say "women's lib is evil" and indeed underlines the existence of white magic alongside black magic. (Also, Akuma-kun's mother and sister fly on a broomstick, while his rubbish, hen-pecked father is alarmed by strong women on TV.)

The first Akuma-kun screen adaptation was a live-action series in 1966-67. The mind boggles. I don't plan to look for that, but I've heard good things about the recent Netflix series. Apparently it's much darker than this, which sounds like a better fit for the material. This 1989 show invites comparisons with Dr Seuss. (Consider those little blue ghost things, the twelve "mame yuurei" controlled by Yuuko. They're cute and goofy and I love them, but I couldn't look at one without remembering Theodor Seuss Geisel.)

I don't dislike this show at all. The concept is funny, as with Devilman. However, I'm several decades too old for its target audience.