Pandaing to the Audience

Who needs a caption when you can just look at his chubby widdle cheeks?

"I bring PANDAMONIUM!"

— Pandaren Brewmaster, Warcraft III

Proof that not all Bears Are Bad News. Given the iconic status of pandas, it's not surprising that they turn up a lot in media, especially while looking cute.

Apart from their striking black and white fur, the black spots around their eyes gives them an appealing sleepy look that seems to match their adorably clumsy behavior. Furthermore considering that they are often seen lounging about, peacefully eating plants instead of hunting, it makes them seem so innocent. In addition, they are one of the few animals who have a protruding bone in each paw that acts as an opposable thumb to grasp objects, giving their eating habits an appealingly human-like appearance. Keep in mind that eating bamboo requires a large amount of chewing. That round adorable face houses some powerful jaw muscles.

As a side note, zoologists debated for years whether pandas were more closely related to bears or raccoons up until DNA stepped in to settle on "bear, albeit primitive".^note  To be clear, this refers specifically to the giant panda. The much smaller red panda, which was for a long time believed to be a related species, is actually a musteloid, meaning it's more closely related to raccoons, skunks, and weasels. But even today, some people will still incorrectly call someone out if they refer to pandas as bears.

Finally, just in case you're Too Dumb to Live, cute as they are...do not try to cuddle a real life panda. Seriously. Unless you're Shaq.◊ Pandas may look cute and cuddly, but they are still bears, and while not as dangerous and aggressive as other bear species, they are still very much capable of badly injuring you if they feel provoked or threatened. However when they are young and in a playful mood, just you try to resist them when they approach you with all their charm turned up full blast. More recent depictions of panda characters in popular culture seem to be subverting the usual "passive and cuddly" persona the panda has built up over the years by depicting them as any other sort of bear... Or at least one that somehow knows how to use Martial Arts.

This could've been named "Everything's Better With Pandas", but the pun was too obvious.

A Super-Trope to Fighting Panda, where pandas are portrayed as martial artists. Not to be confused with the controversial practiced of pandering — sorry, pandaing^note Pandas are native to China, you see. — to the Chinese audience by making films designed to pass through their censors and not get Banned in China; nor to be confused with pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections, or PANDAS for short, a hypothesis that a subset of children exists with rapid onset of obsessive-compulsive or neurological tic disorders. See also Yet Another Baby Panda and What Measure Is a Non-Cute? (one reason pandas get so much more attention than similarly endangered animals.)^note The IUCN upgraded the status of the giant panda from "endangered" to "vulnerable" in 2015.

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Examples:

Advertising

• KitKat
• Zen
• The logo of the World Wildlife Fund is a particularly cute panda. That little fellow beat the World Wrestling Federation out of their title...literally.
  • They've also worked with the Boy Scouts to establish the World Conservation Award, aka the "purple panda" badge.
• Panda Express, which sometimes has plush mini-pandas available as souvenirs. Although...
  You mess with the pandas - we bust your chopsticks!
  • Same thing with Wanchai Ferry.
• Jing Jing the panda is one of the mascots for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
• The 2022 Winter Olympics features Bing Dwen Dwen, an adorable anthromorphic panda with a suit of ice, a heart of gold, and a love of winter sports, ready to share the true spirit of the Olympics with the whole world.
• Now-defunct Toys-R-Us competitor Child World used Peter Panda, a panda dressed in blue overalls, as its mascot from around 1982 until its demise in 1991.
• Panda Energy International.
• Tarepanda, one of whose mascots is a panda that rolls over at a top speed of 2.75 MPH.
• One advert for the directory enquiry service 118 247 has a panda driving a London black cab. No explanation given.
• Genki Gang sells felt Panda-ear hats.
• The skateboard company Enjoi uses lots of pandas, although they're famously often humping. Or indulging in S&M.
• Vinnie , the mascot for Fox's "bisquits".
• Never Say No to Panda is an example where the existence of the panda won't make things better. Seriously. This panda is a dick.
• Pandamania, a kit for a vacation bible school class. They have both the regular and red variety as characters.
• Hello Panda, miniature chocolate- (and other flavored) filled cookie biscuits with pandas in sports themes made by Meiji Seika.
• Geely, a (fittingly) Chinese car company makes a car called the Panda◊.
• Fiat, an Italian automaker, has made a car called the Panda for much longer (since 1980). It's another city car, and it's quite deserving of the name, being fairly cute.

Anime & Manga

• Ranma ½ has a subversion in Genma Saotome, who frequently claims to be just a big cute panda, but really is a fat old human scam artist.
• Even Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata got in on the action with Panda! Go Panda!
• Panda Z Robot Panda Made of Win!
• Azumanga Daioh: Concernin' pandas... is it black spots on white, or is it white spots on a black background?
• May Chang from Fullmetal Alchemist has a pet midget panda (Shao May) which is frequently mistaken for an oddly-colored cat.
  • Said panda nearly bit off Yoki's arm at the elbow after he tried to steal from May Chang. Keep in mind that Shao May is a very small panda.
• Panda, while he is a hamster, looks like his namesake in Hamtaro.
• Gantz has an alien-hunting baby panda named Hoi Hoi. Not only does he function as the Team Pet after losing the Butter Dog, the thing proves that, although cute, it can still kick serious ass, gaining 40 points before disappearing somewhere.
• Great Teacher Onizuka: Saejima is illegally importing giant pandas into Japan. Saejima tries to convince Onizuka that the pandas are really advanced robot toys.
• China and Hong Kong from Hetalia: Axis Powers definitely love their panda companions.
• In Excel♡Saga, Excel and Hyatt must escort the T10000, a robotic bomb designed to go off in downtown F-City. Hyatt suggests the robot is too obvious, so they end up disguising it as a panda. It works the wrong way, since it attracts more people.
• In One Piece there is Pandaman - a recurring character inserted into backgrounds. And he is Badass◊.
• Pandaikon from Nerima Daikon Brothers is not only the mascot of the team and occasional mastermind behind the day being saved, but he is also the object of desire of no less than two characters of a recurring cast of five.
• Pandalian is an anime chock-full of pandas.
• Pain in the rear or just plain adorable, Panda from Shirokuma Cafe is one of the most naturally depicted pandas outside of documentaries.
• In Yakitate!! Japan, Mokoyama disguised himself as a panda for his second rematch with Azuma. He lost to Azuma, but he became a real panda.
• Subverted in Naruto. While Pain has a panda summon, most wouldn't consider it even remotely cute, with several large piercings, Rinnegan eyes, and a frozen snarl showing triangular, saw-like teeth.
• The ultimate subversion: Death Panda, in which the antagonist is a amoral, perverted, sick creature that indulges in three things: murder, rape and eating. And having a crush on it's archenemy.
• The Jewelpet Rald.
• The second season of Kemono Friends gives us Giant Panda, who has the habit of falling asleep at the drop of a hat (a reference to the lethargic behavior of real pandas). Just do not tick her off...
• Kaede from Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai loves pandas, wears for the most time when she's onscreen a pajama which design is based on them and is happy when her brother visits the pandas in the zoo with her. But when her memories come back at the end of the story, she isn't interested in these animals anymore.
• Shima Shima Tora no Shimajirō gives us Marurin/Mary-Lynn Sasaki, a panda cub who is introduced as soft-spoken, shy and carries around a plush teddy.
• Panda from Jujutsu Kaisen is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: an intelligent, talking adult panda who also happens to be one of the protagonists' upperclassmen.
• A double subversion in Hell's Angels: the hellish pandas are quite grotesque-looking for the most part, but the one who gets the most in the spotlight is the one who looks like a giant panda plush with huge claws and KISS-style facial markings.

Comic Books

• Panda Khan, which was about a bunch of anthro Chinese pandas. The bad guy was the Lord of Death, who for some reason was the only human-looking character. Panda Kahn would later be included in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toyline from the 80's.
• Usagi Yojimbo has Lord Noriyuki, a child-lord who is protected by Usagi's friend and comrade Tomoe Ame.
• The Italian strips A Panda Piace... (Panda Likes...). The answer is a lot of silly things.
• Wolverine was shocked to discover that his spirit guide animal is a talking panda. He naturally assumed it would be a wolverine. The panda retorts that wolverines are too busy being angry to be spirit animals. Logan insults the panda by calling it cuddly. Then the panda and Logan fight. The panda wins.
• The minor Spider-Man villain Panda-Mania.

Films — Animation

• Mushu and Cri-Kee actually threatened Chi Fu with a bunraku-puppet mounted on top of a panda in one scene from Mulan.
  Mushu: (inside the puppet) What's the matter? You've never seen a black-and-white before?
• In Mulan II, Yao's gift to Mei is a stuffed panda.
• Exploited in Turning Red. Meilin Lee transforms into a giant red panda, not a panda bear, but it's still a panda, and it's still ridiculously cute. She and her friends raise a lot of money from classmates willing to pay to get their picture taken with her in that form.

Films — Live-Action

• Warner Bros.' 1995 film The Amazing Panda Adventure
• The Hug has Pandory, the sole animatronic character of Pandory's Pan Pizza Palace. However, he's really a subversion of this trope.
• Pete Smalls Is Dead features several people disguised as pandas as seen in this clip.
• Tropic Thunder qualifies, in that Tugg Speedman loves pandas and does conservation work for them. Since the film runs on Refuge in Audacity, he ends up accidentally killing one and later wears its head as a camouflage hat. The example is more accurately a subversion, since Tugg's reason for killing the panda is that it is ferociously attacking him and he is afraid of it. In fact, it's not even revealed that this fierce animal is a panda until after it's been killed.
  Tugg Speedman: I killed one, Rick... the thing I love most in the world.
  Rick Peck: A hooker. Oh Jesus, you killed a hooker!
  Tugg: No, a panda!
  Rick: Amanda? That's probably not even her real name.
• The 2018 comedy film Show Dogs features a police dog going undercover to stop an animal smuggling scheme, with one of the animals being Ling-Li, a baby panda.
• In Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, the first panda birth in the San Diego Zoo is Serious Business. (Almost) Truth in Television; people who live in San Diego are well aware that the local news stations do seem to love them some pandas.
• Vince McCain from Fierce Creatures imported a (robot) panda to the zoo. It is later seen with an "out of order" sign. But again, we're reminded that real life pandas can be quite aggressive. When Vince walked into the Panda pen for the first time, the staff members were all terrified because they thought the panda was real and about to attack.

Literature

• Bruce Coville's Book of... Aliens: I, Earthling features Ralph J. Bear, an adorable miniature panda who was created as part of a program to preserve the species (which is part of what prompted the Kwarkissians to make contact with Earth) and given to Jacob as a going-away present before he and his father moved to Kwarkiss.
• The title of Lynne Truss' book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, is a reference to a joke on poor punctuation: A panda walks into a cafe and orders a sandwich. After the panda has eaten his meal, he takes out a gun and shoots several holes in the ceiling. As the panda begins to leave, the waiter cries out, "What was that for?" in regard to the shootings. The panda tosses a wildlife guide to the waiter. The waiter reads the guide, and it says, "Panda. Black-and-white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
• The Berenstain Bears New Neighbors deals with new neighbors, specifically Pandas. Fantastic Racism becomes this to Papa Bear while the others are okay with them.
• The A to Z Mysteries series has The Panda Puzzle, in which the three protagonists search for a missing baby panda bear.
• In Spirit Animals, we have Jhi the Panda, one of the fifteen Great Beasts and patron of the realm of Zhong. An Actual Pacifist with healing abilities, which causes some friction with her Action Girl Kung-Fu Kid partner Meilin.
• ''Of Pandas and People'', a textbook in support of intelligent design, published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, received criticism from the evolutionists for its lack of scientific merit.

Live-Action TV

• The Sooty Show has a female panda puppet called Soo.
• On 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy shows Liz Lemon a baby sneezing panda, before telling her to fire 10% of her staff.
• Purple Panda and Little Panda from the planet Purple in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
  • Purple Panda and his family also appear in the spin-off series Donkey Hodie.
• The Colbert Report has brought up pandas on a number of occasions. Stephen has clarified that the panda is a bear (although the red panda isn't) and, as such, holds full Godless Killing Machine status. Although it was interesting to watch him view a video on baby pandas and keep having to remind himself that the awesome cuteness was just a trick.
• Similarly, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has mentioned pandas more than once. On one occasion after Thanksgiving, he notes that Barack Obama's Thanksgiving address received far fewer YouTube hits than a video of baby pandas sleeping.
  Jon: And to answer your next question, no, we cannot just watch that for the rest of the show.
• The Dude Perfect Show has as their mascot Panda, who is actually someone wearing a panda costume.
• This classic clip from Sesame Street. Even the music is iconic.
• A stuffed panda toy can be seen in the living room in Full House.
• One episode of An Idiot Abroad showed Karl Pilkington dressed as a panda.
• Jimmy Fallon's tenure on The Tonight Show brings us Hashtag the Panda, a performer in a full-body panda suit who dances about — to the point of Overly-Long Gag — in the wake of particularly corny monologue jokes. Introduced as a temporary Running Gag in response to a news story about a Chinese zoo that put a television in a panda's pen to help with its depression, the faux panda quickly became an audience favorite; its name was the winner in a fan suggestion contest on Twitter. Hashtag has since only been brought out sporadically, such as during the week the show spent at Universal Orlando in June 2014 — and Ben Stiller turned out to be in the suit, claiming to have been all along in an effort to promote a new project, to Fallon's perplexity.
• In the First Doctor story, "The Chase", future companion Steven Taylor has been locked up in an alien prison for years with his stuffed panda, Hi-Fi, his only company.
• A season 2 episode of Chicago Med starts with the doctors worrying if a potential patient could cause an international incident if something goes wrong, and then when they take the case, there's a Chinese ambassador and a veterinarian present. It turns out that the panda on loan to the Chicago Zoo needs a cardiothorassic surgeon.
• The Ultraman Ace episode "Give Back the Panda!" features a pair of kids befriending a friendly Chinese shopkeeper and his shop's pet panda, just as an alien invader named Steal is attempting to steal panda-related merchandise, including stuffed toys and decorative ornaments, to bring back to his planet. The episode culminates into Alien Steal going on a destructive rampage trying to kidnap said pet panda by force, endangering the two children and the shopkeeper in the process until Ultraman Ace comes to the rescue. The episode is actually filmed in conjunction with China's Panda Diplomacy, where in the same year the episode was released, the Chinese government delivers two pandas to Japan as sign of goodwill.

Music

• The song "The pandas must die" by Corky and the Juice Pigs is built on the shock value of contradicting this trope.
• Tao, a former member of K-Pop Boy Band EXO, is known as 'panda' to the fans due to his under eye circles.
• In 2015, Desiigner released a song called "Panda" on SoundCloud, which eventually found its way into the mainstream, leading it to chart at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The "Panda" in the song actually refers to a white BMW X-6 with tinted windows, which Desiigner thought "looks like a panda".
• Ken Ashcorp has a cutesy, antropomorphic panda as the main focus of most of his songs' artwork, as well as his online avatar.
• Funky Panda is a funk music channel which uses cute panda art to illustrate its music selection.

Pinballs

• One of the endangered animal species that Popeye must rescue in Popeye Saves the Earth is the panda.

Print Media

• The panda issue of Zoobooks took a realistic approach to this trope. While it stressed the importance of conserving these cute creatures, it also reminded readers that Real Life pandas are capable of being dangerous if provoked. Their overview of panda anatomy revealed what a panda looks like underneath its skin-namely, that it has large fangs and claws. The caption of the diagram said that pandas in zoos frequently destroy their toys.
  • One of this issue's illustrations managed to subvert this trope and play it straight at the same time. An adorable baby panda was under attack by a group of wild dogs, but its Mama Bear had stepped in to protect it. She is coming down, fangs bared, right on top of one of the would-be predators. The caption indicates that a panda's jaws are capable of crushing bone as easily as bamboo.

Professional Wrestling

• In the 1980s there was Pandita, a luchador who wrestled in panda suit. He was unmasked in 2008 by Súper Pinocho but his two sons, El Hijo del Pandita and Pandita Jr continued his legacy, as well as FMW wrestler Flying Kid Ichihara, who had the alternate gimmick of Rei Pandita.
• The Alianza Universal De Lucha Libre (AULL) promotion has Súper Panda, who was a 1x AULL Tag Team Champion.
• Neo Women's Wrestling had a trio of Reina Panditas in 2005.
• In Monterrey enterprises such as LLF there is “El referí Mas Optimo del Planeta” Oso Panda, as well as his sister, La Panda.

Radio

• Subverted in The Men from the Ministry episode "Claws". The male panda Coco that's being shipped into the London Zoo is described by the zookeeper as being absolutely adorable, but once it gets accidentally transported to the General Assistance Department thanks to a misunderstanding, it proceeds to completely wreck the place and causes all sorts of trouble.

Video Games

• 3 Pandas is a puzzle Browser Game about three pandas of three different sizes trying to maneuver through their world, after being taken away from their home.
• Panky the Panda: The Player Character is a panda named Panky who's on a quest to save his brother from the poacher who kidnapped him.
• Tekken has a female panda character, named Panda. She's highly intelligent for a Panda, learned a bear-style martial arts and serves as the bodyguard of the resident Anime Chinese Girl, Xiaoyu (who's no slouch by herself, by the way). And has a hilarious relationship with a male grizzly bear, Kuma (he loves her, but she ignores him, then hilarity usually ensues.)
• The Pandaren in Warcraft III. were originally just an April Fool's joke faction that people liked so much they ended up actually putting it in the game in some capacity with the Pandaren Brewmaster hero and Pandaren NPCs. Rumor had it, for quite some time, that they didn't appear in WoW due to sensibilities and marketing the game in China, in that China's national animal was originally depicted in the style of a Samurai, which is Japanese. They were made a playable race in the fourth Expansion Pack: Mists of Pandaria. Nevertheless, the fanbase is very broken about it.
  • And in the fangame Defense of the Ancients, there are two heroes based on the above Pandaren race: Mangix (Brewmaster) and Raijin Thunderkegg (Storm Spirit). They got less-Panda models when Dota 2 was released. Also originally, before making the jump to Dota 2, Kaolin (Earth Spirit) and Xin (Ember Spirit) used to have panda models too.
  • Two Pandarens from Warcraft get included Heroes of the Storm, one of them being veteran Chen Stormstout, and another one just push this trope further... how to do even more pandaing? Make the panda a young one and a girl. That's Li Li. (and surprisingly, Li Li was included first before Chen)
• Pandas are notably absent in Guild Wars (in particular, the Far East Factions campaign) allegedly due to Chinese laws. There are a couple pandas in the game, but they have Gameplay Ally Immortality; pandas also exist as minipets.
  • That's no longer the case. As of the Beyond: Winds of Change storyline, it is now possible to acquire a panda as Ranger pet, and it can be temporarily killed in battle.
• Zigzagged in the Sly Cooper series. In his first appearance, The Panda King was very much an aversion, thanks to his use of his skills as a fireworks artist to extort from the villages around his compound, as well as being a member of the gang that murdered Sly's dad and stole the Thievius Raccoonus and was an enemy to the Cooper Gang. In the third installment however, he undergoes a Heel–Face Turn and is shown to be be still a bit grumpy, but has renounced violence and is generally good-natured and mellow, not to mention a VERY loving father...which leads to him becoming the Cooper Gang's Demolitions Expert, after Sly helps rescue his daughter.
• Lao Jiu, a magical mini-panda, is Litchi Faye-Ling's mascot, pet, and hairclip in BlazBlue. Cute enough to distract one opponent, and fond of spending time in Litchi's Secret Compartment.
• Pokémon:
  • Spinda are shaped like giant pandas, though their coloration is more akin to that of the raccoon-like red panda.
  • Pokémon X and Y finally give us a proper panda in Pancham and its evolution Pangoro. Subverted in that they're hardly cute (Pangoro definitely, Pancham by comparison to regular examples) and are Fighting-types, with Pangoro also being Dark-type and looking particularly intimidating. However, Pancham often fail to be intimidating and end up looking cute instead, and Pangoro happen to have little tolerance for those who bully the weak. In addition, their shiny◊coloration◊ makes them resemble Qinling pandas.
• Etrian Odyssey II: Heroes of Lagaard has a blue-eyed panda as one of the four options for the Beast class. The other choices being a brown bear, a wolf, and a sabertoothed white tiger... which are all functionally the same.
• Wii Fit features a game where you have to shift your body weight to head footballs. You to avoid flying boots- and panda costume heads.
• The first stage of Jitsu Squad - a Training Level - is populated entirely by sentient, andromorphic pandas. They're tutors and teachers to the squad's members, giving them instructions on player controls and attacking functions.
• In Digimon World DS, Pandamon (Monzaemon painted to look like a panda) is the only digimon in the game that you encounter at the end of a level that you WILL NOT FIGHT. EVER. Rather, he asks you some questions about Digimon that are insultingly easy to see if you're worthy of helping him with the question that perplexes him. Apparently, he couldn't get a multiple choice question, even though there are only two possible answers.
• The Monster Rancher series has Mewnda, who is a hybrid of a Mew and a Pancho monster. It looks like a stuffed panda toy. Initially this seems kind of weird—Mew is a cat, and Pancho is a cute bug living in a giant pumpkin—but makes sense as a pun. Panda, Pancho.
• Pankichi, the mascot character in Getter Love!! "Panda Love Unit" is the name of the group of girls involved in the game (not including Reika, of course). The game is set in a town called Panda Town (complete with Panda Burger, Panda Park, Panda Game Corner, etc.), Ayumi keeps a Pankichi doll at home, Reika gives you a Pankichi doll as a gift, and panda angels or devils appear when certain item cards are used or after a girl accepts or rejects an "I love you". Oh, and there's also a Chinese exchange student as one of the girls, and a Chinese restaurant on the map. China, native country of pandas, not likely a coincidence.
• The French MMORPGs Dofus and Wakfu have the Pandawa class, a race of anthro pandas. Anthro Ninja Pandas that attack by getting drunk and setting parts of their body on fire.
• CaptainGerBear's ChubPan is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, a chub panda.
• Bamboo Pandamonium from Mega Man X8 chucks grenades and launches bamboo rockets (yes, really). You don't want him to hug or punch you; it does massive damage.
• Overlord II has pandas, who are definitely not nice. Harm the bamboo they eat and you have several tons of angry panda rushing to rip you to pieces. Worst part? If you want to advance you must break down bamboo blocking your way.
• Saints Row: The Third has pandas (or at least, cardboard cut-outs of pandas) displayed at Professor Genki's Super Ethical Reality Climax. Shooting those pandas is the only thing the show considers "unethical". That said, the city of Steelport is also implied to import panda meat and create hot dogs with them, which would subvert this trope. The Boss can even dress up as a panda in one of the DLCs, though whether this counts as a straight example depends on your personal opinion of the Boss.
• The King of All Cosmos would "like to become an adorable panda in everyone's hearts and minds" in Katamari Damacy.
  • Also in We ♥ Katamari, there is a fan who requests many expensive items to be rolled up, so that they can buy strawberries and feed them to pandas, so that they'll become red pandas.
• Teemo, a character from League of Legends, got a panda costume with a bamboo blowpipe. Annie also gets a costume where she turns her pet bear Tibbers into a panda, while wearing a panda-ish costume herself. All that the game lacks is a costume that turns champion Volibear into Volipanda.
• The Kooma Panda in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance]. They're the game's obligatory Smash Mook, and perhaps one of the most troublesome variants of it in the entire series, due to being surprisingly quick on its feet for its size and able to strike from quite a distance away. On the plus side, they can be your allies, too.
• Curtis the Panda from Carnival Island. He later appeared as a minion in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.
• Freedom Planet has The King of Shuigang (eventually murdered in the intro), General Gong, Prince Dail, Neera Li, and Spade. The last three however are bosses, and they can put up a fierce fight.
• Two of the main character avatar choices in the Taichi Panda mobile app game include male and female panda warriors.
• Tillman, Swanny and Skiles from Battle Bears are robot pandas.
• In Spyro: Year of the Dragon, pandas are NPC's of some areas; they need Spyro's help or can help him in some way. There's even a giant balloon in the shape of a panda. (Year of the Dragon is definitely the most Asian-esque game in the series, although Spyro and kin are still Western dragons.)
• A Minecraft update added pandas, along with an entire "Bamboo Jungle" biome (and a hilly version) to house them. They come with various personalities—normal, lazy, worried, playful, aggressive, weak, and brown—but serve little purpose besides looking cute. If you're mean enough to kill one, you'll find that unlike most passive/neutral mobs, they drop no meat, only bamboo (easier to collect from the forest around them) and a tiny amount of experience. Their only semi-practical use is in farming slimeballs from baby panda sneezes.
• In Grow RPG, there is a hidden solution where you can find a panda suit.
• Super Panda Adventures: Fu is a panda knight out to save his planet, and the princess from invading alien robots.
• In Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, pandas are among the pets a city can gift to another one.

Webcomics

• In a Running Gag in PvP, Brent is mauled by The Office Panda... who also seems to be the mascot of a coffee chain: Panda Espresso.
• Radioactive Panda has a giant (radioactive?) panda in it. No, really! Said panda is easily identified by their green eyes (or green welding goggles) and red scarf, and is frequently seen fixing things. Also knows how to fly spaceships. There are also miniature pandas which are used for emergency power.
• Twisted Kaiju Theater once featured a Panda Z figure as Emo Panda, who also happened to pilot a panda mech. Though in a subversion, Emo Panda was really more whiney than cute.
• The Boy has a dream about pandas in this Scary Go Round-strip. But it seems that he preferred the dream about the perpetual motion machine, he had before.
• Commander Kitty has the Badass Adorable Spacer Nin Wah, a red panda. Her twitter account even has her gushing about Firefox's livestream of real red panda cubs.
• Mountain Time has a panda bear that is adorably obsessed with receiving a lobotomy.
• Mr. Lovenstein: "Thanks, Rock and Roll Panda!"
• El Goonish Shive doesn't have any actual pandas, but it does have a strip dealing with the memetic cuteness of pandas. As a child, Ashley insisted on reading Ranma ½ on the grounds that, "It has a panda!" Her dad eventually relented on the grounds that, "It's not like it could warp your young mind too bad."

Web Original

• Google's autonomous problem-solving AI, CADIE, examined the whole internet and designed a personal site from mean variables. It was brightly coloured and flashed, and full of pictures of pandas.
  • Since CADIE has been revealed to be an April Fools' hoax, the page design must be a Google programmer's comment on this trope.
• Horribly, horribly subverted by Snoofles in Forbiden Fruit: The Tempation of Edward Cullen
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series has one baby panda in the cast. It plays card-games and has an Egyptian Pharaoh living in it's body... And is not actually a panda at all, but still, the trope's invoked.
• The mascot for web-only Puzzles & Answers Magazine. Why? Well, the magazine goes by P&A from which its web address derives.
• An anti-virus software called... Panda Security. It's actually pretty good.
• Homestar Runner Pan-Pan, the 20X6 version of Pom Pom.
  • And then of course there was "Pistols 4 Pandas"...
• Inverted in Weebl's song, 'Cucumbers', where pandas are the cucumbers' enemy. They attack them with their feet.
• Sneezing Panda
• Flickr has an error screen contains a girl with a toy panda on a lead.
• Monokuma the bard from the Deviantart Extended Universe is a very well-read panda.
• In the "Medimoji" web video series by ZDoggMD, the panda emoji talks about the challenges that he faces as an ophthamologist. He also wasn't happy about being matched to Johns Hopkins, one of the most prestigious hospitals in the US, because of its location. (Apparently, people thought he was a foreign medical graduate, but he is not.)
  Panda: People confuse me with the optometrist. He's the guy who goes, "Number one, or number two?" I get to do all the fun stuff, like telling the patient, "I am so sorry, Mrs. Johnson, but you are going to go blind."
• Vsauce has a video called "Why Are Things Cute?" The thumbnail image is a baby panda.

Western Animation

• The last season of Jackie Chan Adventures has a Giant Panda absorb the chi of Tso Lan the Moon Demon. It subsequently goes for a flight in the sky for nice, crisp leaves.
• Julius Jr. has Ping.
• Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness starring Dragon Warrior Po, the Kung Fu Panda and his friends.
• In the Mickey Mouse (2013) episode "Panda-monium", Mickey tries to get a picture of a baby panda in a Chinese zoo. This ends up being a subversion, as the panda messes with him and eventually steals his camera, while Mickey gets black eyes and is mistaken for a baby panda himself while the real one takes a photo as the episode ends.
• In Mickey and the Roadster Racers, Lulu wants to take a photo with Penny the Panda^note not to be confused with Penny Ling from Littlest Pet Shop (2012), and after meeting some playful gorillas, elephants, a giraffe, and the animals helping to change a flat tire, Lulu discovers that Penny is a mother of two adorable panda cubs, and everyone gets the chance to have their picture taken with the pandas.
• The Secret World of Benjamin Bear: Holly Bear, Howie's friend, is a living stuffed panda bear.
• South Park had Sexual Harassment Panda, but he was just a guy in a suit.
  • Not if you asked him.
  • This is a subversion in that this particular "panda" was actually quite revolting, given his Too Smart for Strangers spiel.
    • And that makes him a saaaad panda...
  • Panda Bear Madness Minute!
• Walter Lantz's Andy Panda
• Pandamonium was a Saturday Morning Cartoon on CBS in The '80s.
• Peter The Panda in Phineas and Ferb. But since he was Doofenshmirtz's new nemesis, the fans hate him.
• In the "One-Ton" episode of Super Secret Secret Squirrel, Secret Squirrel has to stop the titular giant panda, from destroying the city without harming or endangering it as he is an endangered species. He successfully arrests him after making the panda knock himself out, thus endangering himself.
• The Simpsons:
  • The episode "Homer vs. Dignity": Homer dresses as a panda and is mounted by a male panda.
  • Moe also runs a panda-smuggling operation from the back room of his bar.
  • During a trip to China, Homer tries to steal a panda cub, and is attacked by the mother when he strangled the cub for biting him.
• Team Umizoomi: Features a baby named Little Joe in the "Little Panda Joe" episode, in which Millie, Bot and Geo help him get back to his parents at the Umi City zoo.
• The "Pop Out Panda Island" episode of Animal Mechanicals features the Mechanicals helping a group of pandas to get to the bamboo on a mountain.
• In the Arthur episode "Wish You Were Here", Sue Ellen meets her pen pal, Tenzin Wangdu from Dharamsala, Tibet. In a bit of Early-Installment Weirdness, notably his first appearance in the "Sue Ellen's Little Sister" episode, he was originally a brown bear, according to his character profile.
• Highlighted in the Wild Kratts Season 3 episodes "Panda Power Up", "Red Panda Rescue" (with the red and giant pandas), mentioned in "The Colors of China" and the special "A Creature Christmas" holiday episode.
• In Cartoon Network's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2017) episode "The Pandas are Coming", Sam Sparks has an irrational Conspiracy Theorist fear of pandas, believing them to be aliens due to their thumb-like appendages, having a diet of bamboo even though their digestive tracts were originally designed for meat, and having black and white fur when the rest of their natural habitat isn't with nothing to blend into. As Swallow Falls gets involved in the ensuing "Panda-monium", Mayor Shelbourne seeks to profit from the panda-themed tourism with Zang-Zang's arrival, complete with a panda sneeze, a "panda patrol car", and his own adorable panda dance.
  • Subverted when the DNA sample that Flint took is full of alien microbes, and Sam uses a bamboo shoot as a blowgun to launch-feed a sardine into the panda's mouth, revealing it to be an alien with squidlike alien tentacles, confirming Sam's suspicions, but also angering the townspeople when the mother ship recalls the panda alien, after the aliens blame them for rejecting the adorable panda dance of eternal life, and Swallow Falls misses out on the opportunity to become an everlasting paradise.
• Toot & Puddle episode "Tumble Pandas" has Toot travelling to China to meet a panda acrobat family.
• Total Drama World Tour features a game called Total Pandamonium where the player must help DJ escape from angry baby pandas. Trust me, it's not as cute as it sounds. This game is based on the Japan episode (yes, yes), where a baby panda pretty much mauls DJ, while Alejandro is able to charm his until it actually acts quite adorable.
• Hei Bai, the spirit monster, turns into a panda at the end of the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "The Spirit World". Not to mention Pabu from the Sequel Series The Legend of Korra, who is a fire ferret, which is a mix of red panda and the rare black-footed ferret.
• Pammy Panda, a member of the Shirt Tales.
• The Brady Kids had a pair of twin pandas among their cartoon animal sidekicks.
• One of the Care Bears (1980s) episodes centered around two lost Care Bears, a pair of panda twins (Perfect and Polite Panda) living in a small, utopic tropical paradise situated in the middle of nowhere.
• Master Yo of Yin Yang Yo! is a grumpy old panda.
• Master Panda of Skunk Fu! is another grumpy old panda.
• The Art Shift in the second season of American Dragon: Jake Long leads Trixie to wear a shirt with a panda on it.
• Ming-Ting and Ting-A-Ling, the two geeky panda siblings from the Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers episode "An Elephant Never Suspects" who try to dig their way from the local zoo back home to China in a mechanical dragon.
• Subverted in TaleSpin so politically incorrectly that the episode "Last Horizons" was banned from American TV.
• In Ni Hao, Kai-Lan, Tolee (a Koala) has panda themed clothes. A subplot of the story in which Kai-lan travels to China has Tolee meeting up with a family of pandas.
• The Venture Bros. had Roy Brisby and his "ComPanda" He won from David Bowie in a trivia contest that was apparently trained to put people in a burlap sack. Bowie eventually wanted it back.
  • In The Venture Bros. universe, David Bowie is a supervillain. If he wants his panda back, he gets his panda back.
• The Jimmy Two-Shoes episode "Panda-Monium", where Heloise finds that a bunch of pandas are now her Loony Fans.
• The Hair Bear Bunch encounters a baby panda in "Panda Pandemonium." To Square Bear, the panda (named Percy) is a kindred spirit. To Hair, Percy is a third shoe. But he helps the bears escape to take in a carnival where they lose him to a contest booth barker.
• In an early episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Space Ghost offers to let Donny Osmond promote something, to which Donny snaps that whenever people try to promote things on this show, they interrupt and cut to something unrelated. Or, he tries to, but halfway through they cut to zoo footage of a panda.
  Narrator: Behold the Wooly Panda. It is soft and round. The nearby sound of a throttling chainsaw startles it. "Eek Eek", says the panda.
• Penny Ling, the adorable Shrinking Violet panda cub from Littlest Pet Shop (2012).
• The Amazing World of Gumball gives us "How to Ratatwang Your Panda", a parody of Vídeo Brinquedo's films.
• The two pandas who befriend Garfield, Odie, and Nermal in the The Garfield Show episode "Big Trouble in Little China". Ironically, they both speak in Australian accents and they find it ridiculous for pandas to do kung fu.
• The main characters of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic have to fight a large Bug Bear with fur similar to a panda bear while the main plot continues without them. This is a blatant lampshade around the fact that the episode is basically an episode starring several fan favorite characters and giving them a canon personality (or Pandaring to the audience).
• We Bare Bears has Panda, Exactly What It Says on the Tin who has a dorky personality to match.
• Teen Titans Go! Beast Boy in the "Wally T" episode:
  Raven: If we pander shamelessly, it could have disastrous consequences, Robin.
  Beast Boy: (turns into a panda): "Pander"? What do "pander bears" have to do with anything, mama? We got to get more fans!
• Toon Bops: One of the animal characters the show uses is Miranda, a female panda who looks like this.
• In the T.O.T.S. episode "Panda Excess", K.C., Pip and Freddy must deliver a super-adorable panda cub named Precious to her parents, which isn't an easy task, due to her charming cuteness.
• Chip and Potato gives us Chip's best friend, Nico.
• Word Party has Lulu, who is a purple panda cub.

Real Life

• As suggested up top, this is most certainly not Truth in Television. Pandas are very ornery, even to each other. This is exactly why it's been particularly difficult to engage in captive breeding of pandas at zoos. That being said, things are looking up for the Giant Panda, which was upgraded from "endangered" to "vulnerable" by the IUCN in 2016.
• Given this trope, and the giant panda's extremely low birth rate (especially in captivity), the births of cubs in zoos are always big news. Tragically though, such joyous news often ends up being too soon and is followed shortly thereafter by the very heartbreaking news of a cub's death, as panda cubs unfortunately have quite a high mortality rate (especially if it's twins; whichever cub is smaller will be rejected by the mother and often does not survive, even with intensive human care).
  • This tendency not to breed quickly is actually an evolutionary adaptation: The Giant Panda's natural habitat are mountainous regions where few things grow. The one thing there is an abundance of is bamboo. Unfortunately, due to large amounts of bamboo needed to sustain a single panda, this means that the natural environment can only support a small population. This isn't helped by habitat loss.
• In 1936, Su-Lin, a giant panda cub was brought to the U.S. He was male, and named after Su-Lin Young, the sister-in-law of Quentin Young, Ruth Harkness's expedition partner. He was exhibited at the Brookfield Zoo near Chicago, which created a consumer desire for panda-related products. They tried to introduce him to Mei-Mei in the hopes that she would be his companion, but they fought with each other and had to be separated shortly afterwards. Sadly, Su-Lin died of pneumonia a few weeks after Mei-Mei's arrival.
• In China, a giant panda named Pan Pan lived to the ripe old age of 31 (born in 1985 and died on December 28, 2016). His name means "hope" or "expectation", and he was believed to have sired over 130 descendants. ^note The giant panda's average life span is 20 years in the wild and 30 years in captivity.
• Wang Wang and Funi are a couple in a zoo in Australia, that have not successfully mated after even after being together for years. But during the 36-hour mating period each year, newscasters love to report on it because it combines Yet Another Baby Panda with Sex Sells. This newscast had a lot off double-entendres both intentional and unintentional with the newscasters loosing it, including a totally new definition for "Eats, shoots, and leaves."
• Panda diplomacy. Essentially, one of China's primary methods of waving the olive branch to foreign nations is to give them pandas for their zoos. This goes all the way back to the 7th century, when Empress Wu Zetian sent two pandas to the Emperor of Japan. The most famous recent case is the panda diplomacy between China and the United States, whereby China provides pandas to the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C.. DC went positively gaga for the bears—not only are they a major attraction at the zoo (and one that even native Washingtonians will go to see), but they long appeared on the Washington Metro's paper farecards.
• At the Beijing Zoo, Zhang Jiao was tossing a stuffed panda back and forth with his young son, which ended up in the enclosure of Gu Gu, a giant panda who had bitten a curious teenager and a drunken man. Zhang jumped into the enclosure to retrieve the stuffed toy, leading to a Bears Are Bad News moment when he was attacked by Gu Gu, who chewed up Zhang's leg; out of love and respect for China's national treasure, Zhang didn't fight back against Gu Gu.
• The British police used to have patrol cars called pandas, logically enough because they were blue and white. Yeah, blue. Don't ask us.
  • When police cars were introduced they were black and white or black and blue. The former inspired the nickname and it stuck, even in areas which used blue ones.
  • The Mexican Federal Road Police cars are appropriately black and white, and called pandas as well.
• Apparently the Chinese government didn't think that the live news coverage of the eclipse of 22 July 2009 was complete without pandas. See it all here.
• Little Tai Shan the panda, now apparently Butterstick, from the Washington D.C. zoo. The idea behind the name is that the little panda was described as "the size of a stick of butter" when he was born; instantly, DC area bloggers struck up a campaign to name him Butterstick. The zookeepers went with Tai Shan instead, but Butterstick remains a popular nickname, even used in official materials.
• A bullion coin is a type of coin made from a precious metal like gold or silver, used as a form of making small investments in that metal, and which sell for a price close to the spot price of the metal (and a markup for the minter or dealer to make a profit). Most of these coins have fairly boring, traditional designs, and they repeat the same design every year. China's bullion coins, however, have a different panda design on them each year, which has led to them being valued as collection items and thus commanding a higher premium over the value of the metal, compared to plainer bullion coins.
• In January 2010, Mozilla Firefox started a website with live webcams on a pair of red panda cubs, in support of protecting them.
• There's a shop in London that sells basically nothing but panda toys and panda themed items.
• Former Hannah Montana star Emily Osment is a fan of pandas, at least judging from her Twitter posts and pictures. People who attend her concerts wear and/or send her panda merchandise regularly.
• During "Panda Awareness Week" in early July, the folks at the Chengdu conservatory posted some videos of pandas, including this one of four pandas playing on a slide.
• The PANDA group (People Against the NDAA) is a social activist group designed to fight the US law of indefinite detention (the ability of the president to arrest and detain or even kill any American civilian suspected of anti-government actions without due process) passed in the NDAA 2012. Certainly a noble fight and their name emulates a very cuddly animal. What's not to like?
• Similarly, the logo of the World Wide Fund for Nature, an international non-government organization for wildlife preservation, is a cuddly panda.
• Anarchopanda will give you hugs if you attend a protest in Montreal.
• When the office of Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, was open for visits during the European Heritage Days, a panda statuette was prominently displayed on the desk.

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