Manga / Pop Team Epic

Popuko and Pipimi, setting the mood.

"There is no darkness but ignorance"

— William Shakespeare, in Twelfth Night, the official website's substitute for a premise

Pop Team Epic (ポプテピピック^note Some chapters (7 times total) mislabel the series' English title as Pop Teen Epic. Also, some Anglophone fans like to write it Poptepipic) is a comedy yonkoma web comic created by Bkub Okawa. (Otherwise known for his Touhou Project doujins) and published by Takeshobo on their free Manga Life Win service (Season 2, Season 3, Season 5, Season 6, Season 7, Season 8) Vertical Comics had licensed it for an official English translation in October 2018.

It's best described as a Quirky Work with negligible continuity and humor that often relies on Non Sequiturs or Japanese pop culture references, heavily mocking and parodying other manga, anime, and video games, as well as a heaping helping of Self-Deprecation. The only recurring characters are a pair of schoolgirls named Popuko, the blond-haired shorter one with a visibly drawn nose and who is quicker to anger, and Pipimi, the dark-haired taller one who is generally calmer. Other details tend to vary between comic strips. There's really nothing like it out there.

In April 2017, an anime adaptation was finally announced for release later that year in October 2017, only to be delayed to January 2018 due to production difficulties. The series takes on a Sketch Comedy format, with different segments' animation handled by different animation studios. The bulk of the series is done by Kamikaze Douga, who handles segments with 3D computer animation, and Space Neko Company, who handles the 2D animated segments as well as most of the "POP TEAM STORY" segments that feature original stories with gags inspired by the manga. Other recurring animation directors include:

• Makoto Yamashita, in charge of the "POP TEAM 8bit" video game parody segments made with original pixel art animation, which he was using as his final term project in a college art program at the time
• Kamikaze Douga's Thibault Tresca, creator of the Gratuitous French "JAPON MiGNON" segments that only exist because he knows absolutely no Japanese and his superiors thought it'd be funny to let him do what he wants just based on the art
• AC-bu (AC部), creators and voice actors of the "Bob Epic Team" segments which are known for their...distinct and intentionally inconsistent off-model art style
• UchuPeople, a married couple who create the "POP TEAM DANCE" music videos starring Stop Motion felted puppets
• Kazuki Sekiguchi, director of the "Pop Team Cooking" Cooking Show parodies that make use of Line Boil
• Miyo Sato, who uses sand art and painting on glass as she did for Mob Psycho 100 to create the "Pop Team Epic Tales of Long Ago" segments
• Yuanyuan Hu^note Bacon Mushamusha-kun and Asami Ike^note The shark attack flipbook both produced segments featuring their unique art styles, and Gorilla Film made two different segments with drastically different styles ^note "Bara-bara Tai-chan" and "Awoken Pipimi"
• Episode 13 brings us "POP CLAY EPIC", Claymation shorts made by BUSTED ROSE. In addition, a unique intro was produced by Sunrise, directed by Masami Obari.
• Episode 14 features Toshiyuki Aoyama's 3D "Popxar" shorts, "Pop Team Collage" by Yoko Ko, and "Pop Team Pastel" by Satomi Yonetani. With composite studio Asura Film and AC-bu each doing their own takes on a theoretical Hoshiiro Girldrop intro.

Each episode is a Quarter Hour Short... sort of. Once the episode ends, an encore presentation is immediately broadcast afterwards but with a completely different voice cast for Popuko and Pipimi, with one pair generally being two women and the other pair two men.^note The first episode is an exception as the 2nd half still had a man as Popuko paired with a woman for Pipimi. In each pair, the two have some relationship between them, generally as a pairing in a previous show or simply a well-publicized friendship. Sometimes the dialog and jokes are different between the two versions of the episode, either due to ad libbing on the actors' parts or jokes have been rewritten to fit in with a particular actor's prior roles, as well as other minor roles being recast for humorous effect. By the time the series ended in late March 2018, after 12 episodes, Popuko and Pipimi had been voiced by 24 different people each, not counting the "Bob Epic Team" and "JAPON MiGNON" segments which each have different recurring voice actors and the two different sets of vocalists for the series' Insert Songs and ending theme songs.^note And the nonsensical joke casting of two actors who star in a different Kamikaze Douga production. And that's just the original Japanese broadcast version. Funimation and Sentai Filmworks both picked up the series for English audiences, producing two different translated scripts distributed to their own simulcast services as well as Crunchyroll and others. Toonami aired the anime from June 30, 2018.

A TV special featuring two new episodes^note Which had different casts per episode half which was further different based on which of 4 websites the episodes were streamed on, meaning an additional 16 people voiced each character on top of two new pairs of singing voices and a new voice for Pipimi in "JAPON MiGNON". was broadcast on April 1, 2019.

In October 2021, the anime's Remix rerun brought up so much changes that the staff literally announced that they won't rest on a simple rerun. Truly a bunch of trolls. After the rerun ended, they announced that a second season was indeed coming — it began airing in October 2022.

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Let's Trope Together:

A-M

• Actor Allusion:
  • The episode in which Norio Wakamoto provides the male voice of Pipimi includes a bit where she's dressed up as Vega/M. Bison.
  • In one scene Popuko is revealed to be a robot, and in the male version, she even says "baby" at the end of a phrase shortly after the reveal. Her male voice actor in this episode Tesshō Genda is the regular Japanese dub voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and by default, the T-800. He is also the Japanese voice of the original Optimus Prime.
  • It should be no surprise that Ryūsei Nakao is the voice actor for Popuko when the anime adapts the "Your motherfucking life ends 30 minutes from now" strip.^note According to some accounts, Ryusei delivered the line in the exact same manner.
  • Pipimi combines into a mecha with Popuko in Episode 4. Both Tesshō Genda and Akira Kamiya have worked on combining mecha anime. Voltes V and God Sigma for Tessho Genda and Getter Robo for Akira Kamiya. Genda is also famous for another robot cartoon, having provided the Japanese voice of the original Optimus Prime.
  • In Episode 4 of the dub, the Initial D parody GTR is voiced by Joel McDonald, who was Takumi Fujiwara in the Funimation dub of Initial D.
  • In Episode 7, during the baby sketch, Popuko is dressed as a baby. Her appearance resembles Chiffon from Fresh Pretty Cure!, and she's portrayed by the same voice actress, who is known for her toddler roles.
  • In the male version of the Pop Team Cooking segment in Episode 10, as Pipimi is yelling at her co-host, she is accompanied by the sucking sound effect of The Hand, the Stand used by Wataru Takagi's character in Diamond is Unbreakable, Okuyasu Nijimura.
  • In Episode 10, Inspector Higure is voiced by Chafurin, who is best known as Inspector Megure from Case Closed. Chafurin also voices another inspector, Ooishi. The allusion also makes it into the dub, as Higure is voiced by Megure's English voice actor, Mark Stoddard.
  • Episode 11-B's commentator, B.B. Goro, is a frequent Junji Inagawa impersonator. This comes in handy when he's brought in to parody Inagawa's Paranormal Activity commentary.
  • In Season 2 Episode 4’s Pop Team Epic: B-Side skit, Pipihara reveals the weapons he stocked within his uniform. Unique to Part A is the inclusion of the Benz Knife owned by Hunter × Hunter character, Chrollo Lucilfer, as a deliberate shoutout to Popuoka and Pipihara's Part A actresses Megumi Han (Popuoka) and Mariya Ise (Pipihara) also playing the Hunter × Hunter main characters Gon and Killua. The same trope also applies to Killua's English voice actress Cristina Vee, who voiced Popuko in that episode.
  • In the main segment of Season 2 Episode 8, Popuko and Pipimi call each other names during one part of their battle royale game. In Part A, Popuko (Voiced by Asami Sanada) calls Pipimi (Voiced by Kyoko Hikami) "Usada", a nod to the seiyuus' work as Dejiko and Rabi~en~Rose in Di Gi Charat, in particular how Dejiko refers to Rabi by her real last name, Usada, instead her stage name.
• Adaptation Distillation: The nature of the manga as 4-koma non sequiturs means there is little continuity to be had. That has not stopped the anime from combining some strips with common themes into a longer segment.
  • One example from Episode 4 combines the strip about a conveniently placed save point, where around the next corner is the Boss, with the strip featuring the evil demon lord and the beanbag chair, with a Dragon Quest inspired loading screen between the two scenes.
  • Sometimes two thematically-linked strips are each adapted back to back with eye catches in between, such as the "part time job" strip and the "list" strip, or the "I have to go to school, Mr. Futon" and "oversleeping" strips.
  • The Pop Team 8bit segments often take jokes from multiple strips and combine them together for a single video game themed Shout-Out segment. As an example, the second racing game segment from Episode 7 starts out as a Super Mario Kart parody...before going directly into a Pokémon parody, where Popuko's Moveset references four strips in a sort of Freeze-Frame Bonus: "Shrinking", "All Pull Mandragora", "Next Door", and "Eisai Haramasukoi". She goes with "Shrinking", which segues into an adaptation of a strip with a reference to Trials of Mana, which then goes out of the 8bit segment into an adaptation of a strip where Popuko gets angry at losing a video game.
• Adaptation Expansion: The manga is only a 4-panel gag series, so it's expected that the anime would expand on those to fill longer periods of time in the episodes.
  • Episode 8's "The Dragon of Iidabashi" Pop Team Story segment expands on a small gag where Popuko writes "Designated Crime Syndicate" on the Takeshobo headquarters staffed by bamboo-headed people into a full yakuza family of bamboo-headed people.
  • Episode 11's "Eisai Haramasukoi" dance sketch segues into the opening sequence featuring her in a club dancing to EDM music while Pipimi acts as a DJ.
  • AC-bu's Bob Epic Team segments go even further in expanding on the strips in their own unique ways, such as the extended fight scene and takuan factory during the "Are you mad?" sketch, the "Already seen it at the zoo" sketch adding more animals and revealing the girls have somehow made their way to Australia, the "I am not staring at you" sketch going into a mini music video, a full drum solo out of the "Mistimed Rimshot" sketch, and the complaint letter sketch resulting in animation with far more frames than AC-bu had ever used in any of their prior sketches. The most blatant example of their adding to the source material was being given the reins to make a Pop Team Story segment all about Pipimi daydreaming a documentary about Hellshake Yano...presented by the animators turned voice actors narrating their script over pencil sketches in multiple sketchbooks treated as puppets.
  • The second season of the anime features the "Train Battle" in full albeit with Pipimi replacing the old man from the original strip.
• Affectionate Parody:
  • UchuuPeople's videos for "Let's Pop Together" and the song featured in Season 1 Episode 14 are blatant yet loving parodies of the videos for Earth, Wind & Fire's "Let's Grove" and Armi ja Danny's "Tahdon olla sulle hellä" respectively.
  • Season 1 Episode 13's Cold Opening skit and intro parodies the Humongous Mecha genre, the Brave Series especially. Their willingness to go all out with these parodies, going as far as to get Sunrise to work on them, indicates it's all in good fun.
  • Season 2 Episode 9's main segment parodies the Japanese delinquent stories from the 1980-90's, reproducing the Japanese animation art style and format. Despite the clear gag elements, such as Cthulhu as the main character and the unusual presence of a lightsaber, the storyline is still a good-natured and classic True Companions plot typical for the genre.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Some strips have nothing to do with Popuko and Pipimi, focusing instead on some other characters and whatever weird things they're up to.
• Animation Bump:
  • The show's segments that aren't done entirely in its signature art style sometimes see a sudden shift in animation quality. Pop Team Cooking, for example, is the closest the anime looks to a kids cartoon, utilizing squiggly lines, darker pastel colors and generally more in-betweens than usual; while JAPON MiGNON takes the show's CG animation and plucks the choppiness out of it. Then there is Bob Epic Team which over- and under-animates things on its own accord while making sure no one stays on model for too long.
  • In Season 1 Episode 13's opening sequence, the animation plays out like a normal skit, before revealing a fluidly-animated Pipimi-Robo in the final shot. This bump caries over to the intro.
• Anime Opening Parody: The anime does a bait and switch by starting off apparently like a magical girl/pop idol anime called "Hoshiiro Girldrop" complete with an anime opening. Just as it first title card is read out, Popuko appears and rips it apart, starting the real anime of the series.
• Anthropomorphic Personification:
  • One strip personifies their publisher as Lord Takeshobo no Hikomaro, an emperor pursuing Pop Team Epic to presumably capture it and lock it away (or kill it). Popuko plays the role of her own manga.
  • In announcement strips, Takeshobo is often portrayed as a man with bamboo for a head.
  • Episode 8's Pop Team Story "The Rising Dragon of Iidabashi - Pipi the Avenger" has the entire yakuza Bamboozle Gang (Chikushokai); lower ranked members are bamboo shoots, the next tier up are bamboo shafts, and the Boss is a kadomatsu (the three angle-cut bamboo stalks used for Japanese New Year celebrations).
• April Fools' Day:
  • The official anime website was put up on March 31 as the site for an adaptation of Bkub's romcom manga Hoshiiro GirlDrop. On April 2nd, it was updated to show Popuko tearing it apart, revealing that Pop Team Epic itself was getting an anime adaptation.
  • For April Fools 2019, an hour-long TV special with two new episodes' worth of content were aired on four different channels. Each channel had different voice actors for both Parts A and B of each episode.
• Art Evolution: While the comic itself is already a noticeable upgrade from Bkub's early doujins, that doesn't mean the guy hasn't changed his style since starting Pop Team Epic. Aside from the lineart being a lot cleaner, Popuko and Pipimi have become noticeably rounder and stouter — this is particularly noticeable with Pipimi, who appears comparatively chubby as a result.
• Art Shift:
  • Art style changes happen a lot in the manga:
    • A panel in one comic (later adapted in the anime) is immediately followed by a (much more detailed) "Blu-Ray version".
    • The final panel of a comic features a photo-realistic closeup of a turtle.
  • In the anime, all skits presented are rendered with various mediums, from crappy scribbles, CG animation, stop-motion, to by-the-book shout-outs:
    • Episodes 2, 4, 12 and 14 have musical segments animated entirely with felt dolls.
    • Episode 2 also featured a segment where the animation studio—Space Neko Company, straight out aired their rough key-animations, only to be intervened by "the finished-looking" Popuko and Pipimi, and ends with a live-action segment of the guest voice actors complaining to the recording staff within their recording room.
    • The anime's DVD and Blu-Ray editions have different cover art as a call back to the "Blu-Ray Version" joke from the manga. And they're all Die Hard parodies.
  • The iconic "overly-detailed middle fingers" pose clashes with the simplistic character designs of the girls.
  • After Takeshobo "reboots" the comic for an arc, Boys' Love mangaka Harada takes over the art duties.
  • Done for 2019 April Fools Special's intros. While Episode 13 features an intro sequence guest animated by Sunrise and Masami Obari, influenced by the Humongous Mecha genre that they're both known for. A Hoshiiro Girldrop intro opens Episode 14... only for the second half's version of the same intro to be taken over by AC-bu instead.
  • Episode 13's "Pop Clay Epic" segments are of course, made of clay.
  • Poputan, the Lighter and Softer Season 4 opener, is in the style of how Bkub usually draws his happier comics like his Cinderella Girls and later Touhou doujins. The girls are even shown opening their mouths for once.
  • Season 2 of the anime brings back the Sunrise/Obari style for a dedicated segment in Episode 2, poking fun at the more expensive animation required for it compared to the usual style.
• Art-Style Dissonance: It's a comedy 4koma manga about two Super-Deformed schoolgirls with perpetual Playful Cat Smiles, who often use rude language and do surreal and sometimes violent things.
• Author Appeal: Bkub likes to show his appreciation of many works via numerous references:
  • Made in Abyss. One of the fortunes in Episode 2 even states "Nanachi is cute," complete with a surprisingly well-drawn Nanachi.
  • New Game!. Popuko keeps saying "I'll do my best for the whole day today!" as a Running Gag.
  • The Idolmaster gets a reference in with Kenji Akabane and Shunsuke Takeuchi as well as Ankira doing the ending theme, while Eriko Nakamura and Asami Imai (Haruka and Chihaya) voice the duo in Part A of Episode 9. Bkub is known for his love of the franchise, a fact that gets lampshaded by Ankira themselves in Episode 8.
  • Kamikaze Douga doesn't slouch on their favorites. They sneak in references to the PriPara anime, ranging from Popuko aping the "Kashikoma" catchphrase, to a magazine poster with the pair in Shion and Nino's duo pose, to the female singers for insert songs outright hailing from PriPara. Bkub frequently tweets about it as well.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • There are multiple jokes of the (originally) nonexistent series Hoshiiro Girldrop turning ut to be Pop Team Epic instead.
    • How Season 2 of the manga opens up. After the conclusion of the original strip, Hoshiiro Girldrop begins and tells a story about a boy encountering and housing a girl who supposedly was his childhood friend. While trying to convince the boy, the heroine rips off her face to reveal she's actually Popuko, kickstarting the real comic.
    • The first anime episode opens with a Cold Open and opening teasing the viewer into thinking it's a 'Hoshiiro Girldrop anime, only ending when Popuko tears through the title card.
    • A Freeze-Frame Bonus on Episode 2 discusses this trope being used with Hoshiiro Girldrop, where one of the fortunes says "Terrible luck: You get to work on an incredibly cute idol anime but it ends up as the opening act to a shitty anime".
  • For Season 6, instead of Hoshiiro Girldrop, it opens with a comedy manga about a Third Wheel watching his childhood friends hook up and how he deals with it. It only turns back to The Pop Team Epic we know and love when the last page reveals that the movie theater they went to is filled with Popukos and Pipimis.
  • In the Vanver segment in Episode 2, while the guest voice actors have an argument with the director, a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl fades in next to them. The narrator asks if we now understand what's going on as the camera zooms into... the corner of the room, where Popuko's and Pipimi's faces are hiding. In the reprise of the episode, with a completely different set of guest voice actors and completely different dialogue, when the camera zooms in to that corner there's instead a second ghost in the corner with her mouth wide-open... with Popuko and Pipimi hiding inside.
• Big Applesauce: The setting of "Dancing with a Miracle". From the fact that the Twin Towers were still standing and the synth soundtrack in the beginning, the majority of it took place in the 80s as well.
• Big Bad: In the first and last episodes of the anime, we got a new council of evil stalking the main duo. They're revealed to be King Records in the latter.
• Big "WHAT?!": Pipimi lets out a huge "what!?" in response to Popuko claiming that she'll die if she sees a jagged word bubble. (This, predictably, kills her. Twice.)
• Biting-the-Hand Humor:
  • Many, many jabs are taken at Takeshobo (the comic's publisher). Getting shafted at parties is the kindest treatment they get. Even one dessert café promotion got in on it, featuring a waffle (standing up, so it resembles an office building) with the Takeshobo sign on it. As with the playable Taiko no Tatsujin track of Pop Team Epic's opening theme, which lets the player destroy an icon of Takeshobo's building upon tapping the drum controller to it.
  • After the anime's premiere delay, the anime takes shots at King Records when it can.
  • The entirety of Episode 12's Pop Team Story is the girls fighting against King Records, along with the classic destruction of Takeshobo.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • Esahi Super Dry is clearly Asahi Super Dry, just a letter off.
  • The “PPT” drink on the cheater player’s computer desk for Season 2 Episode 8 based it’s product design off of Monster Beverage Corporation’s Monster Energy drink.
• Blind Without 'Em: Popuko manages to leave the Earth searching for her glasses. Since the series runs on Negative Continuity, this is the first and last time Popuko is even mentioned as needing glasses.
• Blood Knight: Both of the girls love violence and destruction.
• Book Ends:
  • The first and last Pop Team Stories center around the Nebulous Evil Organization King Records and their attempts to make Pop Team Epic into a more conventional anime series. Both attempts end with the girls emerging victorious.
  • The first sketch in Episode 1 was Popuko punching Pipimi with the "Are you mad?" "I'm not mad" exchange. The last canonical joke has the girls' fused finishing move be a strong punch, and the exchange is used again, this time with the fusion asking and the five Kings responding.
  • Both the first and last episodes have "Pop Team Stories" parodying popular plotlines for their specific episode number: "Encounter" features the first episode of a romcom, while "THE AGE OF POP TEAM EPIC" is the last episode of a hot-blooded action series.
• Bottle Episode: "Rising Hell ~The Hellshake Arrow~", which takes AC-Bu's Hellshake Yano bit from the first season and expands it to the entire episode.
• Bowdlerise: To a degree. Crunchyroll's English subs for the anime seems to avoid translating "kuso" as "shitty", replacing it with "weird", "silly", or other similar words; "shitty" only appears a few times, whereas "crappy" tends to be the strongest flavor in the absence of it. Averted with Sentai Filmworks'/HIDIVE's subs, which translates "kuso" appropriately as "shit"...and occasionally as "fuck", for good measure.
• Brick Joke:
  • At the start of Episode 5, the "Steamboat Willie" parody is censored with footage of a boat. Later on in the episode, we have a skit with Popuko doing her impression of Mi**ey, and we only get to see it via her shadow.
  • The "Blu-ray version" gag mentioned in Art Shift eventually returned when the anime started getting physical releases, with the DVD covers rendered in the standard style and the Blu-Ray covers done in a more realistic style.
• Butt-Monkey: Hoshiiro Girldrop despite being fictional. All of the series' announcements are torn through by Popuko, their anime announcement was an April Fool's joke, and what little we do see from the anime from its previews shows that it's little more than moving clip-art.
• The Cameo:
  • An early strip has Histral from Bkub's Mission Impossible comic suddenly show up out of nowhere. Lampshaded when Popuko mentions she hates it when Production Throwbacks happen.
  • The Hoshiiro Girldrop opening shows the God of Eurobeat near the left when the whole cast is rounded up. As he is a one-off character in the regular Pop Team Epic comics, this is one of many clues that Girldrop isn't the real focus.
  • Nanachi from Made in Abyss makes a couple of cameos in the series. One in Season 1, Episode 2 during a Freeze-Frame Bonus in one of the fortunes, and another, in Season 2 Episode 3 with their own brief segment called "Nanachi Ranking". Both Shiori Izawa and Brittney Karbowski also reprised their role.
  • In the Toku parody opening of Season 2, Yuichi Nakamura (the actor, not the voice actor) makes a brief appearance. Fitting, as he has been in several toku works before.
• Canon Immigrant: Subverted for laughs in one strip where Pepayo claims to be a character that made her debut in the anime, only for Popuko and Pipimi to point out she never appeared in it.
• Casting Gag: The series itself usually tends to cast and pair certain voice actors who have a noteworthy history with each other (i.e. a pair voice actors who voice two characters from a popular series). The second season takes this further by having them fit the genre and the skills for the main segment.
  • In the Hero and Magician Girl segment in Episode 2A, Nobuyuki Hiyama and Asami Sanada play supporting characters that match their most well-known typecasts — The Hero for Hiyama and the Magical Girl for Sanada.
  • In the dub, Johnny Yong Bosch and Stephanie Sheh both play Popuko in Episode 8. This is the episode the Japanese broadcasters wanted to air "endlessly". This is a nod to the Haruhi Suzumiya's "Endless Eight" arc which saw the same content repeated and broadcasted for eight episodes to reflect the multiple iterations of their summer break the characters went through, includng Bosch and Sheh's characters Koizumi and Mikuru.
  • In season 2's dub of 8B, they had Christopher Wehkamp pair up with Alex Organ whom he frequently darrins on certain roles (notably with Shota Aizawa) due to Alex going on hiatus from voice acting between 2017-2022.
  • The final episode of season 2 features Yūichi Nakamura (the actor probably best known for his Kamen Rider roles) As Himself, as well as his Alternate Self, which is also physically played by him... but voiced by the other Yūichi Nakamura.
• Chekhov's Gun: Textbook example in "Cursed Mansion" in Episode 11, with an axe and two guns actually mounted on a wall. Well, unless you factor in the one unused gun at the end...
• Chest Monster: The two girls find an insect that disguises itself as a Village Vanguard store^note Think of it like a Japanese Hot Topic to lure in and kill "subculture bitches".
• Clone Army: In the idol band Mockumentary sketch from Episode 3 of the anime, Pipi-P (Pipimi), struggling to find replacements for Pop-chin (Popuko)'s backup singers in her idol band, eventually resorts to cloning Pop-chin herself. The Pop-chin clones eventually overrun humanity and lay cities to waste. This leads to Pipi-P ultimately becoming a ruling dictator, dressed like M.Bison/Vega no less.
• Comedic Sociopathy: A common source of comedy is Popuko being indifferent at best and amused at worst by even the most extreme acts of violence and wrongdoings, though Pipimi is hardly a saint herself.
• Completely Different Title: In-Universe example: Dancing with a Miracle was originally known as Dream in New York, but was changed when came time for translation.
• Continuity Nod: In one of the rare moments of the manga having continuity, Popuko calls Pipimi out on daydreaming again, claiming the latter girl was imagining Hellshake Yano again after the first time she did it. Only this time, it's Magmamixer Murata.
• Credits Gag:
  • From Episode 3 onwards of the anime, Bkub Okawa's "role" in the production changes per episode. They have been: Executive Kusomanga Advisor (3), Middle-of-the-Island^note At Comiket, "islands" are the rows of tables used for commercial booths. Regular attendees refer to their location in the convention as to where they are at the "end of the island" or "middle of the island". The more coveted location is at the "end". Writer (4), College Dropout (5), Virtual YouTuber (6), Warrior of Light (7), Miyakko^note A nickname from people from various cities in Japan with "Miya" in their names, like Bkub's hometown Nishinomiya in Hyogo (8), Let's Player (9), Manga Lover (10), Choreography (11), kuso manga boy (12), "jumped the shark" (13), Bkubku Okawa (14).
  • The opening sequence for the second half of Episode 10 suddenly has sound effects incorporated into the opening sequence, much like Kamikaze Douga's work on JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
  • In Episode 12, both airings had different opening videos about Pop Team Epicrimson (a parody of the Sega Saturn game Death Crimson: opening cutscene in the first part, gameplay in the second.
• Crossover: Sanrio collaborated with this series in 2018, for the Summer Comiket season.
• Cultural Cross-Reference: While the majority of the "Pop" in Pop Team Epic comes from anime and Japanese video games, quite a few references come from American pop culture as well: Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, Undertale, Cuphead, various Disney movies... the list goes on and on. There are also a lot of Die Hard references in the anime, due to the entire series being Author Appeal to its producer, Kotaro Sudo.
• Cultural Translation:
  • Episode 2 of the anime has Popuko sing a song, with another tagging along, upsetting Popuko. In Japanese, Popuko was singing "Shizukana kohan no mori no kage kara" (静かな湖畔の森の影から, literally "from the shadow of the woods by a quiet lakeside"), a Japanese children's folk song considered to be a variant of the Itsy Bitsy Spider melody. Funimation's English dub changes this to Popuko singing "Little Bunny Foo Foo" (a Western children's folk song also similar to Itsy Bitsy Spider) instead.
  • Episode 9's Pop Team Story "Dancing with a Miracle" is English in the first half (translated by guest cast member Ikurru Kamijou, a.k.a. YouTuber The Anime Man) and Okinawan in the second (translated by veteran actor Masahiro Arakaki). In Funimation's Englih translations, Hawaiian Pidgin is used for the subs and an informal Southern American English accent for the dub. The Italian subs go with a Naples dialect.
• Cute Oversized Sleeves: One strip references this trope, by referring to them as "cutesy sleeves". In typical absurdist Poptepipic fashion, Pipimi is using them to hide her "bloodied hands".
• The Day the Music Lied: One strip/segment sees Popuko wake up to the strains of Peter Gynt's "Morning Mood" (as established by a caption)... only to discover, after getting dressed and opening her curtains, that it's still night outside. Cue caption abuse.
• Deranged Animation: Incredibly bizarre animation is omnipresent throughout the anime, especially in the deliberately Off-Model "Bob Epic Team" segments. Even in their "normal" forms, Popuko and Pipimi's extreme chibi character designs can be disturbing to look at, especially given the way their vaguely vulgar-looking mouths move.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Popuko's reaction to a bear smoking where he shouldn't be is to chop off his cigarette with an axe. When he gets out another one, she instead lodges it in his head.
  • A city advisor asks Popuko to build something for children. She builds a rocket swing. When the advisor tells her it might be too dangerous for kids, she accuses him of being an Ungrateful Bastard and asks to collect his head.
  • In one strip, the waiter at a restaurant splashes Popuko when he sets her glass of water down too hard. So when he leaves, she lays out a bear trap for the guy and rings the service bell to bait him into the trap.
  • Another strip has Popuko sliding down a handrail, only to be knocked off by a man sliding behind her. Her response is to shoot him.
• Distracted by the Sexy: One of the fortunes in Episode 2, combined with Freeze-Frame Bonus, alludes to the trope of being too distracted by fanservice to pay attention to anything else:
  You are too busy watching the boobs to notice Popuko on the right.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • In some early comics, the girls' mouths actually open whenever they spoke, as opposed to always being shut which has become the norm in the series.
  • Several early strips have Popuko encounter various non-traditional "gods", such as the God of Laziness and the God of Eurobeat.
  • Some early comics don't feature Popuko or Pipimi at all, such as "Bacon Musha-Musha-kun", "Bara-bara Tai-chan", and the "Ponta the Hamster" strips.
  • Some early chapters render the Latinized title of ポプテピピック as "Pop Teen Epic", before finally sticking to the official title "Pop Team Epic". The first strips call the title Poptepipic Hardcore.
  • The first episode of the anime have the male voice actors come on first before the women. From the second episode onwards, the female voice actors come on before the men. Also, in the first episode Popuko's voice actor is a man in both versions.
  • In the anime, the Pop Team Story segments start out lacking a sense of story structure in the first few episodes. It's not until the third episode's Pop Team Story where they began having something resembling plots.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Three times. Once in the opening sequence, once (albeit on a slightly smaller scale) during the hiccups segment, and once in the "Tree of the Heart" segment (where it's more of an Earth Shattering Karate Chop).
• Enhanced on DVD:
  • Spoofed in a strip where a scene of Popuko in her usual design receives Art Shift to a significantly more detailed "Blu-ray version" of the preceding panel.
  • Spoofed in a a strip where Popuko admits that there's no punchline and that it'll be redrawn for the print collection.
  • The DVD and Blu-Ray covers for the anime get in on the joke by making them drawn in an "improved" normal artstyle.
• Even Evil Has Standards: One strip has The Little Mermaid making her deal with the sea witch so she can marry the human prince. But when the witch asks for her voice, the mermaid asks for the power to bend people to her will. The witch's only response is "Rape is a crime."
• Exact Words: In the Mockumentary portion of Episode 3 of the anime, Pipi-P (Pipimi) told a smoking Pop-chin (Popuko) to "lose the cigarettes". Pop-chin then proceeds to replace her cigarette with a cigar, which Pipi-P actually commended her for.
• Fake-Out Opening: The cold opening, title sequence and next episode preview for the first episode of Pop Team Epic are from Hoshiiro Girldrop, which only actually exists in a very short run series the creator apparently made between hiatus periods on the manga. Only the end credits are NOT from Girldrop.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Popuko's nonstop hiccuping◊. After Pipimi tells her of a rumor that hiccuping 100 times could kill someone, she stops at 99... and promptly self-destructs.
• Fan Animation: Pop Team Epic has various fan animations on YouTube, including motion comics and fan adaptations of Four Koma to MS Paint versions of the opening.
• Fan Flattering: Popuko prepares a party and offers a fancy table with luscious food and drink for the comic's fans (while haters and Takeshobo guests are forced to sit on the floor).
• Fear of Thunder: Popuko fears thunderstorms so much that she cusses at them.
• Felony Misdemeanor: Popuko makes a YouTube video so bad that she gets arrested for it.
• Flipping the Bird: Popuko and Pipimi tend to give the middle finger often (usually with realistically-detailed hands) as a way to contrast with their cute designs.
• Flirty Stepsiblings: The premise of Episode 5's "IMO☆YOBA"^note Short for "Imouto Nante Yobanai de", translated as "Don't Call Me Your Little Sister", and made into "Donca☆Sis" by Funimation skit is that Iyo Sakuragi and Hojo-senpai fall in love with each other but end up becoming stepsiblings when Iyo's deadbeat dad remarries Hojo's equally deadbeat mother. And Hojo's mom and Iyo's "dad" turn out to be (who else?) Popuko and Pipimi, respectively.
• Foreshadowing: There are hints that the high schoolgirls of the Visual Novel segment of Season 2 Episode 6 aren't the real Popuko and Pipimi (they appear at the end to literally break the game). First, they are rivals here while they are normally are unfailing friends. Second, there is a third candidate, a middle schoolgirl with Popuko's haircut, indicating that they didn't merge completely into the game and troll the player. Third, the canteen woman blatantly looks like Popuko, furthering this theory.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: The anime adaptation of the "please subscribe to our channel" comic. The first time, the scene cuts to black and you hear the ringing of a phone. The second time, it cuts to black and you hear a knock on the door...
• Foreign Queasine: One of the anime's JAPON MiGNON segments has Popuko and Pipimi try to be adventurous and order some French food; Pipimi orders andouillette corsée, a traditional offal sausage, and Popuko chooses salade de Maroilles chaud, a salad made from the strong smelling Maroilles cheese. Once they receive their food, they're visibly put off by how strong the dishes smell, and a fly drops dead as it hovers above the table. In the next scene, they've gone to a ramen restaurant instead.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • The opening:
    • The twirling scene has the girls match their outfits to the country they’re in. There are also numerous blink-and-you'll-miss-it gags in the background.
    • When the pencil case is unzipped to show Popuko's eyes, Egyptian hieroglpyhics are on the nearby piece of paper. They read out "KUSOANIME POPUTEPIPItuKU YOROSHKU (O)N(E)GYSHMSU", or "Please enjoy shitty anime Pop Team Epic" in English.
  • Even though it's censored, people can tell the wiki check on Episode 1 was the Japanese Wikipedia page for ''Pop Team Epic''.
  • Season 1 Episode 2 of the anime has a bunch of fortunes being displayed rapidly in succession. They're shown so quickly that pausing/taking screencaps are needed to read them all, as the viewer apparently is supposed to take photos of them with their cell phone camera.
  • In Season 1 Episode 6 of the anime, when Popuko and PP1000 are playing a very faced-pace version of shogi, you can briefly see Popuko Flipping the Bird. The same scene has the PP1000 playing Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, go stones, and throwing a star-marked sutra.
  • Season 1 Episode 10. It's briefly shown that the murder victim was able to write the murderer's name in his own blood, but everyone misses it.
  • Season 1 Episode 11 has a picture in the background of the scenes in the party room that looks exactly like Bkub's Twitter avatar.
  • Season 1 Episode 12:
    • The final explosion that demolishes the building of Takeshobo has the flames make out Popuko's face. In the encore performance it's Pipimi instead.
    • While Shouta Aoi sings the ending theme in the second half, in one close-up he's wearing a mask of his own face...which you can buy on a T-shirt.
  • In the crossover promo for Batman Ninja, a highly detailed picture of Popuko (as Batman) punching Pipimi (as Joker)^note complete with respective "frightened" and "lemon-sucking" faces can be seen before transitioning to a fight scene from the film itself. And there's also exclusive Batman Ninja Popuko and Pipimi Nendoroids (apparently not for sale).
  • Season 2, Episode 4: During Popuko and Pipimi's train fight, the magazine that is used as a weapon contains text that, when turned upside-down and reflected, reveals the Public Secret Message "I'm hoping for peace in Ukraine".
• French Accordion: Invoked and played for laughs in the JAPON MiGNON segment, in which Popuko and Pipimi go to France and test all the French cliches, including the accordion as the background music in all the gags.
• French Jerk: The JAPON MiGNON segment of Episode 1 has Popuko and Pipimi travelling to Paris and wondering how they will communicate. Pipimi tries to imitate a French mime to speak to a local. He responds by Flipping the Bird. Oh, and these segments are animated by a French guy.
• Funny Background Event: When Thibault Tresca is on camera presenting the JAPON MiGNON sketches, a Pipimi plush can be seen in the background. With each successive episode^note it's missing in Episode 9 the plushie gets closer until the final sketch when it's right in Tresca's cubicle.
• Fusion Dance:
  • Popuko and Pipimi perform a fusion dance in Episode 12 in order to take down King Records once and for all. The resulting fusion looks like a combination of Popuko's short build and Pipimi's hairstyle, and is also completely gold.
  • The King Records executive perform a fusion dance their own building, resulting in a giant, possibly mecha thing named Akashic Records that wouldn't be out of place in Super Robot Wars.
• Gag Series: The entire premise of the series is that it contains nothing but gag skits. The anime version somehow manages to exaggerate this further. One example is the scene featuring an ominous council remarking on how a Yonkoma could never become an anime features a character with a fidget spinner for no reason at all.
• Gender Bender:
  • Pop Team Epic: B-Side presents sketches with Bishōnen versions of the characters.
  • Season 2 episode 6 starts on a Visual Novel with an unnamed male protagonist who crushes on Popuko and Pipimi, the former being the excitable and teasing Childhood Friend and the latter being the aloof and charismatic top student of the high school. The second half does the same, except that a female protagonist crushes on male versions of Popuko and Pipimi. The middle schoolgirl who has a crush on the protagonist gender bends too.
• Golden Super Mode: In Episode 12, as Popuko and Pipimi fuse together and turn into "a new warrior" that's completely gold. Their golden color is a reference to God Gundam's Hyper Mode, confirmed since the eyecatches just before this segment are a direct reference to Mobile Fighter G Gundam's eyecatches.
• Good Morning, Crono: In the first episode of the anime, Popuko wakes up and runs to school but something bad happens and resets her back to bed repeatedly. This skit even includes a reference to Crono crashing into Marle in the Trope Namer, Chrono Trigger.
• Goofy Suit: The girls have real-life walkaround costumes that get showcased in the ending credits of Season 2's third episode, where they barge into the King Records (Part A) and Takeshobo (Part B) HQ buildings and get into various shenanigans. With an added emphasis on the Popuko costume's cumbersome pigtails getting in the way of doors and employees at several points.
• Gory Discretion Shot: The Battle of Takeshobo is only viewed from outside the building. Justified as the building then collapses.
• Gratuitous English: Out-of-place English frequently turns up.
  • Popuko tries to ask for a hamburger, but the cashier rather condescendingly corrects her with the proper English pronunciation. Popuko responds thusly.
  • One strip has the girls shouting random nonsensicle English at each other.
    Popuko: GO GO GO GO
    Pipimi: HEY HEY HEY HEY
    Pipimi: DANGER ZONE
    Popuko: I LOVE DANGER ZONE...
• Gratuitous French: The JAPON MiGNON sketches from the anime stand out for being entirely in French in a series that's otherwise spoken in Japanese, solely because they're written and directed by French animator Thibault Tresca who works at Kamikaze Douga. The sketches features Popuko and Pipimi's travels in France, with both voiced by native French speakers Fanny Bloc and Christine Bellier. His colleagues at Kamikaze Douga decided to just give him strips of the comic to read, and Tresca, who cannot understand Japanese, just makes self-deprecating jokes about life in France rather than making "canon" stories.
• Groin Attack: In the "Poputan" sketch, when a farmer sexually harasses Popuko and Pipimi, they tie him to a log and put it on a Conveyor Belt o' Doom moving toward a buzzsaw, crotch-first.
• Hero of Another Story: The cast of Hoshiiro Girldrop have their own romcom plotline, but they're basically interrupted by Popuko and Pipimi's antics before the audience can see much of it. All we ever get to see from their show are the On the Next segments.
• Heroic BSoD: Pipimi out of the blue asks Popuko to imagine her becoming an adult before she does. It does not go well. It's worse in the anime version in Episode 2, because Pipimi asks this while both of them were on the floor, violently laughing◊.
  Pipimi: (sits up) Say, think about what you'll do if I become an adult tomorrow before you.
  Popuko: (abruptly stops laughing, develops Empty Eyes for the remainder of the skit)
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: "IMO☆YOBA" has Popuko and Pipimi be Iyo and Hojo's step-parents. Among their acts includes blowing all their money on pachinko machines, constantly distracting them from studying by doing puppet shows outside their window, and keeping them up at night by Char's Gelgoog Dancing near their beds.
• Horrifying the Horror: At one point, Popuko is called by the subject of the "Phonecall from Mary" urban legend. Instead of freaking out she gets pissed off and picks up her nail covered bat to fight back. When she doesn't find Mary in front of her house she actually calls the possessed doll to ask where she is. The anime adaptation of the skit even has Mary's response sound absolutely terrified!
  Mary: I-I am Mary.
  Popuko: WHERE ARE YOU?
  Mary: At the station.
  Popuko: DON'T YOU RUN AWAY!
• How We Got Here: The Hiccups skit begins with the main duo in the afterlife as Popuko apologizes for what she did. It then flashes back ten minutes earlier.
  Popuko: (goes *hic* *hic* *hic* as a counter in the corner goes from 92 to 99)
  Pipimi: I hear if you hiccup 100 times, you die.
  Popuko: This is 99.
  Pipimi: Oh, it stopped?
  Popuko: (starts glowing) I'll just self-destruct! (Earth-Shattering Kaboom)
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Popuko takes two panels to declare that there won't be any more copy-pasting... in a pose that is identical between both panels.
  • One strip has Popuko resort to asking "Protest-About-Things-On-Twitter Man" to protest about a woman ignoring her child while on the phone... presumably while on the phone himself, and similarly not doing a thing to resolve the "woman ignoring child" problem.
  • Popuko can't believe when girls call their beau sickeningly sweet slang nicknames. When Pipimi shows some interest in it, the former girl switches to calling her one of those nicknames immediately.
• Identical Grandson: Parodied in the "IMO☆YOBA" skit, where both Iyo and Hojo's parents as well as their future children are portrayed by Popuko and Pipimi.
• In the Name of the Moon: Episode 12A of the Funimation dub has Popuko recite the Sailor Moon catchphrase when the two demolish the Takeshobo building. She interrogates an employee at gunpoint.
  Popuko: The anime is wrapping up, friend. IN THE NAME OF THE MOON, I WILL MAKE YOU PAY!
• Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Season 2 Episode 6 has a segment where Popuko decides to move in "auto mode", basing her movements on Pipimi's position, causing her to get stuck on walls, edges of pits and a small flower. When Pipimi tries it instead, she keeps falling into the pit and respawning near the edge, until she finally materializes halfway into Popuko, after which the two just greet each other normally.
• Intentional Engrish for Funny:
  • The series's Japanese title actually reads "poputepipikku", which only loosely resembles how you'd actually write "Pop Team Epic" in katakana (which would be "poppu chiimu epikku".)
  • The Funimation English dub pokes fun at the mixture of R and L sounds in the Japanese language in the Skeleton skit in Episode 4 by deliberately misspelling the English word "legend" as "regend".
    GT-R: Remember this: The R in "GT-R" stands for LEGEND!
• Intrepid Fictioneer: Square Enix’s collaboration skits for Season 2 would insert Popuko and Pipimi into the worlds of the company’s various games.
  • Season 2 Episode 4 places Popuko and Pipimi directly inside the world of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, developed by Square Enix’s predecessor Enix. Complete with the title illustration having Popuko and Pipimi do the pin-up pose from the game’s Japanese Famicom edition package.
  • Season 2 Episode 5 places Popuko and Pipimi into Enix’s 1998 PS1 game, Astronoka, where they punch every scarecrow they come across.
  • Season 2 Episode 9 sends Popuko and Pipimi into "The Navel: Extreme" stage of Final Fantasy XIV where Popuko tries to figure out which route leads to the harder version of the dungeon based on what the floor tastes like. Another segment has them play Mahjong against a Dragoon.
  • A number of segments in different episodes involve their adventures with or as Chocobos.
• Kill It with Fire: Pipimi's reaction to Popuko's "music video" in one Bob Epic Team short is to destroy it with fire.
  Pipimi: Turn it off! Stop right now and burn that tape in a fire!
  Popuko: Okay sure!
• Late for School:
  • Parodied when Popuko is late for school and tries getting to class via cape gliding.
  • Popuko fully embraces the cliche in the first episode, complete with a narration of how ordinary she is and a Toast of Tardiness as she rushes to school.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: Episode 12 is the only one featuring a new sketch in the second half of the episode. (More precisely, the Bob Epic Team sketch is different).
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • The interrogation strip focuses on Pipimi questioning Popuko about what she's done (being featured drinking beer in a commercial), while Popuko ignores her and continues to drink. This scene focuses on her doing the sort of Troubling Unchildlike Behavior that minors aren't allowed to do in Japanese media, making it seem like Pipimi is trying to make sure Popuko doesn't get the series into legal trouble.
  • During the idol mockumentary, Pipi-P motions Pop-chin to the cameraman, who just caught her smoking on tape. Her wondering about what Pop-chin is going to say about being caught mirrors the audience wondering about how a minor in middle school was able to be shown smoking on TV without being censored.
• Lighter and Softer:
  • The JAPON MiGNON segments feature Popuko and Pipimi as earnest (and normal) Japanese tourists enjoying French culture whilst vacationing in Paris, showing no traces of their usual violent and vulgar selves. This is because the segments are animated by a French animator who couldn't understand Japanese and thus knew nothing about the series except the character designs.
  • The rocket swing strip takes quite a turn in the anime. Rather than kill the mayor for not appreciating her work as in the manga, the Bob Epic Team version has Popuko shoot birdseed at him instead. The mayor turns into a pair of birds to eat it while Popuko watches with an uncharacteristically serene face.
    Popuko: Live well.
• Limited Animation:
  • The "IMO☆YOBA" sketch in Episode 5 of the anime is animated in such a matter where Iyo and Hojo have barely any animation to them at all. Only Popuko and Pipimi are slightly more animated than everyone else there.
  • The show as a whole enjoys exploiting the limited animation, often for comedic effect like in the "Bob Epic Team" skits or Episode 2's "Vanver" sketch. Mocked in one "Bob Epic Team" sketch during which there is only one frame for nearly the entire sketch. Then it's extremely subverted with Popuko dancing with 90 frames of rotoscoping (accomplished by one of the animators filming himself dancing at home) while Pipimi is still frozen in the same single frame.
• Literal Metaphor: A charming thief claims his greatest desire is to steal a woman's heart, then takes it right from inside her while she's swooning.
• Lost in Translation:
  • The "beef or chicken" strip is, in its native language, about Popuko confusing the flight attendant's food inquiry for Japan's local flavor of the classic "man or mouse" question (Beef = strength, Chicken = cowardice). Without knowing that, it comes across as Popuko being a very picky eater, having an instance of Nobody Calls Me "Chicken"!, or even about to attack the flight attendant over being asked to decide.
  • In Episode 2 of the anime, the ad-libs said by the voice actors are different in each replay even though both are subtitled similarly in English. The second half even features an attempt at impersonating Takeshi Kitano. In addition, it ends with the phrase "Did you get it?" "Owari itadake darou ka?," which is a phrase commonly found at the end of ghost hunting programs on Japanese television. This is but one example of how self-referential the anime is.
  • The "three times three" skit has another joke besides Popuko getting a very basic question wrong. In Japanese, the usual way of saying 3×3=9 is "sazan ga kyuu". Popuko, however, said it as "mimin ga mi" (3×3=3). This prompted Pipimi to ask "mimin ga?" ("what is 'mimin'?"). Popuko misunderstood the question as "what is 3×3?" and thus answered "3". The Funimation dub manages to translate this skit somewhat well, with the dialogue in question reading "three threes're three; threethrees?; three."
  • Episode 9 Part B has the Pop Team Story segment in Okinawan subtitled in Japanese (the two languages are related but not mutually intelligible). Sentai Filmworks decided to subtitle it normally. Funimation decided to use something resembling Hawaiian Pidgin, which retains the joke of being intelligible to English speakers without the need for subtitles while still being uncommon to viewers.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Episode 1 of the anime has Popuko trapped in a simulation referred to as "Macbeth's Miniature Garden."
• Loves My Alter Ego: Parodied. A girl can't handle the pressure of being confessed to by school hunk Kiyoshi-kun, as she's already dating the other most popular guy in school — his puppet.
• Lyrical Dissonance:
  • "Tree of the Heart" from Episode 12 starts out like an uplifting song that Japanese students typically sing at graduation but quickly veers into something else entirely. Added to by the fact that it's a stop motion skit filmed with felted Popuko and Pipimi puppets.
    It won't lose to the rain and wind or the cold
    That tree will grow tall and strong
    That's what growing up means (no complaining)
    No one is complaining (except you)
    It just shows you're not doing your best
    It just shows you're not doing your best
    I... will... kill... you...! (I will kill you, baby!)
  • "Nakayopiece", the ending song of the second season, is a sweet tune about Popuko and Pipimi reaffirming their friendship. It's also about Flipping the Bird. Justified as the Japanese sign language for "brothers" is by flipping the bird with two hands.
    I know a game you can play with just one finger.
• Merging Mistake: After the "auto mode" segment of Season 2 Episode 6, Pipimi decides she will go on "auto mode" instead, basing her moves on Popuko's locations. She falls into a Bottomless Pit, making Popuko worried... before she freaks out and falls into the exact same pit after Pipimi respawns right behind her, and respawns at the exact same place, making the two girls merge together. They don't seem to bother, however.
• Meta Twist: If there's a "letters" strip or skit, whatever is complained about in the letter will inevitably not be fixed (the manga's copy-pasting, the anime's glut of shout-outs). Then comes the Bob Epic Team version, where the complaint is about the segment's Limited Animation... to which Popuko actually commits and moves with way more frames than she did before accomplished via one of the animators filming himself dancing and then rotoscoping Popuko over himself. Pipimi, and the rest of the scene before this, has absolutely no animation at all.
• Minimalist Cast: The only reoccurring characters are our two main characters, and everyone else is either inconsequential or only used for a gag.
• Minor Injury Overreaction: Played with. Pipimi gets a scratch on her knee and she reacts appropriately. Popuko, on the other hand, completely overreacts and struggles to put a band-aid on the bruise, making her freak out even more.
• Mockumentary:
  • Episode 3 of the anime has a sketch that plays out like a mockumentary called "The Documentary: On the Other Side of an Idol's Dream", a documentary about Pop-chin (Popuko), her idol band "Pop-chin with the Tame Monkeys", and her manager Pipi-P (Pipimi).
  • Emotional Documentary: Hellshake Yano is a skit that "documents" the story behind the fictional Hellshake Yano.
• Mondegreen Gag: The official lyrics of "Let's Pop Together" aren't written in Japanese. They're instead English words that approximate the sounds of the supposed Japanese lyrics:
  anti seen just good more
  (アンチ、信者すぐとも Anchi, shinja sugu tomo, "You haters will become fans anyway")
  let’s pop together! ho o
  midnight day ikki to goon
  (みんなで意気投合 Minna de ikitougou, "It will become a hit with everyone")
  let’s pop together all night!
  seen just sky diamond now
  (信者、好きだもんな Shinja, suki da mon na, "Fans, we love you")
  oh ball later me to gun the show
  (おぼれて貢ぐんでしょう Oborete mitsugun deshou, "Because you put food on our tables")
  anti what’s hot can know
  (アンチは、ほっとけんの Anchi wa, hottoken no, "Haters, we don't care about you")
  mu down team chic show yeah reason
  (無駄打ち失笑やり損 Muda uchi shisshō yari son, "You're ridiculous, pathetic, not worth it at all")
• Mood Whiplash:
  • One of the manga's favorite jokes is the sudden shift in tones, most commonly presenting an innocent scenario that abruptly turns dark near the end.
  • The first episode of the anime contains a skil where Your Name is parodied and the bright sun that shines above the protagonists in the light-hearted Crash-Into Hello scene , only for the "sun" to actually be the meteor from the film, which eventually crashes and burns everything and turns the two protagonists into ash.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • Episode 2 has the most epic bird-feeding sequence you'll ever see.^note As one Japanese viewer pointed out, the birds probably meant these birds.
  • Hellshake Yano. Two guys rocking the shit out of a couple of sketchbooks with a simple gag skit drawn in them. Drawn in pencil. With cutout panels. Try as you might, you cannot just look away.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Popuko and Pipimi being voiced by Masashi Ebara and Hōchū Ōtsuka, respectively, in the first version of Episode 1 of the anime is a reference to a strip in the manga where they specifically say they want these two men to voice them if they ever get an anime adaptation.
  • In the "JAPON MiGNON" segments, while Tresca is speaking about his current short, Pipimi and Popuko are shown nodding and crossing their arms. Similarly in "Ginza Hostess Detective", Popuko is told the solution to this week's murder mystery. Their poses and Popuko's quote in the latter short ("mmhmm, mhmmm, yeah, I've totally got it!") mimic her (faux) understanding of a subject in the manga; only this time, in the second one, she actually did understand the situation.

N-Z

• Negative Continuity:
  • The lack of continuity is the norm for the manga. One comic manages to parody it in a single strip by inserting an out-of-place strip and prompting the protagonists to point out the:
    [Panel 1]

    Both: [Inexplicably holding logs] Yeah!
    [Panel 2]

    Popuko: Aah... It's fall so let's eat some delicious harvest food! I'm starving!

    Pipimi: Huh?
    [Panel 3]

    Pipimi: Wait a sec, what the heck's going on in Panel 1?
    [Panel 4]

    Popuko: "Oh, that's just for a Line Sticker, so let's just ignore it."
  • The anime follows the no-continuity formula, with everything treated as a sketch comedy, but Episode 12 suddenly subverts it by having the ominous council from the first episode's Pop Team Story segment sending hitmen after Popuko and Pipimi because they have attained cultural hegemony despite being a shitty yonkoma series, as it ruined their plans for becoming that season's bestseller and if they had their way Pop Team Epic would have been a mundane slice of life anime with normally proportioned moe girls and enough Les Yay to rival that of Manga Time Kirara instead of cat-faced, copy-pasted gremlins overly reliant on pop culture references.
• Ninja Prop: Used against the prop in one sketch- see No Fourth Wall and Standard Snippet below.
• No-Dialogue Episode: Some skits have no dialogue happening whatsoever, with the humour and punchline coming from whatever wacky actions the characters are doing.
• No Fourth Wall:
  • The average reader can glean this from the strips: the girls love each other, hate their publisher, hate you (unless you read the manga), and regularly rattle off jokes about whether a given strip worked or not. Heck, an ice cream flavor made for a collaborative cafe is labeled as "the taste of your face hitting the floor when you heard Pop Team Epic is getting their premiere delayed".
  • Popuko wants long legs in one strip, so Pipimi uses Clip Studio Paint to stretch her out.
  • Popuko and Pipimi are transported to a fantasy-adventure anime in the second episode. An unfinished fantasy-adventure anime, complete with timecode, which they even point out. After the two make the other characters do impressions, we then cut to the live-action voice actors complaining about the amount of ad-libbing they have to do.
    Pipimi: Shut up, bit part actor. Your face isn't even drawn in.
    Catordog: I agree you suck, meow-bark!
  • Episode 2 sees the characters unable to go to Machu Picchu because there is no manga screentone of the place.
    Popuko: "Let's go to the beach!"
    Pipimi: "Yay!"
    [beat]
    Popuko: "Let's go to Japan's Machu Picchu!"
    Pipimi: "We can't. The background isn't done for that, so we can't."
  • Popuko wakes up, with "Peer Gynt 'Morning Mood'" appearing as a subtitle on the screen denoting the music playing, only for her to discover she woke up in the middle of the night. She then grabs the subtitle and begins to beat the shit out of it. This is made even funnier when the same scene is voiced by Baikinman/Frieza.
  • During the "I grow when given attention" sketch, Tomokazu Sugita and Yuichi Nakamura break character and talk about how the animators have been really stretching the joke out, before realizing it reminds them of the opening credits of a television drama from the 90s, and how the animators could place the producer's name on screen in the style of the other show's opening sequence. Guess what the animators did for the final cut?
  • When THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls stars Hiromi Igarashi and Rei Matsuzaki start performing the ending theme song, both of them complain about it before the lyrics kick in. Their complaints mostly hinge upon the fact that they aren't even the main voice actors for the episode, and just sing the ending theme for no reason other than the fact that they know Bkub is a fan of their characters in Cinderella Girls. They also end the song by both remarking "That was short!". Episode 11 has them begging Bkub to let them appear in the finale as the main cast.
  • The reason for the arc-long Bishounen Art Shift in Season 3 is because interest was dwindling after the anime ended. Takeshobo decided to combat this by outsourcing the strip to their BL department.
• Not Me This Time: Takeshobo is always on the girls' tails, and both parties are openly antagonistic towards each other. However, when the girls are ambushed in "THE AGE OF POP TEAM EPIC", Takeshobo had nothing to do with it. King was responsible for the attack, which they learn after destroying Takeshobo's building and killing all the employees.
• On the Next: Season 1 of the anime has next-episode previews... for Hoshiiro Girldrop.
• The Oner: Season 2 Episode 7, which consisted of a full episode Hellshake Yano story produced by AC-bu, was done by shooting one roll for the opening, one roll for the main segment, and two rolls for the endings.
• Officially Shortened Title: Parodied in the Episode 5 Pop Team Story romcom spoof "IMO☆YOBA" (Imouto Nante Yobanai de!), translated by Funimation as "Donca * Sis" ("Don't Call Me Little Sister").
• Origins Episode: Emotional Documentary: Hellshake Yano shows the story of how the "Hellshake" part was added to his name.
• The Other Marty: In-Universe in the strips leading up to the anime's premiere. A "second generation" Pipimi and Popuko are scouted out by Takeshobo to reshoot the strips using more attractive characters, but the original pair aren't having any of it.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • Implied when Popuko makes a video review of potato chips that goes on for nearly two hours.
  • The anime sometimes stretches out the jokes for comedic effect, such as the adaptation "I grow when given attention" strip. In one version, Tomoko Kaneda moans and keeps repeating "Marilyn Monroe" while Yuu Kobayashi makes nonsense noises. In the other, there's complete silence while Yūichi Nakamura and Tomokazu Sugita break character and talk about how long the rough animation is stretching out this joke, and remark on how it reminds them of the opening sequence of another television show, prompting the animators to add production credits over that scene in order to reference that other show.
• Packaged as Other Medium: The Blu-ray release by Funimation features the second disk designed to resemble a homemade BD-R copy, complete with faux-Sharpie writing on the label. The first disc, meanwhile, looks like a perfectly professional disc.
• Pixellation: Whatever items that cannot go on the air for legal reasons are mostly censored with mosaic blurs. But viewers with keen eyes can still figure out what those items were.
• Plant Person: The yakuza gang that Popu and Pipi join in Episode 8's long segment are all anthropomorphized pieces of bamboo.
• Please Subscribe to Our Channel: In one strip, Popuko goes so far as to "visit" people's houses to force them to subscribe to her.
• Previously on…: Parodied. The first strip of Chapter 35 is the exact same as the last strip of chapter 34, only with a "Previously On" label sticked on.
• Production Throwback:
  • The initial poster announcing Pop Team Epic's anime is a reference to Cocolors, an animated movie Kamikaze Douga worked on. Episode 12 basically provides the Origin Story of why they posed like they did in the poster.
  • AC-bu's segments about Hellshake Yano in the anime applied the "high-speed kamishibai" ^note ”Kamishibai (paper acting)” is a traditional Japanese art form of public storytelling theatre by presenting illustrations with the presenter reading and acting out the story from the side. It’s basically the equivalent of a storybook reading done on public grounds, only the illustration papers get to have a stage box to house them. technique that was used on their short film, Safe Driving Guide.
• Product Placement:
  • Season 1 Episode 11 clearly shows the labels of Bud Light, Pringles, Heineken, and Strong Zero among the snacks on the table in the horror skit.
  • Season 2 Episode 2 have the skit of a product advertisement pitch for Japan’s Earth Corporation’s Earth No-mat liquid mosquito exterminator/repellent.
  • A straight up advertisement for Kappa Sushi is made as a clip for Season 2 Episode 6.
  • In Season 2 Episode 7, Popuko and Pipimi advertises for Apollon Music, a local music instrument retail chain within Japan’s Niigata Prefecture.
  • In Season 2 Episode 9, Popuko and Pipimi encourages a father of two to takes his kids to Japan’s Brazilian Park—Washuzan Highland.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Season 2 Episode 7 continues the story of Hellshake Yano, whose label contract got terminated and couldn’t go on with his music career due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. His manager finds him working at a ramen restaurant to survive, and persuades Yano to come back to make music again.
• The Real Spoofbusters: Episode 9 features a brief scene of Pipimi and Popuko wearing familiar suits and backpacks to suck away a gang of rowdy teens.
• Reboot Snark:
  • In the anime, King Records (here depicted as an evil empire) wants to reboot the series into a Lighter and Softer version that turns Popuko and Pipimi into cutsier, more pseudo-romantic versions of themselves. The girls fire back with their usual foul-mouthed referential style.
  • Season 3 of the manga starts with Takeshobo replacing the mangaka with a well known BL artist , explictly stated to drum up interest in the manga after hype from the anime died down.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Popuko is the hot-headed and childish Red Oni to Pipimi's calmer and mature Blue Oni.
  Pipimi: Whatchu looking at?
  Popuko: EY! WANT ME TO FUCKING KILL YOU, MOTHER FUCKER?!
• Reference Overdosed: While the main draw of the series is its weirdness, shout outs make up the other component of the series. It's so prevalent that some comics are devoted to the girls trying and failing to tell a joke without referencing something. The anime adds another level to this with its casting of Popuko and Pipimi each episode, with references to the voice actors' works and their work history together.
• Relax-o-Vision: Season 1 Episode 5 opens up with live action footage of a boat and a note saying that the footage has been switched up due to some circumstances, with Steamboat Willie-esque music playing in the background, in a direct parody of the "Nice Boat" incident. Turns out this was enforced by the anime staff because the original footage was the Steamboat Willie parody which wasn't approved for broadcast (this footage was later shown in the rebroadcast, albeit with pixellation).
• Rewatch Bonus: Aside from playing the same episode twice per run (there are subversions though), there are also some easily missed details which will only be noticed by playing the episode again and, sometimes, by different methods. Take Episode 11 as example: Popuko and Pipimi during "Cursed Mansion" seemed to babbling nonsense, but once you play their conversation backwards...That of Part A actually added to the horror, while that of Part B are, well, talking about unrelated stuff. Taken further with the 2021 Season 1 rerun which not only switches up the voiceacting pairs each episode (resulting in different demanour or even new dialogues), but some frames and animations are actually changed from the original! (One of the example being the fortunes from Episode 2.)
• Rimshot: Popuko tries to play the drum sounds used to deliver a joke, but mistimes it by doing it before Pipimi even tells the joke. This ends with Popuko breaking her drumstick in half while tearing up with Pipimi.
• Robotic Reveal:
  • Episode 4's Pop Team Story "SWGP 2018" about a skeleton race reveals that Popuko had a robotic body, giving her an unfair advantage in the race. Considering the Wacky Racing nature of the sketch, this is probably the least ridiculous and surprising development of them all.
  • Episode 6's Pop Team Story "The 30th Cyber War" about a shogi tournament has Popuko competing with Keicho Okusenman (who is totally not Heihachi) but Popuko manages to defeat him and mostly destroy his interior mechanisms, revealing him for the true robot he is. This leads up to the final confrontation with the world's most skilled shogi player, Mother AI PP1000, who has been masquerading as Popuko's Heian period shogi master guardian spirit Pipimi the entire time.
• Roger Rabbit Effect:
  • The anime's final episode has Shouta Aoi making a guest appearance in live action, while everything else around him is animated. This makes a return in Episode 14.
  • An animatronic Popuko doll parrots animated Popuko and later, Pipimi, in one of Episode 14's segments.
• Rule of Three: "Eisai Haramasukoi" was adapted three times in the anime.
• Rules of the Road: The Mega Man 8 spoof has Pipimi passing signs telling her to jump and slide, as per the norm, then passing a sign of Popuko before the real thing shows up on the side of the road.
• Running Gag:
  • Popuko often has (or causes) trouble in restaurants.
  • Popuko's hatred for "subculture" and its "bitches" frequently comes up, often extending into Disproportionate Retribution (even the merchandise gets in on it). English translations in the anime substitute "subculture bitches" with "hipster girls".
  • After the Season 2 opener for the manga, it's common for anything related to Hoshiiro Girldrop actually turning out to be an announcement for something about Pop Team Epic. (Except for the Hoshiiro Girldrop anthology, which shocked fans by actually being real.)
  • Earlier strips involved Odd Job Gods somehow often getting into contact with Popuko.
• Sailor Fuku: Popuko and Pipimi both wear the sailor uniform as their usual outfits, though they aren't often seen actually going to school.
• Sane Boss, Psycho Henchmen: In the first season episode "The Dragon of Iidabashi - Pipi's Revenge", Pipimi and Popuko became in these roles when they met in jail and made an alliance (licking a lemon to sealing it) and so they became a Yakuza and her Japanese Delinquent henchman, respectively.
• Saying Sound Effects Outloud: In Episode 7, the two guys of AC-bu, who normally animate and voice the Bobnemimimmi segments, "animate" an entire scene with flipbooks while doing the voices, crowds, "music" and sound effects themselves. They appear on screen the whole time.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Extremely common — Bkub has been known to outright call the comic shit. His self-proclaimed title is even "Kuso Manga Boy". Episode 3 of the anime shows he's gotten a promotion to "Executive Kuso Manga Advisor".
  • A sad platypus is given a copy of the manga as some "Poptepi-therapy" to help him cheer up. He finds it boring, prompting Popuko to snatch the book out of his hands.
    Popuko: So you're a hater, are ya?!
  • Season 1 Episode 2:
    • The entire project of Vanver -A Game in Another Dimension- mocks itself for not finishing the animation on time (thus forcing the voice actors to deal with sketches when recording),^note Japan's animation departments normally can't catch on with the demands of their project's overall production speed, in which leads to voice actors having to deal with rough key-animations on a daily basis. and then makes matters worse by having Popuko and Pipimi inserting themselves and further derailing the story.
      Nobuyuki Hiyama: The entire industry's been really shoddy nowadays!
    • One skit has a fortune labelled "Extreme bad luck" that reads: "You get to work on an incredibly cute idol anime but it ends up as the opening act to a shitty anime".
  • Season 1 Episode 3: one comic has Pipimi read a letter calling out the comic for recycling drawings. Pipimi promises to stop doing do, while in-fact doing so. In the anime adaptation, the complaint changes to making references:
    Pipimi: "Pop Team Epic has way too many lame parodies. Please challenge yourselves with more original content."
    Popuko: That really hit me right there... [gives sideways peace sign] Gotcha!
  • Season 1 Episode 4: in the Pop Team Dance segment "Let's Pop Together", which parodies music videos featured on Nico Nico Douga, the comments that scroll across the screen include "This sucks," "What are they even parodying?" and "Mods aren't doing their job".
  • The TV specials: the duo sing a parody of Armi ja Danny's "Tahdon olla sulle hyvin hellä!" where they lament how the popularity of both the show and the manga nosedived after the first season of the anime, noting that it's become much harder to find actors willing to voice them. They note a lot of the criticisms levied against their program, including how their gags rely heavily on pop culture references, only to turn around and say that they don't ever intend to change.
  • The third manga season outright ends with Takeshobo kicking the series to the BL division as a popularity stunt, because even they acknowledged that PTE lost steam after the anime.
• Serious Business: The anime's shogi sketch in Episode 6 treats a shogi tournament very seriously, parodying similar tabletop board game tournament-themed manga such as Hikaru no Go (complete with Pipimi dressed as Sai), all culminating in a battle with a robotic version of Pipimi, PP1000, that ends in a huge explosion.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: A downplayed sense: after Popuko and Pipimi's Fusion Dance to destroy Akashic Records in Episode 12, they unfuse... and Pipimi is turned to stone. Then Shouta Aoi shows up and time travels them back to the start of the episode. Events proceed like they did in the first half, except when Popuko and Pipimi unfuse, Pipimi doesn't turn to stone.
• Shallow Parody: In-Universe. Popuko's "Mi**ey" impression is basically her doing something vaguely resembling Mickey Mouse's voice (while constantly shouting vulgar things) while in shadow. (The original manga strip has her constantly spouting "wwwwww" (the Japanese equivalent of "lololololol"), which is pretty much unconveyable in a voice-acted anime adaptation.)
• Sketch Comedy: The format of the anime is a sequence of comedy skits.
• Special Guest:
  • Shouta Aoi makes brief appearances As Himself (in live action, no less) at the end of both halves of Episode 12. In the first half, he shows up after Popuko and Pipimi's battle with King Records and travels back in time with them while the credits roll; in the second half, he performs the ending theme himself while dancing. Aoi then continues his journey in full Kamen Rider style in Season 2.
  • Season 2 Episode 1 had Popuko and Pipimi encounter a Chocobo, complete with it’s image theme tune. In Season 2 Episode 3, two Chocobos enact Popuko and Pipimi’s slippery floor act.
  • Season 2 Episode 3 welcomes Nanachi from Made in Abyss, who is given the task to rank gourmets.
• Spice Up the Subtitles:
  • Many of the fan translated strips feature profanity not present in the originals, which fits in well with the crude tone of everything else.
  • The Crunchyroll German subs have lines like "tell me how much you love me" being translated as "tell me how hard you wanna fuck me against the wall."
  • The subtitles of the anime streamed on HIDIVE are noticeably more tasteless and have more swearing compared to other English subtitles and what's implied in the original Japanese.
• Standard Snippet: Parodied in one skit on the anime. Popuko wakes up while "Morning Mood" from Peer Gynt plays, as indicated by a subtitle. When she opens the window she sees it's actually late at night, and she proceeds to get mad and beat up the subtitle for lying to her.
• Stop Motion:
  • The "POP TEAM MUSIC" shorts/songs are made in stop-motion with felted dolls of Popuko and Pipimi.
  • Episode 13 gives us "POP CLAY EPIC", this time with the girls made in Claymation.
• Straight Man and Wise Guy: The usual setup for a sketch, with Pipimi acting as the straight man and Popuko as the wise guy.
• Strong Family Resemblance: In the end of the "IMO☆YOBA" segment of Season 1 Episode 5, Iyo and Hojo get married and have two children. Children who look exactly like Iyo and Hojo's parents Popuko and Pipimi.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • The anime's "Bob Epic Team" shorts done by AC-bu are drawn and animated in a deliberately crude and inconsistent manner.
    • Episode 7 brings us a live-action "Bob Epic Team" of the two AC-bu animators flipping pages of sketch books in which they made of a "Hellshake Yano" skit, including having Hellshake Yano slap his manager and dropping the sketch book, and several pages cut up to layer on the other page. For the second play of the episode, the two animators badly dub over each other's lines.
    • Episode 11 has a "viewer complaint letter" that the "Bob Epic Team" segments have limited animation, all while focusing on a single static image of an Off-Model Popuko and Pipimi. The complaint prompts Pipimi to take the complaint to heart...and Eisai Haramasukoi dance with far more frames than even the segments by other animation houses on the show.
  • The first episode is full of visual glitches that suggest that the digital signal is poor, switching between apparent other channels.
  • After the initial gag, Hoshiiro Girldrop's On the Next previews stop having decent animation and make the characters move like paper cutouts.
• Subverted Kids' Show:
  • A deleted scene from the anime has puppets of Popuko and Pipimi sing a cute song about a fox which is meant to encourage kids to go to sleep. Then the sky darkens, heavy metal music starts playing, and then Popuko screams that "They're gonna be sleeping for good!" and trashes the set.
  • A segment using the same puppets that appeared on the actual show, "Tree of the Heart", starts off as a cute song about how you can't give up on your life as soon as you grow up. As soon as the melody becomes upbeat and Pipimi starts to clap her hands, the song turns accusatory, claiming people who are mad at Pop Team Epic are just angry at themselves for giving up. And then, Popuko sings "I...will...kill...you!" and the song turns into one glamorizing destruction rather than the motivational song it was meant to be.
  • Season 2 Episode 3 has the "Poputan" skit, a cutely-drawn kids show parody where Popuko and Pipimi visit the farm to get milk for cake. Despite the light-hearted and peppy nature throughout the segment, Popuko repeatedly breaks character to resort to her usual vulgar self, and the farmer twice throws sexual innuendos at the girls and gets castrated by them as a result.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: As the last two combatants standing, Popuko makes a valiant effort to defeat a cheating player, but ultimately, she can't overcome the sheer number of mods and hacks that make him unbeatable. Luckily for her, Pipimi tracks down and murders her opponent in real life before she can lose.
• Surreal Humor: The bread and butter of this series is its bizarre humour, no matter the skit.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Parodied when Popuko encounters a save point and peeks around a corner to see if the boss is nearby. (It is.)
• Take That!:
  • Justin Bieber's arrival in a strip leads to a spoof version of Pikotaro sending him away almost immediately.
  • Shots are repeatedly taken at Takeshobo after Pop Team Epic's cancelled and ends its original run. Popuko swears revenge on the company in the last comic, and afterwards it's usually referred to negatively and sometimes used as a Sitcom Arch-Nemesis of sorts. Even one of the anime's promotional posters◊ plays this up.
  • In a Season 3 comic, Pipimi and Popuko aim to destroy the Takeshobo building (as per the Running Gag), but accidentally destroy the Kadokawa building instead - alluding to the uproar following Kemono Friends director Tasuki's firing from the company.
• Take That, Critics!:
  • Popuko is less than kind to critics of the comic, frequently belittling them and and mistreating them in some way. (The side note of one strip indicates that it's not serious, though.)
  • The lyrics of "Let's Pop Together" in Episode 4 is basically a big "screw you" to haters, mocking them for wasting their time and eventually turning into fans in a way.
    You haters will become fans anyway.
    We don't care about haters. They're ridiculous, pathetic, and not worth it at all.
    How you long are you going to fight this hater battle?
  • The ending of Episode 8's main segment, "The Dragon Of Iidabashi: Pipi's Revenge," has Popu shot dead by her former gang the Bamboozle Gang. At her funeral, what makes her come Back from the Dead and get revenge is a guy Pipi picked up flipping through a copy of the manga (albeit covered in pixels to obscure the finger) and griping about her hypocrisy:
    Guy: She said she hated subculture girls, but she sure sucked up to them.
• Taking You with Me: When Popuko has the hiccups.
  Pipimi: I hear if you hiccup 100 times in a row, you'll die.
  Popuko: That was 99.
  (Beat)
  Pipimi: Oh, it stopped.
  Popuko: I'll self destruct just to be safe! (blows up a quarter of the planet.)
• Techno Babble: The ominous King Records council discusses Poison Mortel, Nihility Face (or Farce), Mythologia, Macbeth's Miniature Garden, Apeiron Spao (or Spawn), Surhomme, Arche, Shrinker Sedation (or Serration), Lear King, Macbeth Records, Decoherence Xanadu, and Theatre/Hamlet's Death Gods. Some of these seem to be actual words in French or Greek, while all of it is blatantly nonsense.
• Time Lapse: One of the segments in Episode 2 of Season 1 is the creation of the Popuko and Pipimi felt puppets by UchuPeople sped up.
• Time Travel: Shouta Aoi apparently has the ability to travel through time.
  • At the end of the first half of Season 1 Episode 12 he travels back in time with Popuko in order to save Pipimi (who's been turned to stone as a result of a Fusion Dance). It seems to have worked, judging from how the second half of Episode 12 ends.
  • He time travels in Season 1 Episode 14 after after Popuko takes out a demon lord who leads a biker gang and see his young daughter crying over this. Fearing their ratings will plummet, the girls ask Shouta if he can reverse it. He manages to make it in time as the duo of the second half are about to do the deed and talk them out of it. However he earns the ire of 1) the old man who sent the girls to kill the demon lord in the first place (who vows to change his ways, only angering the old man more despite Popuko and Pipimi accepting it), and 2) his own Evil Twin, who comes to stop him from doing more damage to the timeline.
  • The first Opening and Episode 12 of Season 2 both focus on him fighting threats against timelines, akin to Kamen Rider.
• Toast of Tardiness: Popuko parodies the cliche of being late to school and running out of the house with toast in her mouth in the first segment of Episode 1.
• Toothy Bird: The owl that shows up during the Bob Epic Team skit in Episode 5 has visible teeth and gums.
• Tournament Arc: Episode 6 has a whole sketch that parodies tabletop game tournament arcs, with Popuko and Pipimi (the latter whom is represented as a spirit dressed like Sai) playing Shōgi against other players and playing up the Serious Business factors typical with such arcs.
• Tranquil Fury: Implied with the "Mi**ey" skit. Pipimi tells Popuko that she's asking for death for doing the impression period, and then critiques it by saying that "Mi**ey doesn't even laugh like that", all while keeping her composure.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: The girls drink, smoke, and curse like sailors, all while being 14.
• Universal-Adaptor Cast: In each sketch, Popuko and Pipimi often are in different roles and locations, whether an idol singer and manager, detectives, neglectful parents, or world-ending threats. No matter what bizarre situation is going on, the duo are the only constant characters.
• Unreliable Expositor: The narrator of "Dancing with a Miracle" is telling his life story about his friendship with Popuko and Pipimi and how their strong bond inspired him to be the muscular New York major he is today, but what we're actually shown teaches us that he was a fanboying stalker to Popuko and Pipimi, who barely even acknowledged his existence outside of their one rescue.
• Vehicular Kidnapping: Played for Laughs in a live-action video promoting the series, in which a foreign guy is interviewed about anime and his tastes on it, with giant corporeals of Popuko and Pipimi watches him inside a white van behind him, and later outside the van and behind him. In the end, when he's asked for the anime of the season he would like to watch, the guy answers "Basilisk". After that, both Popuko and Pipimi kidnap the guy (while he asks for help) and put him into the van.
• Visual Pun: In one strip, a horde of Americans charge towards Popuko and Pipimi and put rabbit ears on their heads. The Japanese word for "rabbit" is "usagi".
• Wacky Racing: Episode 4 of the anime has a sketch about the skeleton racing sport, complete with hijinks from all the racers. Miscolored and pixel-blurred versions of Dick Dastardly and Muttley even take part in the race.
• Wall Pin of Love: The romantically tensed wall slam is spoofed in a skit between Pipimi and Popuko, as Pipimi's slam breaks the wall and sends them rolling along a track. The anime takes this one step further by transforming it into a Tokimeki Memorial style cutscene before shifting into a spoof of the Donkey Kong Country mine cart levels before finally crashing into and destroying the Takeshobo building.
• Waxing Lyrical: A lyric from Beyoncé's "Irreplceable" is used when Justin Bieber is sent "to the left".
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: Despite being voiced by fluent English speaker Ayumu Murase, the younger Joseph in the first version of "Dancing With a Miracle" in Episode 9 has an accent that is incredibly jarring in the context of 1980s New York City, with his tendency toward Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable making his speech sound vaguely synthetic. The older Joseph is only better in that the Japanese-Australian Ikurru Kamijou (aka. Joey, The Anime Man) can do an American accent, but it doesn't sound a lot like a New York accent. This is (kinda?) fixed in Funimation's English dub, where Joseph's lines were retranslated from Japanese scripts, and re-recorded with American voice actors.
• Who Writes This Crap?!: Episode 2 of the anime has a real-life cut to the voice actors complaining that most of the script is just "ad-lib" after the "sketchy anime" sequence.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: In Episode 6's shogi skit, Popuko makes a competing shogi player break down under pressure before either one of them could make a move.
• Word Purée Title: The surreal skits in the anime version done by AC-bu get their name from a gibberish rearrangement of the Japanese title: Bobunemimimmi (translated in by Funimation as the slightly more coherent "Bob Epic Team").
• Word Salad Title: Pipimi's musical number is titled, "Goddamn Bitch in Cat Tights".

---

Popuko: So I instead said I wanted to be a Troper. Hey! Are you listening?!
Pipimi: Sorry, I was thinking about Hellshake Yano.