Pop Team Epic is known for its bizarre, off-the-wall comedy. When the manga became an anime, its specialty was taking cracks at anime tropes through wacky parodies, alongside its own recurring bits and jokes.

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The anime follows its main characters, Popuko and Pipimi, two little girls dressed in school uniforms, as they insert themselves into beloved anime scenes as well as sketches that feel like they were pulled out of a late-night variety show special. The episodes are packed with shenanigans, each sketch animated by a different animation studio, so there’s a joke here for everyone. Here are the top 10 jokes from Pop Team Epic, ranked.

10 Final Fantasy XV

Final Fantasy XV was a cultural moment for video game fans, with everyone very excited to follow new characters in this beloved franchise. The story follows these friends on a road trip, where they stop to take selfies, eat at restaurants, and cruise around exchanging friendly banter.

Pop Team Epic dialed into this love with a short post-credits bit which features footage from the game, only with Popuko and Pipimi’s heads superimposed over the heads of the boys, leaving them with their signature cat-faced grins and big eyes looking grotesque and bizarre on leather-bound, tattooed bodies with six-packs.

9 Shouta Aoi

Shouta Aoi is a Japanese pop singer and voice actor known for his high-pitched voice. Often featured in anime theme songs and as characters, many anime fans recognize him as an important part of the genre.

In the final episode of Pop Team Epic, Shouta arrives to help save Pipimi, who has been turned to stone following a battle with a monster. Popuko asks Shouta who he is, and he introduces himself, declaring that he is a time traveler who will help them by taking them back in time to defeat the evil overlords who have been trying to stop Pop Team Epic from becoming an anime.

8 "Tree of the Heart"

Each sketch in Pop Team Epic is animated in a different style, which gives each segment a specific and special feel. While most are traditionally animated, others take a wilder approach, such as the recurring music videos that are performed by felt stop-motion versions of the characters.

In “Tree of the Heart,” the cute and fuzzy Popuko and Pipimi begin to sing about how important it is to try your best, a sweet song until they switch gears to berate you for always complaining and eventually just devolve into singing about how much they hate everyone, a staple of the girls’ personalities.

7 The Second Half of Every Episode

Pop Team Epic characters cosplay as Mussolini

Pop Team Epic is a 30-minute show, but the actual runtime of the content is only 15 minutes. This leaves another 15 minutes to fill, which they do by repeating the exact same thing. There are minor differences between the two halves of the episode, but the joke is in one major difference: the voice actors.

The first half of the episode features relatively normal-sounding little girl voices for Popuko and Pipimi, but the second half features men doing the voices instead, making all of the absurdity of the first half even weirder when considering the little girls are now voiced by men pretending to be little girls.

6 Mecha Alliance

The bread and butter of Pop Team Epic is doing weird, funny, and spot-on parodies of beloved anime and video games. One of the better examples of this trope is the Mecha Alliance opening theme, which feels like it could be from any mecha anime of the last three decades, particularly anime like Gundam Wing and Neon Genesis Evangelion.

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The joke, of course, is that Popuko is presented as the mecha pilot while Pipimi is herself the robot that Popuko pilots, complete with long blue hair and a color scheme in the style of a school uniform.

5 King Records

Pop Team Epic’s first episode features a shadowy villain organization called King Records which is determined to keep Pop Team Epic, which it feels does not qualify as an anime, from becoming a show. Part of the joke is that King Records actually produces Pop Team Epic, so it’s both meta and ironic, but it’s also the beginning and culmination of the show.

The last episode features a dramatic showdown in which the King Records building becomes a giant monster, which Popuko and Pipimi have to fight. It also features the last time we hear a recurring joke of the show: Pipimi hits the monster with a killing blow and asks if it’s angry, to which it responds, “I’m not angry!” before exploding.

4 NANA

NANA is one of the most popular shojo manga of all time in Japan. The anime has an iconic opening, in which one of the main characters narrates in a wistful voice, addressing her best friend by saying, “Hey, Nana…” while the image captures something special to the girls: a guitar or a glass with strawberries on it. Pop Team Epic opened one of their episodes the same way, instead changing it to “Hey, Mama…” and showing a pendant with a P on it.

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The episode immediately devolves into a ridiculous version of a common shojo anime trope in which a girl and the boy she likes end up as step-siblings. Their parents, played by Popuko and Pipimi, are gamblers, smokers, and drinkers who fritter away the family’s rent money, do “Gundam motion dances” in the middle of the night, and perform puppet shows outside the kids’ bedroom window while they’re studying.

3 Hellshake Yano

In one of the most bizarre and genius segments of the series, two performers tell the story of Hellshake Yano by flipping the pages of two large pads of paper that have images drawn on them to tell the story. Hellshake’s band is about to do a performance, but his bandmates are all stuck in traffic, so it’s up to Hellshake to keep the crowd entertained until they arrive with his famous guitar solo, which shreds so hard that hell shakes beneath him.

The two performers act out the scenes, doing all the voices and sound effects while also quickly turning pages and miming Hellshake’s guitar-playing in a gloriously weird bit in the real spirit of Pop Team Epic.

2 Your Name

Your Name is one of the most popular and highest-grossing movies in Japanese history, and it was a huge moment for anime worldwide. So of course, it was one of the first parodies that Pop Team Epic did, in the first episode of the show. Popuko and Pipimi meet, and as in the final scene of Your Name, they ask each other, “What’s your name?” Popuko responds by doing a weird dance and saying, “I’m me!”

After a long moment of silence, there’s an explosion behind them, and a mushroom cloud envelopes them, presumably killing them both. The joke sets the pace for a hectic show with a breakneck pace that shoves references and gags in at every moment.

1 Hoshiiro Girldrop

From the first episode, Pop Team Epic sets the tone of the whole show with a tremendous bait-and-switch. The episode begins with the opening of an idol anime called Hoshiiro Girldrop. Complete with a poppy theme and pastel-colored animation, it appears for all intents and purposes to be a real anime, that is, until Popuko shoves her head through the screen to assure the audience that they are absolutely not here to watch that.

From then on, all of the episodes end with a preview of the next episode of Hoshiiro Girldrop, complete with a tagline in the usual shojo style: “Fall in love again next week!” The gag continues through the entire first season, showing that if nothing else, Pop Team Epic is very committed to the bit.

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