English Dub Review: Pop Team Epic “You’re the Only One I’m Telling!”

Pop Team Epic is an experience.

Our Take:

It really is, because nobody expected a 4koma gag series to get an anime at all. Granted, Pop Team Epic has been wildly popular on the internet in Japan, with a couple of especially notable panels floating around on them. It doesn’t have a plot, but features gags centering around two junior high school girls, Popuko and Pipimi. Both are rowdy, tends to break reality ever so often, and flip off people a lot.

The largest gags involve a repeated parody of a trope from shoujo manga— running late to school with bread in your mouth and bumping into your true love. The other is a gag they run in the series all the time: disguising the absurd Pop Team Epic with a slice of life idol anime. Slice of life and idols are so incredibly popular that— it’s pulling unsuspecting viewers in as bait. The genres are so different that I didn’t think I was watching the same show.

Generally, it’s absurdist comedy, with a lot of references to Japanese pop culture. Most of the jokes aren’t from the comic but are instead direct parodies of anime and video games. A couple of things aren’t instantly recognizable to an audience outside of Japan such as the Asahi Super Dry commercial, but most fans of Japanese pop culture should be able to get most of the references. There are a few widely known ones, such as Your Name and Totoro, but a couple of more obscure ones as well.

When Popuko refuses to give back the pendant, it’s straight out of Chrono Trigger.

https://twitter.com/sacchun1226/status/949685779315306496

Popuko waking up for the third time goes straight from Kemono Friends to Rurouni Kenshin.

Even the ending rips the text straight from the credits of Mario World.

There’s also a sprinkling of American media as well, such as when Pipimi comes to rescue Popuko, the title font and music are from Guardians of the Galaxy.

https://twitter.com/Nittomata/status/949716861142278144

And Skyrim made it into anime! Enough that guess what, there’s a mod going around, so you can have Pipimi in the real game.

The show itself is a little bit deceiving, since it’s actually 15 minutes long, repeated with different voice actors— the first male and the second female. While the true voices are actually the second one, why the male VAs? They did the same in the Japanese version, thanks to this joke from the manga. The English VAs did a pretty good job capturing the feel of the show, too.

Altogether Pop Team Epic is really something else. While it’s definitely not for people who don’t really dabble in Japanese media, for fans more familiar it’s a good, wild time. Ridiculous, but fun.

Score
  • - 9/10
    9/10
9.0/10