Pop Team Epic

Episode 4

So where did this Pop Team Epic thing even come from?

Well, Once Upon a Time there was a guy named Bkub Okawa who drew Touhou doujins. He did this happily for some time, until his mind was seized upon by a strange idea. A certain pair of chibified schoolgirls invaded his consciousness, encouraging him to inchoate rituals with their incoherent pop-culture-fueled antics. Straining at the edge of his sanity, Bkub knew that only one thing could be done to keep his struggling personhood intact: unleash them upon the world so that he would at least be spared the pressure of bearing this psychic burden alone. And thus this scourge was borne upon the Earth. As the centuries pass us by, and Popuko and Pipimi's visages prove impossible to scrape from our collective consciousness, humanity will finally realize the true extent of what Bkub has done, and how he has damned us all.

This all began in the middle of 2014, when the Pop Team Epic 4-koma comic began serializing in the online magazine Manga Life Win. For those unaware, 4-koma are gag strips with a very specific four-panel format, known for appearing in mainstream Japanese publications to an extent similar to newspaper comics in America. Of course, Pop Team Epic itself didn't debut in any big pub, although I suspect that it's turned out more successful than anyone could have anticipated.

4-koma series actually get turned into anime fairly often, but they're pretty hard to make work since they can often feel like someone shoved as many disconnected gags as possible into 20 minutes. The best examples of the genre adapt their content smartly, so they feel like more than a bunch of Garfield strips animated back to back. Some flesh out their jokes substantially (Azumanga Daioh), while others just straight up make the anime into a short format as well (Axis Powers Hetalia). Pop Team Epic, on the other hand, did this.

• Bob Epic Team was on fire this week with two of the best gags that the guys at AC-bu have delivered yet to drag us further into the realm of lunacy. As far as Pop Team Epic skits can be said to have “quality” relative to one another, I find that this is roughly equivalent to how much I want to use bits of them as reaction GIFs – which makes these bits a resounding success. That Steve Buscemi “how do you do, fellow kids?” image meme has been getting pretty stale, so I might prefer to taunt wannabe hip adults with screeching ballsack-mouthed Popteptic faces calling them UNCOOL instead. That alien bit also had me reeling.

• The toboggan sketch didn't get many laughs out of me. Mostly it just felt long and random. It did, however, serve to illuminate certain things about Pop Team Epic that contribute to its popularity with English-language weebdom, most notably its many references to American pop culture, specifically the stuff I've seen brought up for years in the likes of Homestuck or whatever. This segment in particular references such meme-tastic films as Cool Runnings and Top Gun. Also, in a gag that all of the cool teens in the audience are certain to catch, Hanna-Barbera's Dick Dastardly from the Wacky Races cartoons makes an appearance, mosaic-censored like Pipimi!Totoro from way back in episode one. (I know now that they're doing this to avoid being sued under Japan's parody-unfriendly fair use laws. As an example of an anime comedy getting bitten hard by this, Osomatsu-san's reference-tastic first episode was blasted into nonexistence out of fear of dozens of lawsuits from intellectual copyright owners.) However, this censorship is also convincing my brain that there's something obscene about these familiar characters that I just hadn't realized previously. In the words of a stoned-out Yoda, quality brain poison, this show continues to be.

• Those puppet song and dance sequences are going to be the highlight of every episode they appear in. This one was particularly Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!-ish, with the deliberately VHS-quality production and font choices. The whole thing is also a near shot-for-shot reference to Earth, Wind, & Fire's “Let's Groove” music video, continuing to prove that this show is fully in touch with the millennial youth these days.

• I forgot to mention it last week, but Popuko and Pipimi's voice actors are in fact changing every week. This episode features Yōko Hikasa and Satomi Satou as the girls, while Tesshō Genda and Akira Kamiya play the hammy man voices. The former pair voiced some of the main girls from K-On!, while the latter two are old-school seiyuu who've practically been working forever. I'll try to be diligent in bringing up voices in the future, but the most interesting of the ones I missed definitely have to be the voices of Freeza and Cell (Ryūsei Nakao and Norio Wakamoto) back in episode three.

Read Part Two of this review here!

Grade: B

Pop Team Epic is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and HIDIVE.

Gabriella Ekens would not get most of the show's references without assistance from the lovely people on Twitter. You can follow Gab here if you want to help do her job for her.