Pop Culture Pun Episode Title

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A subtype of Pun-Based Title which applies to individual episode titles, and not the fact that the pun is based upon some element of popular culture, such as the title of a film, book or song. Catch Phrases, song lyrics, adages and colloquialisms can also be riffed on.

Also a subtrope of Idiosyncratic Episode Naming. Related to Literary Allusion Title and can sometimes overlap.

Examples of Pop Culture Pun Episode Title include:

Anime and Manga

• Most episodes of the English dub of Pokémon (the first ones had quite expository titles). Including one that includes a pun based on the Japanese name of a character. (Barry's Busting Out All Over)
• Many episodes from the English dub of the various Digimon series.
• The FUNimation dub of Keroro Gunsou does this a lot.
• As does its dub of Crayon Shin-chan.
• Ichigo Mashimaro does this kind of rarely: "Violent Night", "The Hat's Meow"...
• Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt does this with every episode, referencing famous movies: "Catfight Club", "Pulp Addiction", etc...
• The Ranma ½ movies and OAVs were retitled in this manner when imported and dubbed for North America, resulting in things like Big Trouble in Nekonron, China and Like Water for Ranma.

Live-Action TV

• Many episodes of the Syfy series Eureka, especially in the third season. ("Bad to the Drone," "Show Me the Mummy," "Best in Faux.")
• Farscape did it a lot also, such as "John Quixote," "I Shrink Therefore I Am" and "Bringing Home The Beacon".
• Gossip Girl
• Several episodes of Charmed.
• The Food Network cooking show Good Eats does this for most of its episodes: "Porterhouse Rules," "Citizen Cane," "The Egg Files," "Field of Greens," etc.
• An episode of Lost is called "Some Like it Hoth," a reference to both Some Like It Hot and The Empire Strikes Back.
• Too many Psych episodes to list. Observe...
• Similar to the Simpsons example, there's the Angel episode "To Shanshu In LA", in which it eventually turns out that the Shanshu prophecy refers to a vampire becoming mortal and thus living and dying naturally.

Video Games

• The tasks and scrolls in My Sims Kingdom frequently have this kind of name when they're not being boringly prosaic. For example, when you're told where to find a scroll that helps you make gears, the task is called "Gears of Where?"; when you get the scroll, it's called "Solid Gears of Metal".
• Chapter 4 of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is called "For Pigs the Bell Tolls".

Web Comics

• The Non-Adventures of Wonderella. Every. Single. Strip.

Western Animation

• A few episodes of South Park.
• Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy
• The Simpsons achieves many of these puns by incorporating Homer's Catch Phrase, "D'oh!" ("D'oh-ing In The Wind," "The Greatest Story Ever D'Ohed.")
  • In keeping with the writers having originally called it an "annoyed grunt," it used to be intimated thus - hence "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(annoyed grunt)cious," "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)" and "I, (Annoyed Grunt)-bot."
• Fanboy and Chum Chum had episode titles such as The Janitor Strikes Back and Little Glop of Horrors.
  • One episode was not only named A Bopwork Orange but also parodied the classic film.
• Every other episode of Futurama.