Pop Culture Pun Episode Title

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 Television

• 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 Comic

• 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.