Bread Barbershop (브레드이발소) is a Korean animated children's show starring an anthropomorphic slice of bread named Bread Pitt who owns a prestigious "barber shop," where he decorates various deserts. He's assisted by Choco, a sarcastic chocolate cupcake, Wilk, an eager to please milk carton with a misspelled label, and Sausage, a sausage who acts like a dog.
The show, which is made by Monster Studio and premiered in 2019, has three seasons as of 2022, comprising 92 episodes. It also has two educational spin-offs called Wilk's Dessert Story and Bread and Wilk's World Tour. The show is available in English on Netflix, Tubi, Peacock, and YouTube (see here
for its English channel). A theatrical film based on the show, Bread Barbershop: Celebrity in Bakery Town, was released in South Korea on March 1, 2024.
Bread Barbershop contains examples of:
- Affectionate Nickname: In "Choco's Blind Date", Bagel keeps calling Choco "Cacao", the name for raw cocoa.
- Ageless Birthday Episode:
- Bread's age is not mentioned in "Bread's Birthday", where Wilk wants to give him a present for his birthday.
- Macaron celebrates her birthday in "Macaron's Day Off", but her age is never mentioned.
- Alien Invasion: One of the wishes the genie grants in "Magic Kettle" is for a kid's school to be annihilated by aliens. When they arrive, the aliens proceed to shoot other buildings in the food town as well.
- Alliterative Name: Wilk's full name is Wilk White, which repeats the letter "W".
- Alliterative Title: Bread Barbershop.
- Anachronism Stew: In Bread and Wilk's World Tour, historical figures from Ramses II to Steve Jobs frequently pop up to educate Bread and Wilk, in modern times. It's heavily implied and outright shown that these figures are actually spirits, particularly in "Cairo, Egypt" when the two see the mummy of Ramses II in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization and later meet said Pharoah in person (who departs by entering a sarcophagus).
- Anthropomorphic Food: Nearly the entire cast are anthropomorphic foods, with the main character being a walking piece of bread and his assistants being a cupcake and a container of milk.
- Art Shift: The end credits show the characters in 2D animation, whereas the show itself is 3D. The spin-offs also shift the art style to 2D animation.
- Ascended Fanboy: In "Movie Star Bread", Bread and Wilk get to do acting in an upcoming movie of Donut Ranger - their favorite show.
- Balloon Belly: In "Magic Kettle", Wilk's genie grants Sausage's wish in eating gourmet meals. Later as everything is going horribly wrong, it's shown that Sausage's gorging has made him so fat that he's now the shape of a ball.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: In "Magic Kettle", Wilk's genie wishes go well at first, but start to go horribly wrong later on, starting with a kid wishing his school was destroyed by aliens and getting it; besides that, among other things, the elderly woman's wheelchair malfunctions, Butter can't handle the fangirls chasing him, and Bread is too rich and doesn't work anymore. It eventually gets so out of hand that Wilk uses his last wish to wish for a trip back to when he found the kettle.
- Beanstalk Parody: "Wilk and the BeanStalk" has Wilk buying magic seeds that grow into a beanstalk. The beanstalk brings him to a bunch of foods in the sky, but Wilk must refrain from telling anyone about the magic the beans have.
- Big Fancy House: Owing to the amount of money he must have made during his time as a barber, Master Bread owns a big, elaborate mansion with a front yard that has a fountain and a path with bushes on either side.
- Bishie Sparkle: Butter has a sparkle surrounding him, adding to his pretty boy appearance.
- Call-Back: In "Bread and Baguette, Part 2", Choco and Wilk bring Big Head Cupcake from the first episode to Bread, Big Head Cupcake being clearly happy that Bread gave him a makeover and having married and had a kid since then, all in a bid to give Bread back his courage so that he'll fight back against Baguette. Choco holds up a tablet and shows Bread how much he's impacted his other customers, all of which are from previous episodes; the donut hole kid from "Munchkin Donut" wants to be a barber, Butter from "Butter Fingers" won a Best Actor Award at the Bakery Film Festival, the thug pie from "Bully Pie" is imprisoned but thinks of himself as the prettiest of the inmates, and Soboro Ppang and his crush from "Soboro Ppang's Crush" are planning to get married soon.
- CamelCase: The word "BeanStalk" in "Wilk and the BeanStalk". It's unknown why this is written like this, since "beanstalk" typically doesn't have camelcase.
- Cartoon Cheese: Cheese is one, despite being meant to be Camembert (which is creamy and whitish-yellow).
- Cast of Expies: Look closely enough at the main characters' personalities, and you might notice similarities with SpongeBob SquarePants.
- Master Bread is Mr. Krabs, owning a successful business and doing everything he can to appease customers, but often more for the money than other things.
- Wilk is SpongeBob, the enthusiastic, hyperactive employee whose has had a lifelong dream of working in a business establishment (the Krusty Krab in SpongeBob's case, and the Bread Barbershop in Wilk's case) and looks fondly on his job.
- Choco is Squidward, working as a cashier who couldn't care less about her job.
- Chip is Plankton; he runs his own business right across the street from the main barbershop and uses evil plans to be the top barbershop, similar to how Plankton tries to make his restaurant popular.
- Celebratory Body Tossing: In "Potato Chip's Chip", after Bread becomes a hero of Bakery Town, the citizens (including Wilk and Choco) throw him into the air.
- Cherry Blossoms:
- In "Soboro Ppang's Crush", Soboro Ppang imagines cherry blossoms falling when he sees his love interest for the first time.
- In "My Love, Choco", there are cherry blossoms around Choco when we see her from Milk Bread's point of view as he falls in love with her.
- Christmas Episode: In "Sausage's Christmas", Sausage is left alone for Christmas and ends up coming across Santa Cream Bread, who allows him to help deliver presents while his reindeer's leg is healing. Sausage suggests gifts for Bread, Wilk, and Choco when Santa delivers presents to their houses.
- Celebrity Lie: While Bread is somewhat well-known throughout Bakery Town, in "Father Bread", Wilk comes up with an operation to give the idea of him being more popular to impress Bread's father, giving everyone fake items with Bread on it such as foods and a copy of TIME Magazine and making them gush about Bread. It works up to a point.
- Cinderella Plot: "Cheeserella", per the name. Cake Princess has a party, meets Cheese, and falls in love with him, only to not be able to figure out where he's gone; her servants set up a reward for him, luring all the cheeses in town to her castle to find Cheese, with Cake Princess going off their smells instead of any glass slippers to identify the Cheese she loves.
- Comically Cross-Eyed: In "Hello Sausage", one of the bully sausage dogs who torments Sausage has a constant cross-eyed expression that makes him look doofier than the other, more thuggish sausage dogs.
- Consummate Professional: Bread is super focused on giving his clients the best "haircuts" he can, sometimes exhausting his employees in the process, and has a policy of not giving up on any customer.
- Continuity Nod: "Father Bread" contains a passing reference to how the previous episode, "Strawberry and Chocolate", ends. Romeo and Juliet had gotten together at the end of the latter episode; they pass by Father Bread in the other episode, mentioning that if it weren't for Master Bread, they wouldn't be together.
- Cultural Cross-Reference: The food barbershop owner's name is Bread Pitt, a pun on the name of the American actor Brad Pitt. You'd think this was done for the English version to make it funny for English viewers, but nope, his name is the same in Korean.
- Cuteness Overload: In "Cat Cupcakes", the rats' reaction to the pastry inhabitants of Bakery Town having cat-shaped frosting is not being scared as you would expect, but finding them adorable. So adorable that it kills them.
- Cutting Corners: Chip, Master Bread's rival, opens a barber shop that uses expired ingredients to save money.
- Dance Party Ending: The end credits show various characters, as 2D renditions, dancing to the credits music.
- Dead All Along: In "Ghost House", certain characters, namely the actors Bread gives makeovers, turn out to have already been dead after a car crash, to Bread and Choco's shock.
- Demoted to Extra: Choco for the first half of Bread and Wilk's World Tour where she only appears in the openings of several episodes and provides narrations for the fact files. She does join Wilk in one episode of the latter half of the season.
- A Dog Named "Dog": A slice of bread named Bread and a sausage named Sausage.
- Donut Mess with a Cop: Referenced; the policemen are donuts as a spoof on the joke about donut-loving policemen.
- Dreadful Musician: Wilk's singing about Monday in a couple episodes causes everyone around him to cover their ears or otherwise react negatively.
- Dreary Half-Lidded Eyes: Choco tends to have half-lidded eyes, showing her less-than-enthused, sarcastic personality.
- Edible Theme Naming: As shown in "Father Bread", Bread's father is named Breaden, and he has brothers named Breadwin and Breadward.
- Episode Title Card: The episode title cards have a design with a barbershop window with scissors at the top, and spinning posts on the left and right, with the episode title being in the window. Wilk says the episode title in Season 1; Bread says the episode title in Season 2; and in Season 3, he's replaced by Choco.
- Feuding Families: The strawberry and chocolate cake families in "Strawberry and Chocolate", true to what that episode is parodying (Romeo and Juliet). Their children, the chocolate cake Romeo and the strawberry cake Juliet, fall in love with each other, but this doesn't sit well with their families, who have been mortal enemies for a very long time.
- Famed In-Story: Bread Pitt is known both within Bakery Town and out for his haircutting skill, and many people from both backgrounds have gotten their haircut from him.
- "Freaky Friday" Flip: In keeping with the show's tradition of making different food puns, the production team named an episode "Freaky Fry-day" and had it be about Wilk wishing to be as good at being a barber as Master Bread. He gets his wish - he switches bodies with Master Bread after an accident, at which point everyone starts to appreciate Wilk's more avant-garde hairstyles up to a point, thinking they're Bread's hairstyles.
- Genie in a Bottle: Wilk is offered a kettle that turns out to have a genie in it in "Magic Kettle", and gets 300 wishes from it.
- God Save Us from the Queen!: Cake Queen, who throws people in the dungeon for even the most minor of offenses.
- Haggis Is Horrible: In the Bread and Wilk's World Tour episode "London, England", Wilk mentions that England has a lot of disgusting-looking foods. One of which is naturally haggis.
- Handy Feet: In "Put Your Best Foot Forward", Bread, whose arms are in casts, mentions being able to do a better job at certain tasks Wilk is bungling with his feet. When Wilk and Choco leave, Bread realizes what he said and trains himself to handle various barber tools with his feet. It works, and it impresses so many people that he gets a news story.
- Haunted House: In "The Haunted House", a BreadTube video creator records himself entering a house said to be haunted by a ghost couple and doesn't return. Master Bread learns about the treasure that's said to be hidden there and brings Wilk and Choco to find the treasure with him.
- Hit Flash: In "Choco's Blind Date", Choco trips on a rock and the screen gets covered with stars to punctuate the impact.
- I Am a Humanitarian: In "Soboro Ppang's Crush", Wilk is seen eating pieces of Soboro's crust after Mr. Bread plucks them off.
- Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Almost all of the pie characters use the same design and voice as the titular character of "Bully Pie", with the only exception being Director Popcorn's cameraman. The same goes for a tough croissant who is always accompanied with the pie.
- The Internet Is for Cats: In "Cat Cupcakes", when pulling up some pictures of cats on a search engine for everyone else to figure out what a cat looks like, Wilk says "They basically run the internet."
- "Jaws" Attack Parody: Bread has a poster in his barbershop that spoofs the Jaws poster, with the title of the film replaced with the word "Barber" and a pair of scissors replacing the shark.
- Ladies and Germs: In "Lonely Tart", the host of Master Patissier refers to everyone as "Ladies and gentlebreads!"
- Leitmotif: Chip has a crafty-sounding tune with a lot of finger-snapping to go with his scenes, fitting for a cheapskate rival to Bread.
- Lohengrin and Mendelssohn: The Mendelssohn piece is played during weddings on two occasions, in "Cake Princess's Wedding" and in "Chocolate Wall".
- Love at First Sight:
- In "Soboro Ppang's Crush", the eponymous crush is set up pretty quickly - the woman saves Soboro Ppang from being pestered by a robber, the robber flees, Soboro sees the woman, and the rest is history.
- In "My Love, Choco", Milk Bread only has to see Choco once to realize he has a passionate crush on her, without having even talked to her.
- Machine Monotone: The eponymous automaton in "Robot Wilk" speaks in a monotone.
- Manchild: Wilk is implied to be 20 years old in a Season 3 episode (a flashback is said to take place 20 years prior to the present). His appearance and voice don't lend themselves to resembling an adult, he has an enthusiastic personality, he idolizes Master Bread, and he still has an affinity for the series Donut Ranger, which is implied to be for all ages, after all these years. An excuse for it is given in "Big Boy Wilk" - despite being a grown man with a job, his parents still treat him like a little kid, feeding him his food like a baby and reading him bedtime stories (among other things).
- Matrix Raining Code: In "Barbershop Pup", green raining code appears around Sausage as he gets the accounts balanced on Choco's computer.
- Mistaken for Romance:
- In "Macaron's Day Off", a guy sees Wilk with Macaron, a famous Idol Singer, and thinks they're dating. He asks Wilk for the pictures he took with her, but Wilk, not realizing up until now that Macaron is a famous pop star, decides to keep them and give them to Macaron.
- In "Choco's Blind Date", Choco lies that she's dating Wilk to get Bagel out of her hair. Due to not having the context, Wilk thinks Choco actually has a crush on her, much to her shock.
- Money Fetish: Bread will gladly do anything for money.
- Moving Right Through: In "Heavy Metal", the heavy metal band are sad that they don't have any fans cheering for them, only to notice there are some fangirls headed right for them... or so they think. They're actually headed for another pop band who happens to be right behind them.
- Multi-Part Episode: The Season 1 finale, "Bread and Baguette", is spread across three parts and focuses on Baguette, who antagonizes Bread for getting the job he wanted, running his place out of business with his haircutting skills.
- Named After Somebody Famous: Master Bread's full name is Bread Pitt, a pun on Brad Pitt.
- Nearly Normal Animal: Sausage is a Largely Normal Animal. He is the show's equivalent to a dog and has largely dog-like behaviors and desires, but "The Chess King" show's that he is a really good chess player, enough that he can qualify for a tournament, and in "Sausage's Christmas" he suggests gifts for Bread, Wilk, and Choco for Santa to give to them and directly speaks to him asking to be with the others on Christmas.
- Nice Guy: Wilk. He's friendly to pretty much everyone and always happy to help out without asking for anything in return.
- Non-Mammalian Hair: Bread has a mustache, despite being bread. It's implied to be made of chocolate though.
- Ocular Gushers: Everyone cries gushes of tears. The animators paid special attention to this with Wilk - his tears are made of milk.
- Pac Man Fever: In "Cheeserella", the mobile game Cheese helps Cake Princess to beat makes 8-bit sounds, despite its graphics being in-line with a mobile game.
- Perpetual Frowner: Sarcastic, deadpan Choco rarely ever smiles, to the point that there's an episode ("Choco Smile") based around Bread holding a contest to see who can make her smile after an inspector determines that her frown ruins the workplace joy, which disqualifies Bread Barbershop from receiving government subsidies.
- Pet the Dog: "Potato Chip and Sausage" gives Chip the sympathy spotlight. He wins Sausage in a bet with Bread and initially treats him like a lowly servant, but gradually warms up to him after seeing how capable he is and even starts viewing him as a friend. Ultimately, he decides to return Sausage to Bread's Barbershop after seeing him worry about a grief-stricken Wilk.
- Playing a Tree: One of Bread's dad's greatest memories of Bread is him playing a tree in a play, as seen in "Father Bread".
- Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: The episode "The Dark Wilk Rises" is named after The Dark Knight Rises.
- Poster-Gallery Bedroom: Wilk's bedroom is shown to have a bunch of Donut Ranger posters on the wall, Donut Ranger being an in-universe tokusatsu show Wilk likes. This helps to establish his excitable, kid-like personality.
- Princesses Prefer Pink: Cake Princess is primarily pink in color.
- Pursue the Dream Job: In "Job Test", Wilk introduces himself stating that he's been dreaming of working in the Bread Barbershop his whole life.
- Quarter Hour Short: Including the theme song and end credits, the episodes are about 10-11 minutes long.
- Questioning Title?: "Crab or Cracker?" has a question mark in its title, referring to whether the crab cracker is a crab or not.
- Robot Me: In "Robot Wilk"... well, the title spoils it. Chip invents a robot Wilk to replace the real Wilk at work and eventually attack Master Bread.
- Roll Out the Red Carpet: In "Potato Chip's Chip", one of the things Choco does after Bread becomes suspiciously generous is to roll out a red carpet in front of one of the customers to make them seem more special.
- Shout-Out:
- In "Butter Fingers", Butter and a woman are seen re-enacting the "I'm flying" scene from Titanic (1997).
- In "Wilk's Story", when he begs Master Bread to help him with his milk label, Wilk paraphrases a quote from A New Hope.Wilk: Help me, Obi-Bread Kenobi! You're my only hope!
- In "Movie Star Bread", Wilk proudly exclaims that his "barber level is over 9000", a reference to a famous meme from Dragon Ball Z. Later in that episode, Wilk wears armor with a scouter on it like the ones in Dragon Ball Z as part of his movie outfit.
- In "The Dark Wilk Rises", the priest attempting to exorcise Wilk exclaims "The power of crust compels you!", paraphrasing a famous quote from The Exorcist.
- In "Bread and Baguette, Part 2", Choco gets a job at Bakery Land, which seems to be a parody of Disneyland if the fact that she's wearing the clothes worn by Disney's version of Snow White as mascot clothing is anything to go by.
- The movie theater has posters parodying real movies. A sausage dog tied to a bunch of balloons is depicted in the sky for a film called Fly, parodying Up's iconic flying house; a bunch of colorful foods are inside a silhouette of a larger cupcake in a poster that brings Inside Out to mind; a poster with a busy street looks like the artwork for Zootopia; and a donut kid with a baby bottle sits in the same smug pose as the eponymous character of The Boss Baby.
- There is a poster for a game called Panc-Man in the arcade.
- In "Potato Chip and Sausage", a strong pie man playing the "hit the bell" game at the arcade gets such a high score that a cupcake compares it to Muhammad Breadli, a pun on Muhammad Ali.
- In "Put Your Best Foot Forward", Wilk mentions listening to a song by Olivia Fig Newton-John.
- In "Choco's Blind Date", Choco is excited to get tickets for a play called Catcakes. Later in the same episode, Bagel claims to have tickets to The Phantom of the Office.
- There are multiple in "Take Care of My Hair"; the television station is called BBC, a version of Bob Iger named Bun Iger shows up who runs a company called Bunisney, and at the end of the episode, the film-within-the-show Joke references the stairs scene from Joker (2019).
- "Steambun's Moving Day" involves a poor family scheming to get themselves employed by Bread so they can replace him and his employees, making it a Whole-Plot Reference to Parasite (2019).
- In "Ghost House", Bread and Wilk get scared by a long-haired cupcake woman who pops out of a well inside a television and attempts to go through the TV screen. Later, Bread makes one of the actors look like a skeleton with a skull resembling Jack Skellington's.
- Sickeningly Sweethearts: In "Heavy Metal", some of the only people who attend the heavy metal group's concert at the beginning of the episode are a cupcake couple who are too busy flirting with each other to bother seeing the performance.Male cupcake: [makes a kissy face at his girlfriend]
Female cupcake: You're sweet as pie! - Show Within a Show: Donut Ranger is a show akin to Super Sentai and Power Rangers that is shown to have some decent popularity and merchandise in the Bread Barbershop world. Bread and Wilk are big fans of it.
- So Beautiful, It's a Curse: In "Butter's Quest for Ugliness", Butter's good looks end up causing a bunch of women to faint from his beauty, causing him to get placed on house arrest. The rest of the episode is him trying to figure out how to look ugly so he can get out of the house and not cause people to faint.
- Spin-Off: It has two spin-offs, both with educational themes. Wilk's Dessert Story has Wilk teaching viewers the origins of different foods; Bread and Wilk's World Tour has Bread and Wilk learning about different important figures in history.
- Start My Own: A variant in "Cheese's Playground"; Cheese starts his own playground after bullies don't allow him to play in the public playground and make fun of his stinky odor.
- Stink Snub: Cheese tends to be made fun of because his odor is stinky, with bullies in "Cheese's Playground" going as far as to not let him play in the playground due to his smelling so bad.
- Stuck in the Doorway: In the first episode, the big-headed cupcake has trouble getting into the barbershop because his head is that big, causing him to get lodged in the doorway.
- Tattooed Crook: The wanted pie crook has a tattoo of an arrow going through an apple on his right arm.
- Three Wishes: In "Magic Kettle", the eponymous kettle's genie gives Wilk a whopping 300 wishes instead of three, believing that "in this digital age, that's too few!".
- Title Theme Tune: The theme song, "Hey! Bread Barbershop" by Raon, features the title of the show in its chorus. Hey, hey! Bread Barbershop! He can't be beat...
- Toilet Humor:
- In "The Barber of Bakery Town", during a competition with a rival, Bread designs his cupcake person's frosting to look like poop, complete with texture. He goes back on it, turning it into a golden dragon instead.
- In "Bread's Wisdom", the way Bread finds out who the baby's mother is played for laughs, but disgusting. He sees the baby's poop is a specific color and uses an X-ray on both fish pastry women fighting over the baby, discovering that each have different-colored fillings and determining who the baby's mother is by matching the color.
- In "Freaky Fry-day", Wilk, while in Master Bread's body, gives the queen a brown hairdo with further decorations like nuts and gummy worms on it. A kid at her hairdo reveal points out how much it looks like poop and makes fun of it, which angers her.
- Too Unhappy to Be Hungry: In "Potato Chip and Sausage", Wilk, thinking about how Sausage must be with Chip (who had won him in a bet earlier), refuses to eat the soup Master Bread makes him and is shown to have not eaten in a while. Meanwhile, Sausage is too sad about Wilk to eat the dog food Chip gives him.
- Train-Station Goodbye: "Father Bread" ends at the train station Father Bread arrives at; Bread and his dad sorrowfully exchange their goodbyes as the former realizes the latter really cares about him.
- Trans Nature: In "Crab or Cracker", a crab cracker kid goes through a phase where he thinks he's a crab and wants to live in the ocean with the other sea animals. Bread perpetrates a plan to scare the kid out of being a crab by having some customers come in and pretend to get makeovers that look like real ocean animals, including some of their more grotesque details like veins on a fish's eyes.
- Visible Odor: Cheese has a sickly yellow aura representing his smell.
- "Wanted!" Poster: In "Bully Pie", the thug pie has a wanted poster of him in the town. He shows shock at the fact that he's wanted for a reward of one million dollars, complaining that he's worth more than that.
- Way Past the Expiration Date: Played for laughs at the end of "Tea Master", where Wilk finds out that the tea that the Tea Master gave him expired in 1990. Despite this, when mixed with Wilk's tears, it becomes a delectable treat that Bread enjoys.
- Who Will Bell the Cat?: The trope-naming fable is referenced in "Cat Cupcakes", where the queen asks her servants to come up with a plan to get rid of the rat infestation in Bakery Town. One of them suggests putting a bell on the mice and is told to do it himself, but doesn't come back; the second one suggests luring cats into Bakery Town to scare them off and is told to get them himself, only to not come back either; and the third one suggests having Bread style everyone's frosting into the shape of cats.
- Whole Episode Flashback:
- In "Wilk's Story", Wilk recounts his early childhood, when his parents noticed he has the word "MILK" misspelled on him (all the milk cartons in this show have the word "MILK" on them, except for Wilk). He goes to the Bread Barbershop after learning about it, wanting to get his label fixed.
- In "Choco's Job Interview", Bread recalls how Choco became his cashier when Wilk asks. This reveals that she used to be in a gang of bikers before she was hired.
- Wilting Odor: In "Camembert Cheese", Master Bread claims to have helped Stinky Tofu, whose smell was so bad that life perished wherever he walked. The Art Shift visuals show Stinky Tofu walking past flowers, killing them.
- Work Info Title: The title immediately tells you that the show is about a barbershop run by a slice of bread.
- World of Pun: There are a good plenty of food puns to be found in Bread Barbershop, ranging from character names like Bread Pitt and Bun Iger, to jokes about Bread being "toast" once Chip defeats him, to mentions of foodified versions of well-known works and events such as Panc-Man and the Cornvid virus.
- World Tour: The main premise of Bread and Wilk's World Tour.
- Your Size May Vary: In the main series, the Anthropomorphic Food characters are the same scale as regular food. In Bread and Wilk's World Tour, they have been scaled up to roughly human size so that the premise will work.
