General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Most Popular Girls in School

The Most Popular Girls in School (often abbreviated MPGiS) is an American stop-motion animated comedy web series that animates Barbie, Ken, and other fashion dolls as the students of a fictional high school in Overland Park, Kansas, centering on a feud between the school's cheer squad and the wealthy Van Buren sisters. Created by Mark Cope and Carlo Moss and produced by Lily Vonnegut, it ran on YouTube from a pilot in October 2011 to a final episode in August 2017, and became one of the platform's best-known scripted series after a Tumblr-driven surge in popularity in January 2013.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Stop-motion crude-humor comedy using Barbie and other fashion dolls with customized costumes and hairstyles; episodes average about 9 to 10 minutes²^•³
Creators	Mark Cope and Carlo Moss; producer Lily Vonnegut, who also voices Brittnay Matthews¹^•⁴
Pilot	Uploaded October 3, 2011 to the YouTube account Associates of Awesome, run by Los Angeles-based comedian Garrett Mendez; viewed nearly 22,000 times within five days¹
Run	5 seasons, 82 episodes, May 2012 to August 29, 2017, on YouTube⁵^•³
Channel scale	TheMostPopularGirls channel: about 1,110,000 subscribers and 197,417,428 total views across 341 videos⁶
Reception	8.8/10 on IMDb (795 ratings); TV-MA rating; described by Variety as "Mean Girls meets South Park"⁷^•²
Spin-offs	The Trisha Show and Judy and Red in the Morning⁸

Spoilers

Premise and style

The series follows the Overland Park cheer squad and its head cheerleader, Mackenzie Zales, as they feud with rivals including the Van Buren sisters, hipsters, and other enemies in a battle up the social ladder.⁹ The opening storyline centers on a new girl, Deandra, who arrives at Overland Park High and becomes entangled in the existing feud between the Van Burens, described as the most popular girls in the area, and the cheer squad; later seasons shift to other conflicts, though always centered on the cheer squad.¹⁰

The comedy relies on the contrast between the dolls' sweet appearance and the characters' profanity-laced dialogue. A Daily Dot profile described the effect of hearing vindictive, foul-mouthed cheerleaders voiced largely by grown men, noting that many female characters are voiced by bearded male performers.⁸ A student review at the time put the appeal plainly: the show has the stock drama of a teen movie, the prom-queen race and the war between cliques, but with dialogue far cruder than mainstream cinema allows.¹¹

Run and ending

The show ran five seasons of 13, 17, 28, 12, and 12 episodes respectively, plus 9 specials released between October 2013 and May 2020, with the final episode, "The Final Walk," airing August 29, 2017.³^•⁵ Season 3 was the longest at 28 episodes, running from November 2013 to May 2014.³ The final season's episodes centered on an international cheerleading competition involving Team France and the captive Brittnay and Deandra.¹⁵

Origin

The idea came from a comedy sketch originally titled "Bathroom Hierarchy," written by Los Angeles actor Carlo Moss and based on a deep, annoying voice he often used to portray women on stage.⁸ The pilot, an argument between three Barbie dolls in a high school bathroom, was uploaded on October 3, 2011 to the YouTube account Associates of Awesome, run by comedian Garrett Mendez, and drew nearly 22,000 views in five days.¹ Moss, a former student at Santa Monica's Lighthouse Church School, told the Santa Monica Patch that the series "resonates with a lot of people who are on the fringes of high school. It gives a voice to their frustration."

Database listings give the series' first aired date as May 1, 2012, when it moved to its own channel, TheMostPopularGirls, created April 30, 2012; the Know Your Meme entry dates the pilot itself to October 2011 on the earlier Associates of Awesome account.³^•⁶^•¹

Spread and fandom

The series grew slowly through 2012: a link on Videosift, an in-character Twitter account for Mackenzie Zales created in December 2011, a move to a dedicated YouTube channel in May 2012, and an official Tumblr with image macros of the characters.¹

The Tumblr surge. On January 10, 2013, Tumblr user gloomyteens posted the pilot episode, where it gained more than 65,000 notes in three weeks; GIFs and fan art followed under the tags TMPGIS and MPGIS, and GIF photosets received tens of thousands of notes.¹ A contemporary review reported the series gained almost 800,000 views in a matter of days during that month.¹¹ An official Facebook fan page launched January 17, 2013 gained nearly 3,800 likes in under a month, and in late January the series was featured on Thought Catalog, Buzzfeed, The FW, and Oh No They Didn't.¹ By late 2013 the series had topped 35 million views, enough for the talent agency William Morris Endeavor to sign its creators.⁸^•¹²

Production and business model

The team behind the show later organized as Extra Credit Studios, a Los Angeles animation studio making original stop-motion productions since 2011, which describes MPGIS as one of the biggest scripted YouTube series of all time.¹³ Funding came from a mix of traditional crowdfunding, outside investment, and YouTube ad revenue, a model that forced long production gaps: before the most recent season, the channel went dark for more than two years while the team pitched investors and built capital. The studio turned to Patreon to fund year-round weekly output.¹³

The series was a 2015 Streamy Award nominee for Costume Design, and Famous Birthdays reports that the first episode has been watched more than nine million times.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026