Pip and Dot (2024)

"You set them up, I'll knock them down."
—Pip and Dot, Death Screen

Pip and Dot are a miniboss that appears in the boss fight with King Dice when landing on Space 4.

Description[]

Appearance[]

Pip and Dot are a living domino with Pip on the top wearing a blue 19th century style Stovepipe hat, along with black sleeves and white gloves and his wife Dot is on the bottom wearing a gray skirt and red heels with white stockings. The two halves also share a red bow, acting as Pip's bow tie and Dot's hair bow.

Personality[]

Pip and Dot are a loving but conflicted pair with a temperamental relationship.^[1] As evidenced by their defeat animation, Pip and Dot seem to be quick to get into fights with each other.

Intro[]

Pip looks down at Dot while raising his hat, smiling, while Dot looks back up, sweetly batting her eyes. They then notice Cuphead and Mugman and start swinging with their frown and smile alternating between the two.

Battle[]

For the duration of the fight, they sit on a swing. They have two known attacks:

• Pip opens his hat to summon a Domino Bird, which has eyes on each side of its face, that travels along the screen to the player's current location. The bird acts as an obstacle to hurt the player(s), but can be defeated. Hitpoints = 20/20
• The second attack involves them spitting a blue, pink or orange twenty-sided die from a sharp-toothed mouth in-between them which slowly travels in a zigzag motion in an attempt to hurt the players. The pink ones are parryable. In Expert mode, the twenty-sided die is spit out at a steeper angle so it bounces more and stay on screen longer.

In Expert Mode, they attack more frequently.

The left side of Pip and Dot's stage is a wall of spikes. The player(s) also need to jump over patches of spikes on the domino conveyor belt floor. In Expert mode, the floor moves slightly faster.

When defeated, Dot will angrily kick Pip in the eyes with her red heels. Hitpoints = 600/750

Gallery[]

Trivia[]

• Pip and Dot represents Dominoes in which they are sometimes used as playing cards or dice in casinos. The Domino game originated in China and were brought to Italy where they became popular in all of Europe.
• Aside from Rumor Honeybottoms and Grim Matchstick, Pip and Dot is the only non-plane boss that has moving elements in their stage.
  • Delicious Last Course added Glumstone The Giant, The Howling Aces, and Mortimer Freeze with those elements.
• The eyes of Pip and Dot seem to resemble the pips in the separate squares making it look like a double two domino tile.
• Despite the fact that Pip and Dot share the same body, their designer, Tina Nawrocki, considers them a married couple, noting how close they are.
  • They may have been separate dominoes before they married, but it is unknown how and why they are connected, and how they connected in the first place.
• In the unused Simple Mode, they would spawn lower than the ground and can be only damage by certain Supers or EXes, the floor would actually move and have spikes on them and at the back, their attack animation would play but neither the domino bird or the dice would spawn to attack. They only have the default 100 health. In later version like 1.1.3, the Simple Mode differences have been removed and would play like Regular Mode instead.
• Along with Hilda Berg and Esther Winchester, Dot does not wear lipstick.
• In the fifth episode of The Cuphead Show, Pip and Dot can be seen twice watching King Dice's game show, Roll The Dice. Oddly, Dot is seen wearing lipstick.
  • In the twelfth episode of the same season, Pip and Dot can be seen in the movie theater when Cuphead and Mugman are following Ms. Chalice, and are also seen shushing Cuphead and Mugman whilst they're talking during the movie.

Inspiration and Similarities[]

• The stage for their fight is very similar to a trap in Bimbo's Initiation (1931) where Bimbo is trapped in a room with a conveyor belt floor that brings him closer to a knife in the wall that pokes him. In the stage, the player(s) are dragged on a conveyor belt floor into a grid spiked wall.
• The die they use in their attack is known as a "d20", an icosahedral (twenty-sided) die mostly used for tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons. Even though D&D wasn't around during the time period of Cuphead, the d20 die has been around since ancient Egypt.
• Their design, because they're a domino piece, is reminescent to Mr. Domino from the PlayStation 1 game No One Can Stop Mr. Domino!.

References[]