@paramaline
i just learned a Japanese thing that i thought you would appreciate! one of my study buddies found out that axolotls have a funny common name in Japanese: ウーパールーパー (pronounced like "oo-pa-ru-pa"), which made us all go "wait like... oompa loompa??" so one of my friends did some investigating, haha, and found this article on it (deepl does an ok job with the translation if you are curious and want to read it)
basically: it comes from this 1985 commercial for instant yakisoba in a cup (i have no idea if the commercial was at all inspired by oompa loompas)
something kind of funny, though, is that when i ran the text through deepl while making this post, i noticed that deepl could not for the life of it figure out the word "ウーパールーパー" lol and it kept translating it as "Whooper", and then i was like "...wait a minute"
sure enough, the Japanese name for wooper is apparently "ウパー" ("oo-pa")! Japanese doesn't really distinguish between a "wu" and an "u" sound, and both of them are written with ウ in katakana, so wooper's name probably came from ウーパールーパー!
