Kung Fu Panda in release order

About this order

What is on this list

All four Kung Fu Panda films. Six shorts and television specials, from Secrets of the Furious Five in 2008 to Dueling Dumplings in 2024. And all 146 episodes of the three series: Legends of Awesomeness on Nickelodeon, The Paws of Destiny on Amazon and The Dragon Knight on Netflix.

There is no fifth film. Nothing is announced and nothing has a date.

Two films are dated by a foreign opening

Kung Fu Panda opened in South Korea on 5 June 2008, the day before America, and Kung Fu Panda 4 in the Philippines on 6 March 2024, two days before. This site dates an entry by its first release wherever that happened, so those are the dates here. Neither moves anything in the order.

Kung Fu Panda 3 is the one that could have and does not. On Saturday 23 January 2016 it played a single nationwide paid preview session in China and took about $6.4 million — a real audience, in seats, six days before it opened wide on the 29th. Wikipedia prints the 23rd as China's release date; Variety and the Hollywood Reporter both call it previews ahead of a 29 January opening. This list uses the 29th, on the same grounds that keep the Cannes screening of the first film off it: a preview is not a release.

Nothing here ever played in front of another film

Every short in this franchise reached its audience on a disc, in a digital release or on NBC. That is worth saying because it is the exact opposite of this site's Ice Age list, where three of seven shorts were attached to somebody else's film in cinemas.

Secrets of the Furious Five came on the second disc of the first film's DVD. Secrets of the Masters came on the second film's. Secrets of the Scroll and Panda Paws and Dueling Dumplings were digital extras. Only Kung Fu Panda Holiday was made for an audience watching at a particular time: NBC, Thanksgiving night 2010, half past eight, straight after a repeat of Merry Madagascar.

One of those dates might be two months early. The second film's disc came out in France in October 2011 and Sweden in November, both before the American release in December that Secrets of the Masters is dated by, and whether those earlier discs carried the short could not be established either way.

An episode that came out on a disc

Has-Been Hero is an episode of Legends of Awesomeness and it sits in December 2011, three and a half months before Nickelodeon showed it. It was on the Kung Fu Panda 2 disc, and a disc is a release — the same rule that dates half the shorts on this page. So the twenty-second episode of season one arrives before the twenty-first, which is the kind of thing this site exists to show you.

Fourteen episodes went out in Germany first, and this list does not use those dates

Legends of Awesomeness ran out of steam in America. Nickelodeon showed eighteen episodes of season three across 2013 and 2014 and then stopped for twenty months; the last ten limped out on Nicktoons in 2016. Germany did not wait. Fourteen episodes premiered there first, and the series finale, Emperors Rule, went out on Nickelodeon Germany on 6 September 2014 — twenty-one months before America saw it.

Those dates come from one German listings archive. English Wikipedia knows something happened, and says the last few episodes "were released in chronological order in Germany between December 30, 2014, and January 7, 2015", but gives no date for any individual episode and only says of the finale that it aired "sometime in 2014".

So this page uses the American dates and tells you about the German ones here. It is a different call from the one on this site's Indiana Jones list, where four episodes are dated by their Swedish and German broadcasts, and the difference is what the sources will carry: those four have nothing else, where these fourteen have a well-documented American run and one archive against it. If better evidence turns up, ten rows move and the end of that series looks very different.

IMDb cannot order this series either

Worth saying because it is the obvious place to check. IMDb's dates for Legends of Awesomeness season three are a mixture: it has See No Weevil on 10 January 2015 and Face Full of Fear on 12 January 2015, which are German airings, sitting among American ones. Its numbering is sound and its episode pages are linked from every row here, but its dates cannot put this series in order.

There is a second trap next to it. IMDb carries a separate entry called simply "Kung Fu Panda", a television series dated 2014, which is the Nicktoons-branded run of season three filed as though it were a different show. Every link on this page goes to the real one.

Two double-length specials, counted as the two broadcasts they were

Enter the Dragon and the Emperors Rule finale were each 45 minutes and each numbered as two episodes. Wikipedia gives them two numbers apiece and footnotes the first as "a double length 45 minute special"; IMDb carries each as a single episode. This site counts broadcasts, so each is one row. Enter the Dragon is numbered 7, with no episode 8, and the finale is 27 of 27.

That numbering is Wikipedia's rather than IMDb's, which closes the gap and runs one lower for the rest of season two. The Episode column here keeps the numbers most guides print.

The Paws of Destiny is two seasons, and Wikipedia says otherwise

Amazon put out thirteen episodes in November 2018 and thirteen more in July 2019, and calls them seasons one and two. So do IMDb and TVmaze. Wikipedia alone treats it as one season in two parts and numbers the second batch 14 to 26. This list follows Amazon, since that is where the thing came out.

The second batch is dated 5 July 2019. Wikipedia's episode table says the 4th, but its own lead, its own infobox and the trade press when it launched all say the 5th.

Ten rows carry a cross-over mark, out of 156

The films carry none, here as everywhere — a film in a franchise is a cross-over of a sort, and marking them all would say nothing.

Four of the shorts have one. Kung Fu Panda Holiday opens inside Mr Ping's nightmare, which is the first film's ending restaged as the thing he dreads. Secrets of the Masters is the origin of three characters made for the second film. Panda Paws is three minutes with four characters made for the third. Dueling Dumplings is the franchise's only true epilogue and it gives away the end of the fourth film.

Five episodes of Legends of Awesomeness reach back at the films, and all five reach for the same thing: Tai Lung. He never actually appears — he is a flashback in Rhino's Revenge, an uncle in The Kung Fu Kid, and in Master and the Panda he is Po wearing a shifting stone. The fifth, The Maltese Mantis, reaches sideways instead, at Secrets of the Furious Five. And one episode of The Paws of Destiny names Kai and so places that whole series after the third film.

That is all of it. Lord Shen is mentioned once in eighty episodes and never seen; the Soothsayer, Kai, Li Shan and the panda village never appear in Legends of Awesomeness at all. The pandas in The Paws of Destiny come from the third film but they are that show's own regular cast, which is not a cross-over — the same rule that leaves a spin-off's own leads unmarked everywhere on this site.

One link between two of the series is real and is not marked, because nobody has pinned it down. Somewhere in The Paws of Destiny, Bunnidharma says he has not seen Oogway since Oogway banished the demon Ke-Pa — and Ke-Pa is a Legends of Awesomeness villain, invented for that show's second-season finale. It is the only thread connecting any two of the three series, and no source consulted says which episode the line is in.

What is not here

Kung Fu Panda: Unstoppable Awesomeness, a fifteen-minute four-dimensional film made for a theme park in Dubai in 2016, and Kung Fu Panda: The Emperor's Quest, the ride film at Universal Studios Hollywood from 2018, which recycles much of it. Wikipedia's list of DreamWorks productions files the second among the short films; it is an attraction.

Kung Fu Panda Spectacular Live, a stage show. The video games and their cinematics. The making-of pieces on the discs. And the Legends of Awesomeness retail DVDs, which bundle episodes that are already here.

Where the links go

Every entry links to IMDb and to the Kung Fu Panda Wiki. No episode of any of the three series has a Wikipedia article of its own, so every episode's Wikipedia link is its own row on the relevant list article. Panda Paws and Dueling Dumplings have no Wikipedia article either and link to the franchise page.