Why do Pop Team Epic episodes repeat with different voice actors? When watching Pop Team Epic on Crunchyroll, each episode plays twice in a row. Both times the episode is nearly identical, only with the main characters voiced by male actors instead of female actors.

Why does each episode of Pop Team Epic play twice? Why re-record the show with different voice actors?
According to an interview done to the producer of the anime, there were several reasons:


The animation originally was meant to be broadcasted in web format only, not as a TV series. Then the author asked the producer if it was possible to record two tracks: one with female voice actors and one with males and broadcast the primary track and the auxiliary. This wasn't possible with web streaming.
Then when they considered a TV broadcast for the series, the episodes weren't long enough to allocate one full slot of broadcast, and unlike previous seasons, they didn't have another series to fill the slot.
So instead of broadcasting one episode with dual audio as the author requested, they just paid for the entire slot and broadcast the 2 recordings, with male and female actors. There are differences in both because the director and producer give full freedom to the seiyuus to do whatever they wanted (and they didn't like it), and they even modified some scenes according to the actor used (Ep. 3 Bison reference) or their performance in the recording (the Tomokazu Sugita episode). But these were minimal.


The interview is in Japanese here: https://www.animatetimes.com/news/details.php?id=1517584766