Episode 51: Donkey Kong vs Knuckles
ODBFB Prediction https://web.archive.org/web/20150822001620/http://www.screwattack.com/news/death-battle-predictions-knuckles-vs-donkey-kong
This was one of the funnier episodes. I remember Protodude made a calc of DK sending the moon down to Earth, which was considered a country level feat, and made people side with him. Though I think some people tried to dismiss that feat as an “outlier”?. I also remember we had to tell Ben that Knuckle's moon punch in Sonic X only destroyed a transceiver and didn’t move the moon itself. That distinction probably secured DK's win.
Anyway this episode set a pretty important precedent. Up until that point most Sonic eps had heavily utilized components of Archie Sonic lore in the analysis. But Archie Knuckles was basically a god, and that made them reconsider utilizing it. This led to the whole “case by case” rule when it comes to character composites.
Oh on that note. In hindsight I think some people might consider using Sonic Boom and Sonic X a bit strange. But similar to how Satam and Adventures appeared in older Sonic Death Battles, you need to remember what Sonic media was relevant when this episode was made. At the time Sonic X had only aired a few years ago and was the most faithful adaptation the series had up till that point. AT THE TIME Sonic Boom was fairly recent, and didn’t do anything uber crazy. Sonic in general DID NOT HAVE spin off material that was set within the game universe(as is the case now). So that debate over "their" inclusion did not exist.
Episode 52: Wolverine vs Raiden
ODBFB Prediction: https://web.archive.org/web/20150911030744/http://www.screwattack.com/news/death-battle-predictions-wolverine-vs-raiden
I remember debating this episode on SA forums. It was just this circular argument of trying to find ways for Raiden to actually kill Wolverine. It was agreed “at the time” that Raiden was obviously stronger and faster, but Wolverine’s regen and skeleton was this huge problem to actually delivering a killing blow. It also wasn’t possible for Wolverine to just give up and go home since we assumed the fight had to end in a death.
Some of the proposed methods where
Throw Wolverine into space (cause technically Raiden is strong enough to do that right?)
Use the electric Sai’s to impale Wolverine’s brain through the slit openings in his eye sockets(those holes openings aren't super ultra narrow. Shut the fuck up!).
Pick him up and throw him repeatedly until you reach a body of water. Then throw a big rock on him
Bury him underground somehow
I will never forget Kirby kid coming into a forum thread and posting this picture, while sincerely stating “Raiden can hit him in his brain using this hole!”
Then having people explain that’s where the spine goes.
Anyway, Raiden won because Swan found this feat by a character named Misty Knight, who used something called antarctic vibranium to destabilize Adamantium (Ben attributed this find to me by accident). This power was compared to Raiden’s HF blade. In hindsight, I'm not sure if that comparison holds, but man I got chills when Raiden cut Wolverine’s head off. Another one of the classic season 2 episodes.
Episode 53: Hercule vs Dan Habiki
ODBFB Prediction: https://ulltraguy.blogspot.com/2024/04/old-blog_13.html
I think this was the first fight DB had won since Vegeta. Though after this fight they had I think an 7-8 year win streak? I mention it cause I remember a big thing at the time was this idea that Death Battle hated anime. Though frankly I would say Street Fighter had it much worse. They where on a losing streak for multiple years.
Anyway the ep was pretty well done. It leans more into the video games than most modern Dragon Ball eps would. A part of me would like to do Dan again one day, since I feel like he’s ironically gotten more stuff since the ep came out.
Episode 54: Yang vs Tifa
ODBFB Prediction: https://web.archive.org/web/20151019234233/http://www.screwattack.com/news/death-battle-predictions-yang-xiao-long-vs-tifa-lockhart
I’m gonna go out on a limb and defend this episode. NO there was no secret corporate conspiracy. The animation is also better than you remember it. It’s been 10 years. Lighten up a bit.
Anyway around this time I think Screwattack started to go under, and they were being bought out by this larger company named Fullscreen. Rooster Teeth was also owned by this same company, and DB was set to merge with them. This wasn’t publicly known right away, but once it was people made up conspiracy theories that Yang won as some form of appeasement.
Personally I think Yang just won because the show still had issues with RPG characters at the time. Tifa was given equipment based on what she was given in spin offs similar to Cloud, which put her at a disadvantage. Additionally the fact Tifa was a character you could take in and out of your party at any time also led to arguments of what feats “counted for her”.
It was almost a meme in the forums about whether “Tifa exists”, cause some people had this extreme reluctance to compare her to any other character in FF7 or count any feat that was based on gameplay, because we didn’t know if that was “cannon”. In HINDSIGHT Tifa would win a 1000 times over with modern scaling and composite rules, but that just wasn’t the established precedent back then. Leading to her loss.
Anyway I remember this being another episode that got a lot of blowback. A lot of people made the “Pillar Feats” thing into a meme. I also distinctly remember Deviant art made an ENTIRE WEB PAGE called the “YangHatersHaven” , where they would commission art of Tifa violently beating Yang in fights(It’s still up btw). This one guy named Antcow particularly was obsessed with the fight and would try to find quotes from the blog group or Ben to support this idea that Tifa winning via conspiracy. Even years later he still hadn’t let it go.
Episode 55: Megaman vs Astroboy
OFBDB Prediction: https://ulltraguy.blogspot.com/2024/04/old-megaman-blog.html
This is a good fight. Good usage of Megaman’s powers. Astro Boy is acrobatic. Nice fake out ending, etc.
But holy shit is there a story behind it.
I mentioned that Protodude was a big part of the community up until that point. He had been making more and more calcs, particularly for Megaman and was more involved with tons of discussions. As a fan of Megaman and Astro he obviously had opinions on this fight.
I myself also liked Megaman and had a lot of opinions on this fight, and we had pretty long debates over it on SA Forums. I argued heavily for Astro Boy and he for Megaman. In hindsight it’s probably closer than either of us gave it credit for at the time. As some of his calcs were a bit wonky and I was probably more scrutinizing on several feats than i should have been.
But during the discussion on SA forums, this guy named King Bowser got involved. He was this massive troll who tried to mislead everyone else on the site, lied constantly and kept bringing up weird stuff about his girlfriend sexual acts .
I’ll never forget how he declared that he was a member of MENSA, and how that made him intellectually superior to everyone else on the forum.
Anyway he and Proto got into some sort of fight and then they realized that they knew each other in real life! King Bowser was like one of his actual friends IRL that lived down the street.
Proto vs King Bowser animated
Anyway that was when Proto decided to leave the vs community. I still talked to him a few times after that though.
Episode 56: Green Arrow vs Hawkeye
ODBFB Prediction: https://ulltraguy.blogspot.com/2024/04/old-hawkeye-blog.html
I recall this episode being really close. I think they did a good job of working with what limited moves they had. No one really contested Hawkeye winning either.
Episode 57: Pokemon vs Digimon
ODBFB Prediction: https://ulltraguy.blogspot.com/2024/04/old-pokemon-blog.html
A pretty objectively good fight. The analysis holds up too. I think watching Red get killed was a bit hard to see though. I also can’t help but think that Ash would have put up a better fist fight lol.
Anyway this episode marks the end of season 2 and the end of Death Battle’s time on Screwattack. Right after this episode SA’s website merged into Rooster Teeth and the layout changed again. Our blog “content” sorta made the jump, but the change in format was too great for anyone to really continue posting stuff the way they used too. Communication also became significantly worse.
This is what caused a lot of people to start posting content using “blogger”, a blog system developed by google. It also meant the forums became a greater hub for discussion on the show, because they were one of the few locations left untouched by the merger.
Some people also started to use Skype to communicate and a lot of us kept in contact with that.
Episode 58: Dante vs Bayonetta
ODBFB Prediction: https://ulltraguy.blogspot.com/2024/04/bayonetta-blog.html
This is another fight that shows how insane Torrian is at animation. All the weapon switches, briefly having two characters on stage at once, the summoning, etc could not have been easy to pull off. It’s an objectively good fight.
That said at the time it did cause some heated debates. The consensus used to be that Bayonetta should win and her losing caused some pushback, particularly due to the usage of the raindrop feat on Dante’s side. This is ironic given how nowadays people argue Dante is universal or whatever due to lore stuff. Still, Dante was well liked enough that most people still rolled with it.
One thing I forgot about with this fight is that the DMC reboot game had come out recently and that there was this whole debate on whether or not that should be included or not.
Episode 59: Bowser vs Ganondorf
Super Lava
ODBFB Prediction: https://odbfb.blogspot.com/2016/04/death-battle-predictions-bowser-vs.html
……This was another canon event for the community.
So I feel like I need to explain again what the “role” of the Research Team/Prediction blog was up to this point.
The Official Death Battle Fan Blog was a group of bloggers who would create predictions and fan content for Death Battle. It was established during season 1 of the show, and was founded by the G1s Samurai Spartan, LousyTactician, PSB, and Akumath. Myself, Max Of Few Trades, Lswan, Hero's Shade and a guy named Darkhyrulelord all joined shortly after. Essentially several of the current Researchers and Writers have been fans since near when the show started.
During season 2 Ben contacted us and asked if we wanted to share notes on characters. He would send us emails where he would tell us fights in advance and then we had the “option” to send him information or arguments back. We did not directly talk to the Death Battle team about their thoughts on outcomes and didn’t directly get involved in choosing the final winner, but we had an influence on the show's trajectory. This is why in those older eps referred to us as the “additional volunteer research team” in the credits.
This eventually led to a couple of problems
This created an odd discrepancy in results between us and the show. Because we didn’t know the outcomes, we would sometimes choose a different character to win in our blogs than the official episodes (oftentimes pivoting based on the community's opinion). This created a rift with the community reception, where they would get EXTRA angry if the result of an episode was controversial and we had said the opposite character should win. Essentially we became the “idealized” vision of how the show should go in their heads.
Next this arrangement meant we were kinda in a legal gray area. We technically had insider information, but we weren't contracted employees or under any kind of agreement to actually keep anything secret. It was basically the honor system. This was fine under the much smaller community driven Screwattack, but once the show was owned by a larger company the implications of that became far more apparent. One of the big things is that some of the members ran or were involved in an unofficial fan podcast, and probably didn’t always filter their opinions on it.
PodCast: https://web.archive.org/web/20160413184326/http://forums.screwattack.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=21438
https://www.youtube.com/@discussingdeathbattlepodca4583/videos
This episode kinda brought those potential issues to a head VERY quickly. Bowser is a very popular character and a lot of people did not like the outcome of this fight. Add in people contesting the previous ep, and it was kind of an implosion. I don’t think anything else has matched this episode on a community level. I’ve sometimes been told that this episode was the catalyst for other vs shows being made like Crossover X, because they wanted their own content after seeing the result.
Unfortunately even we fell into this negativity and made the situation worse by publicly disagreeing with the episode and getting mad about the results. I can imagine this probably did not look good, particularly since the mergers and acquisitions were still ongoing.
https://odfbfmisc.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-official-death-battle-fan-blog-just_19.html
In hindsight I have to say that Ben is a very very very very very good person for still trying to make things work after that. I personally would say we were in the wrong looking back and he could have just ended the relationship there if he wanted. I say this particularly because at this point I and others on the team have directly dealt with “backlash or meltdowns'', and know how bad that can feel. He did care a lot, even if some of us where blind to it at the time.
Essentially he proposed having us all sign an NDA and becoming “official” volunteers. We would know results ahead of time and have a more direct hand in determining outcomes. We still wouldn’t be “obligated” to do anything though and we would communicate via slack. Ultimately not everyone made that jump. You may have noticed that several members of the original ODBFB team are no longer associated with the show.
DarkHyruleLord wasn’t exactly a member of the team tbh. We teamed up with him to make this fan comic, and he technically became a member after, but he never actually worked on anything after and kinda just fell off the Earth.
Psb seemingly just lost interest in the show. He was fairly active on a lot of our blogs and research up until this point, but kinda just dipped rather than take the offer.
SamuraiSpartan was the original founder of the ODBFB group and was actually the unofficial leader up until that point. He actually tried to get hired for the show directly at one point, but then those plans didn’t work out, which influenced his decision to not sign on.
Myself, Max, Akukma, Hero, and Lousy lousy all took the deal. So we continued to work on the show. Though even all of them didn't stay long term.
Episode 60: Ratchet vs JaK
ODBFB Prediction: https://dbodbfb.blogspot.com/2016/04/backstories-ratchet-clank-ratchet-is.html
Season 3 has a lot of ups and downs, but this fight stands as one of its best. Well written, well animated, good analysis. It was probably good that the ep was so well received coming off the prior episode. This is also the final episode that had a prediction blog made by the original ODBFB team. After this the G1 blog was slowly formed by people still in the Death Battle community as a direct replacement.
Oh yeah funny fact.
G1 is a term used for members on Screwattack. Even though the site hasn’t been around in years, members of the community still will refer to themselves by that name. I’m surprised more people newer to the fandom don’t ask what it means.
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