Ultraguy Death Battle Retrospective: Episodes 1-20

 

Thought it might be fun to talk about my thoughts on Old Death Battles and my time in the community as a whole.

Episode 1: Samus vs Boba Fett

Ngl I kinda enjoy this ep for its simplicity and I think it holds up well enough. One of the things I sometimes miss about the old Death Battle episodes, is how a lot of the outcomes and logic wasn’t as contingent on number crunching and drawn out analysis. These episodes could be just a few minutes long and the verdict could basically just be “yeah that sounds about right I guess”. No fuss, no muss. Not that I want to go back to that style, just that the hobby used to be taken much less seriously back then, and I miss those days sometimes.

On another note I could imagine launching the Death Battle show would be much harder these days. Back in the early 2010s the only “good” sprite animations I can recall were the SMBZ shorts. But the standards have risen much higher since then, with multiple big youtube animation channels being prevalent now. Back at the time these episodes were simultaneously hosted on “Screwattack” and could actually get traction on that website specifically. Now I feel like internet videos are a bit more monopolized to a few sites.

Episode 2: Akuma vs Shang Tsung

Ngl I don’t remember this one as well. I wasn’t really a fan of either character.

Episode 3: Rogue vs Wonder Woman

I'm curious if Rogue could actually pull off a win against Wonder Woman nowadays. I imagine that the X-Men have some stupid stuff, but I also imagine Wondy could just flatten her in one punch. The episode probably isn’t wrong that Wondy’s lack of armor would cause problems if Rogue “could” catch her off guard somehow though.

Episode 4: Goomba vs Koopa

I think this is one of the first episodes I watched outright. I had been a fan of Mario for a while at that point, so I thought the ep was a fun little joke fight. I think Koopa would probably win if we did the fight again for “real" btw.

Episode 5: Haggar vs Zangief

Did you know that Ben animated most of the original Death Battle eps himself? I think he did it up until Eggman vs Wily. I forget that he has those skills sometimes, because he never really showcased it after he hired animators to work for him. Anyway I think the animation on this one is pretty decent for the time. I also remember this fight the best for how Boomstick didn’t really want to kill Haggar, but did it anyway.

Episode 6: TMNT Battle Royal

I consider this fight to be a classic, but man did Mikey get disrespected by WIz lol. Funny enough it's one of two episodes I think got copyright striked off of youtube.

Episode 7: Zitz Vs Leonardo

Now this is one fight where I think the winner would “probably” flip with a modern analysis?  If you were writing a comic book where the both fought, it would probably end the way the episode did. (Leo has training and Zits doesn’t. That sounds reasonable in a vacuum)

Episode 8: Yoshi vs Riptor

I find this fight funny, cause I feel like at the time it was one of the first fights people probably disagreed with. Because “cartoons are weaker than realistic characters” or something(this was a common sentiment at the time). If we did the fight now the recap would probably say Yoshi was like 5353533 shitatons of TNT stronger and has like a million more abilities tbh.

Episode 9: Felicia Vs Taokaka

Not much to say about this one. I thought it was fun and while I’m sure the analysis doesn’t hold up, I don’t think I care much about that.

Episode 10: Kratos vs Spawn

I think about this fight in a modern context and this post comes to mind.

https://www.reddit.com/r/whowouldcirclejerk/comments/19586le/scene_went_hard_though/

Anyway that debate would be fun if it happened today.

Episode 11: Bomberman vs Dig Dug

I remember even several years ago people were saying Bomberman had universal feats or something. But it feels like not many really noticed even after the ep came out since Bomberman doesn’t really have much of an active fanbase these days.

Episode 12: Vegeta vs Shadow

This ep is interesting. For one Shadow had a ton of Archie exclusive stuff, like explaining his abilities via the Chaos Force and giving him a multiplier for Super Forms that was brought up in the Super Sonic vs Hyper Knuckles comic special. Vegeta was also given Dragon Ball GT, which is obviously non canon now.

To an extent I guess it kinda makes sense in the context of when the episode was made. Satam, Archie, etc were more “well known” staples of Sonic’s Media landscape in the USA in the early 2010s. In fact Sonic himself didn’t really get more story driven games until the adventure games came out in the early 00s. So for the first generation of Sonic fans in the 90s the Archie comics and Satam “was Sonic’s lore”. Likewise GT was the “canon” ending for Dragon Ball for a LONG time. So of course that’s what they gave Vegeta. Though it didn’t give him SJ4, which I don’t think we would do from a modern context if we used GT.

Anyway all of this makes the analysis seem a bit wonky in hindsight. Still a fun fight though. They even got the Team Four star voice actors, and this was back in their haydays. 

Episode 13: Mario vs Sonic

Speaking of wonky. 

This episode also had Archie stuff in it, and utilized a lot of it in Sonic’s background. Though they didn’t really use the scaling at all, albeit they probably weren't aware of it at the time.

I’ll also probably go into this later, but man the Sonic vs Mario debates have altered to such massive degrees over the last 10 years. I think the general perception when the fight was made was “Mario is a normal guy without power-ups” and “Sonic has superpowers all the time”. So I’m not surprised the verdict was explained the way it was. 

Nowaday you get arguments about both series blowing up universes, arguments about spin off canonicity, Paper Mario, translation debates, dreeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam worlds, and string soup. It is a bit more convoluted. 

Episode 14: Bieber vs Black

Probably one of the only eps I don’t revisit lol.

Episode 15: Luke Skywalker vs Harry Potter

I would like to see Luke in another fight one day. I’m assuming he could bring a lot more to the table. 

Episode 16: Chun-Li vs Mai

No real opinions. I forgot Chun-Li was in season 1 lol.

Episode 17: Starscream vs Rainbow Dash

I don’t care for MLP, but I like this fight. It was kinda just funny and Starscream was on point. 

Episode 18: Master Chief vs Doomguy

Man, I want to see a remake of this episode. I didn’t care much for either character back at the time, but I think Doomguy is really really cool now. The original episode holds up decently for its time, but stuff from 2016 and Eternal would be cool to see in an animation.

Episode 19: Eggman vs Wily

So this is the episode that made me join the Death Battles community. I made an account on Screwattack, specifically so I could debate the outcome. I remember this was the first time I met Akumath the Hedgehog.  During the wait for the ep they had little episode trailers where they would reveal who was going to be fighting for both sides. That was really fun. Interestingly they included Satam and Aventures stuff for Eggman, like Swatbots and Scratch/Grounder. Though this made sense given both those cartoons were much more recent “at the time”.

Ben did a pretty good job of animating the fight despite doing it on his own. I think his computer also exploded at some point when making it or something? In hindsight I think Metal Sonic winning was a “bit” of a cop out, but It was cool as a twist ending on the first watch.

Episode 20:  Zelda vs Peach

This episode illustrates the difference in the modern power scaling community and the older one very very well. Back during season one most people following the show didn’t know how to calc anything, didn’t normally research the characters very in depth, and didn’t generally scale them. There wasn’t even a prediction blog for fights at that point. Mario in particular also has all these weird little contingencies people would abide by that made the characters unintentionally weaker (don’t compare different sub series, Mario Party doesn’t count, they’re only like brick breaking strength, etc). 

Most people kinda went with their gut in terms of what “felt right” and Peach at the time had a poor reputation. Many people saw her as a damsel in distress with little fighting ability, while Zelda was seen as a “more badass, mature and capable warrior” (especially as Sheik). In reality  Zelda had only fought around 3 fights series wide at the time (and generally only giving support to Link), while Peach had defeated Bowser on her own and been on several intense RPG adventures. Peach also had a lot of feats that technically existed at the time, but the fanbase didn’t know about. The recap also focused a lot on the soccer ball kick, while Peach had a whole levi of other advantages.

The result is one of the “lower” like to dislike ratio eps of that era and people heavily contesting the result. Something I can’t really imagine happening again in a modern context. Particularly after the Mario Movie and Showtime.

Anyway vs stuff aside this was the first ep where Death Battle got its own animator and it def shows. The animator Lang made something that was a huge step up from prior episodes.