I destroy a complex 5D dream cosmology every time I wake up
G1 Blog:
https://g1dbteamblogs.blogspot.com/2018/10/death-battle-predictions-mario-vs-sonic.html
So first I wanna just talk about the history of this fight. I had been a fan of both franchises for a long time and I had actually done a “composite” analysis on both characters long before I knew the episode was happening. I went through all the games on both sides, the mangas, the comics(including Archie) and the anime/ovas.
Mario: https://ulltraguy.blogspot.com/2017/04/character-analysis-composite-mario.html
https://ulltraguy.blogspot.com/2017/04/character-analysis-paper-mario.html
Sonic: https://ulltraguy.blogspot.com/2016/11/character-analysiscomposite-sonic.html
I also knew at the time that I wanted to do a blog on them both fighting each other and wanted to make that blog as definitive as possible. Of course peoples opinions on both series were fairly erratic, so I wanted to get as much help as possible. I made an entire discord server specifically for the blog and went through the feats and arguments for both characters one by one. I then took all the information and arguments from the server to make a collective prediction blog with those community members. Stats aside, I would say that both side franchises were looked into pretty in depth by the standards of those days.
Even now you can’t escape your past Homie
Later on Ben revealed that he wanted to do this fight for the 100th episode. I was assigned Mario. From the get go we were told that the old episode was not relevant at all. This was going to be a fresh take and the verdict could potentially change.
To people watching the show now, I don’t think you realize how big of a deal that was. There was kind of an “unspoken” rule up until that point was that the show would never rescind a verdict or acknowledge being “wrong” in any way. This was also the first “actual” rematch. Goku vs Superman 2 was essentially just post launch DLC. Samus vs Bobba Fett was the HD retextured remaster.
Anyway the overwhelming opinion in the community at that time was that Mario had a clean victory over Sonic. So I kept that in mind when we eventually had the meeting to settle the verdict. It took some pushing, but eventually we secured Mario as the winner.
When the fight was announced, there was kind of this preemptive assumption we would get the verdict “wrong”. A lot of people assumed the verdict would not change, and in the lead up to the fight got progressively more angry about it. I remember people listening to the music track of the fight and being certain that it was hinting Mario would lose somehow.
Still I tried my best to build the arguments around what most of them thought. I even made it a point to ask many people in our community if they would like to get their names in the episode. You might recall I did something similar for Goku vs Superman 3 many years later.
Anyway when the episode came out It was certainly awkward to an extent, cause suddenly people realized they had been getting riled up over nothing. Regardless, everyone was happy with the verdict and agreed with the outcome, as well as how it was explained. They liked the animation a lot as well, though some people thought the “angry Mario” stuff was weird. This was the 2rd episode to have a 2D animation btw.
Famous last words
So this retrospective is probably all going in a different direction than some of the newer fans of Death Battle might expect? Cause I’ve def noticed the change in opinions on this ep overtime.
Well every episode is made in a vacuum of its own expectations from the fandom, biases of the time, subjective opinions on vs, and so on. The power scaling community can be more fickle than it gives itself credit for.
So let’s segway into a history lesson on the vs communities treatment of Mario and Sonic
Where are my 500 billion Universal stats?
At the time this ep was made
For Mario
He was generally considered to be “city level”. The castle punting feat was considered to be the best feat most people could agree on. Even then there was some debate on whether that feat was a “joke” among some communities. I remember having to show Ben one of the Mario Manga’s where he did the same thing to back it up as legitimate.
A lot of people did not like using Mario Party for feats. The series was just seen as “weird” and somehow inconsistent with the rest of Mario’s portrayals.
Scaling Mario to DK or Wario was also initially seen as unreliable. People argued that they had not interacted outside of sports games in years, so those characters could reasonably be much stronger. In fact, scaling Mario sub series to each other was frowned upon.
Dk's Moon punch and Wario's shake king feat where both considered to be among the best Mario feats people could agree on.
Things like Bowser’s black hole feats and the power star flight things had only just started to be accepted. Even then not a lot of people had calced either.
In general people also tried to apply a cannon to Mario very strictly for some reason. I recall even Vs wiki over the years has debated switching Mario’s stats based on what series he appears in.
People were aware of “Dreamy Bowser” but largely ignored it for “scaling” as it was seen as this weird outlier.
Paper Mario had kinda just become a hot topic because of Paper Jam. Up until that point just using Paper Mario stuff wasn’t something people cared about.
For Sonic
Game Sonic was not considered to have a lot of good calculable feats in base form. I remember one of the few feats people used at the time was Sonic breaking the chains of the Little Planet in Sonic CD, which was only MCB. People debated that fighting Perfect Chaos could be city level, but there were pretty large attempts to be conservative by inflating the time Chaos spent destroying station square.
Sonic’s best feat was considered to be his mountain bust feat from the OVA. Hence why Sonic was considered town level by a large amount of the community at the time.
Super Forms were considered to be planet level via fighting Dark Gaia. Even then some people contested how much he scaled, because Chip helped in the fight.
It was generally argued that Time Eater and Solaris did not scale to Sonic AP wise, because their powers were based around space/time manipulation powers Sonic didn’t have. In fact this is the exact reason a black box saying that appears in the episode. I even remember hearing people say that “all Uni Sonic feats are a lie”.
Whether Sonic was actually FTL in base was heavily contested. Many of the statements were from 3rd parties, like coloring books or art books. Sonic’s own claim was seen as a possible exaggeration.
There was actually a lot of debate on whether Wisps were outside help or not. As they were technically sentient creatures who were choosing to help Sonic.
Overall episode was largely built around the popular opinions of the time, and then leaned into Mario having a better arsenal to justify his win. Many higher end feats were only alluded to or stated in black boxes.
The opinions regarding what media sources could be used were also much different. Everything used fell under normal Death Battles composite rules. No one really minded the use of the Mario cartoon, anime or comics. Canonical Sonic spin offs like IDW or Sonic Prime also did not exist at this point. Supplementing Sonic’s side with stuff from Boom, Sonic X and the OVA made sense, particularly given they were all still fairly recent at the time. The OVA in particular was kind of a given to be used, because Sonic’s best feat came from that in the eyes of most viewers. Only Archie Sonic was explicitly left out, cause it was around that time that we realized how OP it was.
Over time a lot of these sentiments changed. A handful of Sonic fans got fairly persistent in trying to convince the community to raise Sonic’s stats. They found a Japanese manual that stated Sonic could go FTL. They found a feat of Sonic surviving the Death Egg exploding, found several black hole feats, found Uni feats outside of just Solaris/Time Eater, etc. Conversely people stopped being as nitpicky with Mario cannon, scaled him to other sub series, used Mario Party, and also believed they found several universal feats. So essentially opinions flipped about as hard as Superman going from planetary to Outversal in the fandom's eyes.
Of course nowadays I would say the discussion on both series has spiraled wildly out of control and has just turned into a never ending contest of trying to one up the other franchise. After “Dreamy Bowser” became more popular as an argument, Sonic fans started to argue about the cosmology of Maginary world. There’s never ending discourse over Paper Mario and how it fits into Mario canon. People try to argue dimensional tiers for both. Recently I’ve seen more effort put into translating stuff to prove or disprove feats than I have for any manga, light novel or japanese centric media. I think I’ve seen people argue both are Multi+ or 5D at some point. As well as go back and forth on what feats they think count for either series. It’s wildly inconsistent (just like back then tbh).
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Anyway I would say that I still like the episode and I was proud of setting a new precedent that verdicts could change in rematches. I’ll never forget the reaction people had when they saw Death Battle changing its mind on an outcome. Though this episode had a funny effect of people suddenly demanding tons of rematches, like Yang vs Tifa 2.
I also like the animation, though I think some of the criticisms of it aren’t unreasonable. The set up for the fight is a little silly, and probably leans a bit into a memey characterization of Mario at times. It also doesn’t use that many power-ups, though I find that understandable given 2D animation is expensive. I think the kill move is still one of the most memorable.
When it comes to the research side, I’m not sure what to tell people. It was more or less exactly what people asked for at the time lol. Unfortunately Mario vs Sonic wars are ever evolving and pretty erratic.
Please have a sense of humor about this
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