The pitch
The idea of doing another rematch for Goku vs Superman actually existed for a couple of years. I believe it was first conceptualized in 2020 or 2021? Lousy and Swan both initially looked into Superman. I also had information on Goku. In this initial idea it was originally just going to be “Super” Goku vs the Modern Superman (Post-crises, N52 and Rebirth).
I started ruminating on the idea for a while and decided that I wanted to look into Superman myself. Obviously Lousy/Swan had looked into him a decent amount, but a lot of what they gathered was still relatively “common knowledge”. I felt like trying to read through Superman’s history on my side would also help give me perspective when pitting him against Goku.
As the years went on I occasionally would work on Superman notes off and on, but when we were told we were going to do it for season 10 I kinda had an idea.
Essentially the idea would be to composite every version of Goku and Superman into one. This would not only make the fight “definitive” but it would allow us to focus on more unique material than the first two fights. In my mind we already did GT Goku vs Post-Crises Superman and “Super” Goku vs N52 Superman, so why do Super vs Modern Superman a second time.
I would say the actual decision to do this wasn’t that hard to fight for. I kinda just said “I think this would be a cool idea” and Ben sorta went “yeah that sounds cool”. I don’t even remember If I showed him the doc pitching it.
The research
Back when the original idea for the idea was suggested I gathered notes on the DCAU extended universe cartoons and read all the DCAU comics. I played the Injustice games and read those sides in comics. I also watched and read Red Son, the Reeves movies, and the Fliercher cartoons. At the time I just wanted to make blogs of a few misc Superman incarnations.
As time went on I decided to try to read through most of Superman's Post-crisis comic history. I figured if I paced myself I could probably do it. I think I read a few hundred Post-Crisis comics initially.
When it became clear that Goku vs Superman was gonna come back, I decided to go for broke. I was gonna consume all Superman Media from start to finish, even the stuff we wouldn’t use in the episode. I believe it was winter of 2022 that I was fairly set on this.
One big issue I realized was that all the “flowcharts” on characters don’t really work, cause they skip over material. I decided to go to the DC wiki and look at the list of comics for each variation of Superman. I then went through each in alphabetical order.
There were some days where I had more time, but I essentially calculated the amount of comics I would need to go through daily to finish before the research meeting would happen. I also essentially looked at lists of Superman’s cartoon appearances, movies, tv shows, etc. I would often watch some of these at 2-3x speed while also taking notes. It was pretty daunting, but eventually over months and months I whittled it down. I actually didn’t finish until November though. Funny enough Infinite frontier had happened by the time I was done, which canonically merged all Superman’s, making a composite much easier to justify for him.
Goku was significantly easier to research. When the original idea was brought up I had already gone through the trouble of taking notes on his main incarnation, along with GT, Super, Heroes, etc. Likewise I had owned all 42 volumes of the manga since I was a kid, and watched the anime as it was originally released. Since I also had one set of notes for all collective DB characters, I naturally just filled out all the info for Goku by the time this ep was finalized for production. I mostly just had to go back and add in notes on random games, cards, plays, etc.
Overall it was probably at least 8000 comics, 60 volumes of manga, 100s of episodes of anime and dozens and dozens and dozens of hours of various movies, tv shows, etc. I even bought a copy of the original Superman Novel.
Community involvement
I made it a point to lurk on a lot of people in various discords to see their opinions on both characters. I also obviously checked other places to see if they had missed powers or feats, such as vs wiki, reddit respect threads, etc. Again I would say Superman was harder in this respect than Goku.
I’ve got a whole document on Sneed
When I finished I actually reached out to a lot of these people and got their names in the episode.
The debate
I won’t lie before I nixed Q and As I was planning on making a pretty extensive one for this episode. Essentially for the most part it really just came down to proving that Superman could counter Goku and was stronger than him. Many of these counters were found through observation, or via leads I found in various discord posts or threads. Since I wanted this fight to be “definitive” I decided that I wanted to make both of their stats as high as possible to avoid any room for doubt.
Firstly I decided to bump up the universe size for both characters. I figured that even at a baseline that if Superman could destroy more universes than Goku, that would serve as an understandable baseline for the casual audience. For Dragon Ball the universe model was resized using Heaven as the focus point, while the size of the DC universe based on its rate of expansion. Ironically for DC the hardest part of this calc was finding the exact age of the universe, which was only stated to be 15 billion once in Zero Hour. Once I had the numbers for both where found, it was pretty easy to compare. We also upscaled Goku with broad strokes to avoid igniting a fight.
Next was the high end stuff. We had already used low complex multi arguments for Heroes via the crack of time. On Superman’s side the question was “what feat will normal people buy”. Ultimately I felt like the World Forger Punch was the best, as he was obviously the strongest being Superman had defeated with a fairly blatant punch. Mxy was also a good supporting evidence because he was weaker than World Forger, and pretty much had feats of destroying DCs entire omniverse. This was largely explained in a black box since I knew normal people wouldn’t understand it well.
Speed wasn’t that complicated either. Since Superman’s universe could just be made larger than Dragon Ball’s, his finite speed feats were going to be larger than Goku’s no matter what.
In terms of incalculable speeds Superman could obviously scale to the Flash, and his silver age counterpart also had this feat of breaking the bonds of infinity. Goku is a little bit different. For those who may remember Trunks didn’t have high end speed pulled on the trigger during his ep. Though I was aware of it at the time.
From Trunks’ calc doc
For a pretty long time Dragon Ball, even Heroes, having immeasurable speed was considered a huge debate. When the community server had prior matchups involving the series or when other discord servers talked about it they were not convinced. I remember vs wiki didn’t even have it on their profiles until a month before Trunks’ episode aired.
Because of that I didn’t feel the need to push it as strongly back at that time(Though I tried to get a black box added addressing it). For this fight I knew we had to use it, but I actually felt like the Black hole feat in Heroes was too esoteric to explain quickly or easily. It also didn’t involve Goku directly, so you’d have to spend time scaling him.
Instead I decided to be a bit more radical and just use Goku blocking infinite Zamasu as a feat. I figure that since Zamasu was temporally omnipresent that would be much more understandable to normal people.
The fight Script
Lousy, Swan and I helped Ben brainstorm a lot of ideas for the fight. I remember Swan came up with the idea for the “world of cardboard” line. I also came up with the idea of having Superman’s bioelectric aura become visible similar to the new Superman Cartoon. I also came up with the idea of the multiverse shattering showing alternate versions of the fight and the fight ending in the crack of time. I then wrote up a document of various combinations of character incarnations that they wrote into the script.
The host script
Ben was the primary writer for this fight, but I helped out a lot in terms of organizing the information and giving feedback. One of the first things I did was a long list of what feats, plot points, character traits, arguments, etc should be brought up in the script. Essentially a kinda pseudo outline. There was actually a slight debate on including Heroes stuff, but I more or less said giving Superman everything and leaving that out would be a bad idea. Ultimately the script still uses Heroes and GT, but leans a bit more into Super.
Anyway every draft I would write up a long series of notes. I believe we did this around 4-5 times. We actually cut it really close cause I remember we were trying to squeeze in meetings late each week and I don’t think the final version was done until sometime in November.
The episode was also a lot longer than I think most people anticipated. I think the goal was originally 18 pages, and that went up to like 25 or something. This was the longest episode since Megaman Royale.
The Details
I also wrote up all of the “slates” and “black boxes” in this episode. My attempt was to cram in as much info into the episode as possible while not repeating any information that was spoken verbally. If you look carefully, I would say that every major feat both characters have done was accounted for somewhere. Overall boxes and slates are much more numerous and meaty than average.
For the black boxes particularly I kinda ended up cramming in a lot of misc counters to Heroes stuff. Unfortunately the episode was already like twice as long as a normal ep, so you couldn’t really go over that in a feasible way. For each black box I also wrote up a lengthy description detailing what they should be implemented for. We didn’t keep “all” of those boxes, but I think we had enough that everyone felt the episode acknowledged every possible argument.
The slates also have a lot of specific references I put in. Both characters have their names written in their native tongue cause I searched that out specifically. Their favorite foods and occupations were also something I specifically sought out. I also had the idea for the “not a bad dad” thing for Goku.
My favorite was listing on the L.L. love interests of Superman. I actually outright wrote down each of these love interests as I came across them in the comics. Several are super obscure.
The editing
The episode was edited by DJTiki and Max. They both did a fantastic job and did some of the best editing of their career imo. I had a job of gathering “most” of the footage they used. I was also around fairly often to give DJ pointers or extra material if he needed while editing. Funny enough, I think the researchers tended to be more willing to bend over backwards to get DJ extra editing material relative to editors that came before him. Kinda makes us hypocrites.
One of my favorite panels was this scene from Superman Smashes the Klan.
The Math
I did the math for both characters. Every calculation the episode used was by me and made by scratch. Ironically I would say that “most” of them weren't that hard. You can actually see them listed on my blogspot.
Learning from the past
I think a big thing with this episode was avoiding some of the pitfalls of the second Goku vs Superman. Both characters are far more friendly this time, the battle is framed as a spar and so on. Both characters I would say also get a lot more respect in the rundown. In particular I’m glad Superman’s rundown plays him being a good guy completely straight.
The final product
I think this episode came out as perfectly as it possibly could. I think every argument or feat that you could possibly care about was in the episode in some form.
The animation was beautiful. The shard crack scenes, the ultra instinct fight, the galaxy wide sun dip and the final blow were all amazing. The final shot with the fist bump was lovely. The voice actors killed it! They even got cameos from the original episode's voice actors(another suggestion I made). Brandon also made a magnificent song for this ep, which was called “Super” (yes another suggestion I made lol)
Obviously I put A LOT of myself into this episode, and I would wager it wouldn’t have been possible without me. But I would also say that about pretty much everyone who worked on it. I see this episode as a culmination of all the talent, lessons learned, skills, teamwork and passion built up by everyone at Death Battle over a 10 year timespan. I don’t think it would have been possible at any other point in the show's history and it’s probably the episode I’m most proud of. I even got a special recognition in the episode in the credits for it.
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Anyway I’ll have one more part summarizing the retrospective
This was so wholesome
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