Reviews WebAnimation / Death Battle

Justin Beiber vs. Rebecca Black: Worst. Episode. Ever.

Death Battle had some things to smooth over when they were first starting out. The health bars made the fights less intense as it was easy to know who was winning. The hosts didn't have their personalities nailed down. The fights were graphically bland.

But that was all fixed. The health bars went away (though the problems of How Much More Can He Take moved in), Wiz and Boomstick firmly established themselves, and the fights began to look like something other than a cheesy arcade game. As season 1 progressed, some really good matches (most notably Goku vs. Superman) were done, but a huge blemish shall always remain on the show: Beiber vs. Black.

I have 3 problems with it: First off, it was really just a huge Take That to the two pop stars for no grater purpose. They dedicated resources away from making "real" episodes to produce what is essentially an elaborate insult to two people who already get so much crap. Imagine all the other possible matchups they could have done...

Second, I hate the fact that they took two real life people and had them fight to the death. I'm not coming from a moral angle, but a legal one. What if one of them sees the video and gets upset? Nothing good can ever come from that. And yes, while MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch got away with it, a web show on a gaming website is very different from one of the most popular channels ever (as far as money and therefore legal defensive power is concerned). And while Death Battle uses all sorts of copyrighted figures, most of whom belong to big companies that would crush Screwattack.com on a whim, that hasn't happened yet, so it's safe to assume the companies are fine with Death Battle's use of their characters (or at least can't do anything to stop them).

Third, it was just a plain bad episode. Most of the characters rundowns were not related to combat at all, the combatants were just headshots of the real life pop stars crappily photoshopped onto sprites, Boomstick implying he wants to commit suicide because of what he thinks is bad music is not funny, and I just found the fight to be boring, focusing on (poorly done) slapstick rather than serious action. I also found the omnicidal ending to be tasteless (I do not find joy in the Jonas Brothers dying in a car explosion, thank you very much).

Worst Death Battle episode ever. No denying that.