DEATH BATTLE!

YouTube Channel Review

Let me pose a question to you: if Batman and Spider-Man were to fight to the death, who would win?

How about the famous red-capped plumber, Mario, and the speedy blue hedgehog, Sonic?

Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter?

Well, that’s what the folks who run the YouTube channel DEATH BATTLE! hope to solve once and for all.

The videos typically last 20 minutes, as the animated “Wiz” and “Boomstick” (voiced by Ben Singer and Chad James, respectively) seek to cover every major power in a character’s arsenal. And after explaining just what each character can do, the animated battle begins, showcasing which character wins …

… and which character ends up as a pile of goop.

POSITIVE CONTENT

The DEATH BATTLE! team does its research. They scour the comics, TV shows, movies, video games and any other canon source of information they can find regarding a given character in order to give them a fair fighting chance. At minimum, no one can say these videos aren’t wellsprings of information. At maximum, they show viewers how to both respect a character’s power (and, by extension, a franchise’s creative choices) and broadly illustrate how to research and present factual findings in an easily digestible format.

The channel allows its audience to submit their own potential combatants, letting viewers have a chance at seeing their own ideas on the DEATH BATTLE! screen.

CONTENT CONCERNS

As required by the nature of these fights to the death, DEATH BATTLE!’s animated characters shoot, stab and punch each other into bloody pulp. While some pixelated battles may seem less graphic simply due to the animation style the channel’s creators chose to do for the fight, others are more realistic. One character’s jaw gets ripped off, for instance, as he is fed his own heart. Others are decapitated or split into pieces. Some simply evaporate into a fine red mist. But regardless of animation style and death, viewers can be confident that someone will meet his or her bloody end.

As Wiz and Boomstick provide audiences with the skillset of the two fighters, they’ll analyze everything (or, at least, everything relevant) from the character’s background. This includes any unsavory violent, spiritual or sexual issues that appear in the source material. Viewers can also be sure that Boomstick will make a sexual quip, especially if one of the fighters is a woman.

Swearing occurs on most episodes, with language getting as intense as the f-, s- and p-words. God’s name (including in the form of “g-dd–n”) is used in vain. And other crude words like “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n” and “h—” are frequent, too.

CHANNEL SUMMARY

Anyone who has a favorite character from any series has probably debated with a friend on that character’s fighting merits—and DEATH BATTLE! turns those friendly arguments into researched animated reality.

But just as you might expect, these battles, when put to screen, are a lot more graphic than those debates—in more ways than one. So, with the crude language, violence and occasional sexual content, parents may want to leave those debates as plain conversation.