An Epic Rap Battle Retrospective, Part 5

 

Starting with season three, the Epic Rap Battles would enter a much more organized production schedule similar to actual television shows, allowing for more regular episodes they could release at specific times of the year.  Season three was split into both autumn and spring/summer halves.  This also prevented rap battles from slowly trickling out at a random rate and hopefully would keep schedule slip from happening.  The third season was also shortened to twelve episodes, a much more manageable number.  It featured very sharp writing with some of the best lines they’d come up with to that point.  However, they found themselves wasting an episode on what was becoming a tradition for them…

 

Hitler vs. Vader 3

Best line: “You wrote a little book, got’em fired up.  Had a Beer Hall Putsch, got’em fired up.  When your bunker started getting fired up, you put a gun in your mouth and fired up.”
Runner up: “I’ll kick your balls and your face, a war on two fronts.”
Curse watch: Both were dead before the debut of this battle.  Adolf Hitler committed suicide rather than be captured by the Allies in 1945.  Darth Vader sacrificed his life to save Luke Skywalker.

 

Sigh.  Another battle between Darth Vader and Adolf Hitler.  I really didn’t want to have to write about them yet again.  So I went out and got the mail instead and made a cup of tea.  Anything to put off this battle for a little bit longer.

A couple packages happened to come for me in the mail, both of the books that I bought from Indigo that were yet to arrive, one from my most recent order and one from an order in November that finally came.  Not because it was lost in the mail, but because the book wasn’t published yet when I bought it.  I pre-ordered Beast Complex based on the strength of Paru Itagaki’s more famous manga, Beastars.  She drew Beast Complex prior to Beastars and although it wasn’t published outside of Japan at the time – who would take a chance on publishing a one-shot from a brand new and unknown mangaka? – Viz Media finally licensed it for publishing last year because of how well Beastars was doing.

The book finally came out last month and I’ve been eager to read it.  But not too fast, I don’t want to run out too quickly because one volume is all that’s ever going to-

Hang on, Paru literally just started drawing more Beast Complex?  Okay, I’m going to go curl up in a chair with my tea and what is now the first volume of Beast Complex for a while until I’m done.

And that’s how much I don’t want to talk about Hitler vs. Vader, even though Vader has some really good lines this time.  Plus, him cutting Vader in half is definitely supposed to be a deliberate ending to the Hitler vs. Vader series, but I imagine people are still calling for a Hitler vs. Vader 4 to appear someday.

I wonder if Peter and Lloyd were ever tempted to do a prequel trilogy.

Please don’t do a prequel trilogy.

 

Blackbeard vs. Al Capone

Best line and its runner up: “C’mon, they chopped your head off and they hung it from a rope.  The only legend you left was your prohibition on soap. I mean, that rat nest beard’s trapped so many crumbs, thus bum could get marooned and still eat lunch for a month!”
Curse watch: Both were dead before the debut of this battle.

 

Reflecting back on season three, I realize now that the Epic Rap Battles could’ve been a lot worse.  This is the first battle to be sponsored, but thankfully very few battles are media tie-ins.  I think there’s only one other battle that’s sponsored in the entire series.

The biggest problem, I imagine, with sponsoring a rap battle is that the audience has to care about the tie-in.  Fortunately, an Assassin’s Creed game about sailing the high seas fits quite well with a rap battle featuring one of the most notorious pirates to ever sail the seven seas.

Are there only seven seas in the world?  There’re a lot more than seven, as far as I know.  Do they mean seven oceans?  But there aren’t seven oceans either, are there?  I thought there were only five.  And was the phrase “seven seas” coined just because of the consonance and the clear distinction between the two words, as opposed to “six seas” which retains the same consonance but blends a little too much into one word if you don’t deliberately add a pause between the two?

What are the seven seas/oceans anyway?  I looked it up and they’re counting the seven seas as: the Arctic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean (also known as the Antarctic Ocean), the North Pacific Ocean, the South Pacific Ocean, the North Atlantic Ocean and the South Atlantic Ocean.  Yep, in order to make the name fit, they have to divide two oceans in half.  So not only is the second word inaccurate, so is the first.  Nothing about the term “seven seas” is actually correct.

Anyway, watch the background for some silliness with Edward Kenway making deals and defeating pirates.  This particular sponsorship is pretty benign in that it doesn’t force Peter and Lloyd to have one of the assassins trying to rap against another assassin.  Can you even imagine?  “Epic Rap Battles of History!  Lee!  Harvey!  Oswald!  Versus!  Edward Kenwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!  Begin!”  Audience: “Wait, versus who?  Oh great, another video game character I need to pretend to care about.”

And that’s why they haven’t done video game characters since the third battle of season two.

 

Miley Cyrus vs. Joan of Arc

Best line and its follow up: “When I come under fire, I can hashtag handle it.  If God’s in your corner, girl, you need better management.”  “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain, you ratchet skank!  Your manager’s riding you to the achy breaky bank!”
Curse watch: Joan of Arc was burned at the stake long before the debut of this battle, protecting Miley Cyrus from the curse.

 

Miley Cyrus is another example of a singer who was very notorious at one point in her career but whose notoriety has faded a bit since then.  She’s also one of the music industry’s most infamous “fall from grace” stories, where she went from the family friendly Hannah Montana to the much more (im)mature Miley Cyrus, although she hasn’t tried to court controversy in recent years.

Just like it was in vogue to hate on Justin Bieber for a while, Miley Cyrus earned the same hate for the sudden change in public image she was trying to cultivate, from buying her boyfriend a penis-shaped cake to chopping off her Hannah Montana hair, filming provocative music videos and twerking in front of Robin Thicke.

And it keeps happening.  It’s happened for years prior to Miley Cyrus – Britney Spears was the biggest “fall from grace” story prior to Miley – and as long as children keep getting elevated to stardom as “family-friendly” stars and overexposed to the public that way, it’s a problem that will persist.  The lucky ones are the ones who burn out from acting completely and disappear for a while, like Macaulay Culkin, Mara Wilson and Jake Lloyd, and yet two out of those three still had rough lives.  Macaulay Culkin hasn’t always looked like he’s been taking good care of himself, which has made fans concerned about him, and Jake Lloyd’s mental health has deteriorated since his own retirement, which was brought on when Star Wars fans and the media basically blamed him for the perceived lack of quality of the first of the prequel movies.  It just goes to show that even those who escape this kind of life are still affected deeply by it.

 

Bob Ross vs. Pablo Picasso

Best line: I’ll confess that there’s not a lot of killer lines in this one, which makes it the weakest of the first six rap battles of season three…
Curse watch: Both were dead before the debut of this battle.

 

I confess that I don’t pay much attention to the art world.  I’m aware that art exists and I know a few things that might occasionally come up in Jeopardy!, like Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” or Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and his infamously long lost painting “The Pandorica Opens” (some just call it “Blue Box Exploding”).  I am also aware of Adolf Hitler’s paintings, as I mentioned on this blog before.  Most of the art I appreciate the most comes from the furry fandom, to be honest.  I don’t care about historic importance as much as I care about what’s pleasing to the eye.  I feel like most art collectors buy art because it’s expensive and not because it’s actually any good.

Bob Ross came along and taught the joy of painting and inspired a lot of people who share art today.  The Internet has also helped accelerate the spread of art, with art gallery websites like Deviant Art popping up to help the budding young artists of today reach an audience.

I don’t know if any of today’s artists will ever reach the kind of name recognition the old masters like Picasso and Van Gogh have, but I would be amused if two hundred years from now, names like Black Teagan, Kitchiki, Tim Kangaroo and Babsiwuff show up in museums beside Leonardo da Vinci.  Just a pipe dream, I know, but it would be amusing.  There are already famous graffiti artists like Banksy being treated similarly to the old masters, so it’s only a matter of time before the news starts reporting on specific furry artists commanding high prices at auctions.  The time will come when Brian Swords’ “Stay Up Late” becomes the next “Starry Night”.

 

Michael Jordan vs. Muhammad Ali

Best line: “You stay at the Ritz cause you sold out to crackers.”
Runner up: “Used to float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.  Now you double dribble balls that nobody can see.”
Curse watch: Both were alive when this battle debuted; Muhammad Ali passed away two and a half years later

 

I think this is my favourite actual battle from the first half of season three.  I say “actual battle” because… well, I’ll get to that in a moment.  Not only is it a suitably epic match-up, it features the same actors from Gandhi vs. Martin Luther King Jr.  Even better, it’s the very first time a battle included three verses for each participant.  Perhaps this means there’s a surplus of material to cover in the careers of both Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali.

Something which will become increasingly apparent in later seasons of the rap battles is just how close certain characters end up sounding to Peter and Lloyd, although it seems to affect Peter’s characters more.  Lloyd, so far, seems to be the better actor of the duo, although some of himself accidentally comes through in his portrayal of Bill Gates in season two.

This is the second time Key and Peele have shown up to play characters in the rap battles, and although they’ve yet to return for more, I’m left with the impression that both Key (Gandhi and Michael Jordan) and Peele (Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali) are good at portraying historic figures.  Compare Michael Jordan from Space Jam and Key’s portrayal of him for this battle.  It’s near uncanny.  I really hope they can return for more battles because they’ve proven themselves to be great at them.

 

Donald Trump vs. Ebenezer Scrooge

Best line: “I do not believe in ghosts, and I don’t believe that hair!”
Runner up: “Boo!”  “Aaaaah!”  “You’re gonna die!”
Curse watch: Scrooge does not die during A Christmas Carol and Trump is currently alive… but J.P. Morgan, the Ghost of Rich Dudes Past was dead before the debut of this battle, protecting both Trump and Scrooge and complicating the curse’s interactions with Trump in his future appearances in the series.

 

Oh dear.  It’s Donald Trump, everyone!  This was made long before anyone realized he had set his sights on the White House.  I wonder if they would’ve substituted someone else in Trump’s place instead since, aside from Darth Vader and Adolf Hitler, Peter and Lloyd have been very reluctant to have past characters return, other than sometimes bringing Lincoln in to rap against the presidential candidates.  Maybe Jeff Bezos, although he wasn’t as notorious a billionaire as Trump was at the time this battle was released.  Trump also had name recognition, thanks to The Apprentice.  But that’s enough speculation about the past.

It isn’t even a rap battle, per se.  The flow of battle actually follows the classic novel A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, with Donald Trump playing Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge playing Ebenezer Scrooge, with appearances by a historical figure, a modern player in the entertainment industry and the grim reaper.  It’s a very well put together episode and the format of a rap battle actually works quite well for the story.  It begins like an ordinary rap battle, and just when Scrooge starts to get going with his first verse against Trump, suddenly the Ghost of Rich Dudes Past shows up to interrupt and derail the proceedings.  It works so well that I should include it in the nice column if we decide to do an updated version of our Naughty/Nice feature about adaptations of A Christmas Carol in 2022.

God bless us, every-

WHO WON!  WHO’S NEXT?

 

Next week: Season three continues!