The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

Origin: a Newgrounds cartoon from December 2005

The song came first. Neil Cicierega, recording under the name Lemon Demon, wrote “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny” — a bouncy, breathless track narrating a free-for-all brawl in which pop-culture figures kill each other off in rapid succession. Animator Shawn Vulliez, then posting as altffour, built a Flash cartoon around it, and the result went up on Newgrounds on December 22, 2005.

It was an immediate hit on the site, taking Newgrounds’ Weekly Users’ Choice award on December 28, 2005. Know Your Meme records the original submission as having passed 12.4 million views by May 2012, and a 2007 YouTube reupload gathered over 5 million more within five years. Dr. Demento — the long-running novelty-music radio host — named it the number one song of 2006 to that point.

What actually happens in it

The lyric is a deadpan sports commentary on an escalating massacre of cartoon proportions. Godzilla kills Batman. Aaron Carter shows up. Abraham Lincoln and Optimus Prime, Shaquille O’Neal, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, Indiana Jones, a Care Bear, Benito Mussolini and the Blue Meanie all pile in, along with a small army of Gandalfs. Nobody is safe and no fight lasts more than a bar or two.

The joke is the flatness of the delivery: the narrator describes an apocalypse in the same tone a broadcaster uses for a bowling tournament. And the ending is the payoff — after everything else is destroyed, the winner is Mister Rogers, standing in a blood-stained sweater. In 2005 that was a genuinely shocking punchline, and it is still the line people quote first.

Why it hit

The track is the purest possible distillation of mid-2000s internet humor: a crossover fight argument, the kind forum users had been having since the 1990s (“who would win?”), rendered as a song that simply kills every combatant and refuses to adjudicate. It arrived alongside Chuck Norris Facts, and Norris’s cameo lands as a knowing wink at the meme he was already the center of.

It also belongs to a specific technology moment. Newgrounds and Flash made it possible for one songwriter and one animator to reach millions of people with no label, no studio and no distribution, on a platform where the audience voted the winners onto the front page daily. Cicierega had already proven the model with Potter Puppet Pals; “Ultimate Showdown” showed the same pipeline worked for music.

Legacy

The song outlived Flash itself. It generated stop-motion remakes, anime-cast versions, My Little Pony recasts, Minecraft renditions and endless “who would win” spin-off lyrics that swap in newer characters. A collaborative 15th-anniversary reanimation in 2020 stitched together contributions from dozens of artists, each taking a few seconds of the original.

For a certain age bracket the whole thing functions as a time capsule — a list of exactly which celebrities and characters were ambient in late 2005, preserved in the order they were destroyed.