Dragon Ball Super: Beerus Remake Fans Argue the Rough 2015 Hit-Reaction Face Was Better

Dragon Ball Super: Beerus pulled up one of the most mocked frames in franchise history this week -- the moment Goku takes a full hit from Beerus and his face warps into an infamous, blurry scribble -- and set it side by side with the cleaned-up 2026 remake version of the same shot.

The clip comes from a Japanese reaction-compilation channel and drew 223 comments and 5,356 likes, with viewers split over whether the rougher, more distorted 2015 original actually sells the impact harder than the smoother redraw does, plus a color-inversion trick that complicates the whole "bad animation" narrative.

By the end, even the thread's most reasonable voices can't fully commit to one side.

A Japanese reaction-compilation channel pulled up one of the most mocked frames in Dragon Ball Super history this week: the moment Goku takes a full hit from Beerus and his face warps into an infamous, blurry scribble. That shot comes from the original 2015 Beerus Saga broadcast, which adapted the Battle of Gods movie into a TV arc, and it's been a running punchline among fans for over a decade for how rough the drawing gets. The channel set that old clip side by side with the same beat redrawn, frame for frame, for the 2026 Beerus remake, and the resulting 223-comment thread pulled in 5,356 likes -- not because anyone agreed on which version looks better, but because nobody could.

That's basically the whole thread in miniature. A good chunk of commenters jumped in to defend the much-maligned 2015 original, arguing the messier, more distorted face actually sells the hit better than the smoother 2026 redraw does.

Things got more technical once someone pointed out a trick buried in the original scene. Invert the colors on Goku's warped 2015 face, and the lines line up almost exactly with the clean art of the 2026 remake -- meaning the "ugly" scribble wasn't sloppy in-between animation at all, it was a deliberate color-negative effect the whole time, applied on top of the same underlying linework fans had been laughing at for years.

From there, a few commenters tried to explain why the older version still reads as more painful on a technical level, even with rougher line art, rather than just chalking the whole thing up to nostalgia.

Not everyone's convinced the nostalgia is earned, though, and one reply calls out what it sees as the whole thread's inconsistency -- spending years mocking the same animation it's now defending.

Even the thread's most measured reply, posted near the end, can't fully commit to one side of the argument -- it just narrows the defense down to this one shot specifically, rather than the Beerus Saga's animation as a whole.

Eleven years on, a scribble that spent over a decade as the series' go-to punchline still can't settle whether it was ever actually bad -- and the remake arguing against it may have only made the case stronger.