The creator of Celebrity Deathmatch looks back at the versus show’s weirdest highlights

polygon.com:

In the third episode of Celebrity Deathmatch’s second season, Calista Flockhart slams Lucy Lawless’ head into a copy machine, wraps a telephone cord around her neck, and then bounces off the ropes to deliver a gut-wrenching blow. But right before impact, Lawless bends at the waist and absorbs Flockhart’s literal head of steam right up her ass. In what color commentator Nick Diamond describes as a “devastating rectal clutch,” the deemed-legal move changes the course of the match, and the Xena actress quickly drags Flockhart’s squirming, headless body up to the top rope to slam her way to victory.

Although there had been plenty of comically repulsive beatings throughout the show’s first season, creator Eric Fogel had never tried something this… intimate, and assumed MTV would take the move off the air. But to his surprise, the network’s Standards and Practices division approved the segment, suggesting to Fogel and his small team of animators and writers that hardly anything was off-limits in their clay-model world. “There was something funny about over-the-top violence,” Fogel tells Polygon. “I think we were always game to push the envelope and get a reaction from fans. […] I said to myself, ‘If we can get this stuff by, let’s keep pushing it.’”

With each successive versus-driven episode during its original, four-season run from 1998–2002 (and four years later, on its two-season MTV2 reboot), Celebrity Deathmatch did exactly that. Unbound by the laws of physics but tethered closely to tabloid grudges, the stop-motion series was based on a simple, effective premise: “Two celebrities meet in a boxing ring and beat the living shit out of each other.” At least, that’s how Fogel, then a 27-year-old TV animator, pitched his