Oh my god — I’ve only been doing this for three months, and by my count I’ve done 125 of them so far.
How It Started
It’s the morning of October 5th, 2025. We were getting ready to leave for a cruise when saw this cross my timeline. I was moved to action by a force greater than I could comprehend. I tried to actually cut out the subtitles from the launch DVD of “Trunks – Mysterious Youth” (which has an early subtitle font that they swapped out later), but it was taking too much time, so I just layered on text subtitles myself using the more modern font choice. This one’s notable for not really being a visual edit, but it got the brain juices flowing.
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) October 5, 2025 at 7:54 AM
Best Composition
There’s just something about the overall placement, blending, and color matching in this one that works so well. It’s pretty hard to line up the soft grain of Dragon Ball footage with the real blurry-yet-simultaneously-sharp Gumby footage, but in this case everything fell into place. This is one of my absolute favorites. There’s just something equally comic and horrifying about it.
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) November 12, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Most Unsettling
I think the (extremely poor) coloring of the hands makes it even worse, but it’s definitely the extra neck and broad shoulders that I had to paint to make it all fit together which makes this so unsettling.
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) December 1, 2025 at 12:41 PM
Easiest Gimme
I really tried to come up with something else, but this one kinda just made itself.
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) November 11, 2025 at 2:46 PM
Most Surprisingly Difficult Edit
There’s a similar creepy doll head right where I placed the one from Gumby, but it required me to reconstruct a lot of the surrounding blocks. It took way more time that I like to spend on these (which is usually less than a minute!), and all for something that looks so good and yet is hard to see what’s been done to it… The backgrounds in DBZ movie 9 really are spectacular, though, huh?!
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) November 11, 2025 at 5:28 PM
Best Edit I Bet No-One Else Understood
These are characters from Apple Pop, the children’s puppet show with Akira Toriyama character designs. I used this specific episode — of the characters traveling to the distant kingdom of Batanko for Chippo to temporarily take over — as a showcase during my Otakon 2025 panel.
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) November 13, 2025 at 11:07 AM
Idea That Came To Me The Fastest
The very instant I saw Pokey hunching backward like this, I knew what I had to do. The background is actually from a slightly earlier scene in the same episode, because there otherwise would have been too many character elements to cover up and paint over. I took the actual beam that hits Trunks, extended it one direction, flipped it, and then also extended it back out the other direction. It’s so crude (both in content and execution), but it makes me laugh every time I see it.
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) November 25, 2025 at 3:49 PM
Most Underrated
This one rules. There are two frames of the Turtle Hermit standing up in front of Kuririn that I was able to superimpose, paint over just a tiny bit of the right side of the closet door frame behind them, and I otherwise had a completely clean frame to work with without the Turtle Hermit at all. This idea also came to me pretty quickly due to the frosty mug of milk there. Overall I think it’s pretty well blended and composited, too! I think she needs to be just a little bit fuzzier than how sharp it looks over top the Dragon Ball footage, but it’s still damn good.
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) November 24, 2025 at 8:28 AM
Thought It Would Do Better
There’s something so nonchalant about Gumby’s posture combined with the gruesomeness of the scene that gets me every time I scroll by it. I sampled Vegeta’s shadow underneath Gumby to give him a similar bit of depth, and I think it really blends together well.
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) December 3, 2025 at 5:42 PM
Most Likes
We have a late-breaking winner on this one! Originally it was going to be my Trunks-looking-over-Prickle edit (only my third edit, and one I tend to forget about because it was so early), which had a little over 200 likes. However, this December 29th edit (another Trunks one, wouldn’t you know!) truly escaped my usual orbit, and is sitting at 300+ likes (and still rapidly going) as the year wraps up.
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) December 29, 2025 at 11:20 AM
Meri’s Choice
I’m actually surprised this isn’t the one with the most “likes” on its post — it definitely made the rounds, and I even saw people that I listen to and read start liking it! That was neat.
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) November 14, 2025 at 3:13 PM
Mike’s Choice
I put a little more effort into this one than I generally like to, but it was hard to pass up the pretty obvious (to me, anyway…?) name combination.
— VegettoEX (@vegettoex.bsky.social) November 7, 2025 at 9:35 AM
Editing Fact That I’m Betting Very Few People Notice
The Gumby screenshots are posted in an incorrect resolution of 720×480 straight from (presumably) DVD rips. This stems from the fact that DVDs store video with non-square pixels, and the aspect ratio is adjusted by playback software/hardware to a correct 4:3 format (640×480), or 16:9 (~854×480) in the case of animorphic widescreen content. I manually resize the Gumby images to 640×480 before doing any editing work. This is why my edits may look “thinner” than what you see from that account; theirs, in fact, are actually too wide.
Lessons Learned
Trunks material always does well.
Big, filling-the-frame, single Gumby characters are both easier to cut out overall, but also make for better composition content in terms of sizing, placement, blending, etc.
You can really just scrub through any Dragon Ball-franchise episode and find something for any given scene, but I think about it longer than I probably should.
I cannot, and will not, be stopped.
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