Disney Meets Dragon Ball Z with Great Ape Rafiki

Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball has one of the most malleable universes in action anime and manga. Due to the various species, characters, universes, and more, you can pretty much imagine any type of character working with the rules of the franchise. This means, literally, any character. Throughout the years fans have crafted all sorts of hilarious mash-ups and crossovers with every other pop culture juggernaut you could think of. One of the recent hits, for example, was the joke that Scooby-Doo favorite Shaggy unlocking his own take on Ultra Instinct.

Ridiculous as these mashups are, they continue to succeed! Now we have a new contender for what should be the next major crossover character as artist Dvart shared an engraved and painted cutting board to Reddit that's set the internet on fire. Giving The Lion King's mystical baboon Rafiki his own Great Ape form, it's a sight that makes a lot of sense the more you look at it.

While it initially seems like this would be too wild of a pairing, Great Ape Rafiki just looks too perfectly fitting into the Dragon Ball universe. Now it puts a whole new spin on the Disney classic if you imagine that he'd transform into this giant monster at the sight of a full moon. Let's hope their version of Earth isn't in the Dragon Ball universe!

I engraved and painted a character mashup into a cutting board: The Great Saiyan Ape Rafiki from r/dbz

Rafiki having a Great Ape form would drastically change the way the character acts in The Lion King. Rafiki's on the sidelines through the film as a mystical observer who has a keen sense of the natural world around him, and combining that with a powerful transformation like this, and it blows the lid wide open. But would he work in the Dragon Ball world? Would Rafiki still serve as an adviser to royalty? Could you imagine him holding a baby Prince Vegeta over a cliff to show the other Saiyans?

How would Rafiki do in the Dragon Ball world? Let us know your thoughts in the comments or talk to me directly about all things anime and other cool things @Valdezology on Twitter!The Japanese-language and English dub releases of Dragon Ball Super are now complete and available to stream with FunimationNOW and Crunchyroll. Viz Media is also releasing new chapters of the manga at a monthly rate that can be read entirely for free through the Shonen Jump digital library.