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Attitude era Papa Shango


IANdrewDiceClay

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I love these kind of things. Like when the Jindrak in Evolution images came out for example.

I remember tweeting The Godfather about these images after he mentioned this proposed Shango return in a shoot interview like 5 years ago. For his sake I don't think he would've had the same success as Shango as he did as the Godfather so things probably worked out for the best.

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5 minutes ago, wandshogun09 said:

My first thought was he’d probably be involved somehow with the Undertaker/Kane story.

When SCG ran through the Monday Night War timeline, the stories from the Observer at the time said he was coming in to feud with Taker (this was pre-Kane) with the story being that Shango had brought him back from the dead in the fire that killed his family. They abandoned it, presumably to run with Kane. As a concession, when Wright came back as Kama in the New Nation, he was given a random win over Taker in a tag match on Raw.

That Pic is stunning. I've never believed that they were actually going to bring him back.

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Thinking about it, he might’ve came in as part of Paul Bearer’s squad to join forces with Kane and Mankind when they were knocking about together over the spring and summer.

If he’d come in late in 98, I suppose he’d have been a natural fit for heel Taker’s Ministry Of Darkness. 

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8 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

Did they confirm if that's from 1998? The rumoured period for it was summer of 1997.

 

It was the summer of 97. He said he was all set to return as Shango before Vince had a last minute change of mind and paired him with Faarooq on an episode of Raw against the Undertaker.

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1 hour ago, tiger_rick said:

Did they confirm if that's from 1998? The rumoured period for it was summer of 1997.

It's 1997, just prior to him returning. I mentioned 98, because that's when shit turned really mad. This character was off the wall in 1992, fuck knows what they'd have had him do in 1998. He voodoos Val Venis' cock off or something.

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I think the biggest thing is how the rest of Undertaker’s career would have looked, had Kane never been introduced. I think Papa Shango would’ve been a fairly short term kind of opponent for Taker, like Gonzales/Kamala etc were - only shorter, because of the more frequent PPVs. The expectations for Kane probably weren’t much more than that, but I don’t think Shango would’ve had the staying power and evolution that Kane did. I expect he’d have been gone after WrestleMania 14, or SummerSlam 98 at the latest. At which point, it would’ve been too late to join the Nation and become the Godfather.

Still, imagine the kind of stuff he’d have been doing. If he was still around in mid-98, he’d have done a spell on Sable to make her Vince’s sex slave, for sure. 

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Love hearing about this kind of stuff. I remember reading that Dr. Death was primed to be foil for Stone Cold after he won the belt. Pretty sure there was rumours of John Tenta being brought in for that purpose too. Because they didn't happen they seem utterly bizarre, but there's always been plenty of rudderless garbage thrown on a Fully Loaded or what have you, even when wrestling was at its best. 

In 1998 they got far, far bigger than the amount of proper stars they had prepared. It took them ages to catch up. Dude Love, Undertaker turning heel etc were all basically desperation moves that year to keep feeding Stone Cold. 

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Yeah, looking back it definitely all worked out for the best with them going the Kane route instead. 

This thread reminds me, the WWF actually brought in Vic Grimes in the summer of 1999 to feud with The Godfather. He was ‘Key’ the drug dealer. Being a big fat bastard and all in white, he even looked like a mound of coke. Think he was out of the company in a few weeks though. Look at the state of him;

68DF5758-CE19-468D-AF14-BFB0DF2B4BAF.jpeg

Edited by wandshogun09
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