Keep or Delete from History? Kane

[HarmonicGenerator]

Oh, the opening vignette for No Mercy 02 where he sits next to the Undertaker and goes “how was your week” after they’d both been through terrible wrestlecrap storylines was quite good as well.

[LaGoosh]

Probably the hardest possible choice for me.

Yes Kane has been massively shit for the vast majority of his career and actively made watching WWE worse for long durations of his tenure.

However I'll go with keep just because from 98-2000 he was my absolute favourite wrestler by far. I loved that motherfucker more than anybody.

I will say that in an era filled with bonkers and inconsistent booking that Kane's story from Autumn 97 to Spring 2000 was pretty great and developed logically throughout.

[DavidB6937]

It depends what you're looking for really.

If it's someone who had consistently good matches then obviously you can just bin him off straight away.

But the guy was massively over and featured in some of the most interesting stuff they had going on for a lot of the early years in his career.

I think there was enough in those early years to warrant him existing.

[Supremo]

How many years do you reckon he had to live his life with the half-shaved head? Weddings. Birthdays. Christmasses. Funerals.

Him agreeing to that should have put to bed any belief that he was somehow the smartest guy in the locker-room.

Edited August 13, 2025 by Supremo

[Gus Mears]

Katch as Katch Kane was the best Kane. 

This and the Monster Mash Battle Royale were his greatest moments.

[tiger_rick]

Fucking hell, I'd forgotten that ever happened. Kane & Big Show chain wrestling at 1/4 speed is where it's at. 

[TheScarlettChad]

Delete fat bald Kane from 2004-2011. Masked Kane post 2011 had Team Hell No so he JUST gets a pass for that. 

[Merzbow]

God that horrible period where every tag-team was "Team X Y", just call them Hell No, there's no need to add the prefix.

[BomberPat]

I've said before on here that I wasn't watching wrestling at the height of the Attitude Era, but from what I remember at school, all the kids who were mad on wrestling were doing crotch chops and Stone Cold Stunners, but what they talked about was The Undertaker vs. Kane - Kane was really cool, in a very late '90s way. So my knee jerk reaction would be to keep him, based solely on how WWE paints the Attitude Era as being The Triple H Show way more than it ever was - I think if I asked lapsed fan friends of mine who their favourites were in that era, or who they thought the big stars were, you'd hear Mankind, Kane, The Undertaker, and maybe even the New Age Outlaws and Chyna, before you heard Triple H's name. I tend to be sympathetic towards anyone who's slightly hard done by in WWE's historic revisionism.

But then Kane was shit, wasn't he? Not always. But most of the time. For the vast majority of his career, he was an "oh for fuck's sake" wrestler. You'd get yourself hyped up when someone was set up to face a mystery opponent, and then pyro would go off and that fucker would walk out. There's another thread about the lowest points of wrestling, and I can't think of much lower than Corporate Kane wrestling in his M&S trousers. 

You have to take a bit of a sideways look to figure out what you'd actually lose if you lost Kane. Would we never get Hell In A Cell if the writers' room wasn't tasked with a gimmick match built around the eventual reveal of Kane tearing the door off the cell? Or would the natural escalation of the Monday Night Wars got us there anyway, considering Cornette took much of the concept from earlier matches? And, given that it was the same writers, would it have just been some other monster heel in that spot, given that for much of the Undertaker's career his job was to fight the newest lumbering monster of the month, and somehow Kane was the one gimmick that just outlived that?

There was a lot of supernatural nonsense between Undertaker and Kane, specifically stuff tied into their relationship and the fire motif, that we might not have got. A lot of it was rubbish, but it created a lot of playground chat at the time. So do you not get some cool images of the Inferno match, of lightning striking coffins, of stage-hands being set on fire, and so on, without Kane to build them around, or does The Undertaker alone get you there anyway? Given the story was that they were going to bring back Papa Shango before they went with Kane, does he just get some of the gimmicky stuff instead? Something I've realised on looking back at old WCW stuff is how much Vince Russo just recycled his old ideas from the WWF, and how much of the Sting/Vampiro feud was stuff he clearly originally wrote for Undertaker and Kane - so, was it 'Taker and Kane who gave him the ideas, or were those ideas always going to come out somewhere anyway? In which case, you don't even need Kane for the gimmick bollocks.


Something the now-cancelled Mike Quackenbush once said is that Kane was in many ways a victim of the never-ending format of wrestling, that if this his debut and initial feud with The Undertaker had been one series of a TV show and then the character was killed off when the story came to a natural end, that story would be looked on far more fondly than it is. In that format, you could maybe do the 'Taker/Kane feud, the humanisation with X-Pac, the Brothers of Destruction first coming together, then maybe one last match between them, and then that's it. But instead, this character who was really only defined by his relationship to The Undertaker stuck around doing other shit every single week for another twenty years.

[Your Fight Site]

Keep.

Pro wrestling is about characters. So for one of the WWF’s biggest stars (both in terms of popularity and stature), the Undertaker, to be revealed to have an even bigger brother in Kane, who’s looking for revenge, was a shot in the arm needed to breath some life back in to the Dead Man’s character after nearly a decade.

[TheScarlettChad]

28 minutes ago, Your Fight Site said:

Keep.

Pro wrestling is about characters. So for one of the WWF’s biggest stars (both in terms of popularity and stature), the Undertaker, to be revealed to have an even bigger brother in Kane, who’s looking for revenge, was a shot in the arm needed to breath some life back in to the Dead Man’s character after nearly a decade.

He wasn't a great character though. Unless you count his debut year. One year out of almost thirty. 

[air_raid]

It’s an easy keep for me. You can’t really maths your way through them going “well on balance there’s been more bad than good” because the same principle would have you throw out all the good Simpsons along with the shit. Kane turning up at the end of the first Hell In A Cell was a brilliant finale to a twisty story of a match and was a killer moment in a year of killer moments. The summer where him and Mankind, Austin & Taker, the Outlaws and the Nation all treated the tag belts as important, was wonderful. Rock vs Kane on Raw just as Rock was turning face is one of my guiltiest pleasures, as is the handicap where Rock pins Taker. His return at the end of THAT 10 man tag was a great moment. I’m not losing any of that, and I’m only 2 years in.

[Jesse]

Yeah I'm keeping him. When things were hot, Kane was great (debut, spooky bollocks feud, reuniting with Taker) and when the product got shit he stank up the joint and wore out his welcome. He's not AEW Jericho where the product is picking up and every appearance from him is dragging it down; get rid of him and it's not like anything changes about those years, they're still filled with unimaginative booking you've just got Big Show or someone in there instead.

Kane was awesome when I was a kid, all the nerds thought he was way cooler than Undertaker and we were obsessed with seeing under the mask. I remember using No Mercy's character creator to remove his mask and speculating whether it was modelled on his real life face or not. He gets to stay for that alone.

[HarmonicGenerator]

1 hour ago, FLips said:

That Kane has never had a good match. Yeah it’s the old “wrestling is subjective” thing and yeah he’s never put on a Meltzer 5 star classic, but him vs Undertaker at Wrestlemania 14 is a great bit of business, and the Brothers of Destruction were over as rover and them vs The Two Man Power Trip was the business. The Triple Threat Hardcore match at Mania 17 is excellent too.

Absolutely he’s done a load of shit, but his 1998-2003 masked era had some great stuff, and his later unmasked run while mostly rubbish had some decent tags and 6 mans with the likes of The Shield, and a good match with Daniel Bryan. Even his match against Taker at WM20 is up there for me.

This post in another thread reminded me he’s a really fun part of the WrestleMania X-Seven undercard as well.

Can I change my mind to “keep, up until a certain point in October 2002, then delete”?

[AshC]

7 hours ago, Merzbow said:

God that horrible period where every tag-team was "Team X Y"

Team Hacksaw Jim Duggan and Super Crazy.

I wouldn't choose to go and rewatch Kane stuff. But that initial run was fantastic, he was a great monster character, one of the best they've ever done.

Although he did cost us Shawn Michaels vs Flash Funk in October 97, do we get that if he's binned off? ?