Biazzaroworld #1 - The Undertaker

[Jazzy G]

Remember when WWE Films wanted to make an Undertaker origin movie set in the old west? That's why they had that brief spell of calling him The Last Outlaw, wasn't it?

[westlondonmist]

26 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

It's interesting that the people who seem to have most immediately seen right through his tough guy act were Tracy Smothers and Brian Pillman, both of whom knew him pre-WWF; he had a reputation in WCW, apparently, for being a bit of a wet blanket, never travelling with the boys, and so on, none of which really matters, but is a real contrast to the "conscious of the WWE" locker room leader schtick he laid on thick later on. Like a lot of older wrestlers, he's done the "if MMA existed when I started out, I'd have done that rather than wrestling" spiel - but like you say, it's not like he couldn't have been a fighter; he was never a boxer, or an amateur wrestler, never to my knowledge did any martial arts training, he was a college basketball player.

If I'm writing alternate history, and Mark Calloway is off the table, Barry Windham is my guy for the Undertaker gimmick, leaning more into the original presentation of it as a Wild West vibe. I think it's a mix of things - I don't think Calloway gets over without the Undertaker gimmick, but I also suspect nobody else gets over with the gimmick.

I can't think of anybody else who wrestled at such a high level for such a long time that, even by the standards of cartoonish '90s dross, had so few good matches to show for it - and so many actively dreadful ones. I don't think there's another wrestler who has ever been afforded more opportunities, when anyone else would have been binned off. My criticism of Triple H is that if his role was as The Guy To Wrestle The Top Guy, or as a gatekeeper heel to make new stars, then it's a damning indictment that you can list the stars he made on one hand, and the same goes for the number of people who had their best match against him - for The Undertaker, for years his role was as the guy to establish new monster heels and giants by working against them, and the vast majority of those opponents never amounted to anything, disappeared without a trace, or had actively bad matches with 'Taker. Even the ones who made it and stuck around - Yokozuna, Kane, Big Show - none of them did their best work with Undertaker.

 

Yeah I don't think anybody else gets it over to the same level, but I think they probably do enough to make it interesting enough that it would be fondly remembered. Even if they did get heavily over there would obviously be a completely different path post 92. I also don't think it gets over with Brother Love staying as manager, Paul Bearer was amazing.

[TheScarlettChad]

His 2007-2009 run had some great stuff. His match with Batista at Wrestlemania was great, his match with Edge at One Night Stand 2008 was great including that hilarious triple table bump. What the fuck was he thinking? No wonder his body turned to dust, a year later.

[SuperBacon]

8 minutes ago, westlondonmist said:

Paul Bearer was amazing

He's also absolutely vital in the Mankind feud. I did actually (SPOILER ALERT) care about him turning on The Undertaker, and when he did, really bought into it. Him suspended in that little cage above the ring at Survivor Series 96 is hilarious. 

He was a brilliant character and actor and nailed the tone every time.

[Carbomb]

22 minutes ago, TheScarlettChad said:

His 2007-2009 run had some great stuff. His match with Batista at Wrestlemania was great, his match with Edge at One Night Stand 2008 was great including that hilarious triple table bump. What the fuck was he thinking? No wonder his body turned to dust, a year later.

That match with Batista at WM23 was one of the few times I've been invested in a Taker match. Also, I think his match with Edge at 24 is quite underrated - it was fun, even with the predictability of the Streak in the background.

In answer to @BomberPat's question, I think Big Show is the only top-level guy I can think of to wrestle for that long as a main-eventer and have so few good matches. I like the guy, and enjoyed some of the gimmicks he's had, but I really can't think of a single good match he's had.

[Merzbow]

45 minutes ago, Jazzy G said:

The Last Outlaw

I only recognize one Last Outlaw.

[tiger_rick]

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

If I'm writing alternate history, and Mark Calloway is off the table, Barry Windham is my guy for the Undertaker gimmick, leaning more into the original presentation of it as a Wild West vibe. I think it's a mix of things - I don't think Calloway gets over without the Undertaker gimmick, but I also suspect nobody else gets over with the gimmick.

I'm pretty sure there is no Undertaker gimmick without Mean Mark. The story was that Vince thought he looked like an old-time Undertaker and came up with the gimmick from that rather than having had the idea and been looking for a guy to fill it. 

Also, given they were looking for something for him around that time, if it was the other way around, it would have been John Nord! 

[Jazzy G]

42 minutes ago, TheScarlettChad said:

His 2007-2009 run had some great stuff. His match with Batista at Wrestlemania was great, his match with Edge at One Night Stand 2008 was great including that hilarious triple table bump. What the fuck was he thinking? No wonder his body turned to dust, a year later.

That Batista match was better than it had any right to be. 

[BomberPat]

Again, though, it's mad to think that someone even had the opportunity to have that run of genuinely good main event matches almost twenty years into a run that featured an ungodly amount of bad matches, bad angles and bad promos, and after he was one of the worst drawing champions and Wrestlemania headliners they ever had. His career is a long, long run of being given second chances that another wrestler - especially an early '90s gimmick worker - would never have been granted.

[Supremo]

He’s second only to Triple H in terms of men who owe their careers to Mick Foley.

Watching all the, “In Your House,” events back last year confirmed it. There’s so much dross for so fucking long. Endless casket matches with his shitarse mates, where more effort was put into their game of dominoes backstage than actually entertaining the paying audience.

But then Mick Foley dives into his career (literally, from the apron to the floor!) and it completely revitalises him. It’s like both the performer and the character suddenly awake from a stupor. Whether you want to judge it on matches, performance, character or story, the leap between his 1995 and 1997 is positively insane and I attribute almost all of that to Mick Foley.

I’d argue 1997 is his best year. He never had a better match than the Hell in a Cell with Shawn. He never had a better storyline than Paul Bearer bringing in Kane.

There’s no denying he’s got some incredible matches in his archives, especially that Hell in a Cell with Shawn, which is still probably top ten matches of all time. However, his overall Good to Shit Ratio has got to be somewhere around 20:80. For every Batista match at Wrestlemania 23 there are endless DUDs that left you cold. I’ll always consider paying £15 to watch a pay per view headlined by Taker vs. The Dudleys in a Concrete Crypt Match as one of the lowest points of my fandom. Maybe one of the lowest points of my life.

In trying to articulate why I have more time for Taker’s character than I do any of the other spooky knobheads, I think it’s because it was rooted in that cartoon 1980s world and then grew and adapted from there. It’s easier to accept something so silly when it was born at a time when everything was just as daft. I’m convinced that’s the blind spot your Bray Wyatts and Malakai Blacks never understood. It only works because of legacy and tenure, where you accept the way something is because it’s always been that way. Without that, you’re just a cosplay loser rocking up out of nowhere, talking in riddles and switching the lights off and on again. Grow up.

The ultimate irony is that Taker spent decades upholding kayfabe to protect the character, only for it to become apparent that refusing interviews and never dropping the act actually protected everyone else from discovering what a dickhead he was in real life. He’s got to be up there in terms of who’s done the most to tarnish their legacy in the post-kayfabe world.

An absolute loser of a man, with the worst T-shirt selection of all time. All the Wrestlers Court stuff. All the fake hard man stuff. Complaining that the locker room has too many Nintendo Switches in it nowadays, and it was better when people were carrying guns and knives. Fuck’s sake.

Even the WWE-produced documentary made him out to be a sad old prick who couldn’t let it go. He’d shit the bed one Wrestlemania, insisting on coming back the next year to cancel it out. Then he’d have a good showing, insist he still had it, but then come back and shit the bed again. Rinse and repeat. The only thing that stopped him was Covid shutting the World down, allowing them to shoot such a great episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that even he accepted it could never be topped. Had he had a normal singles match with AJ Styles, we’d probably all still be stuck in that endless cycle!

When I think back on his legacy, I always come back to this (3 minutes in). Just watch and listen to that reaction when DDP rips off the mask. This was magic. This was money. Even without the big stars, The Invasion still had the potential to actually work!

Fast forward a couple of weeks to Summerslam and Taker and Kane are treating DDP and Kanyon like jobbers (stiffing them so badly even Perry Saturn would tell them to lighten up) and the whole thing is in the bin. I know it was a company-wide approach and it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway, but Taker was easily the biggest offender. Was such a mark for the idea that they were still the opposition that he killed what could have been the biggest angle of all time.

I think that’s my lasting impression. For a man who considered himself a locker room leader he may have been the biggest mark of them all. It’s a work, Mark. It’s not real. You own WCW, now. You don’t have to give Kanyon a concussion. You aren’t a real hard man. You wouldn’t have won the UFC Heavyweight Title. You wore tights and eyeliner for a living, mate. Own it.

[DCW]

The Invasion stuff really soured me on Taker too. I know DDP should have fought against that stupid stalker angle purely on the fact that he was married to Kimberly and thus would obviously have zero interest in poxy Sara McTaker. But it was the way he was thrown around like a jobber by big Mark that really annoyed me. So detrimental to business for such a locker room leader, cutting down a  main eventer who could obviously draw some money, just to be a prick. 

[BarryOVega]

The no selling during the invasion was insane, the segment with the Old Stone Cold coming back was incredible but watching it back, Taker is taking a beating off 3 or 4 blokes and I'm pretty sure Booker T ends up walking off to go after someone else because Taker is just stood there taking everything 

That period also showed how much stroke he had or how loyal he was when his mates Kronik were fucked off after one match

Overall he's a legend though, the shit matches he had the first 5 years of his WWF run were never meant to be good work rate matches or anything like that, he stepped up massively once Foley turned up, his stuff once he turned heel (and WCW was completely buried) was good, he was pretty selfless as well trying to get dross like Khali and Koslov over

Nowhere near top 5 of all time but still a great run, especially with the amount of injuries he had

[air_raid]

What I forgot to mention about the Mania 27 match is how annoying I found at it the time, that Sheamus was instrumental in writing HHH out, and last time Taker was on screen he was buried alive by Wade Barrett, but Trips and Takes were like “fuck those jabronis” and worked each other instead.