Looking at the Shockmasters helmet, it appears to be a Stormtroopers helmet
painted and glittered.
http://www.thesharkguys.com/sports/top-20-worst-masked-wrestling-gimmicks-of-all-time-part-i/
January 29, 2009 | Sports
The Blue Eyed Bandit: The failed gimmick created by the Toronto half of the
Shark Guys
In pro wrestling there are a few ways to temporarily prolong your career. You
can bed a member of the McMahon family, (preferably one involved in wrestling),
adopt a tranquilizer regimen usually reserved for dancing circus bears or
change up your identity with regularity like a wanted felon, or the less
wanted, Madonna.
A great way to do this is by hailing from the menacing-sounding "parts unknown".
An integral part of adopting this US Customs and Immigration-defying strategy
is donning a mask, which adds considerably to the air of mystery not present if
someone were to say, "hey, isn't that Bob from Akron?'
In Luche Libre wrestling, they've known about this for a while, not because
it's some foil to work illegally in the United States, but because in Mexico,
the mask is a key character component, passed down through generations and held
in the highest esteem. (also, it makes it easier to escape with your fight
purse in some of the crummier barrios)
In Mexican wrestling, the mask is honorable and totemic, so much so that
grapplers are occasionally even buried in them (with a closed casket just in
case some heel attempts a funereal unmasking).
In these parts, masks are also associated with burial–if your Larry the Village
Grocer, "paper or plastic" routine is in jeopardy of being buried in the bottom
half of the fight card, you can change up your identity and see if the crowd
pops for The Gimp Assassin instead.
Masks are a great part of your gimmick arsenal, especially when they're used to
introduce a new character, like Kane or put a twist on an old one. When The
American Dream Dusty Rhodes became The Midnight Rider after losing a match and
being 'banned from the state of Florida for 60 days' [Snarky Editor's note: Like
that's a bad thing?], a mask put the big man back in contention and suspicious
heel manager J.J. Dillon noted, "In a very strange coincidence, a few days
after that match took place, emerges a 'new' wrestling superstar, conspicuously
265 lbs and over 6 feet tall."
Many wrestlers, for their very survival, concealed their identities so they
could fight in different territories.
We're not talking about those guys.
The masked grapplers featured on this list are wrestling writers'
brainchildren, brains that might've been deprived of oxygen for a prolonged
period. Some of these scribes should be masked themselves, perhaps a bag worn
over their heads, (after they're repeatedly face-planted in the turnbuckle),
for devising these less than spectacular creations.
So here are, scheduled for one fall and for all the marbles, our Top 20 Worst
Masked Wrestling Gimmicks of All Time!
20. The Repo Man. A repossession agent is some guy in a pickup truck with a
clipboard, who tows your cherished possessions off the driveway if you've run
afoul of the bank. How he turned into some kind of er, "Loan Ranger" with a
rope, is beyond us. You can't just grab a mask, and slap it on any old
profession, especially if it's one typically not associated with wearing a
mask. Perhaps this is how repo men operated in the 1880s. Regardless, this
gimmick was repoed pretty darn quick.
19. The Conquistadors. Recipe for a lousy gimmick: Give yourselves a moniker
inspired by 15th century Spanish explorers, fail to reference this or the New
World in any way whatsoever and then inexplicably drape yourself in gold tights
and matching masks. The idea here, which is as much of a stretch as spandex
after a leapfrog, is that they were treasure seekers. However, rather than
crested kettle hats and capes, or anything else that would've resembled a Ponce
de Leon or Cortes (guys who originally brought dysentery and horses to the
Americas) these Conquistadors, who were Puerto Rican and pawned off as
Mexicans, became relegated to ethnic jobber feuds with the likes of the Young
Stallions.
18. The Patriot. Given the unhealthy doses of xenophobia and nationalism always
rampant in pro wrestling the last thing you needed was some condemned flea
market knock off of Captain America, especially when The Real American,
American Dream, and the cross-border tension easing Can Am Connection already
beat you to the fake punch, as far as saluting the flag is concerned. Much like
the other Patriot Act, this wore thin pretty quick. What would've been fun: a
wigged, Patriot founding fathers gimmick. "I'm gonna take you out and beat you
senseless. We hold these truths to be self-evident"
17. The Executioner. Again, zero effort on the part of the WWF at the time to
enhance his executioner persona with say, a dark black hood (effectively put to
use by the other Executioner, menacing boxing hall of famer Bernard Hopkins)
or an axe. Instead, what was obvious to everyone watching Wrestlemania I, was
that it was none other than "Playboy" Buddy Rose in a really tight-fitting mask
(red for some unfathomable reason), whose identity top brass wanted to conceal
as an immediate loss to Tito Santana would've sidetracked his career. If you
look closely at the attached photo, you can see the look in Buddy Rose's eyes
as he realizes the only thing he's executing is his career.
16. Aldo Montoya. Aldo Montoya, "The Portuguese Man O' War". Opting for a
superhero look rather than the marine invertebrate was a good choice, as a
human jellyfish doesn't play well in any arena. However, this superhero
looked like a sketch scribbled in the sub basement of a rec center for wayward
youth. Bears passing resemblance to a forgettable incontinent-sounding comic
book creation from the 40s, The Whizzer, dressed up in that always intimidating
color: yellow. Forever known to fans of the squared circle as "the guy with a
yellow jockstrap on his face".
15. The Battle Kat. Easily the least intimidating masked wrestler of all time
that isn't the one following this entry, this kitty was doomed from the start,
as his feline mannerisms/persona were immediately undermined by Gorilla
Monsoon's unhelpful "It's gotta be hard for him to step into the ring and do
anything with that kind of mask on, you've got no peripheral vision and it's
tough to breathe". Even more difficult had this extremely lame gimmick gone on
for any longer would have been fending off lawsuits from Mattel, owners of the
He-Man franchise from which the Battle Kat idea was blatantly stolen.
Check out Obsessed with Wrestling for more
14. Shark Boy / Shark Girl. Shark Boy (thankfully, no relation) would draw his
hand to his forehead like a pontifical blessing and then mimic a shark's dorsal
fin, because, well, he hailed from "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," and
at various times "from the deep blue sea".
To demonstrate how much wrestling has evolved since the introduction of masks,
his female counterpart Shark Girl, it would seem, sprouted limbs and crawled
ashore, as she hails from an island. (For other terrible TNA masked wrestlers,
please check out the offensive and tacky partner of Sharkie Curry Man).
13. Golga. Speaking of sharks, the talented John Tenta (R.I.P.) best known as
Earthquake, was 'The Shark' in WCW ("I'm not a fish, I'm a man!") and just when
you thought things couldn't possibly sink any lower, the accomplished sumo
wrestler was weighed down by an even more astonishingly brain-dead gimmick,
Golga, part of the decorous Parade of Human Oddities. The character was
obsessed with Cartman from Southpark, a cheap product tie-in during the show's
heyday.
12. The Giant Machine. Many speculate that during his heyday Andre The Giant was
one of the most recognizable athletes on the planet. Nobody else had as much
difficulty getting in and out of imported rental cars. Just before Andre turned
on Hulk Hogan, the WWF decided it would be a good move to put one of their
all-time biggest draws in a mask and bill him as Giant Machine, a masked
wrestler from "The Orient." If you're nearly 7 feet tall and 500 lbs, a masked
masquerade is less effective than throwing a tarp over you and being passed off
as a Ringling Brothers elephant. To their credit, wrestling brass and if memory
serves, Bobby Heenan, pointed out to the audience in protest, 'that guy's
really Andre the Giant!'
11. The Killer Bees. An above average, athletic tag team known for their feuds
with the Hart Foundation, they make our B-List by being a babyface team that
adopted a dirty tactic used by heels—not a good one, like a chair or a foreign
object—but 'Masked Confusion', whereby the referee would be confused about who
was the legal man in the ring, due to their concealed masked identities (At
least the facial identities. Completely different physiques and hair length
were a different story, but wrestling referees are notorious for being not the
brighest of lights on the Christmas tree.)
As this list (click here for Part One) makes clear, few wrestlers can make a
masked gimmick work. As far as wrestlers who are not currently suffering from
wrestling's no-union pension plan, those who make masks work can be counted on
one hand, make that finger, Rey Mysterio. Masked wrestlers have traditionally
been pretty far down wrestling's totem pole. More than half of the entrants on
this list are jobbers — those poor slobs whose career highlights consist of
feats such as being the second as opposed to the first person to be sent
careening over the top rope in a Battle Royale.
These days, pro-wrestling has more championship belts than clean drug tests and
the WWE has a near monopoly, so there is no reason to put some plug in a mask
and send him out to eat canvas for half an hour at the hands of the latest hot
commodity getting a push. The days when the public wouldn't start a riot when
presented with an undercard featuring Steve Lombardi and Johnny K-9 versus The
Moondogs are over. Wrestling fans these days require stars who can speak and who
they'd be able to pick out in a police line-up. The days of the masked wrestler
are coming to an end. (Here we are exempting masks used in the commission of
crimes by wrestlers past their salad days). Still we would like to take this
opportunity to pay a tribute of sorts to the art of masked wrestling, as it is
practiced at its very, very worst. Here then are the Top 10 Worst Masked
Wrestling Gimmicks of all Time!
10) TIE — Mr. America/Who?: Like #12 only worse, Mr. America saw THE most
recognizable wrestler in the world put on a mask for reasons known only to
those able to collect on a McMahon trust fund in middle-adulthood. This
particular Hulk Hogan gimmick competed with Arachnaman in terms of being a
guarantee for a lawsuit from Marvel Comics, with a Captain America ripoff
outfit that makes The Patriot look like the height of non-copyright-thieving
creativity.
Then there's Who? Who was Who? Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart, one half of the great
Hart Foundation. The other half of that team — Bret "The Hitman" Hart — went on
to become a world champion and have a fantastic documentary made about him. Jim?
He was made to go forward as Who, a gimmick apparently solely intended to give
the announcers the opportunity to resurrect the comedic corpses of Abbot and
Costello. "Who got suplexed? Why Who got suplexed! No, that's what I'm asking
you, who got suplexed? Who got suplexed!" and on and on says a joke that was
funny before color television but makes us feel sorry for the guy who set the
record for the anvil toss at the Calgary Stampede.
9) Doink/Dink The Clowns: The WWF/WWE reached its creative nadir in the early
1990s. Hulk Hogan had wrestled and bodyslammed every grotesquely fat man within
the continental United States throughout the previous decade. That and the
scandals involving steroid use and other nefarious goings-on at McMahon Central
made it clear that the company needed a new direction. The federation was,
however, on cruise control. It was before WCW* was much of a competitor and
they could still rely on storylines and characters that might strike a chord
with eight-year olds who arrived on the short bus. Doink The Clown started off
as an arguably decent gimmick — a Joker of sorts combined with everyone's
underlying fear of clowns being psycho-scissor-stabbers — but was carried off
so terribly that the only defence WWE officials could give in later years was
that they were appealing to children. A clear sign of a crappy gimmick is
anybody can pick it up. When this happened with the Undertaker, people were
wondering what the hell happened, and when the WWF brought in a fake Razor
Ramone and Diesel it was obviously a joke, but there were Doinks aplenty and
they were completely interchangeable. When they brought in Dink, the carny code
was complete, and the entire gimmick earned its place on this list.
*(For a non-masked example of just how crappy things can get without competion,
we refer you to Crush, the Kona Hawaii surfer who had possibly the worst
finishing move ever: The Heart Punch.)
8) The Sultan: Solofa Fatu comes from a line of Samoan wrestling royalty. His
uncle Afa trained Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler (in his active days, Afa
would not hesitate to bite the head off the odd fish on national television).
Solofa started out like his uncles, playing a "headshrinker" and no doubt
carrying on a stereotype Samoa's public relations department could have done
without. Between that gimmick and his current gimmick as Rikishi, the
smotherer-by-arse sensation, Solofa played "The Sultan", a mysterious
Mideast-themed character managed by Bob Backlund and the Iron Sheik (for how
these two came to partner, we refer you to the nearest wrestling geek). Like
Yokozuna, another Samoan stuck into an ethnic role for which he didn't have the
language (Japanese in that case), the Sultan was a silent, fat-assed, imposing
type. The mask was obviously intended only to disguise the fact that Fatu of
the Headshrinkers had maxed out his frequent flyer miles by moving to the
Mideast.
7) Avatar/Shinobi: Some wrestlers are destined to get the worst gimmicks
imaginable until the day they refuse to go out there as Quarter-Mile Quinton
The Marathon Runner with a Club Foot and decide a career driving truck would be
a lot less humiliating. Al Snow is one such wrestler. Snow has been given so
many crappy gimmicks that when he played a character who talked to a plastic
head on a stick it was considered a real step forward. He gets double kudos
here first for his role as Avatar, a gimmick that was so pointless, Snow seemed
to have been keenly aware of it himself and would put on the mask while he was
walking to the ring. When you're moving on from an utterly senseless gimmick
like that, improving is your only option and Snow did… slightly.. with Shinobi,
a generic ninja gimmick that evidenced only a few more brain cells firing than
the Avatar schtick. From there they moved him to the role of Leif Cassidy, one
half of the "New Rockers" who will be sure to figure prominently on a future
list of Dorkiest Wrestling Gimmicks of all Time.
6) Arachnaman: Like Glacier — a ripoff of a Mortal Kombat character and a near
miss on this list — Arachnaman comes out of the proud wrestling tradition of
stealing ideas when your creative well is drier than Jake the Snake's minibar.
This brainfart from the Mensa minds at WCW looked like a third-world knockoff
of Spiderman, and even shot silly string "webs" from his wrist. The IP theft
was so pathetically blatant that Marvel Comics threatened a lawsuit and
Arachnaman went to that great Lousy Gimmick Battle Royale in the Sky.
5) The Yeti: "Let's call him 'The Yeti'!" "What's a Yeti?" Had this exchange
taken place among the WCW braintrust it would have saved the company one of
its most embarrassing legacies. Frozen in a block of ice at the start of a
Nitro episode, the Yeti breaks free from the block and reveals himself to be: a
mentally-challenged six-year-old's attempt at creating a mummy costume. In
addition to the powers-that-be not having a clue what a yeti is, even the
pronunciation of the word was lost on broadcasters as Tony Schiavonne shows,
announcing the arrival of the "YE-TAE!"
[dingdongs]
4) The Ding Dongs: There are few entries on this list that match The Ding Dongs
for sheer ability to annoy. We would have loved to have been in the room when
the creative genius who thought this one up laid out his plan to the team:
"Alright, see we're gonna put you in these masks and tights I picked up at an
Ed Wood set sale and the whole gimmick is going to center around bells. We'll
call you the Ding Dongs, say you're from Belleville USA, put bells on your
boots and make sure that there's a bell on the ring apron. That way whoever is
not in the ring can just ring that darn bell like crazy on the outside. The
people are going to love it!"
3) Max Moon: Like greatness, some have crappiness thrust upon them, but not so
in the case of Max Moon… or at least not at first. Mexican wrestling star
Konaan was set to make his WWF debut and he already had a spaceman gimmick —
Maximillian Moon (Max for short) — worked out. The WWE spent a huge chunk of
change creating the eyesore Max Moon Suit, complete with wrist devices that set
off fireworks and a rocketpack. But Konaan walked out on the WWE leaving behing
his terrible gimmick and a suit too expensive to toss into the nearest
dumpster. Paul Diamond, being unlucky enough to fit in the suit, took over the
gimmick, before Max Moon was blasted into the wrasslin' cosmos.
2) The Shockmaster: How did the WCW, with Ted Turner's money backing it, manage
to completely collapse you ask? Shocking tales such as this help illuminate
the reasons. Fred Ottman — previously of the all-time-worst gimmick contending
Tugboat — was set to debut as The Shockmaster. Had this gimmick not failed due
to The Shockmaster's hilarious debut, he would still have made the list
somewhere.
But, as it happens, The Shockmaster had a debut that was characteristic of the
lousy gimmicks and poor planning common during the WCW era. He was the mystery
tag team partner of Davey Boy Smith, Sting (the wrestler), and Davey Boy Smith,
going up against Sid Vicious, Harlem Heat, and Big Van Vader. Sting announced
this mystery partner,and in busted The Shock Master, tripping on a piece of
scenery and landing on his face. All of the wrestlers alternated between
busting their guts laughing and holding it in, while Davey Boy Smith was heard
to remark: "He fell flat on his arse! Fell flat on his f*cking arse!"
1) The Gobbledy Gooker:It's 1990, the Survivor Series, you're a wrestling fan
and the big moment in your sexless life is about to happen: Mean Gene is about
to reveal what is inside the giant egg that has been hyped on television for
weeks. Surely it must be something terrific what with all the hype. Maybe a
wrestler who had been thrown out of the federation for exposing himself on a
plane/knifing someone in a bar is making his grand return? Maybe the egg
contains another grand jury indictment for Vince McMahon? The moment comes, the
egg cracks open, and out emerges Hector Guerrero in a heavily-feathered
turkey-like outfit. For the first few moments, Mean Gene is barely audible over
the chorus of boos coming from fans shocked by just how insanely crappy a
surprise this is. Then some goofy music comes on and the Gooker takes Mean Gene
to the ring for a dance session that lasts an achingly long time. Announcers
Rowdy Roddy Piper and Gorilla Monsoon do their best to play up how much the
fans are loving it, but the booing is audible even with the music going. The
Gooker does some flips and leaves to the utter bewilderment to this day of
anybody who remembers seeing that live.
The entire incident begs the question: What did they plan on doing with a man
in a giant turkey outfit? That they hired Guerrero, a wrestler with a pedigree,
to play the role suggests they meant the Gooker to wrestle. The wall-to-wall
booing he received upon his debut meant the end for the Gooker, who stayed off
of WWF/WWE television for years until it became fashionable to mock the very
worst of the past, and he was brought in for a gimmick battle royale.
WE WILL LEAVE THE (DIS) HONORABLE MENTIONS UP TO OUR READERS. WHO DID WE MISS?
LET US KNOW! CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE!
If we lose freedom here there is nowhere else to turn to. This is the last stand
on Earth... Ronald Reagan
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the
government and I'm here to help.' Ronald Reagan"Politicians are fine until they
stick their noses into things they don't understand, such as most things" P.J.
O'Rourke
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