A couple of weeks ago, Teddy Hart opened his mouth. Now, usually this would not be a bad thing, because nine times out of ten, when Teddy Hart does this, it’s quickly followed up by someone attempting to beat the shit out of him. So it all works out and all, y’know? But alas, this time was different. See, Teddy was on the Live Audio Wrestling radio program promoting the first show of his new Next Generation Stampede Wrestling, and things seemed to be going the usual Teddy manner until he got to the point in the discussion where he talked about the things NGSW (…really, guys? Why not just get it over with, call it New Future Stampede Wrestling so that you can have that NFSW going for you) were going to be doing to set themselves apart from all of the other independent wrestling promotions out there. Here’s what Teddy had to say:
|
Now, I don’t really speak much Canadian, but I’ve picked up a few key phrases in the language of Completely Fucking Insane and I’m pretty sure one can be traced back to the other. Or maybe it’s just Teddy being, y’know, Teddy.
But the thing is, Teddy isn’t the first guy to come down the pike with some hair-brained idea to revolutionize professional wrestling. And while I don’t really see…whatever that is up there getting off the ground, a handful of other bizarre promotions saw the light of day, at least for a short time. Sure, every promotionn tries a few wacky things here and there, but at the end of the day, the core concept is still a combination of people wrestling in a wrestling ring, using wrestling maneuvers and trying to beat their competitor. Some went bigger and glitzier (WWE), some went bloodier (ECW), but at the end of the day, they were still wrestling promotions. No, the promotions I’m talking about thought outside the box on things. WAY outside the box.
I should note, I’m relegating this strictly to the U.S. and Canada, because I could be here for days doing an article like this for Japan. Because seriously, what the hell, Japan?
8. AWF (American Wrestling Federation)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZneHuluv3gs
Let’s start off with one that doesn’t completely go balls out crazy on the concept of pro wrestling, okay? The AWF surfaced in the mid-90s and was looking to compete with WWF’s New Generation era and the beginning of the Bischoff-Hogan WCW era. That right there should have been a sign to just set fire to any money that was going to be invested, but the AWF heads had a plan: They were going to use a system consisting of four-minute rounds, three rounds for non-title matches, twelve for title matches. With one-minute rest periods between rounds.
Do you start to see a problem here?
Let’s put this in perspective by taking a look at some of the talent the AWF brought in to work this pacing nightmare: The Road Warriors. 2 Cold Scorpio. Nailz. The Warlord. The first two names, a rounds system would completely kill the kind of momentum necessary in their matches. For the last two, it meant the chances of getting 14-minute long Warlord and Nailz matches were just that much closer to reality. And God help us if one of them got a title shot.
Oh, and they had judges too. Name one time that doesn’t involve Terry Funk sending Ric Flair to the hospital where having judges for a wrestling match was a good idea.
The AWF wasn’t done there. No, they wanted to suck ALL of the excitement out of their program by basically casting the live crowd. It’s been said that several of their shows’ entire audiences consisted of paid extras. Other times they allegedly brought in the homeless to fill up the seating.
No, I’m not joking.
7. Mat Rats
It was 2001. WCW and ECW were dead and gone. TNA had not yet been born. The world needed – NEEDED – another wrestling promotion to compete with the WWF. Something new. Something different. Something that broke child labor laws in most parts of the free world.
Eric Bischoff, still under the impression he still mattered in pro wrestling, struck up a partnership with a group of investors that saw the birth of Mat Rats, a promotion that would go the opposite direction of WCW in that, instead of hiring a bunch of 50 year old has-beens, they only hired kids. And we don’t mean “young guys”…we mean kids. The eligible ages to be hired by the company ranged between 14 and 21.
Now, how exactly this was going to work, I have no idea, especially when half the talent roster had curfew halfway through their shows. The idea came and went, and I honestly don’t have any idea if they ever actually ran a single show or just spent all of their time putting together press releases, but not too long after, Bischoff would end up in McMahonLand, and Mat Rats would go on to be just another failed attempt.
With minors. I cannot stress that part enough. Two 30 year old guys covered in tattoos and scars wrestling? I’m cool with that. Two 15 year old boys in trunks putting each other in head-scissors? One step away from Chris Hansen asking us to have a seat right over there.
6. Incredibly Strange Wrestling
Musician and horror movie guru Johnny Legend was a fan of wrestling and sometimes did gigs as a manager. As far back as the mid 1980s, Johnny was showing up on wrestling video tapes and showing his love for the business. Johnny, though, is one weird guy, so it comes as no surprise that when he finally decided to start his own promotion, it turned out a little…different. First came the venue choices; instead of typical gyms and arenas, Johnny held the ISW shows at nightclubs, concerts and festivals. And due to some legal crap I won’t go into detail here, one of his former partners split and there ended up being two ISWs floating around. But what got ISW on this list, you ask?
Johnny and his buds decided to ramp up the performance art part of the show and in doing so, opted to go out of their way to try to find ways to offend pretty much every person on the planet. Over the years, the roster included such main event talent as the Poontangler and Uncle NAMBLA and held a “Christians vs. Lions” match once in which Dante the Baptist dragged a giant crucifix to the ring before wrestling a guy in a lion costume.
El Pollo Diablo, aka what stoners see when they watch the Gobbeldy Gooker
It was basically wrestling’s first attempt at “shock rock” – something companies like XPW and ICP’s Juggalo Championshit Wrestling have picked up on in later days.
5. Chikara
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOcjq4siu7A
Taking some of the less-offensive inspiration from promotions like Incredibly Strange Wrestling and combining it with the cult following of promotions like Ring of Honor, Chikara is one of the more successful companies on this list and are still around. Extremely popular with the internet community, Chikara offers technical wrestling, high flying spot action and…invisible wrestlers?
Chikara is…hard to explain sometimes. They’ll stop a match halfway through for an impromptu dance contest. Or for no reason at all, everyone in a match will start to move in slow motion, with the crowd acting appropriately. It’s insanity on a humorous level, and has created quite the following itself by being unique. Old school fans seem to despise it, but given some of the things “real” pro wrestling has offered over the years (Rick Steiner vs. Chucky, anyone?) it ain’t so bad.
4. Wrestling Society X
In 2006, MTV starting having a mad craving for some wrestling love they hadn’t had since the days WWF Heat was around. So they started their own show and decided to up the ante a bit by…you know what? All that stuff Teddy Hart was talking about up there? This. This is pretty much what he had in mind. MTV’s short-lived Wrestling Society X program was technically professional wrestling. Technically. With an emphasis of style over substance, and trendy MTV style over pro wrestling style, the show was full of things exploding, people getting electrocuted and piranhas.
Fucking piranhas.
MTV only aired nine episodes before pulling the plug (a tenth episode was released on DVD). They’ve followed it up with the somewhat more traditional Lucha Libre USA. Which doesn’t have piranhas to the best of my knowledge.
3. GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling)
For decades, David McLane’s GLOW has been the butt of many jokes within the industry’s fanbase. Started around 1986, the show was exclusively female wrestling, and was done with tongue set firmly in cheek. And while the show wasn’t great and most of the women on the roster could barely work, GLOW set a lot of precedents. First and foremost, as already stated the roster was comprised completely of females. Now, all-women wrestling troupes had been around for quite some time (early on, some towns and states that had barred male wrestling hadn’t bothered with females, so they were the only ones that could perform). But GLOW was different. First, GLOW was a television series, not a weekly televised event. It ran in seasons – something unheard of for a wrestling show at the time – and was one of the first wrestling promotions to attempt nation-wide exposure, right behind Vince McMahon.
As much of a clown as the show came off, it was historically significant in a lot of ways. While vignettes and skits were already a healthy part of a wrestling show’s running time, GLOW made the between-match skits the “important” part of the show and treated it very much like a Laugh-In type variety show. For better or worse, McLane was the first to treat his promotion like a television show instead of sporting events, something I quietly chuckled about to myself when Tony Schiavone announced the “season finale” of WCW Thunder.
Themed promotions have popped up time and again since,often trying to emulate the “success” of GLOW, such as the growing number of all-little people wrestling shows lately. And even after GLOW left the air, its influence continued, as McLane tried to revive the formula with the more traditional POWW (Powerful Women of Wrestling…you work that anagram out) and the somewhere-in-the-middle WOW (Women of Wrestling), while others went even more extreme and started adding toplessness and full nudity to their shows, like WEW (Womens Erotic/Extreme Wrestling), GLOWW and whichever ones Carmen Electra’s been involved in. And since we’re on the subject of naked women wrestling…
2. Ultimate Surrender
Perhaps the ultimate end road that GLOW started, Ultimate Surrender is….okay, remember those ads for apartment wrestling that used to be in most of the wrestling mags you could find on the stands? No? Oh, right, I’m old. Okay, anyway, the old mags had these ads that showed women “wrestling” in apartments (thus, naturally, apartment wrestling) with one another (or with men sometimes) and by the end of the (completely posed/staged) “matches” would be missing most or all of their clothes and in some of the raunchier ones, would start…uhm, performing other athletic skills.
So in the 21st Century, we get its modern day equivalent, Ultimate Surrender.
It’s porn, in case you haven’t noticed yet.
The damn thing is, there’s more mat wrestling involved here than in some “real” promotions. Treated as a weird hybrid between amateur-style wrestling, pro wrestling and porn, the matches take place on a mat in a gym, where two women attempt to pin each other for points. Through the course of the rounds, clothes are removed and exposed orifices become just another place to try out the mandible claw.
On the other hand, tombstone piledrivers just became the most awesome thing ever.
Okay, so it’s naked women squirming around doing some elementary mat work. That’s all? Well…no. See, while they DO keep track of win-loss records and and seemingly truly attempt to keep certain aspects grounded in tradition, the participants aren’t vying for championships or title belts. No, because the winner of the match gets to…hmm, how do I put this delecately?
Oh. Okay, yeah, that. The winner of each match gets to slap on a strap-on and go to town on the loser. Which is something I’m thankful will most likely never find its way over into the more mainstream stuff, because the idea of Hornswoggle getting pinned by Great Khali is already bad enough.
1. Kaiju Big Battel
Take one tablespoon of pro wrestling, add in two scoops of Godzilla movies, mix with brown acid and you have Kaiju Big Battel, an ongoing performancce piece show that combines the best elements of Gotch and Gamera, Thesz and Gappa the Triphibian.
The ring is filled with a model-sized city. The wrestlers wear costumes more fitting for a Power Rangers episode and much destruction is caused in the process. The heels are “managed” by Dr. Cube, who creates his monsters with world domination as his goal, whereupon they fight the “good” monsters in a ring.
Sure, it’s theater more than actual wrestling, but at the core, it’s still the business, just turned on its head and stuffed up the rear with a massively bizarre gimmick.