The 411 Wrestling Top 5 11.03.10: Week 99 – Worst Debuts

Hello everyone and welcome to 411 Wrestling’s Top 5 List. What we are going to is take a topic each week and all the writers here on 411 wrestling will have the ability to give us their Top 5 on said topic, plus up to three honorable mentions. Most of our topics will be based on recent events in the Wrestling World, looking at those events that make us think of times past.

Oh yeah, because every debut has to be just perfect. Yeah, if they succeed. If they flop, they become more forgotten than most of the former divas to 90% of the wrestling universe. Those are the people we are looking back at here.

So what did our group of writers select? Let’s find out…

Michael Ornelas

5. Matt Morgan (Smackdown 2005) – The stuttering big man defensive about his speech impediment? That’s the best they could do with this guy? And after a few weeks, he becomes Carlito’s stuttering sidekick? At least he wasn’t awful in the ring, but what a horrible idea this was.

4. Braden Walker (ECW 2008) – “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Braden Walker…and I’m gonna knock your brains out.”……..WHAT?? Is this REALLY what Chris Harris thought was going to get him over?? Was this the WWE’s plan all along to bury the career of a guy from TNA that had so much potential before it could even get off the ground? We’ll never know, but this almost couldn’t have been cheesier.

3. Shockmaster (WCW 1993) – I mean….honestly, what is there to say that hasn’t been said before? It’s the pretty obvious answer…but I didn’t want to put it number 1 because I personally disliked the rest more than this.

2. Jeff Hardy (TNA 2010) – At the end of a horrible something-dome match that they do in TNA where Homicide couldn’t even climb out the top because it’s such a stupid contraption, Jeff Hardy just comes out of the crowd, trips over the crap on the floor, and just no sells Homicide, hits him with a chair and a Twist of Fate, and proceeds to climb the cage because he’s “cryptic”. This did nothing for me. And this was one of the rare iMPACT! episodes where I was giving TNA a chance to win me over. But they brought in a man with potential prison time looming over his head and now he’s their champion. When will they learn? Just push Joe to the moon again and I’ll watch!

1. Orlando Jordan (TNA 2010) – I’m not homophobic at all, and I’m actually am pretty supportive of alternative lifestyles…but I don’t like it when this crap is shoved in my face. He could have been revolutionary and a role model for bisexual viewers by being comfortable about his sexuality and being a badass wrestler. Instead they made him a super creepy, oversexed version of the mid-90s Goldust. It doesn’t make bisexuals look like they’re people too when they’re exploited like this. The weeks following this were much worse.

Ryan Byers

5. Chris Benoit (WWF, 2000) – At the time that they jumped ship from WCW to the WWF, the “Radicalz” of Perry Saturn, Dean Malenko, Eddy Guerrero, and Chris Benoit were considered the hottest free agents in all of professional wrestling. Their initial appearance with the company on Monday Night Raw had a lot of people talking, but the wheels largely fell off by the end of the next episode of Smackdown. Why? Because the WWF has always been paranoid about making guys they didn’t “create” look like bigger stars than guys they did “create.” As a result, in a match where the Radicalz’ ability to obtain WWF contracts was supposedly on the line, Chris Benoit was pinned by Triple H. There are very few cases where I’ll say that a certain result should always occur or a certain result should never occur, but one of them is that a guy debuting in a new company who is supposed to be anything other than a job guy should always win his first match and never lose. Doing otherwise really cuts him off at the knees and requires he be rebuild before he can go anywhere.

4. Glacier (WCW, 1996) – Everybody who was watching WCW in the mid-1990s remembers the video package. A bunch of bizarre yet state-of-the-art (for the time) computer graphics were shown on the screen, containing lots of runes, bright lights, and snow. The tag line “Blood Runs Cold” concluded the clips, and those of us who weren’t yet on the internet were trying to figure out what this all meant. Ultimately, it was revealed that the videos represented a new wrestler by the name of Glacier, and those of us who were naive enough to believe it thought that this guy could be a major player. After the video packages literally aired for months and got to the point where they were more annoying than intriguing, the man finally made his debut. Where did he make it? WCW {Pro}, the hour long Sunday afternoon squash match show that nobody watched. Who did he make it against? The Gambler. Yes, THE GAMBLER. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with giving a guy an easy opponent in his first match out, but putting Glacier up against the Gambler on {Pro} sent the message loud and clear that he wasn’t so special after all and that we’d wasted our energy over the last several months getting excited about his debut.

3. The Renegade (WCW, 1995) – Here’s the bait, and here’s the switch. In 1995, Hulk Hogan, flanked by his love-and-hate relationship partner Randy Savage, was the top babyface in WCW. The two promised to bring in a big surprise for an upcoming pay per view . . . but not just any big surprise. They promised THE ULTIMATE SURPRISE, complete with vignettes that saw Hogan and Savage posing in front of the silhouette of a muscular man pumping his arms and spasming in a manner most similar to that of the Hulkster’s Wrestlemania VI opponent. Then the PPV rolled around, and, despite every indication to the contrary, the man who debuted was not the Ultimate Warrior but rather The Renegade. Gimmick-wise, he was a cheap knockoff of the genuine article and fans realized it almost immediately, reacting to Renegade in almost all of his matches with sheer apathy. What was even worse for the “hardcore” fans among us, though, was the fact that, when looking for an Ultimate Warrior knockoff, WCW had managed to find and sign the one guy who may actually have been WORSE than the Warrior when it came time to put on a match. Sadly the man behind the Renegade character committed suicide not long after his WCW run, but that doesn’t change the fact that the character was a miserable failure from the get go.

2. The Gobbledygooker (WWF, 1990) – So much has been written about this one over the years that I don’t know what I can really add at this point. You all know the story. It’s 1990, and on WWF television and even at house shows, a ton of attention is placed on a massive novelty egg that the company is carting around from city to city. The contents of the egg were billed as a big surprise that would be revealed on the Survivor Series. Looking back on things, I have no clue why people thought that a new wrestler, concept, or otherwise that hatched out of a giant fake egg sitting on a giant fake nest actually would have been cool. That’s a pretty lame debut regardless of who or what is debuting. However, what actually came out of the egg was one of the three worst things that I could imagine coming out of it. (For the record, the other two are: 1) a swarm of spiders and 2) David Otunga.) Out popped Hector Guerrero dressed as a bird. He was the Gobbledy Gooker. That would have ben bad enough. The debut was made all the worse, though, by the fact that somebody decided that the Gooker’s first appearance on television should be followed by approximately forty-five minutes of him “dancing” with Mean Gene Okerlund in a segment that the announcers sounded embarrassed to call and the fans openly jeered. I can’t think of a single redeeming quality that this debut had.

1. The Shockmaster (WCW, 1993) – As with the Gobbledy Gooker, a lot has been said about this over the years. You know the story, so I’m not going to tell it blow-by-blow. However, what I would like to point out is that, looking back on the incident some seventeen years later, I have zero clue how anything that was associated with this new character that WCW bestowed upon Fred “Typhoon” Ottman was supposed to be cool even if he didn’t fall flat on his face (literally) during his initial appearance. First of all, his costume consisted in part of a Star Trek Storm Trooper helmet, and science fiction is never cool. On top of that, he’s a big fat guy busting through a wall. I have no clue how anybody was supposed to watch that and think of anything other than the Kool-Aid Man. Finally, we had the overdubbed promos performed by Ole Anderson speaking into a vocoder. If the character had lasted, would we really hear those every week? If we did, were we supposed to do anything other than laugh at them? All the company had to do was spend thirty seconds describing what this character’s debut was supposed to look like to even the nerdiest of fifteen year old boys, and they would have realized very quickly that it needed to be pulled before Ottman even had a chance to do his infamous belly flop.

Greg DeMarco

5. Glacier (WCW 1996) – I have to admit that I was excited when I saw the “Blood Runs Cold” videos that aired. I thought we’d see something fresh, different and exciting. What we got was a guy who was passable in the ring with an overproduced entrance (reportedly to the tune of half a million dollars), crappy outfit (reportedly to the tune of $350,000) with bleached white hair and one blue contact lens. The Blood Runs Cold promos ran FOREVER, mainly thanks to the debut being pushed back in favor of the nWo. After four appearances, the reported $850,000 worth of entrance & apparel was scrapped. One more match, and Glacier was off of TV for 10 weeks.

Something ran cold, alright.

Upon his return, Glacier was put into his most (only?) entertaining program, a feud with James Vandenberg’s charge Motris (portrayed by Kanyon). Granted, there was tons of made up back-story discussed, and Glacier’s helmet was stolen for some cosmic reason. But the angle was dropped, we never found out what the deal was between Glacier & Mortis, or why the helmet theft mattered.

4. “The Dragon” (WWF 1991) I it should be considered blasphemous to place Ricky Steamboat on a list of 5 worst anything. Yet here he is. After an amazing WWF run, peaking with his WrestleMania III classic against Randy Savage for the Intercontinental Championship, and an equally exciting run in the NWA, peaking with his NWA World Heavyweight victory, Steamboat returned to the WWF in 1991 as…The Dragon.

A fire breathing dragon? Really?

Just “The Dragon.” At first, there wasn’t even a mention of his prior Intercontinental Championship, or his WWF history. The man had already had a legendary career, and he was treated as a completely new wrestler! Who breathed fire. Crazy thing was, Steamboat never made it out of the lower mid-card during this run, but he never lost on television, and only lost on a few house shows against Skinner–who had to cheat to beat him. I guess that’s the power of a fire breathing dragon…

3. The KISS Demon (WCW 1999) – I’ve always been a fan of KISS. They’re not my favorite band, but I enjoy their work. When they performed on Monday Nitro, I had no problem with it. But when the performance ended with the debut of Bryan Adams dressed by like Gene Simmons, I knew this was a mistake. The KISS Demon was born, supposedly out of a contract with Eric Bischoff that included the provision that The Demon would get a main event PPV match. That match–tentatively scheduled to be against Vampiro on a special 1999 New Year’s Eve PPV–never happened. Well, the contract was apparently satisfied when The KISS Demon lost to The Wall in the 4th match of 2000’s Superbrawl in a “Special Main Event.”

If it debuted now, would it be Dr. Love?

Due to the “success” of the KISS Demon, plans to debut 3 more KISS themed characters as part of The Warriors of KISS were scrapped. Considering Bryan Adams pulled out of the gimmick after the first appearance (leading to Dale Torberg’s highest profile wrestling appearances), this thing was doomed from the start. I’m sure Eric Bischoff now claims he had nothing to do with the idea, much like the AWA’s Team Challenge Series.

2. Oz (WCW 1991) – Kevin Nash will go down in wrestling history as many things, including former WWF Champion Diesel and one of the founding fathers of the nWo. He’ll can also be remembered for his run as Vinnie Vegas, and even as the mohawked Master Blaster Steel. But I’m sure Nash would prefer if no one ever, EVER, brought up the Man from Emerald City, Oz.

I bet Nash punches someone in the face every time he sees this picture.

Managed by Merlin the Wizard (sure, who else?), portrayed by Kevin Sullivan, Nash entered the ring emblazoned in green, with long white hair and a white goatee (much like his current look, but back 1991 he colored it that way on purpose). Nash squashed a bunch of jobbers on his way to a “big match” against Ron Simmons at The Great American Bash. This crap continued through the end of 1991, and in early 1992 Nash was (thankfully) repackaged as Vinnie Vegas.

1. The Shockmaster (WCW 1993) – There’s nothing more I can add to this that hasn’t already been said. This had to be the worst idea in professional wrestling history to ever come to fruition. If you’ve never seen the video, find it. It’s awesome. The bastard love child of a Storm Trooper and the Kool-Aid Man, the only thing that would have made Fred Ottman’s Shockmaster debut better would have been him standing up with Ole Anderson’s voice over saying “Oh Yeah!”

OOOOOHHH YEEEAAHHH!!!

Robert S. Leighty Jr

5. The Ultimate Warrior (WCW) – The initial POP and ovation for Warrior was great, and then he began his promo. It just went on and on and you could see the crowd dying. That was just the start of an ugly run in WCW.

4. The Kiss Demon – It really seems like I am picking on WCW here, but this was stupid beyond all belief. Even worse was this was supposed to be the start on a Kiss Army in WCW and the Demon specifically was contracted to be in a Main Event of a PPV. That Main Event match was the 4th match at WCW Uncensored as even the guys in charge in WCW released how horrible this idea was.

3. Renegade – This was no fault of Rick Williams. He was presented with an opportunity to be in a Top angle in WCW with Hulk Hogan. Tell me what young guy wouldn’t jump at that chance. What Wilson had no control over is that WCW was basically promising the Ultimate Warrior and when Renegade debuted the crowd was less than thrilled.

2. The Yeti – What were they smoking in WCW when they came up with this idea. Seriously how can anyone think a Giant Mummy debuting out of a block of ice is a good idea? The Yeti debuted at Halloween Havoc 95 when he helped The Giant attack Hulk Hogan in a manner that was rather disturbing. They used a double bearhug and it looked like the Yeti was humping Hulk Hogan.

1. The Shockmaster – Easily the first debut that came to my mind when I saw this topic. I don’t see how anything can ever top this as it was just bad in a train wreck way. Everything about this was just bad or botched in some manner. Even if horrible though it was pretty damn funny and gave WWE something to mock when they promoted Rise and Fall of WCW DVD on RAW.