The mix of one of WWE’s top stars, Hollywood legends and a major storyline should’ve been a magic mix going into SummerSlam 1994.
Despite being built over the course of months, however, the bitter battle between two Undertakers – yes, two – met a fairly catastrophic end.
The madness began at the company’s Royal Rumble event in January of the same year when, having been pummelled by WWE’s biggest and heaviest performers, The Undertaker was due some much-needed time off to recuperate.
As a result, he was it seemed, pretty much killed off. Falling to defeat to Yokozuna and nine others in a grim casket match, the Phenom was stuffed inside the dreaded box and wheeled away, before mysteriously ascending to the heavens and vowing via the arena video screens that fans would be ‘witness to the rebirth’ of the Undertaker in due course.
The Deadman was gone for a while, before mysterious ‘sightings’ of the character were dotted about weekly WWE television. One week, a baker said he’d seen the ‘huge’ Undertaker while a primary school-age child said she’d seen him ‘slide down the slide.’
Jewellers, firefighters, the list went on – but what was going on Villainous manager Ted ‘Million Dollar Man’ DiBaise claimed that he’d been able to make contact with the departed grappler, later bringing him back to action under his own management, much to the disappointment of long-serving Taker aide, Paul Bearer.
All was of course not what it seemed. Fans quickly started to wonder whether or not the man they were seeing on screen really was The Undertaker, largely because he wasn’t. DiBaise had drafted in an ‘imposter’ Undertaker, who was played by wrestler Brian Lee.
Lee did the job well. Dressing in the same long coat and black hat and walking to the ring with the same mannerisms, he made a passable impression of the Demon of Death Valley, even down to the individual tattoos worn by the ‘original’ Taker which were painstakingly painted on.
In an interview years later, Lee said of the impersonation: “Your hardcore wrestling fans knew it was a gimmick.
“It’s a task mimicking anybody. Even if they do something wrong it’s hard to get it right.
“I practiced for about two months; from the time I heard I was going to do The Undertaker to the time I went to SummerSlam was a matter of two months.
“It all happened real quick…. I had about three weeks to prepare to be the hottest guy in the business.”
Nonetheless, persistent Bearer was not to be ignored in his protests that this was not the ‘real’ Undertaker, many WWE fans presumably forming a similar opinion as the weeks went by.
If this sounds cartoonish even by the standards of early 1990s WWE, the company didn’t help matters by drafting in Hollywood Leslie Nielsen and George Kennedy of Naked Gun fame for comedy skits which saw them ‘on the case’ of The Undertaker’s disappearance and apparent return.
It was all building to SummerSlam in Chicago where, in the end, it was promised that Bearer’s original Undertaker would return to confront the ‘UnderFaker.’
Judging by audience reception up to and including the return of the real Undertaker, the storyline had been going well enough and the intrigue was there, but the pantomime visual of Bearer beckoning his man to the ring really sticks in the mind as the huge arena was lit up in flashes of a ‘thunderstorm’ as the lighting director went into overdrive.
Sadly, if that was bad, things only got worse. Rather than stealing the show, the sight of two Undertakers standing across the ring from one another was a little farcical — especially given it exposed just how different the two looked despite Lee’s excellent work.
For the first time in the entire night, the crowd fell to a near silence during the swift match. Having been fully invested in the entrance of their returning hero, they appeared to instantly switch off once the two men started battling.
In that sense, the contest was mercifully short at less than nine minutes and, after three Tombstones, DiBiase’s Undertaker was dispatched and never seen again – though Lee did return as Chainz in WWE in the late 1990s.
Though the wrestling empire under the control of Vince McMahon often pushed the boundaries of common sense and taste in its wild presentation of sports entertainment, the experiment of two Undertakers must go down as one of the bizarre storyline ideas of all.
News Summary:
- Two Undertakers, Hollywood legends, schoolkids and thunderstorms – is this the worst WWE storyline of all time?
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