[1994-03-07-WWF-Raw] Tatanka ceremony

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Tatanka has a ceremony with Chief Ray Little Turtle, Strongbow and Wahoo, where he is presented with sacred feathers. Tatanka's response to this seems genuine, but Wahoo McDaniels?? Adding an unnecessary "s" to a last name is SUCH a huge pet peeve of mine.

 

That's picking nits, though, because Tatanka's tears are pretty cool and I'm an asshole for dwelling on that.

[El-P]

WTF was that about ? Funny how Tatanka was pretty hot for most of 93 until he got squashed by Yokozuna. Then he pretty much did nothing of note until his heel turn in the Summer of 94, then gained weight and turn into crap quickly in 95. Yet another occurence of interrupting an unbeaten streak not being a good idea.

[Kevin Ridge]

Random to see Wahoo here on WWF TV. Did Tatanka legitimately team with Wahoo at any point? Decent emotion shown by Tatanka here. I wonder at what point did they decide to turn him heel.

[Exposer]

I'm not so sure WWF should have put this on tv but Tatanka found it to be really important so that's what matters here. I personally thought it was a cool segment but doing this kind of stuff in front of a live crowd is always a risk considering annoying hecklers. I'm probably thinking on it too much because there wasn't a lot of background crap from fans. It was a good segment anyways.

[soup23]

Was this ceremony legit? I really couldn't tell, and having Strongbow there seemed odd given his true heritage. Cool segment nonetheless.

[Zenjo]

With a heel run in it would've all made sense. Without that it's a bizarre, out of place segment.

[PeteF3]

That came later--IRS served Tatanka papers for a "gift tax" on the headdress, and when Tatanka tore them up, IRS retaliated by attacking Tatanka during a match and trashing the headdress. He even beat up fat decrepit Jay Strongbow.

[Guest stanley]

I choose to forget this era

[PeteF3]

I'd forgotten how incessantly they used to shoehorn current event topics into Raw commentary. I believe we've now had more Nancy/Tonya references by various promotions early in '94 than we had Leona Helmsley references in 1990. DiBiase sounds like he's reading his directly off a script. Tatanka is still a bad promo, and he uses the word "bestows" in a bizarre manner--I don't know what word he was supposed to be going for. I wonder what Wahoo, or Little Turtle for that matter, thought about sharing this time with Chief Jay. Tatanka says he teamed with Wahoo early in his career--that's plausible, because I think Wahoo worked for SAPW, where a young Chris Chavis wrestled. He only says two sentences, but damned if Wahoo doesn't still have a presence and a gravity when he talks.

 

I'm a Cleveland Indians fan who thinks Chief Wahoo is one of the worst sports-logo abominations on the planet, and don't even get me started on the name "Redskins." So there's a possibly-oversensitive part of me who still sees all this as noble-savage minstrelsy, even if the WWF is attempting to treat this with respect. Still, all it is is a set-up to rehash the somewhat worn-out "heel destroys the headdress" angle, so the cynical part of this looms large.

 

That said, the Tatanka/Kwang match where IRS collects on the unpaid gift tax is an angle that should go on an Errata set. It pays off this ceremony nicely and while it only led to a nothing mid-card house show feud (oddly dominated by Schyster, even in the Indian strap blowoffs), it was put over huge by Vince on commentary and was one of the major angles of the first half of the year.