[1999-11-15-WWF-Raw] Chris Jericho and Chyna

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Chris Jericho dispatches a cameraman to follow him to a room where he has Chyna tied to a chair. He does his first serious promo (his first serious promo ever?) by yelling at Chyna. This was pitched by Jericho as a way to start making his character more serious. He wants Chyna to say he was the better person and she refuses so Jericho smashes her thumb multiple times with a hammer! Pretty wild angle.

[Tim Evans]

Chyna's selling of the hammer shot is something else. The makeup job is pretty extreme and Jericho comes off like a madman.

[Jingus]

Watching this segment at the time, it felt really creepy in a bad way. Of course all wrestling is fundamentally based in violence; but having a man tie up a woman and then torture her with tools... that's a whole different level of violent shit. Jericho was acting like a 70s-rape-movie villain, not a wrestling heel. And I damn near stopped watching the show when somehow this turned Chris BABYFACE for their next match.

[Zenjo]

A torture porn segment where Jericho ties up Chyna and attacks her thumb with a hammer. Yeah this is the sort of thing you should be showing to kids. The Attitude Era continues to plumb the depths of bad taste.

[Loss]

What's amazing is that this is sort of what turned Jericho babyface.

[PeteF3]

Jericho was on his way to turning babyface already, and this feels like a pretty desperate way to undo that. I would say that they should have done something like this in the ring to have more effect, but that would probably just get the crowd on Jericho's side even more.

[Superstar Sleeze]

I did not think it was a very convincing performance by Jericho. He should sounded more like a lunatic. He was too coherent. Chyna actually did a great job. Pointing out she would just be lying and she did a great job selling the hammer shot. Pretty big misfire here. Jericho has the guts to try crazy things so I give him props for that.