Stand-ins used in wrestling

[Jingus]

I was thinking more of cases where they had unmasked wrestlers pretending to be other unmasked wrestlers, but maybe cases like that haven't really existed.

 

Like announcers referring to someone as Barry Windham throughout a match in an attempt to fool an audience into thinking it's him, when it's actually Dan Spivey in the ring.

Hey, I think I might have finally remembered a legit case of this from American tv wrestling. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, it's been so long, but I seem to remember this being done. In late 1996, WCW had the early NWO angle going on, and the top feud for the moment was Hogan vs. Flair. Then Flair got injured, tore his rotator cuff on a Japanese tour iirc. To explain his sudden absence, WCW showed footage of someone laying down on the floor in the back. They played an old audio clip of Flair selling over the image, and claimed that it was Naitch and he'd been assaulted backstage by the NWO. I think that's how it went.

[S.L.L.]

There are a lof of stand-ins in wrestling in this sense. JBL is doing a modified Million Dollar Man gimmick, which itself is essentially the original Mr. McMahon gimmick. Any number of wrestlers from Mutoh to CM Punk to Akira Hokuto have done a Great Kabuki gimmick. Umaga is a nearly verbatim Kamala. The only problem with the fake Razor & Diesel angle was that the gimmicks themselves were pretty bad to begin with, and Bogner and Jacobs are/were horrible professional wrestlers.

These are really more reuses of common character tropes than true "stand-ins" in the sense that Loss means it.

 

Loss seems to be looking for guys who were meant to be filling in precisely for certain other guys.

 

"Corrupt millionaire" is a pretty standard character archetype. DiBiase, McMahon, and JBL all played "corrupt millionaire", as did a lot of people outside of wrestling, but they weren't ever supposed to be "stand-ins" for one another. If nothing else JBL's heavy influences from JR Ewing and Tom DeLay separate his character quite a bit from DiBiase's, as does Vince's...um..."Vincier" qualities. Not "stand-ins" so much as guys belonging to a common character archetype.

 

"The Great Kabuki" really has become an archetype unto itself, at least in pro wrestling. Wrestling is such a derivative art form that I could never even say with certainty if Mera was the first guy to do the "mysterious Japanese heel with a Kabuki theme" bit, but even if he were, his successors were never really meant to "stand in" for him, just to pay homage to/rip off a good gimmick. Lest we forget, Muta was supposed to be Kabuki's son. Can't very well be your own son. Not without time travel and a sick mind, anyway.

 

"Jungle savage", while not as common of an archetype as it once was for obvious reasons, was still a common archetype. Kamala and Umaga certainly have a lot in common. They also have some big differences, and certainly, no one is supposed to mistake one for the other.

 

As for Bogner and Jacobs, well, I don't think anyone was supposed to mistake them for the genuine article, either. Vince McMahon himself said as much on commentary when "Razor" first "returned". As while this may not be germaine to the actual topic...what's your beef with the original Razor and Diesel gimmicks?

[Guest KÄSE]

My point was that Bogner and Jacobs are often misinterpreted as stand-ins for Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, while they were really "stand-ins" for the gimmicks, or, as you put it, archetypes, that were ostensibly needed in the promotion at that time. Every archetype fits into a particular slot. Umaga and Kamala may not be carbon copies, but it would be hard for them to co-exist in the same promotion at the same time without having some interaction (or being a tag team). They both occupy the same line in the pro graps <i>dramatis personae</i>, so to speak.

 

When you frame it like this, the weakness of the Razor and Diesel gimmicks becomes more apparent. The evil millionaire gimmick has a clear role as leader of heel stable, heel champion or some similar slot. I grant there is some potential in the Scarface-influenced Cuban Libertarian immigrant entrepreneur shtick but it needs mic/skit time to get over, particularly in a non-XPW promotion where being a straight up drug dealer isn't a kosher gimmick. The Diesel gimmick was literally just "big dude, something about trucks". Hall and Nash made those gimmicks work as characters, but Bogner and Jacobs obviously weren't Hall and Nash and they were never given the chance to develop the gimmicks to their respective own images. It's too bad really, because the post-unmasking Kane run made me once again think Jacobs might have become something as a wrestler if he'd have gotten a more expressive gimmick before he was over the hill.

[S.L.L.]

When you frame it like this, the weakness of the Razor and Diesel gimmicks becomes more apparent. The evil millionaire gimmick has a clear role as leader of heel stable, heel champion or some similar slot. I grant there is some potential in the Scarface-influenced Cuban Libertarian immigrant entrepreneur shtick but it needs mic/skit time to get over, particularly in a non-XPW promotion where being a straight up drug dealer isn't a kosher gimmick. The Diesel gimmick was literally just "big dude, something about trucks". Hall and Nash made those gimmicks work as characters, but Bogner and Jacobs obviously weren't Hall and Nash and they were never given the chance to develop the gimmicks to their respective own images. It's too bad really, because the post-unmasking Kane run made me once again think Jacobs might have become something as a wrestler if he'd have gotten a more expressive gimmick before he was over the hill.

But is that really because the original gimmicks were flawed, or is it because the nature of the Fake Razor & Diesel gimmicks prevented them from working - perhaps deliberately so? After all, the crux of Bogner's & Jacobs' act wasn't really that they were Scarface and a trucker, it's that they were impostors of guys who were Scarface & a trucker. The focus was very different.

[Loss]

Imposters of imposters of Scarface and a trucker, even.

[Guest KÄSE]

Yeah, given what is now known about the legal situation at the time, it's certainly possible that the whole concept might have been a work as SLL alludes. Also, all wrestling is fake. And so on.

 

That being said, most successful gimmicks are interchangeable enough to breed imitation, as noted above. Given the (relatively) high incidence of Hispanic wrestlers in the past decade or so, the Cubano style has found little to no love (though I admit I haven't watched much in the way of Florida indies this millennium).

 

More people in wrestling today doing a Kevin Nash gimmick than a trucker gimmick.

 

Razor Ramon and Diesel seem to have died in '96 for the most part, and I don't think Bogner and Jacobs are to blame for that.

 

I'm only now learning WWE revisited the fake Razor/Diesel thing as recently as on the 12/3/07 RAW as part of a Kennedy promo. That's amusing. Wrestling is perhaps the one medium of entertainment that makes use of cases of mistaken identity even more often than the prime time sitcom.

[S.L.L.]

Yeah, given what is now known about the legal situation at the time, it's certainly possible that the whole concept might have been a work as SLL alludes. Also, all wrestling is fake. And so on.

 

That being said, most successful gimmicks are interchangeable enough to breed imitation, as noted above. Given the (relatively) high incidence of Hispanic wrestlers in the past decade or so, the Cubano style has found little to no love (though I admit I haven't watched much in the way of Florida indies this millennium).

Well, there is Estrada and Carlito, with Carlito in particular borrowing pretty heavily from the Razor Ramon playbook (albeit with a fraction of the effectiveness).

 

More people in wrestling today doing a Kevin Nash gimmick than a trucker gimmick.

True. In fairness, the trucker stuff never really played that much into how Nash portrayed the character beyond the associated imagery. He could have had any number of gimmicks and still been the same guy, more or less.

 

Also, Kevin Nash ended up being a much bigger deal than Diesel, so I can understand why he'd get copied more. ;-)

 

Razor Ramon and Diesel seem to have died in '96 for the most part, and I don't think Bogner and Jacobs are to blame for that.

Certainly not. Scott Hall and Kevin Nash are to blame, because they jumped to WCW and killed the gimmicks in the process.

[Phil Schneider]

Would all the fake Memphis masked guys count? I mean you had fake Assassins, a fake Spoiler, fake Mr. Wrestling, fake Super Destroyer. Pretty much every big masked gimmick of the 80's had someone in Memphis ripping them off.

[Bix]

Don't forget Jerry Stubbs as fake Masked Superstar.

[MikeCampbell]

Jeff Farmer as Sting?

[Loss]

Sting was an angle. It wasn't a case of a promotion deliberately attempting to replace someone and act as if nothing has changed.

 

Think Becky on Roseanne, not two wrestlers using the same gimmick.

[Loss]

That said, I'm closing this thread, since none of these examples are really what the thread was about originally.