The Mystique of The Undertaker and Kane
The Undertaker is sort of an enigma. He had one of the worst ideas for a gimmick ever when he debuted: a zombie that can’t feel pain and gets his power from an urn. We the fans were suppose to buy this as fact because wrestling was “real” and if the announcers told us that this guy was a zombie we were suppose to believe them. To Vince McMahon and company we were all dumb marks that had to buy everything they were feeding us because we didn’t know anything about the “sport”. Of course the fans aren’t nearly as stupid or gullible as some promoters may think. Case in point: the dancing birdman, The Gobbeldy Gooker.
The Gooker was the surprise for all those that watched Survivor Series 90. You see months before the event the WWF had a giant egg at various shows. The fact that this all started out with a giant egg isn’t a good sign that the payoff would be good but still the announcers and fans kept wondering what would hatch from the egg come Survivor Series time. Well, on that fateful night the egg did indeed hatch and reveal to the world a turkey man that loved to dance. I must admit that I have never watched this PPV but from what I hear the fans were none too happy. They booed the hell out of the Gooker and his lame antics. Thankfully the WWF decided that nobody wanted to see The Gobbeldy Gooker and he barely clung on for a few more appearances. Vince and company thought the kids would dig their version of a major league sports mascot but the utter stupidity of the whole thing doomed it. Other then the fact that it was one of the worst wrestling surprises ever, it was a man in a horrible looking turkey costume. If they just had him show up at a regular show, the fans would have hated anyways.
But promoters rarely learn from past mistakes. The WWF has continued to give us bad gimmicks and angles and has even rehashed ones that bombed horribly the first time around. Now, I go back to The Undertaker. Unbeatable musclemen, cowboys, hillbillies, evil foreigners, and millionaires that want to buy championships are believable. Not that Hulk Hogan’s ability to “hulk up” is realistic but he and most other wrestler’s gimmick no matter how bad they were at least were grounded in reality someway. The Undertaker on the other hand was based on a creature from horror movies. Surely, the fans no matter how much they bought into the WWF hype would never go for a wrestler that came back from the gave to defeat Hulk Hogan. Because logically if The Undertaker was a real zombie then he really had died at some point in his life. Even if his manager Paul Bearer could have used the power of the urn to bring him back to life, wouldn’t somebody notice that a once dead man is now walking around on national television? Of course you have to wonder why a zombie would want to wrestle and how would he past his physical with no vital signs. Apparently not many fans thought that way and the Taker became a huge hit. I can only think of two reasons for him getting over with the crowd. One: kids (thinking that he’s real) thought he was cool. Two: the adults bought into his aura. The Taker had a great, frighten look, cool spooky music, and the whole zombie thing really made him the ultimate monster heel. Sure Andre and Bundy were huge and the Road Warriors were savages in the ring but the Taker felt no pain and if you knocked him down, he’d just slowly sit back up like nothing happened at all. He was big, scary, unbeatable, and had one of the best finishers in the business, the tombstone piledriver.
The first real crap moment in the character’s career came at This Tuesday in Texas (the first and only PPV in WWF’s attempt to do weekly PPVs). Hogan defeated the dead man by throwing the ashes from the Taker’s urn into his eyes. No amount of physical abuse could bring him down but an old heel trick did him in. If he was mortal I could see blinding him leading to his defeat. But, alas he was the undead and immune to harm. During his zombie days the urn was the source of his powers and when stolen would weaken the Taker. The contents originally was the ashes of his dead parents but since Kane brought the coffined corpses of mister and misses Taker on RAW and chokeslamed Taker through them, I doubt it was. Of course the WWF writing team has rewritten large chucks of Taker’s and Kane’s backstory so his parents ashes were in the urn but somehow they turned back into rotting bodies and were buried. Hell, the urn was stolen by Kama and melted down into a necklace and then returned to its original urn shape at one point. But then the urn disappeared during the Attitude Era and didn’t return till Wrestlemania XX were its role in the Taker’s power was put back in place.
This leads to the massive amounts of continuity problems with the character. First he’s a zombie that gets power from an urn, then he’s a perfectly living evil cult leader, then a normal and still living biker, and now he’s somewhere between zombie and biker. The WWF has never explained how he became living. He just slowly over time lost the zombie aspects of his gimmick. When he came back as the American Badass, no one on the announce team or in the locker room seemed surprised that he was a normal human being and they also forgot all about the Ministry of Darkness’ attempts to kill people and take over the WWF.
Kane brings a whole other part to further mess up the Taker’s back story. Kane is the Undertaker’s half-brother. Because Taker was evil as a kid he burnt down his father’s funeral parlor which killed ma and pa Dead Man and horribly burnt Kane. Paul Bearer is Kane’s father and brings him into the WWF to take out the Taker. Now The Taker is a face and the fans still cheer him after they learn that he killed his mommy and daddy. And Kane is the bad guy because he wants revenge for being disfigured and being driven insane by Taker’s action. Kane’s history was pretty solid except that X-Pac taught him how to talk even though his vocal cords were damaged in the fire. I just guess X-Pac is the greatest teacher ever. Well, this all came crashing down during the Katie Vick angle. Kane wasn’t locked up in an insane asylum all those years, he was really a functioning member of society and a college student. He must have had a good personally because despite wearing a mask he got to date the head cheerleader. Everything was great for a guy that didn’t seem to care that his half-brother tried to kill him and left him scared physically and emotionally. That is until he drove Katie home after a party. Now, I’ve never driven a stick shift and nether did Kane but unlike Kane I wouldn’t have tired to do so. Unluckily for Katie because Kane’s inability to drive a stick shift caused him to crash into a tree and kill the now head cheerleader of heaven. HHH claimed that Kane raped Katie after she died but lucky after a few weeks everyone (except Shawn Michaels) forgot the whole thing ever happened.
Like the egg at Survivor Series, one of the great mysteries of the WWF was what Kane looked like under his mask. Now Kane switch to a mask that just covered the top part of his face, showing the world that his total face wasn’t disfigured. But, after being pushed to the edge, Kane was forced to unmask by Eric Bischoff. When he removed the mask all we saw was nothing at all. Kane wasn’t disfigured in the least even though The Corporation unmasked him and used a picture of his face that they cringed at to blackmail him. So now the very basis of his wrestling career and character was wiped out. So, he healed from his injures after the fire, went to college, and then came to the WWF to attack the Undertaker for nothing (since he never really seamed mad at his mother and foster father dieing). That didn’t stop the errors in his back story. When he was dating Torri, X-Pac kidnapped her and she fell in love with him presumably because as a kid she really liked Animal of the Muppets. Torri revealed to the world that Kane’s bits and pieces were burnt to the point of not working yet in his pregnancy angle with Lita his bits and pieces are now fine enough to maybe produce a child.
A talk about the brothers of destruction can’t be complete with mentioning their super powers. Taker being undead had the whole feel no pain thing working out for him but he could also levitate the ring and cause lighting to strike indoors. He even once floated up to the rafters to escape every heel in the locker room. Kane also feels no pain even though he’s alive which makes no sense. I don’t carry if they are brothers. The Taker has super powers because he’s dead. Kane’s perfectly alive like I said and he can light objects on fire and isn’t affected by fire in the least. Their supernatural powers are totally unbelievable and really hurt the “sport”. If they can do such things then why don’t they just burst their opponents into flames and strike them down with lighting. Wrestling needs to seam as real as possible. Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit are two of the best wrestlers ever. They put on wonderful amazing matches all the time. They are two of the most legit guys ever in the WWF. But, what does it look like when The Undertaker after being buried alive, escapes unharmed. Surly they couldn’t beat a guy that no sells death itself. Kurt Angle fell about 20 feet to the floor and may never wrestle. Doesn’t that make The Undertaker better then him?
The Undertaker has remained an incredibly popular wrestler for over ten years and Kane has been over since his debut. Even with “on paper” bad gimmicks, confusing backgrounds, and super powers that the government should fear people will always cheer them on and fondly remember their time in the ring. People love to believe in something greater then themselves. They loved Hogan because he was the nearly unbeatable ultimate symbol of goodness. They also love Taker and Kane for being comic book heroes/villains brought to life. They can ether be the ultimate evil: undead monsters whose villainy knows no bonds. Or they can be the ultimate good: men so powerful that evil can not harm them and not even the grave can keep them from bringing justice. They have both transcended so much stupidity and lameness to become icons of the industry. People laugh at Jason the Terrible, the various wrestling mummies, Mantaur, and Christmas Creature people buy tickets to see Taker and Kane. Wrestling is just weird like that. Sometimes people get over with the crowd in spite of horrible gimmicks and bad story lines.