Worst Characters Ever!: Glacier

When it comes to wrestling gimmicks, none leave me colder (geddit?) than Glacier. Glacier’s gimmick was that he was a martial arts guy, not in an MMA shoot style, but it in that really cheese-tastic exhibition style whereby a guy would stand there and do a series of moves for no other reason than to show that he can do a series of moves (I think it might be called Kata, but I might wrong).
From April 1996, promos for Glacier started appearing on Nitro, they were very cryptic at first, but then he was finally revealed after about 4-5 months to be... Glacier – the Sub Zero of WCW.
Glacier’s entrance involved the house lights dimming and blue laser beams being shot across the crowd, the awful, awful music played and it would, erm, start to snow. I’m not kidding, fake snow would fall from the ceiling. At this point Glacier enters looking exactly like Sub-Zero did in Mortal Kombat 2 (when he was given a waistcoat and funny face-paint to differentiate him from the array of generic ninjas of varying colours). According to the ring announcer, his outfit has an evil face on his back because he knows that evil is always behind him, and he wore a helmet which was over 400 years old! No really, even though it looked new, it was actually handed down from his sensei.
After Glacier’s long-drawn-out entrance (it usually took about two or three minutes after he did all his fannying about in the ring, he would bow to his opponent and then bow to the referee. With the house lights still an eerie shade of blue and the snow still falling, the match would begin.
Glacier sucked in the ring. There’s no better way of putting it, the guy sucked. In his matches he utilised his martial arts to do some pretty looking roundhouse kicks and some stupid take-downs.
I can’t emphasise enough just how shit this gimmick was; with all its build-up, high production values (over half a million dollars were pumped into the production of his entrance), and hype, you’d think that he’d at least be half decent... you are wrong, you are so wrong.

Worst Characters Ever!: Disco Inferno

“He’s so cocky, he’s so cool, he’s just a disco dancing fool”

I’ve not mentioned it until now, but to mark the 15th anniversary of the start of WCW Nitro earlier this month, I decided to watch it from the beginning (I'm up to Januaey 1996). I’ve read a few books on WCW, and some wrestling biographies, so had a sense of all the backstage bullshit, but I realised that I hadn’t watched it until it had gone past saving.

I’ve been watching it with an open mind and, comparing it with Raw in ’95, WCW were actually putting out a half-decent show. The main-events were mostly bullshit, with the belt being passed every other episode between Hogan, Flair, Savage and Luger, but some of the mid-card stuff was genuinely excellent. With stars like Sabu, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Jushin Liger, Dean Malenko, Psychosis, Alex Wright, Konan and (the very underrated) Johnny B. Badd, appearing most weeks and putting on some stellar matches, it is actually worth watching. This is WCW pre-nWo, pre-Outsiders, pre-Bischoff as character; the show had momentum and energy and the formula can still be seen today in the better episodes of Impact. The commentary was pretty dire. Bobby Heenan made for an obvious heel colour commentator, Bischoff was the play-by-play guy and Steve “Mongo” McMichael also as a colour commentator. Steve McMichael is plain awful; during every show he sits with some ugly dog called Pepe and bickers with Bobby the Brain. In a match between Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit, Eddie hits a Tornado DDT, Mongo comes out with the line: “Wow that move has never been done on this planet and if you think you've seen it before you have more rocks in your head than Heenan.” Hmm...

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. WCW also had some terrible characters, and the one I want to share with you today is Disco Inferno. Disco Inferno is basically a wrestler based on John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever, well, kind of. Mr Inferno would come to the ring dressed in disco garb, and do a weird wiggly dance whist pointing his hands and the most lacklustre way imaginable. Was he meant to be shit? Was that his gimmick? I would have loved to have been at the meeting when someone came up with this character. “How about a wrestler who’s a disco dancer?”, “I love it, let’s put him on TV”. Take a look at the clips and try and understand how the hell this guy lasted for 6 years in WCW, and won a few titles? The mind boggles, it really does.