We all know about The Shockmaster’s infamous debut where he fell through the wall of the A Flair For The Gold set, but did you know he actually wrestled under that name afterward?
They retooled the gimmick to make him a construction worker (?) but still kept the Shockmaster name (??). No, I don’t understand why they didn’t just re-name him to “Hard Hat Fred” or something. The silly gimmick name doesn’t really match the pedestrian gimmick.
I guess they just had no idea what to do with him. Poor Fred Ottman. He really did deserve better than all of this.
But still… Kudos to whoever decided to give The Shockmaster a ripoff of The Beatles’ song “Day Tripper” as his theme music, though.
That’s really cute.
I think the gimmick was that he war the hard hat in case he tripped, I’m not making a dumb joke, that’s really the gimmick
Ah! Okay, I didn’t make that connection for some reason. Makes sense, though.
After Shockmaster’s debut turned into a joke, it seemed they decided to rib him to death over it. The hard hat because he’s accident-prone. And the sloppy guitar playing as a theme: it’s great rock riffs being butchered by a clumsy guitar player, much like the Shockmaster botched his awesomeness by falling on his face. At least that’s my take on the bizarre entrance music he was given
And the guitar player even botched a few licks from the Stones’ “Satisfaction”, right when Mike DiBucca/DiBacco/whatever was being introduced.
That means it’s not just the big two of the Seattle sound (ersatz versions of Pearl Jam’s “Evenflow” for Chris Jericho and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for DDP) but also the big two of the British Invasion who got ripped off by whoever was writing entrance themes for WCW back in the ’90s.
A lot of those rip-offs were apparently due to Jimmy Hart liking to rip off other songs when he took over WCW’s music production: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SuspiciouslySimilarSong/ProfessionalWrestling (I’m not sure if Shockmaster started using that theme after Hart joined the company though; Wikipedia doesn’t have enough info on them for me to guess eitherway).
Yeah, Jimmy loved to do that because it was a lot cheaper than licensing the real song. Makes sense.
Let’s see, commentators criticizing both the theme music and camera work…graphics misspelling the jobber’s name… When *Tony Schiavone* is asking, “Who’s running this show?”, your production could really use improvement.
I realize Mike Dibacco is the enhancement talent for this fine match but the announcer and commentators could at least give him the courtesy of pronouncing his name right,
De-Boo-Kah? Really?
I think that the hardhat/construction-look was a tip-of-the-hat to Ottman’s gimmick when he wrestled in Florida as ‘The Big Steel Man.’ I recall seeing him wrestling Dusty Rhodes under that name during one of his first appearances in WWF/E at a TV taping in Niagara Falls.
Could be! Kind of like when WCW made Booker T into G.I Bro.
That is without a doubt the worst theme music I’ve ever heard in my life. And I’ve been watching GWF reruns recently.
his music sound like some bad beatles / rolling stones some type of muisc
“Talentless clutz” gimmick fails to get over. News at 11.
You too can learn to play the guitar in just two easy lessons!
Day Tripper..how perfect but I remember he tripped at night