Entry tags:

movie, wrestlecrap, wtf

Undertaker Begins
WHYYYYYYY?!!

WWE Films Prepares Undertaker Film

So, immediately after reading this, I shot an email over to RD Reynolds of Wrestlecrap to see if he knows about it. Oh, I'm sure someone has it on the forum already, but I'm too lazy to go look.

Apparently, they're going to set it in the old west. Why? Well, if you remember what the Undertaker looked like when he first debuted in the WWF back in 1990, he looked like an old west undertaker. He even put his opponents in coffins. At first, they would just rent coffins from actual funeral parlors, but later on, WWF manufactured their own wild-west-style coffin props for the character, including the famous "double-wide, double-deep" coffin that they made for Yokozuna and, I think, Kamala. They definitely refurbished it a couple times and used it in story arcs where the opponent wrestler was normal sized. ...but I digress.

The character started changing about halfway through the 90s. He had always been portrayed as being vaguely supernatural, but he started doing wackier things things toward 1995, like summoning lightning and teleporting. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. I know I've seen episodes of Raw where he's teleported. He absorbed Kwang's green mist and spat it back at him. He was kind of this weird comic book character for a while, and it became harder to justify watching it to people.

After that, he was a satanic cult leader for a while, and he crucified other wrestlers. I don't know much about that era, because I was not watching at that point, but it looked pretty stupid. He was doing even more supernatural things.

And then that fizzled out entirely and he turned into an "American badass" biker, for no apparent reason. He had this catch phrase about soup bones or something. I don't know why, but WWE has this weird thing about combining American patriotism with death (see the All-American "Dr. Death" Steve Williams). Nothing says you're a proud American like being a supernatural zombie wrestler who can teleport and shoot lightning.

And that's not even the full range of the Undertaker's history. He has a brother Kane, whose history is equally filled with insanity, if not more so. I'm not going to go era-by-era with Kane. All that needs to be said is that he's a childhood burn victim, thought to have been dead but later turned up alive, masked, scarred, and mute, all of which would be later contradicted, including one storyline which revealed Kane's awkward adolescence, where he accidentally killed his first love in a car crash because he didn't know how to drive stick. I'm not making any of that up. Oh, and he raped the corpse or something, which was painfully recreated before a national audience by Triple H.

They even wrote a book about it, laughably trying to harmonize the ridiculous history of Kane.

I'm pretty sure that the book doesn't have Kane, the brother of the Undertaker, being born in the Old West.

This movie, should it go through to fruition, will add just another layer of absurdity to the entire Undertaker mythos. If you're a comic book nerd or a Star Wars geek, and you're prone to trying to make sense out of story lines that are woefully rife with contradictions, prepare to stand in awe of the average wrestling fan. Continuity in wrestling is a comedic goldmine.