Forgotten Favorites 09.07.10: SmackDown 2008 – Undertaker vs. Kane

Welcome back, wrestling fans. It’s time for everybody’s favorite time traveling column, where we go back and relive some of the most overlooked moments of wrestling’s past.

With Night of Champions around the corner, we’re gearing up for a World Heavyweight Title match-up that’s quite familiar to longtime WWE fans. This week in Forgotten Favorites we’re going to put this particular World Title match in perspective as we revisit the twists and turns of this most serious of brotherly battles. It’s a rivalry that’s raged for years, and yet each time it’s come to blows inside the ring there’s been an added unique flavor to make it a little different from the last go-round. This week we’re going to focus on one of the lesser-remembered battles in this never-ending war, while also reviewing all of the classic clashes we’ve witnessed along the way.

And so, who wants great wrestling?

SmackDown – April 4, 2008
Undertaker vs. Kane

WHY IT SHOULD BE REMEMBERED

Back in the day, when the man known as Jim Grimm was but a wee little Jimmy Grimm, there existed a challenge of wits and determination that decided the alpha male of the house. It was a battle fought between the young Jimmy and his older (and allegedly wiser) brother Dave. They were not the only pair of brothers to engage in this most heated and serious of battles, the likes of which were raging at the time in households across this great nation, but nevertheless it felt at times that their confrontations were the end-all be-all of this realm of combat. It was a competition of guts, intelligence, and turtle shells. It was Super Mario Kart on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

Dave was (and still is) about seven years my senior, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t bring the star power like he’d never felt before. As time moved on, when SNES gave way to Nintendo 64 and Mario Kart gave way to Goldeneye, battles raged once more. I vowed to be the more skilled marksman, to fire an absurd amount of explosives from my grenade launcher, and to be the one who destroyed my brother. Throughout it all, despite the age difference, my brother and I stayed on a relatively level playing field, neither one of us ever truly developing a consistent competitive edge over the other. It seemed to be a draw.

Little did he know, all along I had been hatching a plan to bring about his demise. For over a decade I bided my time, waiting for the right moment to strike. And then came SummerSlam, when I …

Sorry, I was describing my life as Kane again. Sometimes the Big Red Machine is to me what John Rambo is to Frank Reynolds. But I digress …

If you’re talking sibling rivalry in World Wrestling Entertainment, you’re talking The Undertaker and Kane. Sure, other brothers have done battle inside the E’s squared circle, but never has a blood feud raged off and on for so many years as it has with the Brothers of Destruction. And supernatural, superhuman, or superdemonic as the two may be, the running storyline has been oh-so-human over the course of their heated rivalry. Just like any other pair of brothers that has ever fought for male dominance in the house — and just like me and my own brother — it’s a war that, while sometimes put on hold in the face of an outside threat, is never truly over. It’s a constant struggle between the elder and the younger as each tries to out-do the other. Sometimes it’s a matter of breaking the other’s record on Rainbow Road; sometimes it’s a matter of earning revenge on the other for starting a fire in a funeral home that horribly scars one’s face.

To fully appreciate the longevity of the Kane/Undertaker rivalry, we’ve got to turn our clocks back thirteen years to when it all began. Debuting at the Bad Blood PPV in September of 1997, Kane first made his presence felt in the World Wrestling Federation by costing his older brother a victory against Shawn Michaels in the first ever Hell in a Cell match. In the months leading up to the first one-on-one match between the two brothers at WrestleMania XIV, the surrounding story was a hell of a lot more human than might have been expected of two warring demonic monsters.

Revenge for a traumatic childhood was Kane’s immediate goal upon his arrival in WWE. But when an outside threat was presented in the form of D-Generation X, it seemed that, if only for a moment, the Undertaker and Kane were united by blood against a common enemy. This was, of course, all thrown out the window when the little brother set his big brother on fire at the Royal Rumble (or did he?!), and the Undertaker returned after a brief absence to do that which he had initially refused to do: battle his own flesh and blood. When your brother tries to burn you alive, well, that’s the point when Randy Marsh would tell you … it’s on.

When asked for comment on the three Tombstones that brought the Undertaker victory over his brother at WrestleMania, the ghost of Karen Carpenter replied simply, “They’ve only just begun.” And indeed, the anorexic specter was dead-on (lulz!) with her assessment of the situation, as the war of sibling rivalry would continue to rage on. One month after their WrestleMania encounter, Undertaker and Kane would do battle once more, this time (literally) inside a burning ring of fire. The first (and ever since, quite rare) Inferno Match resulted in yet another victory for the Deadman, and it was at this point that the feud between brothers was put on hold for a brief period of time.

As 1998 rolled along, the Undertaker and Kane crossed paths, although not too frequently in one-on-one competition. When Undertaker “accidentally” cost Steve Austin his WWF Title in a match against Kane at King of the Ring, suspicions began to arise as to whether the two brothers had actually gotten on the same page. These suspicions were later confirmed when it was revealed that the evil Mr. McMahon had made peace between the brothers as part of his heinous master plan in his eternal struggle with the Rattlesnake.

Unfortunately for those who hate to see family members at odds, the peace, just like cold November rain, could not last forever. When both brothers pinned Austin in a Triple Threat match at Breakdown in September, the WWF Title was declared vacant, with a one-on-one match between Kane and Taker to be held at the following PPV to decide the new undisputed Champion. The match ended up going to a no-contest when guest referee Stone Cold counted both men out and refused to declare a winner, but prior to the non-finish, the world had been shocked by the Undertaker revealing he had once again joined forces with the dastardly Paul Bearer. With the roles of hero and villain now reversed, the battle between brothers took on a new life.

The night after Judgment Day, this heelified Undertaker declared that he had indeed set the fire that burned his younger brother. And he did it because the Deadman don’t put up with no weakness. Ya heard?

Undertaker and Kane would meet one-on-one again the following month at Survivor Series in the Quarter-Finals of a tournament to crown a new WWF Champion. Bearer-ference gave Taker the victory in this last demonic brother one-on-one PPV match for quite some time. Their paths would cross occasionally over the course of the next couple of years, the highest profile clash of which would be a Tag Title affair at SummerSlam 1999. Once again, the Deadman got one over on his little bro when the Big Red Machine and X-Pac lost their Tag Team Titles to the Undertaker and Big Show. However, shortly after SummerSlam, Taker and Show would drop the belts to The Rock and Mankind, and the Deadman would go on an extended hiatus, disappearing from television screens just before his scheduled title shot in the Six Pack Challenge at Unforgiven.

Still, the rivalry between the Brothers of Destruction had far from been settled. While they had traded off the roles of face and heel for the couple of years prior, their feud took on new life when the Undertaker returned to the E in 2000 sporting a different kind of look.

Fred Durst is his homeboy.

Although they stood side by side as a good-guy tandem for a brief period of time, Kane returned to his evil and jealous ways once the summer rolled along. The rivalry was reignited, with a recently re-heelified Kane taking on his now American Badass of a brother at SummerSlam 2000, their first one-on-one PPV confrontation since Survivor Series ’98.

SummerSlam was to be the last time these two would go head to head on PPV for several years, as a Kane face turn and a WCW/ECW invasion would lead to the height of the good-guy Brothers of Destruction team in all of its destructive glory. Coexisting consistently for the longest period of time yet, Taker and Kane Chokeslammed any fool that dared step foot in their yard for several months, all the way up until Undertaker sold his evil soul to Mr. McMahon near the end of 2001.

From here on out for the next couple of years, the brothers wouldn’t cross paths too frequently. Kane sat out mid-2002 with an injury, returning to an Undertaker-less Raw in 2002. Separated by the brand extension, the Brothers of Destruction neither teamed nor did battle for over a year. That is, until an unmasked Kane went on the war path in the summer of 2003.

When Undertaker, SmackDown’s resident keeper of justice, met Mr. McMahon in a Buried Alive match at the Survivor Series, the world was shocked by the interference of a psycho-crazy Kane. After burying his brother alive, Kane claimed that the Undertaker had become a shell of the monster that used to terrorize the WWE, allowing himself to become weak and inexcusably human with his motorcycle-riding persona. It was a mercy killing, from Kane’s perspective, as his older brother had become what he considered to be an embarrassment.

Unfortunately for the Big Red Machine, his plan backfired in ways he couldn’t have possibly imagined. Indeed, he had killed the American Badass that dominated the WWE for over three years. But the worst kind of phoenix would rise from his ashes: the Deadman of old.

It all did begin again at WrestleMania XX, especially for the Undertaker. Wrestling’s favorite zombie returned to once again vanquish his evil little brother, and with a Tombstone Piledriver he put to rest (for six years at least) the most serious case of sibling rivalry in WWE history.

This week’s Forgotten Favorite was the first time since WrestleMania XX that Kane and the Undertaker met one on one inside a WWE ring. The reason I chose this particular match to center everything around is because it stands in such stark contrast to just about every other Kane/Taker meeting in WWE history. It was completely unlike all of their previous encounters, in that this time each man (or demon or whatever) was a wildly popular fan favorite, and each one possessed a sizable level of respect for the other man. This was far from the “My superpowers are so cooler than yours!” battles of early 1998, and not even close to the “You’ve tarnished our monstrous family’s evil name!” feud that culminated at WrestleMania XX. For the first time in the history of Kane vs. The Undertaker, both men looked at one another as their equal. The match was, in the purest sense of the term, strictly business.

“I like you” … “I like you too, man”

This non-title SmackDown contest from 2008 is a far cry from all of the other Kane/Undertaker battles of yesteryear in terms of significance, but I still find it to be one of their most compelling and entertaining outings together. You have babyface brothers reigning as dominant singles champions and being forced to do battle against their own wills by order of higher management. Faced with the possibility of being stripped of their championships by Vickie Guerrero, the brothers put aside their common blood in the name of business, with the added bonus of knowing full well that this was going to be a treat for each of their fanbases. We don’t see two brothers settling a score from their childhood or fighting for alpha dominance; we simply have two stand-up good-guys who are doing their jobs.

The unique flavor going into this particular Kane/Taker affair makes this one of their most interesting match-ups on paper as well as showing in the execution of the match. It starts out as simply business, with the two monsters engaging in the most wrestling they ever have with one another. Both guys have made their names more as brawlers than technicians, but it’s the level of respect between the two that has them trading wrestling holds rather than punches in the match’s early-going. Forced into a match against a brother that each now respects and stands beside, the Undertaker and Kane are looking to have a wrestling match, not a fight.

Of course, the beauty of the whole thing is how it becomes clear that, each man being a near mirror image of the other, basic headlocks and armbars are simply not enough. While the brothers respect each other in this match, each one realizes that, faced with such a serious challenge, it’s necessary to bring out the big guns in order to earn victory. In this case, the fists start flying, not because of the personal animosity that brought them to blows in the past, but because each man realizes he needs to use everything in his arsenal to get the win. And again, victory is not sought in order to gain retribution or to settle a grudge, but rather simply because it’s in their nature as fellow babyfaces to do their jobs and seek out another tally in the win column. It’s not personal; it’s just business.

This is why, non-finish aside, I feel this is one of the most entertaining of all of Kane and Undertaker’s match-ups with one another. It’s a rare occurrence to see each man reluctant to wrestle the other, and even more rare to see one of these guys (initially) refusing, out of respect, to rely on the brawling style that most often brings them success between the ropes.

WHY IT ISN’T REMEMBERED

See: All of the videos that I have embedded above. April 2008 wasn’t all that long ago, but it’s still a hazy memory in the face of all of the other confrontations that the Undertaker and Kane have had with one another. Regardless of how many times they’ve done battle over the years, it’s doubtful that any one-on-one match between the two will ever rise above their WrestleMania XIV encounter in terms of significance and overall epic-ness. The first time isn’t always the best (although in this case it’s debatable), but it’s more often than not the most historic. Further than that, it’s hard to match the theatrics and surreal quality of the first ever Inferno Match that followed one month after WrestleMania.

As I outlined earlier, the rivalry between Kane and the Undertaker has followed several different paths, with each man seeking the destruction of the other on multiple occasions for a variety of different reasons. Also, throughout the years worth of fighting, the role of face and heel has been traded off between each brother. However, what it comes down to is that, generally speaking, this rivalry is most often thought of as the evil and jealous younger brother Kane looking to prove that he is better than his much more historically successful and wildly popular older brother the Undertaker. This is the route that is being taken with their current rivalry on SmackDown, serving more as a throwback directly to the beginnings of their feud thirteen years ago while conveniently leaving out the Ministry of Darkness-crazed heel Taker of late ’99 and the face-to-face (see what I did?) confrontation of April 2008.

Even so, I present this week’s Forgotten Favorite as a peace offering to that section of IWCers who are damning the re-ignited Kane/Taker rivalry on SmackDown. While the match has happened numerous times over the last decade-plus of WWE programming, this Night of Champions rivalry is still a fresh take on a rivalry that’s always been constantly evolving. Each time these brothers have waged war against each other, the surrounding storyline has changed and shown development of the characters. While we are indeed back to seeing heel Kane seeking the destruction of a babyface Undertaker, things are a little bit different this time around, in that Kane has stated his agenda this time is to prove beyond a doubt that he has surpassed his older brother. He isn’t seeking the revenge he was after at WrestleMania XIV. He isn’t simply on the deranged monster-kick that he was on at SummerSlam 2000. And he isn’t looking to put to rest the humanized biker that embarrassed his family’s name prior to WrestleMania XX. Now, all Kane wants is to step out of his brother’s shadow and show the world that Taker’s time has come and gone. He may be the Deadman that vanquished Kane in the past and enjoyed several more championship reigns and successes, but his time as “the devil’s favorite demon” has come and gone. That position belongs to SmackDown’s reigning World Heavyweight Champion — or so he’d like us to believe.

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BONUS MATCH(!)

SummerSlam – August 22, 1999
Tag Team Championship
Kane and X-Pac vs. Undertaker and Big Show

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Feedback! (or, the Backfeeding!)

Wow, even in 2004 the crowd was better than it is today, and SD 2004 (other than Eddie & Mysterio, and few others) SUCKED.

Posted By: SS87

Sad but true. I think it all comes down to the attention given by higher-ups to the overall product. A non-title cruiserweight feud is unheard of by today’s standards. From 2005 and on, midcard rivalries were featured less and less, and the overall product has suffered.

I dont know if this match would be considered a forgotten favorite as it was a decent match at best, you should do MNM/Hardys from December To Dismember, great match that gets no love probably due to it being on such a crappy ppv.

Posted By: henry

Definitely a good match and definitely a crappy PPV. I think MNM itself is a Forgotten Favorite, as it was a team capable of doing so much more than it was given the opportunity for. Most definitely a possible future column.

Forgotten Favorite: Bret/Michaels from Survivor Series ’97. No, I’m not joking – mostly; the match itself is always overlooked.

And for those interested, the aforementioned Clique Action Zone match is on the Coliseum Video entitled WWF SlamFest.

Posted By: neverAcquiesce

Overlooked indeed for the obvious reasons. Still, I’m not crazy about the match itself. Maybe it’s because I can’t remove the Screwjob blinders when I watch it, but I just don’t think this is one of HBK and Bret’s best outings against each other. On top of that, the IWC will castrate me if I feature that match, regardless of me making any valid points.

This was a good match from Summerslam, which also has Eddie vs Angle which is not as good as their WM 20 classic, but still a great match.I also enjoyed the Kidman/London match and am happy to see it. I will still push for Punk/Burke 2007 JD, but from your response to my comment last column it sounds like you will be using it soon.Good to hear and keep up the great work.

Posted By: Still Guest#8287

Much thanks for the continued support, and worry not, Burke/Punk is coming. I love me some Pope.

YES! Called it a few weeks back!

London/Kidman could have had it’s own column too. One of the few times in WWE history that a Cruiserweight match had proper build behind it (even if they lucked into it with the botched SSP) WITHOUT the title being involved

Posted By: mr_wishart

I was hesitant to reduce it to a bonus match, but I really wanted to feature the Dudleys-Kidman/London rivalry, and I felt like I boxed myself in there. Still, I’m glad I was able to feature something that most fans remember fondly.

As Mr Wishart said above I’m still amazed WWE did a full well-built feud that was given plenty of time between 2 cruiserweights leading to a great showdown on PPV. It’s a shame after the No Mercy match that London never got his revenge on Kidman, the whole thing was just kinda forgotten about.

A quick match suggestion while I’m here – Eddie vs. Rhyno vs. Benoit vs. Tajiri for the U.S. Title from Summerslam 2003.

Posted By: blitzkid

I can halfway recall London and Kidman meeting again after London picked up the CW Title, but it meant next to nothing. And the 4 Way is a good match that I may come back around to whenever a high profile 4 Way comes up again in the E or TNA.

I dont know if this match would be considered a forgotten favorite as it was a decent match at best, you should do MNM/Hardys from December To Dismember, great match that gets no love probably due to it being on such a crappy ppv.

Posted By: henry

THIS ^^^^^

You mis-understood my comment from last week.

Your picks are usually forgotten because they weren’t that great!

I want to click the link, remembering how great the match was that I had forgotten about years earlier (simple concept).

MNM/Hardyz is a perfect example. Great match. Forgotten about. Easily done. Not some dump match that I completely forgot about and don’t care to re-watch ever again.

Posted By: Zeus

To each his own, Mr. Zeus. I can’t please everybody everytime, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t my goal. I will earn your support if it kills me.

could you review Psychosis, Mysterio, Blitzbeirg, and Kidman way. this is a personal favorite of mine because Psychosis rules in this one. or Psychosis Juvi Mysterio and Kidaman fatal four way

Posted By: laparkinator

I’ve been meaning to get around to some WCW cruiserweight stuff, so this is a possible pick right here.

Here’s a left field pick for you:

On Smackdown in 2006, Sylvain Grenier and Tatanka had a series of matches that were not particularly amazing, but inexplicably good considering it was Sylvain Grenier vs. Tatanka. It was like this weird chemistry where two shit wrestlers somehow have above average matches with one another. Might be worth a look. This series of matches would also be interesting to explore as it serves as a prime example of just how depleted Smackdown’s roster was in 2006. As a reminder, Regal and Finlay, heel stablemates, were feuding over the U.S. Title because there were literally no other legit contenders (come to think of it, I’m sure those to turned in at least one FF during that feud).

Posted By: Tom

I always thought Sylvan had potential to grow into a decent enough midcard heel. And I’ve wanted to cover the Finlay/Regal US Title match at GAB ’06, but I wasn’t able to find it last time the urge arose. Haven’t looked recently, but I will re-open my investigation.

I dont know if you have did this one before or not but you should do John Cena vs Undertaker from Vengeance 2003 it wasnt that great of a match but the build up was great(I loved Cena’s promo when he pissed on the tombstone) and it was in the peak of Cena’s heel run

Posted By: Guest#5964

Good match, as was their SmackDown rematch shortly thereafter. It’s definitely completely forgotten by WWE’s kayfabe standards, and definitely an interesting rivalry to revisit.

Can’t remember if you’ve done this one or not but please do Kurt Angle vs John Cena vs Shawn Michaels from Taboo Tuesday 2005!

Posted By: ma

Awesome match. One that I definitely encourage all to seek out. Good call, my friend.

good match… these are 2 guys that should differently still be wrestling on tv!!!

kidman is one of the best cruiserweights of all time and london is young and full of talent…

i wouldnt mind london going to tna and teaming with kindrik again…

them… gen me… and mcmg could make an awesome 3 way tag fued with an awesome ultimate x payoff…

Posted By: Guest#4511

London and Kendrick got straight up screwed out of what could have been a much more impressive Tag Title reign. The fact that they had the belts so damn long and ended up meaning nothing historically is a travesty.

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That’ll do it for this week. Let me hear those suggestions and comments, and I’ll be back in one week’s time to satisfy your time traveling hunger.

Until then, stay safe and out of Dundalk.