Ask 411 Wrestling: Who Is WWE’s Biggest Masked Star in History Behind Rey Mysterio?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals, to Ask 411 . . . the last surviving weekly column on 411 Wrestling.

I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and I am here to answer some of your burning inquiries about professional wrestling. If you have one of those queries searing a hole in your brain, feel free to send it along to me at [email protected]. Don’t be shy about shooting those over – the more, the merrier.

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Kyle wants to remain anonymous . . . whoops:

As a kid the first wrestling I noticed was Pro Wrestling for the NES and my favorite was Starman. When I got a bit older and started watching Superstars etc I still always liked the guys in masks even though they were rarely on and never seemed to do well. So my question is, prior to Rey Mysterio Jr., who was the most successful masked wrestler in the WWF? You can define “most successful” how you like. Let’s not count Mankind since his mask wasn’t the sort I was picturing or anybody who only briefly wore a mask as an open secret such as Giant Machine.

I always hesitate when I get ready to answer a question about wrestling history with a fairly contemporary name because I want to control for recency bias.

However, I thought about this and thought about it, and I really believe the answer to this question is none other than Kane.

Granted, he has also wrestled unmasked for a significant period of his career in the WWF/WWE, but as a masked wrestler he (briefly) held a world championship and numerous secondary titles and was booked as a world title contender in many other instances. He was always protected, even when he had to lose, and I can’t think of a time in his career after becoming Kane when he wasn’t legitimately over with audiences.

Though I am pretty confident in making Kane my answer, let’s talk about another couple of names that are at least in the conversation.

The first name that I thought of other than Kane was the Masked Superstar. He was strongly booked as a heel in the company during the first half of the 1980s and had a major feud with Bob Backlund over the WWF Championship, including main eventing Madison Square Garden against him. On top of that, he was one of Hulk Hogan’s first challengers for the WWF Title after Hogan took it off of the Iron Sheik. Plus, he was Super Machine in the Machines angle that Kyle alluded to in his question. (And, for anybody who may not know, after the Machines he went on to be Demolition Ax, though obviously that doesn’t help his resume as a masked wrestler.)

It’s also worth giving some consideration to the Spoiler, a.k.a. Don Jardine. Spoiler was a repeated opponent for Pedro Morales when Morales was WWWF Champion in the 1970s. Jardine was back for another run in 1984 and 1985, though he spent a lot of time on is back during that one.

Finally, I would say Mil Mascaras should be mentioned, though my understanding is he was more a special attraction in the WWWF than anything else.

One two, is Night Wolf the Wise on?

1. So I read recently that during his time with the WWF/WWE, Jim Johnston wrote 10,000 songs. I think everyone can agree that the man was a genius when it came to producing wrestling themes. The themes really fit the wrestlers. What are some of your favorite themes produced by Johnston and why?

2. What would you say were the peak years of the best WWE wrestling themes?

3. WWE slowly shifted away from using Jim Johnston to produce themes around 2012 by switching to CFOs and now Def Rebel. What is your opinion of how they’ve done in a post Johnston world?

There have been oodles of columns written by wrestling fans over the years about Jim Johnston and his output, and I suspect my opinions regarding his best tracks aren’t going to deviate that much from the general consensus. Basically everything he did for Triple H, including the DX theme, works really well. “Medal,” originally for the Patriot but later Kurt Angle is iconic, though I actually prefer the harder rock remix that you can find on the WWE Anthology album from a while back. It would also be difficult to not include the original themes for Chris Jericho, Vince McMahon, and Steve Austin on the list, as well as the numerous variants of the Undertaker’s music that existed over the years.

(And, if you couldn’t figure it out from the themes that I’ve listed above, my answer to Night Wolf’s second question about peak years for themes would be the Attitude Era – roughly late 1997 through the first part of 2001.)

Again, though, all of those have been covered in great detail by other people. What I’d like to do is take this opportunity to talk about a few of my favorite “deep cuts” from Johnston’s catalog – themes that I thought were pretty damn good but that don’t seem to get much love elsewhere.

I’m All About Cool – One of my favorite things about Johnston is his ability to play in so many different genres, but never in a million years did I think wrestling would allow him to put together a 1950s doo wop song until Deuce and Domino showed up. Like every genre he’s entered, Johnston owned it with a legitimately catchy tune.

With Legs Like That – Recorded by Zebrahead, this pop punk number sounded like something that could have come off a Blink 182 album, and the lighthearted tone fit Maria Kanellis’s ditzy character perfectly, even though I’ve seen reports that it was originally intended for Stacy Keibler prior to her departure from WWE.

Fist / Make Some Noise – Originally used by Mike Tyson when he was part of D-Generation X and later repurposed for X-Pac, this more rap-centric version of the DX theme has always stuck with me. It gives the performer its associated with a much more confident air – daring opponents to try them whereas the mainline DX theme gets right up in an opponent’s face. A nice twist on a classic.

With My Baby Tonight – Is this song cheesy as hell? Absolutely. However, there are boatloads of cheesy love ballads within country music, and Jim Johnston NAILED every trope of that genre when he wrote this song. Plus, he managed to write something catchy that could still be performed well by the Road Dogg, who isn’t exactly a great professional singer.

Blood – Between the red lighting, the fire, and elevator, Gangrel/The Brood had one of the coolest entrances in WWF history, but I don’t think that it would have been half as effective without the theme that Johnston penned for them setting the tone. It’s frankly a shame that Gangrel wasn’t a bigger star than he turns out to be, because in some respects it feels as though this was wasted.

You Look So Good to Me – Again, I love the way that Johnston was able to turn a variety of different types of music into viable entrance themes, and here’s another unique one as he writes a boy band song for Billy & Chuck. Is it politically correct to use the homophobia directed towards groups like N*SYNC to boo your ambiguously gay tag team champions? No, not really. The song slaps, though.

Ain’t No Stoppin’ Me – I cannot look at Shelton Benjamin, in any context, without this song playing in my head. If that’s not an entrance theme nailing a performer, I don’t know what is.

I guess the only part of Night Wolf’s question that I haven’t hit on up to this point is what I think of post-Johnston themes in WWE, and I think that the honest answer is that I don’t watch enough current WWE to fairly comment. When I am watching, I’m usually not watching live and skipping entrances because the shows are so painfully long anymore.

Tyler from Winnipeg gets personal:

How many live wrestling shows have you seen?

Fewer than you would probably guess. I grew up in a really small town and as the only wrestling fan in the house, so for the years when I was young and would have had the most free time to attend shows in person, I didn’t have any way to get to them.

When I got out on my own, I mostly lived in smaller cities that would get WWF/WWE house shows once or maybe twice a year but wouldn’t see any other live wrestling aside from the very occasional attempt to start up a teeny, tiny indy. I’ve never really been in to traveling long distances to watch wrestling, either, and for the last ten years I’ve just not cared enough about current wrestling to go see any live events.

With all that said, I haven’t kept exact records, but I would estimate that I’ve seen somewhere between fifteen and twenty live shows. The vast majority of those would be WWE house shows, and there was a period where I was pretty into SHIMMER and regularly traveling to the DVD tapings they would hold a few times a year. (You can find my live reports on those SHIMMER shows if you dig through the archives of this website – and you can see me pretty clearly in the crowd if you watch the shows.) I also went to one ROH show in the mid-2000s. As a high school graduation present to myself, a group of friends and I did go on a road trip to a live episode of Monday Night Raw, which is the only time I’ve been at any wrestling show that was televised. Finally, I did actually go to one of those tiny, no name indy cards I mentioned once, which featured absolutely nobody you’ve ever heard of.

And that’s it. I’ve never been to a PPV/PLE, and I’ve never been to a show promoted by any company other than the ones mentioned above. Given where my interest level in the current product is, I can’t imagine myself investing the time or money to go to any live shows in the near future, either, though I’ve always said that if I travel to Japan – which would largely be for reasons other than pro wrestling – I would probably try to take in a show at Korakuen Hall while I was there, regardless of what the show is, just to say I did it.

And I’d probably have to go to the Ribera Steakhouse, too.

Bryan wants to tousle with Stossel:

When David Schultz smacked around a reporter for using the F word in an interview, did he or the WWF face any legal action? I’m not saying it wasn’t amusing, but you can’t put your hands on media members for being annoying. Was there any lawsuits?

Yes. John Stossel sued the WWF over the incident and eventually settled for $425,000.00.

Tyler from Winnipeg compares the progeny of two great wrestling families:

Who had a better career: Bret Hart or Eddie Guerrero?

I would say Bret Hart and it’s not even close. He was a multi-time World Champion and a focal point of two different major wrestling promotions for seven or eight years. Eddie did eventually get into the main event scene, but it was relatively short lived and at a time when WWE was running two brands and he was part of the one that was lower priority.

The Hitman definitely made himself into a bigger star. I do think, however, that you could make an argument that Guerrero has a better catalog of matches, though a good portion of that is attributable to the fact that Eddie more consistently had quality opponents than Bret did, since Eddie didn’t have to spend a lot of time pulling passable bouts out of the Kevin Nashes and Sids of the world.

APinOZ is on tour:

Loved the write-up on John Tolos – what a life he led! Funnily enough, at one point I had him confused with John Tolios, who was a Greek-Australian wrestler in Jim Barnett’s Australian version of World Championship Wrestling in the 70s.

And so to a few questions:

In the Tolos article, you mentioned that the NWA World Tag team champions didn’t tour like the singles champ, and that territories simply referred to their own tag champs as world champs. When did this practice stop, with one team only being referred to as NWA world tag team champions?

It would have been the late 1980s, early 1990s, or mid-1990s, depending on how you want to interpret the question.

The last surviving regional version of the NWA World Tag Team Titles was the Mid-Atlantic version controlled by Jim Crockett Promotions. Even though that was a regional promotion, they started to get national exposure through TBS beginning in 1985 when the Russians and the Rock n’ Roll Express were trading the belts. Thus, a wide range of U.S. fans would have known these champions as the NWA World Tag Team Champions, and they were the only ones with belts by that name. However, the titles were still controlled and booked by JCP, not the NWA.

In 1991, while Doom held the belts, the Mid-Atlantic version of the NWA Tag Titles was renamed and became the WCW Tag Team Titles. After this, there was a period where there were no NWA World Tag Team Champions anywhere on the planet.

That changed in 1992, when the NWA partnered with WCW to host a tournament to crown a new set of NWA World Tag Team Champions. The tourney started at Clash of the Champions XIX and continued until that year’s Great American Bash pay per view, where Terry Gordy and Steve Williams – who were also the WCW Tag Team Champions at the time – defeated Barry Windham and Dustin Rhodes to become the inaugural champs.

However, even though this was an NWA-branded title, it really was just a secondary tag team championship for WCW, with the two sets of belts being unified for as long as the NWA titles were part of WCW.

It turns out that wasn’t very long, because, in 1993, WCW and the NWA ended their affiliation. At this time, the NWA Tag Team Champions, Paul Roma and Arn Anderson, were no longer recognized as such. Because they were still the WCW Tag Team Champions, it was a fairly easy change for WCW to ignore.

At that point, the NWA World Tag Team Titles remained vacant for a little less than two years. On April 11, 1995 in Dallas, Texas, the Rock n’ Roll Express defeated Dick Murdoch & Randy Rhodes in the finals of a tournament to crown new NWA Tag Champs. This is the first time that we have an NWA Tag Team Title that is owned and booked by the NWA and which travels among NWA territories, at least to the extent that there were such things as NWA territories in 1995.

The titles were essentially indy belts until 2002, when Impact Wrestling partnered with the NWA to use their championships as Impact’s main championships. Though they were occasionally defended on shows promoted by other NWA members, at this point the belts more or less became Impact property since they were the largest NWA member by far.

In 2007, the NWA and Impact Wrestling went their separate ways, which meant that the Dudley Boys were stripped of the NWA Tag Team Titles. The vacant titles were filled on July 8, 2007 in a match that saw Joey Ryan and Karl Anderson defeat Billy Kidman and Sean “X-Pac” Waltman to become the new champs. The NWA Tag Titles bounced around quite a bit after that, including being featured in New Japan and in ROH for a time. Now, though, you can primarily see them being defended in Billy Corgan’s version of the NWA.

We’ll return in seven-ish days, and, as always, you can contribute your questions by emailing [email protected]. You can also leave questions in the comments below, but please note that I do not monitor the comments as closely as I do the email account, so emailing is the better way to get things answered.