Tuesday, November 17, 2020

The Shockmaster

For any of you that might not know who The Shockmaster is, he's an extremely short-lived World Championship Wrestling character of great infamy.  In 1993 at WCW's Clash of the Champions Pay-Per-View event the promotion was debuting a new character... live.  

Fred Ottman (formerly Tugboat/Typhoon in the WWF) was set to make a dramatic debut as the mystery partner for Sting and The British Bulldog.  The plan was to have him bust through a wall with pyrotechnics going off and then do a little spiel about an upcoming Pay-Per-View.  What happened was Ottman busted the wall from his waist up and when he tried to come through it the unbroken bottom half turned him into a human teeter-totter upending him onto the floor and causing is glitter covered Storm Trooper helmet to fall of and start rolling away from him.  It was such an over-the-top botch that off camera you could hear the other wrestlers break character and laugh at something that was originally intended to be an intense confrontation.  

Obviously whatever credibility the character would have had rolled away in that glitter-glued helmet, and the gimmick was essentially D.O.A. I have read that in the years since Ottman has been able to have fun with the whole thing, which is good to hear because I could see it really getting the best of some of those guys back then who really lived their gimmicks.  

With the Shockmaster's standout adornment being a glittery Stormtrooper helmet there's only one right answer for a custom card, that being the iconic 1977 Topps Star Wars design.  I thought the blue starfield border would be the cheekiest choice for The Shockamster.




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