November 18th, 2011
Another walk through Thanksgiving history, in the form of the early Survivor Series’:
For weeks leading up to the Series, the announcers had been touting a giant egg that sat atop a pedestal in the audience, and which they claimed would hatch live at Survivor Series. This was supposed to create a good deal of suspense, one assumes, and to look back even-handedly at the WWF of the 1980s, it wasn’t a totally ridiculous assumption — lots of silly storylines succeeded in those days. . . . What emerged was none other than the Gobbledy Gooker, a man in a full turkey costume who dragged Okerlund into the ring so that they could square-dance, more or less, to “Turkey in the Straw.” The crowd’s boos were dampened only by the turkey noises that were projecting out over the PA system to approximate the Gooker’s “speech.”It’s from this noise that Okerlund famously gave us the new guy’s name, too: “What is with the gobbledy? The gobbledy gook? PAH! — don’t tell me you’re the Gobbledy Gooker?!” . . .
The crowd saw this and were incensed. It’s easy to look back now and say, “Of course they hated that gimmick,” but that just wasn’t the way things went back then. For years, we had booed when the WWF wanted us to boo and cheered when they wanted us to cheer.Survivor Series 1990 may have been the first full-scale crowd revolt in WWF history, and as such, it was the Federation’s welcome to modernity.
That same night, in his match against Dusty Rhodes’ “Dream Team,” “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase unveiled a new wrestler whom he had “purchased” for his side: The Undertaker. It’s easy to cut and paste The Undertaker we know today into the memory of that night, because they’re very similar. It’s also important to consider what McMahon & Co. were pawning off on us: Mark Calaway — previously a midcard attraction in the NWA (and fairly recognizable as such) — portraying an undead old-West mortician. (Incongruously, he was led to the ring by Brother Love, a red-faced televangelist character, before Love was replaced by the more suitable Paul Bearer.) The Undertaker was every bit the harebrained, ’80s-era wrestling cartoon that the Gooker was; he just wasn’t played for a laugh.To call it ironic that those two characters debuted on the same night gets it exactly backwards. The Gobbledy Gooker and The Undertaker are the same: two characters cut from the same cloth, two ideas hatched from the same egg — er, mind. I’m sure McMahon thought both of them would succeed to some degree; that the audience came down so decisively signaled the beginning of a new day in WWF history. It was the moment we chose tragedy over comedy.
Matt November 20, 2011 at 12:19 pm
The Undertaker vs Gobbledy Gooker at WrestleMania 28.