10 Times Wrestlers Hit Their Finisher In A TV Show

Even small parts need a little more than small packages, as the actress said to the bishop.

The Rock Voyager
CBS

There’s only one thing cheesier and more formulaic than an episode of RAW, and that’s a bit-part performance from a pro wrestler in literally any other TV show.

You know how this works: the company puts the word out that any and all of their ‘independent contractors’ will shamelessly humiliate themselves on any television show they’re told to. Meanwhile, the most paint-by-numbers shows in America decide that somewhere in the twenty-odd episodes of poorly written, poorly produced sloth-fodder they squeeze out every season, there’s room for a shouty, musclebound cameo.

It’s product placement writ (very, very) large - but the company doesn’t get to determine the nature of the part being offered. Sometimes their talent are asked to appear as versions of their wrestling personas, but a lot of the time they’re the villain of the week, or an enforcer, or some other identikit bit part straight out of central casting.

When your product can’t use the trademarked name you gave them, what leverage do you have to get that brand synergy flowing? You ask ‘em to work in one of said product’s equally trademarked finishing moves, reminding everyone watching that this guest actor’s day job is in the squared circle.

Here’s a cringeworthy clutch of samples for you: professional wrestlers slumming it on some of the worst TV shows of the last two decades, and the finishing moves they sneaked in.

10. King Kong Bundy - Married... With Children

Charlotte Flair Psych The Movie
Fox

King Kong Bundy’s ties to eighties/nineties cringefest Married... With Children run deeper than the two guest appearances he booked on the show: it’s a little known fact that the show’s Bundy family were actually named after the late Christopher Pallies’ wrestling monicker.

This led to him being cast to play Bundy matriarch Peg’s brother Irwin in season two’s ‘All In The Family’. He’d just left the WWF, intending to retire from wrestling, so it’s understandable that the show didn’t cash in on his notoriety as one of the sport’s best ever big men.

The same wasn’t true of his 1995 cameo in Married… With Children, in season ten’s ‘Flight Of The Bumblebee’, where, once again under contract with the WWF, Bundy appeared as himself in a wrestling context.

In the episode, forced to pose as a wrestler to get Bundy’s autograph as the initiation test to enter some sleazy men’s club his awful father had formed, Bud ‘Bumblebee’ Bundy receives an in-ring big splash courtesy of one of the best monster heels in the business.

It's Married... With Children, so of course it's hopelessly, gleefully rubbish - but Bundy would be good value on anything.

Contributor
Contributor

Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.