10 Wrestling Storylines That Were Much Darker Than You Think
10. Beaver Cleavage
The Beaver Cleavage character was already plenty dark. If you didn't live through the WWF of 1999 - or haven't read about it in various lists - here's a quick primer:
Headbanger Mosh, with his partner on the shelf, was repackaged. You see, Vince Russo was a genius because he had an idea for every wrestler. The idea here was to repackage Mosh as 'Beaver Cleavage': a riff on the lead young actor from the 1950s sitcom Leave It To Beaver. The twist is that Beaver Cleavage wanted to f*ck his mother. He made various innuendos in his vignettes, saying things like he wanted mother's milk with his cereal and wiggling his eyebrows suggestively.
The suggestion, if you missed it, is that he wanted to suck his biological mother's t*ts, spit out the milk, pour it on his cereal, and then eat the cereal.
Also, the character's name was actually Harry Beaver. So he was basically a c*nt, and Vince Russo, famed for his poor writing, actually grasped a sound bit of advice imparted by the great Mark Twain here: write what you know.
The storyline was darker than the vignettes, because it was retconned. Vince Russo has indicated (not confirmed) that the idea was for Beaver to gross his opponents out by necking on with his "mom", who was actually his girlfriend, and capitalise on the distraction to win.
As Russo said:
"Don’t tell me you ACTUALLY THOUGHT they were Mother and Son? REALLY? BRO—THEY WERE THE SAME FREAKING AGE!!! There was ZERO Maternal Connection. NONE. Please don’t tell me you REALLY thought there was. PLEASE!"
Russo being Russo, he comprehensively failed to understand that the babyfaces shouldn't have ACTUALLY THOUGHT this. They're meant to be smart.
The story was retconned, because it was gross, but then it got worse: turns out the girlfriend, Marianna Komlos, was a lying jezebel who lied about Mosh violently abusing her. So the fake incest angle was actually yet another disturbing "women are inherently awful and manipulative" angle.
Great.