100 Best Wrestling Moves EVER
16. Rob Van Dam | Van Terminator
Rob Van Dam’s Van Terminator was another impossibility of a move.
He moved to the apron as Bill Alfonso placed a chair over the face of Scotty Anton, the first volunteer for a deranged experiment, who was draped across the turnbuckles on the opposite side of the ring. Van Dam then did the “lookout” gesture, asking the audience if it was even possible to fly that distance. It was; from a springboard set-up, he cleared the entire breadth of the ring to smash the chair against Scotty’s mush.
Because it looks like something made possible only in a video game, it’s apt to use a video game analogy. By 2000, high-flying, cruiser-style wrestling had firmly entrenched itself in the mainstream - but through this one, face-melting move, Rob Van Dam took the form from 32-bit to the current generation.
This current generation; it still, 24 full years later, looks positively futuristic.
The move was raved about in such reverent tones that a generation of hardcore fans threw their parents off the phone line and waited patiently for hours to download the MPEG on Limewire.