5 Times WWE Tried To Revive The Legion Of Doom
Some legacies are best left untouched, particularly LOD's.
There will never be another Legion of Doom. Hawk and Animal came through as The Road Warriors in the early 1980’s, completely destroying all preconceptions of what tag team wrestling could be, and establishing their legacy as one of the most dominant teams of all-time.
Managed by “Precious” Paul Ellering, they were two big, tough, and downright mean brawlers capable of reducing any poor soul who dared face them to mush. Their physical presence was unmatched, and their signature spiked shoulder pads, black and red colour scheme, and face paint only ramped-up their menacing aura.
The Legion of Doom were lightning in a bottle, and such uniqueness cannot simply be recreated. That hasn’t stopped WWE from trying, though, and we’ve borne witness to a number of LOD reincarnations in the years following their 80’s/90’s heyday, in name, spirit, and otherwise.
With teams like The Powers of Pain and Demolition (who, to their credit, carved their own legacy over time) WWE have been trying to recreate The Road Warriors for decades. Their most recent attempt came last week, with the now-dropped trademark application for the LOD name (assumedly to assign it to NXT newcomers Sunny Dhinsa and Gzim Selmani).
Excluding the groups who formed before Hawk & Animal became the Legion of Doom, here are five LOD reincarnations in all their “glory”...
5. LOD 2000
The first cracks in Hawk & Animal’s tag team legacy started with the dubious decision to have Paul Ellering manage the Legion of Doom through a creepy little puppet named Rocco back in 1992, but LOD 2000 is where things really kicked-in.
Having disappeared from television after losing a feud with the upstart New Age Outlaws, Hawk and Animal re-emerged during a tag team Battle Royal at WrestleMania XIV. Sporting an altered look with helmets and altered shoulder pads, they re-named themselves, enlisted Sunny as manager, and recruited Droz, a man previously only known for his ability to vomit on-demand. Lovely.
Things quickly fell apart. Hawk’s on-screen character went from no-nonsense badass to a Jake Roberts-esque drunken shambles. WWE pushed this by having Hawk sit-out many of LOD 2000’s tag team matches and join the commentary team call Droz & Animal’s matches in series of intoxicated slurs and nonsensical babblings, and oh boy, was it embarrassing.
It remains one of the company’s most insensitive portrayals of addiction to date, and came to a head when real-life alcoholic Hawk “gave-up” and, scaled the TitanTron, and tried to commit suicide by jumping from the top. Predictably, the idea bombed, the story was dropped, and aside from a few brief appearances in 1999, that was all she wrote for LOD 2000.
While WWE would go-on to top this angle’s vulgarity many times over the years (hello, Katie Vick), LOD 2000 was a disaster. Playing-off a wrestler’s real-life troubles is ill-advised at best, but as bad as this turned-out, it could’ve been a whole lot worse. Before LOD 2000 was canned, Droz was set to be revealed as Hawk’s drug dealer. He’d been keeping Hawk inebriated all along in-hope of taking his spot as Animal’s tag team partner, because sometimes, the Attitude Era was really, really daft.
Not only that but Vic Grimes was allegedly preparing to come-in as Droz’s drug “kingpin,” and the driving force behind the whole angle…
Yeah, let’s move on.