10 Forgotten TNA Appearances By Ex-WWE Stars
Famous faces in strange places, these are the TNA/Impact debuts you totally forgot about.
Impact Wrestling and especially TNA's longstanding legacy in the industry is a strange one.
As a weekly episodic show, Impact can boast nearly two decades on the air, lasting longer that any show outside of Raw or SmackDown in the modern era. And yet, its footprint is constantly up for debate.
The recent debut of Trinity (the artist formerly known as Naomi) with the organisation was a welcome reminder of its pull, particularly when she spoke on the history of women's wrestling within the company. But she's not the first to debut and instantly carry a weight of certain expectation.
In WWE's monopoly years between 2002 and 2019, the show brought familiar faces (with slightly less familiar new monikers) in at such a rate and with such apparent reverence for their old roles. Some - such as Christian Cage, Kurt Angle and Gail Kim - understood exactly how to take what they had and make it feel brand new on their new brand. Lots of others were a little to reliant on prior formulas to gamble on change, attaining varying degrees of success from writers and bookers often equally risk-averse and/or nostalgic for simpler times.
Then there were those that did neither, appearing so randomly or sporadically that it became easy to forget they ever appeared at all.
Until now...
10. Paul Bearer
The late great Paul Bearer left such an indelible legacy as The Undertaker (and later Kane's) manager/father/goodness-knows-what that even the sight of him working anywhere else after his 1991 WWE debut looks like it occurred in another timeline.
This particular stint with Total Non-Stop Action during the organisation's relatively early days has the added weirdness of falling between a very quiet WWE release in 2002 and his epic return alongside 'The Deadman' at WrestleMania XX in 2004, suggesting that he selected a fate involving being sealed in cement rather than staying the course with the wacky weekly-pay-per-view era of TNA.
Going by Percy Pringle III as he'd done pre-WWE, he debuted as many did at the time - as a cliffhanger character from the past that stood to potentially shift the landscape of the organisation forever. That didn't really happen for the mortician. After a remarkably uneventful run during a time where just about everything on the shows was eventful, Pringle departed in 2003 and began preparing for his aforementioned 'Show Of Shows' return.