10 Powerful Wrestling Promos That Never Uttered A Word
2. Chris Jericho
At the very sight of his literally dazzling new light-up jacket and the iconic strains of 'Break The Walls Down', the Memphis, Tennessee fans just wanted the returning Chris Jericho to run through his old catchphrases and cut his trademark extravagant promo. The jacket was a tremendous sartorial choice because it was so outrageous.
Jericho engineered that expectation for the express purpose of undermining it.
On the January 2, 2012 RAW, Jericho - in a further subversion - arrived as the mystery figure behind a series of spooky vignettes designed to create anticipation behind the Undertaker's return, or the debut of a new supernatural character. Very avant-garde for pro wrestling, perhaps those vignettes were too ambitious.
The idea was to make the audience resent that which they were anticipating - for Jericho to play it so over-the-top that what was once endearing would become suffocating and obnoxious. Would a super-exaggerated "Jericho is coming back!" hype-job have better clued the audience in? Or did the dissonance between Jericho's "It's going to be the end of the world as you know it" declaration and his subsequent failure to win the Rumble undermine the credibility of this new repackage?
It was nonetheless a very interesting and audacious return; viewed in isolation, it was a masterful performance in which Jericho, for whatever it was worth in the end, orchestrated a strange - but unforgettable - scene of mass confusion.