10 Things You Didn't Know About WWE In 1996
4. The Bushwhackers Were Still Around (!)
You may remember the Bushwhackers: the arm-throwing, head-licking daft lads who may well have been too stupid even for the WWF of the late 1980s. Great as the Sheepherders, in the Fed, they were not.
Very much the brand of comedy that only Vince McMahon found to be a riot, they were not funny. They weren't even caricatures of people or even stereotypes. People from Australasia don't do daft movements with their arms or lick people indiscriminately. They drink lager and throw barbecues, haven't visited a museum between them, and get regularly attacked by spiders the size of houses.
Everybody knows that.
To underscore the extent to which Vince McMahon was in the midst of an identity crisis as a promoter, in the same year that he first began to recognise that there were actual human beings underneath the glorified Hasbro plastic known to most people as "skin", the Bushwhackers returned after several months away, and crikey, they evolved.
Into Australian stereotypes!
Because you are thick, you dumb wrestling fan, you had to be reminded that Luke and Butch were Australian (they were from New Zealand), and this reminder manifested via - but of course - a kangaroo mascot.