10 Times WWE Asked You To Blindly Hate Foreigners
7. Kaientai
At ECW's inaugural pay-per-view Barely Legal in April 1997, a six-man tag team encounter featuring stars of Michinoku Pro stole the show despite being the only match without a shred of storyline significance to the partisan Philadelphia crowd.
Keeping his finger on the pulse of the industry as usual, Extreme doyen Paul Heyman included the battle to offer discerning United States fans a glimpse at the promotion that utilised a dynamic hybrid style of Japanese aerial action and Mexican Lucha Libre.
In a surprise to many at the time, Pro alumnus Taka Michinoku won WWE's ill-fated Light Heavyweight Title in December 1997, as the company tried in vain to tap in to the style Heyman had showcased months earlier. Following some revolutionary lower card clashes during his first six months, Vince McMahon elected to bring in Dick Togo, Mens Teioh and Sho Funaki to feud against and ultimately align with Taka in an effort to enhance the embryonic league.
Sadly for the ultra-talented Japanese stars, he got bored of that after about two weeks and turned them into a goon squad who wouldn't have looked out of place in a 1970s James Bond movie.
Alongside derivative manager Yamaguchi-San, the quartet attained a lifetime of recall in wrestling not for what should have been a spectacular array of genre-defining classics, but for stripping pornstar Val Venis naked, then hanging him upside down in attempt to castrate him with a samurai sword one week after threatening to 'Choppy Choppy (his) pee-pee'.