10 Times You Forgot Pro Wrestlers Broke Kayfabe On The Air

Here's an example that shows Vince McMahon was fine with breaking kayfabe long before groups like the nWo and DX made it a "cool" thing to do - although it's clear Vince didn't exactly understand what he was doing or how to do it at the time.

For the uninitiated, No Holds Barred was a laughably terrible movie that flopped hard at the box office and is best remembered for a scene in which Hulk Hogan makes a grown man soil his pants.

In the film, Hogan plays the Heavyweight Champion of the World Wrestling Federation. Except his name in the movie isn't Hulk Hogan, it's Rip Thomas. Why? Who the hell knows. But this name change created a very strange paradox when the WWE decided to bring the movie's big bad villain, Zeus, in for a match against Hogan at SummerSlam.

In the storyline, Zeus comes into "the real world" to challenge Hogan to a match because he was upset about losing to Hogan's character, Rip, in the movie. Again, this isn't the actor, Tiny Lister, who played the Zeus character challenging the Hulkster. It's a purely fictitious character crashing the "real life" version of the WWE to challenge, ostensibly, a real person who previously wrestled him as a fictional character.

Consider this the first nationally-broadcast inception.

Luckily for Vince, the whole thing was so damn confusing that no one seemed to notice him crapping all over kayfabe back when that was still a big no-no.