10 Unexpected Origins Of Wrestling Characters
3. Naked Mideon Drew Inspiration From...
That intro may have read as snark, and to some extent, yes it was - but then, wrestling was once so punishingly, stupidly on the nose that it yielded the pig-farming Godwinns tag team of Henry O. Godwinn and Phineas I. Godwinn.
In case you missed it - and your writer actually did for far too many years in his youth - those names are acronyms of 'Pig' and 'Hog'.
Yes, wrestling is very stupid, and was possibly at its dumbest in 1999. The plotting on each flagship cable show was pathetic, and in that time, the former pig farmer - now going by the name of 'Mideon' - had taken to sacrificing himself to the Undertaker and carrying around an eyeball in a jar. A grunt character in the Ministry of Darkness - the first guy to get his face pounded in by Steve Austin when he made run-ins, basically - the character was reinvented when the Ministry was phased out. He became Naked Mideon, which was as exactly as it sounds.
A guy who isn't conventionally attractive getting his kit off? But he doesn't look like they do in 'Baywatch'! Isn't that a riot?
Not particularly, but the character's origin story is slightly more amusing...
...if you're Vince McMahon, and share a brain with a small, particularly dumb child.
Kurt Angle had a fondness for simply being naked backstage, and when Mideon fancied being the new "naked man", and tried to do a meet-and-greet wearing only a fanny pack, Vince was having none of it. Mideon couldn't appear that way in front of impressionable people.
There were too few of them!
He needed to be on television!