10 WWE Nightmares That Thankfully Never Came True
7. Baron Von Bava
Required watching for sitcom aficionados, the 2014 BBC series Detectorists beautifully charts the regular non-adventures of a pair of metal detector enthusiasts who scan the ground day and night ostensibly looking for gold but subconsciously searching for a greater meaning to life in general.
It's a measured and realistic take of a niche hobby, and adds depth and gravitas to a pastime many would consider obscure, and most would consider pointless.
Wrestling fans have themselves been beaten with a similar stick, and it's perhaps that aspect of the utterly absurd Baron Von Bava gimmick that first appealed to Vince McMahon. That, or the fact he had the opportunity to promote a cryogenically frozen 1940s Nazi!
Ex-writer Dan Madigan spilled the beans on the daft gimmick. Having crafted the plot for WWE Studios' moderate success story See No Evil, Madigan pitched the persona, noting also that it should be noted Jewish star Paul Heyman that 'unfreeze' the dangerous monster. Unsurprisingly, Madigan wasn't long for WWE after such an audacious pitch, but elements of Von Bava's overall presentation did seem to land surreptitiously in the lap of John Heidenreich.
Alongside Heyman and with a fearsome chanting entrance theme soundtracking the spring in his goose-step, tiny fragments of the defrosted Von Bava did make it to air, if not in quite as farcical a mould they were perhaps intended.