25 Crazy WCW Facts (That Get Progressively More Ridiculous)
3. That’s…That’s Not Even A Word, WCW
‘Jushin’ - pronounced JOO-shin - is a name of Japanese origin that has connotations of strength and righteousness. It’s as fine a forename as any for a babyface superhero character, and it was bestowed upon Keiichi Yamada, who portrayed Jushin ‘Thunder’ Liger - the anime-inspired NJPW demigod who pioneered the Shooting Star Press and popularised junior heavyweight wrestling as a lasting concern around which entire, legendary shows could be built.
Given that Jushin was the name of the character, you - with a functioning brain - can quite easily infer that Jushin was his name. Now, that might seem stunningly obvious, but WCW never could grasp the stunningly obvious. It wasn’t just the creative team that was profoundly incompetent in most incarnations; the production staff didn’t have an IQ point between them, either.
That is because, when making his entrance for one of his WCW cameos, Liger was referred to as Jushin’ ‘Thunder’ Liger. The use of an apostrophe on the graphic here suggests that a member of the production team thought that ‘Jushin’ was short for ‘Jushing’. Now, there are two issues with this.
The first is that “jushing” is not actually a word recorded in any dictionary of renown. There’s an entry for it in the urban dictionary, the definition of which is somebody joking or messing around.
If in fact this was known to the production person, it’s still Ryback-level dumb as f*ck because it implies a huge misunderstanding of the Liger character. Liger was not a prankster. Liger was not babyface Doink. The only clown here was literally everybody in WCW.