5. The Ultimate Warrior Is Buried Alive In The "Ultimate Coffin" On The Funeral Parlor, Then Is Forced To Overcome His Fears - April-May 1991
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzYjUvGaWUY Given thart he's a 2014 inductee into the WWE Hall of Fame, The Ultimate Warrior is likely many WWE fanatics' favorite wrestler of all time. From being enormous in build, absurd in manner, dressed in neon and cut promos that gave him some sort of otherworldly presence, he's everything we begrudgingly love about both the late 80s-early 90s both in society in wrestling alike. Thus, when he was a guest on The Undertaker and Paul Bearer's "Funeral Parlor" talk show, it was definitely a blockbuster TV segment. Even now, 23-years later, the James Bond villain-esque notion of just wheeling out a coffin with Ultimate Warrior stickers all over it (when the Warrior was a guest on the program) is equal parts creepy, scary and totally bad ass (before the Undertaker being a bad ass was even a thing). Attacking the Ultimate Warrior, then locking him in said coffin and watching "WWF officials" use drills to open the (torn to shreds on the inside due to struggle) coffin, was frightening. Warrior then being revived via CPR? Scary. The following angle of Jake "The Snake" Roberts and his three "tests" to give him the "secrets of the darkside?" For WWE TV, it collided Jake Roberts and the Undertaker - the scariest competitors in WWF at that time - creating cataclysmic levels of never-before-seen fear being displayed in an angle. Roberts locked Warrior inside of a coffin, then buried him alive in a cemetery. The third test ending with Warrior being bitten in the face by a King Cobra, and in his then weakened state seeing Roberts, the Undertaker and Paul Bearer, standing over him revealing their collusion? For that era of WWF television, it was scarier than hell. "Never trust a snake," indeed.
Besides having been an independent professional wrestling manager for a decade, Marcus Dowling is a Washington, DC-based writer who has contributed to a plethora of online and print magazines and newspapers writing about music and popular culture over the past 15 years.