30 Day Wrestling Challenge - Day 29 Favourite Reinvention

May 17, 20204 min read

It is incredibly hard to stay relevant without some kind of reinvention of your character, whether that is a tweak to your current character or to come up with an entirely new gimmick... but which is our favourite reinvention?

BRUM - STING (1996/7)

For the rest of this series, my choices have usually represented indie promotions, Japanese wrestling, or forgotten gems.

But sometimes you just have to play the ball straight. Sometimes you have to go with the simple answer. Sometimes you have to just pick Sting.

The common consensus of leading Bordenologists is that the debut of Crow Sting is the 21st October 1996 episode of Nitro in which he comes out in black and white gear and facepaint, wearing a trenchcoat, and using the Scorpion Death Drop for the first time.

I sympathise with this viewpoint but it's entirely missing the point. The visuals were mostly there, but the character wasn't. This wasn't the debut, this was the prelude.

This episode was the last time Sting spoke into a mic on screen for over a year. He would hang around in the rafters, interfere seemingly randomly in matches, and do ambiguous things like hand Luger a baseball bat.

WCW were surprisingly patient with this. Not only did Sting not talk but he didn't wrestle either. And in this time he grew into his character both literally (his shit mid-length hair grew out into a more Brandon Lee style) and in terms of his portrayal.

One of my favourite moments in this evolution came on the 25th August 1997 Nitro. Sting is intimidating Bischoff (nothing new there) and he smiles. This stoic hero shows emotion. It elevates him above an ethereal wraith, whilst still maintaining his mystery.

The debut of Crow Sting finally came at Starrcade 1997, 14 months after the October 1996 "prelude" mentioned earlier.

His entrance his magical. It starts with a child narrating his tale followed by him walking down the ramp, bat in hand. His hair looks gorgeous. Just compare images of him here to him in October 1996, it's night and day.

Unfortunately it all goes down from there. The debut of this new character is also its death. Sting going over clean here was the only way to go. A 3 month old donkey could have told you that. Unfortunately, WCW didn't have anyone as rational as a 3 month old donkey in their creative team.

I don't want to focus on that as this is a positive article. What's important is the transformation of happy blonde Surfer Sting to cool, brooding Crow Sting.

In a lot of people's memories that seemed to happen overnight. It didn't. Even before the October 1996 Nitro I keep harking back to, Sting had dyed his hair darker and would wear black trunks occasionally. The whole transformation was probably 18 months in all.

But that isn't a bad thing. Sting got cooler as the weeks went by and it made us salivate for an appearance of him, never mind a match.

The other huge achievement of the Crow Sting character was how it managed to succeed within its environment. The nWo, despite being de facto baddies, were loved by the fans.

No one was going to cheer Luger or old Sting against them. They needed someone who could out-cool the nWo and they made him. We all loved Crow Sting and he wanted him to destroy Hogan and his gang.

It's just a pity he didn't. It was nice whilst it lasted though.

ROSS CASEY - RAVEN

If you followed Scott Levy's early career where he was part of WCW's Light heavyweight division as Scotty Flamingo, an arrogant surfer or his early WWF run as preppy tool Johnny Polo, you would assume he had a low chance of grabbing the brass rings in the wrestling industry.

However, the creation of the Raven character was a masterstroke. A depressed, sociopathic, nihilistic misanthrope who dressed like a grunger and made fantastic promos littered with literary connotations - hence the name Raven after the Edgar Allen Poe poem.

In an interesting sidenote, the gimmick was initially pitched to Jim Cornette and Smoky Mountain Wrestling. I guess he already had one Dirty White boy.

His character was one that had a woe is me mantra, but also the intelligence to find folk with a similar mindset and warp them into doing his dirty work. His Raven's Nest and Raven's Flock stables in ECW and WCW were ways of creating storylines at large and his best moments for me were where he was at his manipulative worst.

Turning Sandman's own young son against him was probably the greatest example of this. A very smart, albeit at times disgusting ECW audience bought into the angle so much that they were baying for his blood.

The fact that the Raven character was able to constantly evolve - to a nod to his Johnny Polo past with the WCW vignettes about him being a spoilt, rich mummy's boy, to the undervalued seven deadly sins on WWF Heat to eventually his TNA run where his character went more goth than grunge.

Whilst the character never truly hit the heights that it possibly could have in terms of being a trop draw in the wrestling world, perhaps that fits the narrative better anyhow, What about me... what about Raven?

30 DAY CHALLENGE

DAY 1 - FAVOURITE MALE WRESTLER

DAY 2 - FAVOURITE FEMALE WRESTLER

DAY 3 - FAVOURITE MOMENT YOU'VE SEEN LIVE

DAY 4 - FAVOURITE TAG TEAM

DAY 5 - YOUR FIRST WRESTLING MEMORY

DAY 6 - FAVOURITE FACTION

DAY 7 - FAVOURITE PROMOTION

DAY 8 - FAVOURITE MANAGER

DAY 9 - FAVOURITE COMMENTARY TEAM

DAY 10 - FAVOURITE ENTRANCE THEME

DAY 11 - FAVOURITE MATCH