Back in the early part of 1996, things weren’t looking so great for Hulkamania, brother.
Although Hulk Hogan had weathered the storms of slamming 700 pound giants, monster sumo wrestlers and Rowdy Roddy Piper, his biggest challenge lay before him. One that he couldn’t vanquish with a well-timed big boot and legdrop: Justifying his increasingly outlandish salary to Turner Broadcasting executives who wondered why WCW still wasn’t making money.
1995 had been a big year for WCW, seeing the debut of “WCW Monday Nitro” thanks to Eric Bischoff basically asking Ted Turner for 2 hours on TNT to battle the WWF. But Hogan, increasingly falling behind the times, was still fighting freaks and giants and trying to recapture the glory days of the WWF in a new home.
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The addition of Randy Savage to the WCW roster in late 1994 felt like another enabling move on their part, while Hogan ducked the constant requests from management to change up his act and seemed intent on feuding with Kevin Sullivan forever. Bischoff going out and signing away Hall and Nash from the WWF only fueled Hogan’s paranoia about his spot, especially since they were seemingly going to make more money than him.
Bischoff had asked Hogan on more than one occasion to turn heel, feeling it would freshen up the character — reports after the fact vary on who actually had the idea first, with pretty much anyone in a serious position of power claiming years later that it was THEIR idea — but Hogan was resistant and had one last Hail Mary to throw: Uncensored 1996.
The 1995 version of the show, the debut of the wacky new PPV concept, could at best be charitably described as a dumpster fire. A dumpster filled with clowns. Riding on the back of a train, a train with no brakes, on a collision course for an ammunitions factory. It was bad, is what I’m saying. So really, they had nowhere to go but up.
Hogan’s feud with Kevin Sullivan and the increasingly ridiculous Dungeon of Doom had already seen Hogan dispatching a variety of joke opponents like Zodiac and Shark and Sullivan himself week after week with relative ease, so it was decided that the program needed bigger stakes. So Hogan came up with a concept that would doubtlessly turn around the company for good: Facing the Dungeon in a 4-on-1 handicap cage match with rules to be defined at a later date. Like the day of the show.
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The eye-rollingly stupid contingent set to face off with Hogan was to be dubbed The Alliance to End Hulkamania (TAEH, aka the opposite of “HEAT”). But then, with a week to go before the show and nothing announced, Hogan decided to step up the ludicrous nature of the match, changing it to an 8-on-2 handicap match inside four deadly cages with trap doors and presumably poison spikes or whatever, pitting Hogan and Savage against Sullivan’s crew.
Even worse, the match now inexplicably had Ric Flair and Arn Anderson dragged into it, along with the Faces of Fear, Kevin Sullivan, Lex Luger and two “mystery opponents."
In yet another attempt to leech off the glory of years past, Hogan went out and got flabby old Tony Lister, who had previously drawn as Zeus in the WWF. But that was seven years and 40 pounds ago, and now they couldn’t get the rights to that name so they called him “Z Gangsta." As if that wasn’t enough to make you stop reading, they also got Jeep Swenson (who had some small degree of fame playing Bane in "Batman & Robin") and somehow made the colossally misguided decision to call him “The Final Solution." You know, like Hitler called the Holocaust?
To no one’s shock, people called in to complain about this in droves, leaving them to switch the name to “The Ultimate Solution” by the day of the show instead. Because that was better?
Then came the match, still considered by many to be the worst PPV main event in the history of wrestling. All the “rules” announced on TV leading up to the match were completely ignored, as the four cages became three and the Mega Powers no longer needed to beat all eight members of the Alliance to win, instead vaguely battling through the cages before beating Ric Flair to win, because it’s always Flair who loses to Hogan.
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The production was a complete mess, making the match impossible to follow for either viewers at home or people in the arena, and most of the match was the heels wandering aimlessly for the better part of twenty minutes.
Z Gangsta and Ultimate Solution didn’t even bother to show up until about five minutes into the match!
The show was rightly destroyed by critics at the time, and was also a complete flop on PPV to boot. Hogan’s booking power was significantly reduced, and after taking a few months off, he made a surprise return at Bash at the Beach ’96 and finally turned heel. So I guess in a way, Hulkamania WAS ended after all.
Thanks, Alliance to End Hulkamania!
