Jesus Christ, Superstars: Papa Don’t Preach (May 2, 1992)

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Previously on Jesus Christ, Superstars: Vince McMahon came up with like 15 jokes about incontinence to open the show, and it ended with a Viking trying to stab a zombie to death with a sword. Also, long before Ronda Rousey, we learned that Mike Freedom was a bad idea.

If you’d like to watch this week’s episode, you can do that here, and you can support the column (so we’re allowed to keep writing it) by reading previous installments on our Jesus Christ, Superstars tag page. If you like these, and our break from the normal Best and Worst format, make sure to share it around so it gets read and drop us a comment below.

Here’s what you missed 27 years ago on WWF Superstars for May 2, 1992.

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Superstars is back like a vertebrae and “just in time for Correct Posture Month” — May, I guess — so Mr. McMahon and Curt Perfect open the show with a series of posture-related burns. I’d ask them to shoulder more of the blame, but at least they’ve moved up the back this week and have stopped making constipation puns. Perfect concurrently wins every snap battle ever attempted with the line, “We’re not here to talk about backbones. We’re here to talk about NO backbones!”

It continues, for some reason.

“We’re here to talk about that cheat Randy Savage, who’s so spineless even his own wife can’t stand him.”

“That’s not true!”

“Not only is it true, McMahon, it’s orthopedically correct! And I’ve got more than just a hunch, ha, that the next time Savage runs into Ric Flair he’ll learn the hard way that a stand-up guy like Slick Ric, is no slouch!”

This actually ends up being a real burn as Savage and Elizabeth would get divorced only a few months later, so I’m gonna pretend that Curt Hennig used his WWF Superstars monologue to shoot on his co-worker’s real life problems with first-thought wordplay. There’s only one thing that he hates, ’cause it’s a bunch of crap: happy marriages.

(He should really consider taking his hunch back.)

As for Savage himself, he shows up with his newly won WWF Championship to talk to Mean Gene Okerlund. There are some who say that Savage stole the championship at WrestleMania, just because he won with a roll-up and so much spandex in his palm that 30,000 people saw the inside of Ric Flair’s colon.

Savage’s response, because when you eat enough Slim Jims you start seeing through time:

“You’ve gotta be ribbing! It’s the ’90s!”

His greater point is that yeah, he cheated to beat Flair, but this is Ric Flair, a guy who will do and say anything. Flair trying to molest Elizabeth while his face looked like roadkill validates this in Savage’s eyes, and he claims that what Flair “done did” is get the “kiss of death.” Sometimes you have to become a monster to fight the monsters of the world, and sometimes that monster ends up looking like Lisa Frank designed a package of Easter Peeps.

This is the last episode of the Kalamazoo tapings, so the only new jobber to celebrate is Brian Costello, who looks like the guy who sleeps on the Dynamic Dudes’ couch and whose body hair makes it look like somebody took a shit on his chest. He’s been on enhancement talent duty in the World Wrestling Federation since 1987, and you can tell he’s in the final days of his run because he’s got the bleached, feathered mullet of a 1980s star and the bad goatee of every jobber from the ’90s.

Costello runs up against the Native American Warrior Tatanka, who fights for his people and the “great Indian nations above.” His finisher is a Samoan drop, because in the World Wrestling Federation in 1992, ” having an ethnicity” is a one-size-fits-all kind of attribute.

During the match, ‘The Model’ Rick Martel pops up with a picture-in-picture interview they DEFINITELY needed to broadcast where he declares, “Look at him, look at that Indian, he smells so bad!” You see, in addition to being a model, Martel is also a Dennis Feinstein-style fragrance magnate who carries around an old-timey pump-activated bug sprayer with which to Donkey Kong 3 the shit out of his enemies. To be an evil fragrance wrestler you have to actually propel your poisonous cologne with something, as turning over the bottle on your index finger and gently dabbing your opponents in the eyes wouldn’t look very threatening.

Anyway, Martel shows up after the match to make good on his promise to make the “smelly Indian” smell like the kind of body spray exterminators would use and baits him into jumping into a SCENTED PUFF:

After making Tatanka a big wheel down at the olfactory, Martel steals his ceremonial eagle feathers and coats them in both literal (the cologne) and figurative (the attitude) Arrogance. Mr. Perfect doubles and triples down on the racist jokes as Tatanka sells Axe Eyeball Spray, hitting lines like, “HMM, LOOK PLENTY BAD FOR TATANKA, MAYBE TIME TO CALL MEDICINE MAN.” You know you’re going out of your way to be a terrible person when the guy who created Akeem The African Dream is side-eyeing you for intolerance.

This kid went to the Kalamazoo Superstars tapings and got his parents to get him:

He’s definitely not as stylish as this kid, who wins our supplemental Fit of the Week.

An Ultimate Warrior hat with the brim bent back and a Virgil sweatshirt I can think of about a thousand people with platinum badges to SXSW who’d pay good money to steal this look in 2019.

That, of course, stands for all cops are bae.

Rogue Cobb County corrections officer The Big Boss Man opens the show against recent Viking conquest Mark Roberts, and only the World Wrestling Federation in the early 1990s could say, “you know who’d be a popular and beloved role model for kids A disgraced prison guard who handcuffs people to the ring ropes and beats them up with a nightstick after matches, and who is currently in a feud with a former prisoner who is coming for revenge because he was mistreated. Oh, and we should make collectable foam nightsticks in case any psychotic little children want to pretend they are violent government employees.”

Also we should make a disgraced prison guard stuffed animal and show little girls kissing it on the mouth because they love him so much.

It’s gonna be wild like 10 columns from now when I figure out this was just a 45-minute toy commercial. And even wilder when I realize that I’ve spent my adult life and all my creative talent writing about a 3-hour fried chicken commercial for a living.

He probably expected the devil

The team of High Energy takes on returning jobbists Tom Bennett and Duane Gill in their television debut. Fun fact: there’s only one Hall of Famer on the team, and wouldn’t believe the answer if I gave you two guesses. Additional fun fact: Mr. Perfect, emboldened by a show full of Indian jokes, references how Koko B. Ware was away making “Little Rascals comedies.” Who named this guy “Mr. Perfect,” Hitler

High Energy’s gimmick is that they love to have fun, and also that one of them owns a bird. This causes multiple shots of Michigan’s finest citizens doing “the bird,” and while I wanted to give the “of the week” award to this mom and daughter in matching Solid Gold Dancer outfits, I think I have to give it to this guy, who is clearly a Kids in the Hall character:

Just once I want to see an excited Koko B. Ware fan start lifting off the ground and get scared at what they’ve just discovered.

Crush says that when he was young he loved the game of baseball, but now that he’s in the World Wrestling Federation, he’s not playing games anymore! We get to see him fail to throw a baseball because he accidentally crushes it in his hands, illustrating that he’s just as good at baseball as he’s about to be at wrestling.

Meet Papa Shango, a voodoo priest who is allowed to use a set of spiritual folkways developed from the traditions of the African diaspora to win wrestling matches. He’s also a 6-foot-6, 300-pound guy with muscles so you think he’d be able to win some of this stuff with punching.

Here he somehow manages to overcome Red Tyler, the polar opposite of a voodoo priest and a guy who looks like he’d ask you for a peppermint and then get mad at you for not telling him how spicy it was.

We’re actually only a couple of episodes away from Papa’s greatest moment, which I won’t spoil here. Let’s just say that if you saw it when it happened, you stopped eating mustard for a few months.

This week’s main event is the battle between a man with shit going into his mouth vs. a man with shit coming out of it, as Skinner faces The Ultimate Warrior. Skinner’s entire offense here is spitting in Warrior’s eye before the match starts. Warrior beats this guy so badly they even do a post-match bit where Warrior holds him up, reaches into his mouth, and wipes the man’s own tobacco spew on his face.

You can tell Warrior’s become the new Hulk Hogan because he doesn’t just beat these guys, he makes sure we’ll never take them seriously again. The only difference is that Hogan would’ve ended it with an atomic drop to make sure his opponent never poops straight again. He was a jerk like that.

WWF Tag Team Champions Money Inc. also make an appearance, taking on Quailman and the Silver Skeeter, aka Chris Hawn and Ron Cumberledge. IRS gets on the mic before the match to remind us that the Million Dollar Man wants us to pay our taxes, because he’s tired of supporting us with his tax dollars. I’ll let you figure out how this coordinates with the previous examples of class struggle, racial superiority, and a fanatical love of law enforcement. I’m just here to tell you Chris Hawn still looks like a full-sized adult man growing out of a pheasant’s ass.

One of my favorite running gags in these green screen Superstars interviews is that every undercard babyface (read: anyone who isn’t Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, or the Ultimate Warrior) talks about how they’re “coming for the top” or how they believe they can “reach the top in the World Wrestling Federation.” All of them. Virgil is coming for the top, Tito Santana believes that dressing up like a matador is what was keeping him from the top, and so on. Sorry, Virgil, the only thing you’re having topped off is the cheese on your meat sauce at the Olive Garden.

And more. See you next Wednesday! Woo.