My Favorite Dark/Obscure Wrestling Themes; and Thoughts on the Current State of Pro Wrestling

In today’s blog post I want to talk about some of my favorite unappreciated dark wrestling themes (mostly Undertaker themes). Because going against conventional blog advice, which tells you to find a niche topic to blog about, I don’t want to pigeon-hole myself into just one topic. I guess I’ll just rely on my cult of personality for page views. Anyway, the first thing you hear as a wrestler enters an arena is their theme song. Before you even see them, it’s the first impression we get of a wrestler. In wrestling, music is an important step in character-building; often the first step. I can’t think of another storytelling medium that does that. And yes, professional wrestling really is its own unique storytelling medium. It is distinct from theater and other types of acting, although it derives a lot from theater. Are the commentators not just a modernized Greek chorus? Most everyone knows it is choreographed and scripted, but so are movies, except the actors all perform their own stunts in wrestling. Pro wrestling is a genre of fiction. When you look at it that way you can respect it more. Unless you’re a literary fiction snob.

            Since this is my first time mentioning wrestling on this blog, I feel like getting my thoughts on the current state of pro wrestling out of the way. I used to be a huge fan of pro wrestling. Still am to a degree. I still have a collection of old wrestling pay-per-views on VHS tapes and DVDs. When I’m in the mood I’ll watch them. The WWF/WWE just isn’t what it used to be. It was a slow downhill turn once their only competition, WCW, went out of business, and they no longer had anyone to impress because they were the only game in town. But it was still pretty watchable for a few years after that. I think it was the Chris Benoit incident in 2007 that really killed it. WWE became too heavily sanitized from that point on. That’s around when I gradually stopped watching. And nowadays they’re pandering to the Saudi Arabian government regime by hosting pay per views there while the commentary extols the virtues of the oppressive Arabian government, making me pretty glad I jumped ship before it got to that point. There are other pro wrestling companies I could be watching that are probably doing better content, but I never seem to follow through with them anymore. Lucha Underground was pretty good, I watched that for a while, but I kind of lost track of it. I don’t even watch cable TV anymore, really.

After 2007 WWE started to target children instead of teens and adults. Now no one does any dangerous stunts anymore, no one’s allowed to cuss or bleed. But the change in the target demographic isn’t fully why it’s not as good as it used to be. No, something else is missing. In the 1980’s and the first half of the 1990’s they targeted children too, but they still were never as boring as they are now. The thing was back then they had cartoonish gimmicks. It was campy and silly, but entertaining. Today all the wrestlers go by their real names, and they all dress the same. We’re probably never going to see another Undertaker, Goldust or Mankind. Any storyline they use has been recycled 50+ times already because they figure the current target demographic, 12 and under, hasn’t seen it done already so it’s alright to re-use it. They're not doing anything original. And there was more actual wrestling back in the day. There’s more wrestling in a 1-hour episode of Monday Night Raw from 1995 than there is in a 3-hour episode from today, or at least just as much. If I wanted just storylines without any wrestling, I’d watch a soap opera. And if I wanted just wrestling without any storylines, I’d watch UFC or actual unscripted wrestling (and I do from time to time). WWF and WCW used to blend both pretty well.

Or maybe I’m the one who’s changed. Maybe I just sort of grew out of watching pro wrestling. I’ll always appreciate the technical aspects of wrestling, like the grapples, or anything else with potential real-life martial arts application. But the storylines don’t do it for me anymore. Maybe I’m too old and jaded for it. All my favorite wrestlers are either really old, or dead, and I’ve become a curmudgeon. Anyway, I still like to look back. Let’s have a look some old wrestling themes.

The Original Undertaker Theme

 

There’s no replacing the original Undertaker theme. The one he would come out to in his original attire, as the western-style Undertaker, with his eccentric manager Paul Bearer at his side holding the urn. It’s simple, not too over-the-top like some of his later themes (which I’ll get to), it tells you who he is. It’s just Chopin’s “Funeral March” on a church organ. I like it better than the one he’s used since 2004 with all the thunder in the background and grandiose instrumentals. This is all you need. I’ve gone back and forth quite a bit on my favorite era of the Undertaker’s career, but ultimately, it’s the original I always come back to. Back when he was an emotionless monster, impervious to pain, who only spoke a sentence or two at a time, and only to say something ominous and threatening, or to gloat about the casket he was building for his opponent. He became too human over time, especially during his years with the biker gimmick (my least favorite era, when he had those awful themes by Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock), but even after. I still loved watching any match with The Undertaker throughout the mid to late 2000’s, but by the 2010’s it became kind of painful to watch him become bald, hobble around the ring and have to be carried away in stretchers after his matches. Time waits for no man. Not even supernatural, undead zombie wrestlers. He should have retired around when Paul Bearer died in 2013. It really should have been it for him when Brock Lesnar defeated him at WrestleMania, which in my opinion should never have happened. This Undertaker, the original Undertaker who came out to this theme, has been gone for a long time. And that may actually be the biggest reason I don’t watch WWE anymore. And it's sad.

Undertaker – Dark Side

 

This song is off the album WWF The Music Vol. 2, which I found at a record store one day years ago and have kept ever since, even though I only like two tracks on it, this one and the next on the list. But those tracks are worth having. This one derives from a promo that was released in 1996 when The Undertaker had a feud with Mankind. It contains a speech from the 1994 Royal Rumble, when The Undertaker was defeated in a casket match and “crossed over” into the afterlife for a while. On the screen in the arena (called a titantron) we saw the Undertaker laying in a casket, and he woke up and said this speech before floating out of the casket via some kind of bungee cord up to the ceiling. (I’ve heard it wasn’t actually The Undertaker they got to do that stunt). You’d have to see it to get it. I love this speech. He will never Rest in Peace.

 Mankind – Ode to Freud

 

The original gimmick of Mankind was the best one, in my opinion. By 1998 he was a cartoonish parody of his former self, then he had his other two gimmicks at the same time Dude Love and Cactus Jack and did a sort of split personality thing, and then eventually he dropped all his gimmicks and just went by his real name Mick Foley; by which time that’s what most wrestlers were doing anyway. Unlike a lot of wrestlers Mankind had two themes to start with; an entrance theme and an exit theme. This song incorporates both themes, overlaid with one of his classic rants. “Deep inside, you are merely a mirror image of all my atrocities. The ugliness that exists outside, lives inside every one of you! Destruction…can be beautiful!!”

When can destruction be beautiful? I suppose there’s a certain beauty in buildings being demolished. A supernova, the destruction of a star, can be very beautiful. Fire destroys, but is beautiful. Who thought pro wrestling could get so philosophical?

Ministry of Darkness Theme – Wrestlemania XV

 

There were so many variants on the Ministry of Darkness theme it’s hard to pick just one. And they’re all good. But I went with the version played specifically at Wrestlemania XV because it had both the Gaelic muttering and “Accept the Lord of Darkness as your Savior”. The Ministry of Darkness was The Undertaker at his darkest. From late-1998 to mid-1999 he was an evil overlord who abducted wrestlers and brainwashed them into joining his cult. His goal was to kidnap Vince McMahon’s daughter, force her to marry him and then take over the WWF. It didn’t quite go as planned, of course. The whole storyline was ruined when Undertaker joined Shane McMahon’s Corporation stable (the WWF at the time was a series of wrestling gangs; WCW did it first), and destroyed beyond repair when it was revealed that the Undertaker had actually been working with Vince McMahon all along and it was all some elaborate scheme to steal the WWF championship belt from Steve Austin, who wasn’t even champion yet when the storyline began, but oh well. What could have been the greatest storyline the WWF ever had was ruined. I’ll die mad about this. 

Corporate Ministry Theme

 

I already talked about the Corporate Ministry, when the Ministry of Darkness merged with the Corporation to create this super gang of wrestlers who really would have had nothing to do with one another normally, and reduced the great evil overlord version of The Undertaker into just a minion. But they had a great theme song, you have to give them that. There were a couple different versions of the theme song, but of course my favorite version is the one with the evil laugh.

Ringmaster Theme

 

This was Steve Austin’s original theme in the WWF, when he was known as the Ringmaster. It didn’t fit him of course, a bit too dark and symphonic for his later beer-guzzling redneck gimmick, but it was such a good song that has been forgotten. If only they’d given it to someone else, really.

Unholy Alliance Theme

 

For a couple months in 1999 The Undertaker teamed up with The Big Show, a wrestler known for being over 7 feet tall. Most of The Big Show’s theme songs have kind of a blues vibe to them, and this song is a mixture of that with the Undertaker’s usual dark theme songs, creating something that, like their tag team, didn’t seem like they’d go together well but then they do.

Type O Negative’s Kane Theme

 

Kane had a great gimmick, especially in his first couple years, as the Undertaker’s long lost brother who was thought to have died with their parents when their funeral home burned to the ground, but actually Undertaker’s former manager Paul Bearer rescued Kane and kept him in a basement somewhere, bringing him into the WWF after Undertaker refused to rejoin him (Bearer had betrayed Undertaker in 1996 and sided with Mankind after years of Undertaker not seeing any championships). He wore a cool mask that supposedly covered up his burned face, and was able to shoot lightning and fireballs from his hands using special arena effects aided by clever camera angles. Kane challenged his brother at WrestleMania XIV and continued to have a rivalry with him afterward. The gimmick kind of went downhill after Undertaker became a normal biker with no superpowers and suddenly didn’t really need to have a burn victim half-brother with pyrokinesis. See what I mean when I say wrestling went downhill? They’d never in a million years do a storyline like this again. But this theme song was too cool even for Kane, and went unused. How could they have not used a theme song by Type O Negative?!  How did they let this slip through their fingers?! I mean just listen to the part with the Gregorian chants at about the 1:44 mark. Is that not awesome? What was wrong with this theme, WWE? If only Peter Steele sang on the track; but if he had it would be even more unforgiveable that they never used it.

Anyway, I’m done writing about wrestling for a little while, but it won’t be the last time I write about it. Stay tuned for whatever else strikes my fancy next.