Much like the previous entry, the Menagerie of Monsters, Jerry Lawler’s creatures of the night has a number of outlandish characters to compell its fans with.
In the days of The Territories, when one promotion would dominate a local region, each promotion carefully crafted its own identity and ethos. It continues with a nightmare….
The Menagerie of Monsters
Nightmare Freddie
Dreamwalking slasher Freddy Kreuger made his big screen debut in 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, wherein he would plague the nightmares of teenagers before murdering them in inventive ways.
Played to perfection by the legendary Robert Englund, the wise-cracking maniac with the bladed gloves proved popular enough to spawn 6 sequels, a re-imagining in 1994 as The New Nightmare, a 2003 crossover with Friday the 13th, and an attempted reboot in 2010.
However, while Freddy Kreuger was leading a multi-million dollar movie franchise, Jerry Lawler decided to cash in on the trend himself. Enter: Nightmare Freddie.
Initially portrayed by Tennessee wrestling veteran and CWA/USWA referee Tommy Gilbert, Nightmare Freddie wrestled in a rubber Halloween mask and trademark red-and-black striped sweater, and entered the arena wearing the iconic bladed glove.
Despite his notoriety as a villain in the movies, Nightmare Freddie would prove a hit with the crowds, wrestling as a babyface and teaming with the likes of Dustin Rhodes, Bill Dundee, and Jerry Lawler himself.
He even won the USWA Battle Royal, securing a spot in the 1996 Royal Rumble. However, before Nightmare Freddie could compete in the WWF, New Line Cinema would issue a cease & desist notice, causing Tommy Gilbert to give his spot in the Royal Rumble to his son, Doug Gilbert.
Shortly thereafter, Tommy would give the gimmick to Doug, who went on to portray the character in Japan for years to come.
Jason Joins
Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th was no stranger to a wrestling ring, with Karl Moffat donning the hockey mask in Stampede Wrestling as Jason The Terrible in 1981.
But when Nightmare Freddie debuted in the CWA in 1988, it only made sense that there should also be a Jason Voorhees.
And so it came to pass in 1989 that Doug Gilbert would don a hockey mask of his own to portray Jason in the CWA ring.
However, Jason would not enter a feud with Nightmare Freddie, as the 2003 crossover movie would have us believe.
Instead, the two would join forces against the likes of Chris Champion, Mark Starr, Brickhouse Brown, and Iceman Parsons.
The clamor for these two movie villains would call for the re-introduction of the likes of Frankenstein and Wolfman, if only for a brief run. CWA would also attempt to introduce a Michael Myers analogue, named The Boogieman to avoid another cease & desist.
However, the cease & desist letters rarely reached Japan, where slashers like Freddy and Leatherface regularly step out of the screen and into the puroresu ring.
Ta-Gar, Lord of The Volcano
In 1991, Jerry Lawler was in need of another villain to dispose, and he decided to go back to the “hulking man in a mask” well.
Using Lord Humongous as a blueprint, Lawler decided to add more comic book flavor to this iteration, allegedly basing the mask on Marvel’s Doctor Doom.
Instead of hailing from a post-apocalyptic hellscape, this new character would hail from beyond the stars. In his debut vignettes, Ta-Gar (Lord of The Volcano) claimed to have roamed the galaxy in search of battle, determining that only the USWA roster held worthy opponents.
In a voice not unlike that of The Shockmaster, Ta-Gar claimed that by harnessing the power of the eponymous volcano, he would break his competitors and sculpt the USWA in his own twisted image before demonstrating his resilience by lighting his allegedly mechanical hand on fire.
However, Ta-Gar’s in-studio debut would prove far less exciting. While the vignettes allowed the production crew to show Ta-Gar’s power via special effects, there was only so much they could do in-person.
While promo images and videos showed Ta-Gar having pyrokinetic powers, the live Ta-Gar wielded a plastic shield that shot a rather disappointing “fireball” which never played a role in his matches.
Like most of the other ridiculous Memphis gimmicks, Ta-Gar would only wrestle a handful of matches for the USWA from mid-June to early July of 1991.
While Ta-Gar claimed to be among the greatest combatants in The Universe, his matches ended mostly in defeats at the hands of Bill Dundee and, eventually, Jerry Lawler.
Then, as suddenly as he appeared, Ta-Gar left. The thing that separates Ta-Gar from the other monsters on this list is the mystery that surrounds the character to this day.
Nobody from the Memphis scene remembers who donned the suit in 1991, and nobody has since come forward to claim they were Ta-Gar. For all we know, he genuinely did return to his home planet in July of 1991.
The Christmas Creature
The early 90s was a difficult time for the USWA, who had a tough time coming up with villains for Jerry Lawler month-to-month. That’s when Lawler thought “Who says monsters are tied to Halloween?”
And so it came to pass that in December of 1992, Memphis Wrestling fans witnessed the debut of The Christmas Creature.
This is how a young Glenn Jacobs saw his TV debut, donning a costume akin to what would happen if Swamp Thing inhabited a Christmas tree.
In future interviews, Jacobs claimed that the costume was designed by his mother, who incorporated peppermint stripes, tinsel, and flashing lights into the costume, beating Chris Jericho’s light-up jacket by almost 20 years.
Brian Christopher introduced The Christmas Creature to the sheer indifference of the USWA studio audience in 1992. The future Fake Diesel proceeded to batter jobber Trey Keller as tinsel fell off his costume.
For all Brian Christopher’s ranting in the commentary booth about how fearsome The Christmas Creature was, the gimmick just came across as goofy.
After a couple swift losses to Jerry Lawler around the end of ’92, The Christmas Creature disappeared, while the creatives at USWA figured out what to do with Jacobs.
He would make a handful of appearances for WCW as Bruiser Mastino before returning to USWA in October of 1993 to portray Doomsday, a more colorful rendition of the Lord Humongous character, to whom the USWA no longer held the rights.
In fact, with the black-and-red color scheme and the mask allegedly hiding horrific burns, one could make the argument that Doomsday was the prototype for Jacobs’ most famous gimmick, Kane.
And that’s just some of what went on in the Memphis territory. Legends abound of bizarre horror gimmicks that graced the CWA/USWA ring, including an Undertaker that predates Mark Calaway’s Undertaker, and The Gravedigger, an obvious attempt to ape Mark Calaway’s Undertaker.
However, as happens to all too many regional promotions from the days of the territories, many of those memories are lost to time.
So, take a moment to remember the strange, scary, and screwy gimmicks of your local promotions. One day they may be gone.
