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#3 Hulk Hogan fights a character he fought in a movie he was in - 1989
Gather 'round, children. Let me tell you a story of a time, not too long ago. A time before Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, or Dave Bautista, or John Cena. A time when pro wrestlers weren't taken seriously as actors. It was a time known as.... 1989.
For that was the year that then-WWF Champion Hulk Hogan starred in No Holds Barred, an action movie about a Pro Wrestling Champion (I know, right?) who finds himself having to battle both a greedy and vicious television executive (played by veteran character actor Kurt Fuller) and a vicious underground cage fighter with the world's worst haircut (played by Tom "Tiny" Lister, who would go on to play Deebo in Friday and the President in The Fifth Element.)
Lister was a former basketball player and an actor (and a very nice man in real life). He wasn't a wrestler. He had no experience with professional wrestling prior to this movie. He didn't even actually play a professional wrestler in the movie.
So, of course, Vince McMahon got the crazy idea to bring Lister in as a wrestler and as the same character, he played in the movie and Hogan in the real WWF.Challenge
Wait... what?
Putting aside that Hogan didn't play himself in No Holds Barred - he played a character named Rip that, well, was pretty much Hogan outside of the name - while Lister wasn't actually Zeus in real life. I think we might have established that last part.
SummerSlam 1989 saw Hulk Hogan and Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake take on 'Macho King' Randy Savage and Zeus in the main event. The story, such as it was, claimed that Zeus became furious of Hogan while on the set on No Hold Barred - apparently Hogan had broken his nose or something - and wanted to fight him for real. Well, not 'real' real. Wrestling real. Hogan and Beefcake went on to win.the match
The two teams would later go on to have a rematch in a steel cage during that year's Survivor Series, and that would be the last we would see of Zeus in the WWF. He would, however, reappear later in WCW (this time as "Z-Gangsta"), but the less said about that, the better.
The late 80's was a time when anything Hogan touched turned to gold and the WWE was keen to capture the aura of his popularity. The programming was hence planned around him and the WWE tried and sold what they could.
