Want to feel old and also realize how distant modern day wrestling is from the orbit of actual pop culture? Well, that’s a weird and moderately depressing goal for today, but let’s help you get that off your to-do list.
In 1985, a fake Roddy Piper paraded through a group of kids for “Timber Lake Camp’s WrestleMania.” It seems innocuous, but out comes the Hulkster himself, replete with his gold cross and vague awareness of exactly where he is. These kids in the Catskills proceeded to lose every shit they have ever had.
This video is great because for all of the Hogan classic bits of nostalgia that are thrown at us, those bits are rarely outside the context of wrestling. A key part of the Hogan mythos is that he is easily one of the most recognizable sports figures/entertainers of all-time, but we remember campy failures like Pastamania, or crossovers like No Holds Barred. To a lot of wrestling fans, he’s something that looms larger than life over our childhoods, whether we were tiny Hulkamaniacs or hated him because he maybe had a tendency to ruin things for everyone we loved. But those are still very personal experiences. I think fans today are still distanced from the actual great highs of wrestling in pop culture. John Cena showing up on Parks and Rec is great, but it’s still nowhere close to Hogan standing in front of a group of kids in the middle of nowhere 30 years ago.
Either way, this is a neat little glimpse into “real world” Hulkamania, a thing now easily cured with an attenuated vaccine available at any doctor’s office across the country.
