On the other hand, sometimes sticking to the seemingly bottomless archives lands us with something like that one time the AWA was hired by Kellogg's brand to do some marketing hype.
It's not commercials, guys.
So a little backstory:
For the longest time, companies would, if wealthy, entertain their salesforces/manufacturers by hiring people to put on performances. There's a whole new documentary coming out soon about this fad called Bathtubs Over Broadway, but that one is primarily regarding industrial musicals. This is the absolute first I've heard of an industrial wrestling card. I'd call it a pay per view, but it 100% wasn't. No one outside of the Kellogg's salesforce or manufacturers was really supposed to see or know about this. No one paid to watch it (well, technically, we have, but that's nearly 30 years after the fact).
All I know is that 12 days before I was born, a group of people working for Kellogg's filtered into the Hyatt in Minneapolis, MN and saw an AWA show in a dark arena, interrupted constantly by sales speeches and madness. The sole commentary on these matches is spoken out by the indomitable and slightly manic Larry Nelson.
— The Great Brian Last (@GreatBrianLast) June 10, 2016
What fascinates me most, however, is how the card is arranged and who's on it.
We start, after the Star Spangled Banner (which they got a fairly decent, albeit totally unknown to me, singer to provide), with a parade of AWA wrestlers with replaced, Kellogg's- or General Mills-based names. Mike Enos has become Total the Terrible, Derrick Dukes (the gentleman from the Larry Nelson video above) is Mr. Oat-pportunity, Colonel DeBeers (the same one who wanted to paint Dukes white - it's a South African apartheid gimmick) has taken on the identity of The General, and Chief Wahoo McDaniel of all people has become... Dr. K. Wow.
Quick question to you while you read this: are you ill right now? If you're ill right now, it'll be a very weird experience. It's a bizarre experience while you're well or sober, so I can only imagine that watching this cluster of a show while under the influence of intoxicants or fever would make it utterly incomprehensible.
If you feel that you have the mental fortitude to endure this reality-bending madhouse of a feature, go ahead and start it up on the WWE Network - you may have to hunt around in their AWA section. I'm going to continue talking about it now:
Okay, so why is Kellogg's freaking out? They're about to invade General Mills' territory and conduct business in Minnesota, which I guess is General Mills territory? I don't know much about cereal history... regardless, the name of the campaign was In Your Space!, which is both a terrible pun and a stupid name for a campaign, and with cereals like Nut & Honey Crunch-O's I can't be too surprised that Cheerios reign supreme even now. Sorry. Spoilers.
Every heel comes out with a Kellogg's cereal box that they insult, attack, both insult & attack. There's cereal everywhere in the ring. It's distracting. So is the fuss over how evil General Mills is and how Kellogg's, a brand literally created to be boring so as not to pester the patients in the Battle Creek Sanitarium, is right to put up a fight and bring doom to another cereal brand. Geez. How did they feel about the generics, I wonder?
The first fight is called (all the fights have names, so sorry) "The Melee in Minneapolis", and it features Enos as Total the Terrible going up against Tommy Jammer as Nutri Rockne. Yikes. It's not a great match, but it only lasts a little over 3 minutes, so there's that. Then we're treated to another interminable speech about how Kellogg's is going to take over the cereal aisle. What really bothers me, though, is that the guy obliterates kayfabe (the sacred status of wrestling not being called FAKE) by calling the card "joke wrestling matches". Dude. What the heck.
Eventually, we're given another match. How gracious.
Terror in the Twin Cities is a one-on-one bout between Derrick Dukes' Mr. Oat-pportunity and Wayne Bloom's Hondo the Honeybee Haymaker. Since these guys are representing Nut & Honey-O's and Honey Nut Cheerios respectively, you can guess that Bloom won. You'd be wrong, since this is Bizzarro World and Kellogg's thought that, even though they absolutely couldn't remember the names of their own cereals that we would buy them en-masse. We didn't.
This match is long. It's much longer than we're shown. We only get to see about four and a half minutes, but apparently it's more than 8 minutes long. For a meh match about breakfast cereal. It's Kellogg's money. We don't have to care. Mr. Oat-pportunity wins with Oat Power. Woo.
We roll straight into The General vs Dr. K in The Brawl Near St. Paul.
Again, that's Col. DeBeers vs Chief Wahoo McDaniel. The only interesting thing to happen in this match is that a fan blasts DeBeers in the face with a handful of cereal on his way to the ring. After that it's all chops, rest holds, and two out of shape men whacking each other ineffectually. It's pretty sad, really. Then again, Chief Wahoo was nearly 50 at this point, and very large. It was probably hard for him to keep going. DeBeers has two years left in the AWA.
Now we get to the last speech and... it's a tag match next.
And guys...
Oh boy.
It's the Rile in the Aisle, a tag-team match between the Mills Brothers (Pat Tanaka & Paul Diamond AKA Max Moon) and Sales & Marketing (Greg Gagne the promoter's son and Tom Zenk). Oh boy.
Sadly this is the most competent match on the card, since literally everyone here can actually wrestle and is under 45 years old... Hilariously, they never, ever refer to Sales & Marketing by their full name. They are constantly and consistently called S&M.
S
&
M
Oh my god.
It's not a terrible match, but not an amazing one either, and thus concludes the fever dream that is In Your Space, the Battle of Breakfast Cereals.
If you're feeling hale & hearty, I strongly suggest settling in with a box of your favorite breakfast cereal and enjoying this bizarre little nugget of Wrestling history.
Hopefully this appealed to you guys more than Nut & Honey-O's.
Go Enjoy Something!
FC
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