Match of the Debut - The debut of Oz

Oz w/ The Great Wizard vs. Tim Parker - WCW SuperBrawl (1991)

In honor of the new Oz movie coming to theaters near you, I present wrestling's answer to the classic tale of The Wizard of Oz: a young 7 foot tall and very green (both in attire and experience) performer named, yep, Oz.

If you are thinking this is one of those gimmicks where the wrestler behind the old wizard mask and cape was eventually phased out of television and never seen again, you would actually be very, very wrong. Yes, Oz flopped like most of Dusty Rhodes's wildly bad ideas, but the man behind the wizard gimmick actually ended up becoming quite the star in both the WWF and WCW after a few more failed attempts at superstardom. Turns out, Oz is one of Kevin Nash's earliest gimmicks in his first run of WCW.

Kevin Nash, like a lot of other wrestlers around his time, recovered from a lot of bad gimmicks to become big name stars. Nash might be the biggest success story as no one else can say that they had to play the wrestling equivalent of Oz: the Great and Powerful.

Hopefully James Franco will have the same luck as Nash and start getting good roles eventually. And hey, I never said Nash was any better at wrestling after this...

Also, why was Nash's manager Merlin the Wizard? This is a question a see a lot online and something that still baffles me today. Maybe the new movie will explain it...

But probably not.

Kinda fun fact: Timothy (Tim) (Britten) Parker is also the name of a stage actor who played Doctor Dillmond in the Broadway production of Wicked, a musical about The Wicked Witch and other pre-Dorothy Wizard of Oz themes.

Match of the Day - just Booker takes on fat Ahmed Johnson for the letter T

Booker vs. Big T - WCW SuperBrawl X (2000)

The story behind this ill-advised match between Booker T and a larger-than-I-remembered Ahmed Johnson was that Stevie Ray, Booker's brother and long-time tag team partner, decided to turn his back on his own flesh and blood. Apparently Stevie Ray felt that Booker T wasn't the man that he used be and a bigger, fatter version of the Harlem Heat - Harlem Heat 2000 - had to be created.

Along with introducing his new tag team partner, Big T (Ahmed Johnson, now 300 pounds), Stevie Ray also introduced J. Biggs (Clarence Mason from the Nation of Domination) as Harlem Heat's new lawyer. Mr. Biggs then used his lawyer magic to get the T in Booker T removed since Big T was the only one aloud to use a single T in his name. Along with Booker's T, he also lost his entrance music and the rights to Harlem Heat.

Soon though, Booker T - now just "Booker" - got a chance to win it all back in the match above against Big T at the 10th Anniversary of SuperBrawl. And while Booker looked to be getting his T back in no time, all of a sudden the lights go out in the arena and when the lights kick back on, is this even bigger guy than Ahmed Johnson standing there on the apron . At first, it looks like it's Mabel - seeing as the lights went out for that big man a year or so before this in the WWF when he made his transformation into Viscera, but nope. Turns out it was just a really big guy no one had ever seen before.

Or had we?

The man we see become the third member of this huge new Harlem Heat revamp was also that ridiculously huge chested man (who was never used) in the No Limit Soldiers, another poor angle that WCW felt was necessary to cram down our throats.

The aftermath to this match is pretty awful as well; from what I know, Booker never got his T back and Harlem Heat with all their potential and beef to them never went anywhere (no shocker there). Booker later would join the Misfits in Action (MIA) as "GI Bro" just long enough for people to forget about Harlem Heat 2000 so he could return as Booker T again and get his long overdue push before WCW went bankrupt.

This angle and match wouldn't have been that bad by itself but then Mark Madden, the worst wrestling commentator of all time (Mike Adamle doesn't count since he knew nothing about wrestling), decides that he'll mention that he once lived in Harlem with Stevie Ray and Booker T along with the legendary black civil rights activist, Malcolm X who was assassinated in 1964. Yeah...