Note: In pop culture, plenty of things fail. It’s the nature of the business. Movies, albums, TV shows–hundreds of products are made in an effort to get us to buy them and, generally speaking, it’s a good year for those industries if we dig a fraction of what comes out. The Undiscovered Country, a new series at Fear of a Ghost Planet, will take a look at some of pop culture’s more fascinating failures, the obscure and the cult alike, and wonder what’d happen if things went slightly different. The series begins with one of pro-wrestling’s more infamous–ahem–turkeys.

A little backstory: In the fall of 1990, the WWF was carting around a giant mystery egg from show to show, with the promise that it would hatch at the WWF’s Thanksgiving spectacular, the Survivor Series. Yes, a mystery egg. There was absolutely no way that anything in that egg was getting over, but the WWF gamely toted it from town to town and, somehow, people seemed to be interested in the egg’s eventual hatching. I doubt it showed up in the bottom line, but based on the reaction of the Hartford crowd when the egg started to crack (not to mention when “Mean” Gene Okerlund mentioned that it could be the Playmate of the Year, among other ridiculous possibilities), there were people looking forward to the egg’s contents making his/hers/its debut. Here, for the record, is what happened:

Make no mistake, The Gobbledy Gooker was a terrible gimmick, perhaps the worst of all time. Sure, wrestling has had its Shockmasters and its Arachnamans, its Ding Dongs and its Lazer Trons (also portrayed by the man in the Gooker outfit) (weird that I’m only naming WCW gimmicks), but the Gooker was so bad that he lasted one show. One. They made that costume. They carted that egg around. They gave him nine minutes of time on one of the biggest pay per views a year. He didn’t make it off of his first show, which, in wrestling, is amazing. The Shockmaster lasted a few months. The Boogeyman went a couple of years. Plenty of terrible wrestlers with awful gimmicks get eons to make it, as a wrestling character is, essentially, an investment in the future. As seen from the following promotional videos, the Gooker was supposed to stick around, but the reaction was so bad that giving the poor bird another shot would have been suicide:

The Gooker has since passed into legend, his name synonymous with terrible wrestling gimmicks. The old queen of wrestling websites, Wrestlecrap, annually hands out the Gooker Award for excellence in bad booking. It’s pointless to defend the gimmick, but that’s not what I’m setting out to do here. As awesome as a Koko B. Ware/Gooker tag team run would have been (or, for that matter, a Gooker/Tugboat team, just to pair Gooker and Shockmaster), the fact of the matter is that the WWF blew the whole Gobbledy Gooker thing by hiring a really talented wrestler to inhabit the suit, a wrestler who was doing stuff that few, if any, wrestlers in the WWF were doing at the time.

Re-watch that video of the Gooker’s debut. A lot of ink and bile has been spilled about the square dancing and the turkey strut and “Mean” Gene’s athletic prowess and the hard sell job by Roddy Piper and Gorilla Monsoon, but there’s more to the angle than that. In a hostile crowd, in a full body suit, Hector Guerrero, he of the famous Guerrero wrestling family, was able to jump into the ring, do a forward and back roll, a cartwheel, and, most impressively, a flip into the ring followed by another forward roll. Were he just Hector Guerrero, were this just a segment on WWF Superstars or All-American Wrestling, were he squashing the Brooklyn Brawler or “Quick Draw” Rick McGraw, Hector Guerrero’s debut would have represented the first significant penetration of the Mexican lucha libre style in the promotion since Madison Square Garden lifted their ban on masked grapplers, which allowed Mil Mascaras to feud with Billy Ghaham for the WWF Title. Moreover, Hector was a rather talented wrestler, as these 1997 matches against Dean Malenko will illustrate:

Yeah, I know, it’s a match against Dean freaking Malenko, who, it is publicly documented, never had a bad match, ever. Besides which, these matches took place seven years after the Gooker gimmick flopped, when Hector was in his 40s, a ring technician and jobber to the stars. Here’s a match from 1995, two years earlier, against 2 Cold Scorpio for the ECW Television Title:

2 Cold Scorpio was also a good wrestler, but I think you get the point. Hector Guerrero was a wrestler’s wrestler, man. A joy to watch, regardless of his sparkly WCW trunks or the fact that his most significant television exposure, for most wrestling fans, came in the twilight of his career. He was a smart wrestler from a smart family, and, watching him at 43 against Dean Malenko and at 41 against Scorpio, it’s tempting to think that, had Eddie Guerrero not died in 2005, he would have been wrestling a similar style, if slightly modified for the WWE main event scene’s purposes.

But this is still Hector at 41 and 43, which, for a wrestler, is an eternity from the 36 at which he donned the Gooker suit. Had he been the Hector of his brief WCW and ECW stints, he would have faded away–a good wrestler working a less than interesting gimmick in an era where interesting gimmicks were absolutely necessary. But it didn’t have to be that way, either. Check out this singles match from Championship Wrestling from Florida, where, in an all-stereotype match, Hector Guerrero takes on Chief Joe Lightfoot:

The guy seconding Hector, with the beard and the bandoliers, is Chavo Guerrero, father of Chavo Guerrero Jr., and the gimmick they’re working in CWF, at least to me, looks like a precursor to the lying, cheating, stealing Eddie and Chavo Guerrero tandem that, along with the teams of Edge/Rey Mysterio and Kurt Angle/Chris Benoit, defined an era of WWE SmackDown!, giving Brock Lesnar maybe the best midcard support any champion had since Hulk Hogan and the nWo dominated WCW.

You know how WWE really blew it with the Gooker? They could have done Los Guerreros 12 years before they did, adding another strong tag team to what was already a great tag team division, and instead they got a turkey to square dance with “Mean” Gene. As a wrestling fan, the Gooker’s utter failure is humorous, and his in-ring debut at Wrestlemania X7 was worth the wait (he was eliminated second in the event’s gimmick battle royale, after the Repo Man), but the prospect of Rockers vs. Guerreros or Hart Foundation vs. Guerreros is tantalizing to my wrestlethalmus. Here Hector and Chavo are against the Rock and Roll Express, and Hector teaming with Mando against the Badd Company, who, later, would become the Orient Express, who, as previously documented, had an awesome match at Royal Rumble 1991 against the Rockers.

But, on the flip side, had the Gooker never made his debut, had the Guerrero Brothers made their way to the WWF instead of a man in a giant turkey suit, the potential for incredibly awkward Diva’s division returns would be lost to all of us, and Thanksgivings would be decidedly void of the one-off wrestling character it so richly deserves.