Well That Didn’t Work: The Undertaker vs The Undertaker

Craig Wilson

The early 90s was a sometimes strange time in the WWE. Wacky characters galore as our screens were packed full of brightly coloured WWE superstars. One of the few characters to have any longevity is The Undertaker. In fact, there was one point where a pay per view was headlined by a match featuring two Undertakers.

‘Well That Didn’t Work’ returns with a SummerSlam theme as Craig takes in the fake Undertaker storyline that lead to The Undertaker taking on The Undertaker at SummerSlam 1994

Background

At the 1990 Survivor Series The Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase introduced the WWF faithful to The Undertaker. A year later he became the champion, defeating Hulk Hogan with thanks to Ric Flair, and would soon become a firm fan favourite.

A late call-up to Lex Luger’s team at Survivor Series 93 saw him line-up against the Foreign Fanatics featuring then WWF Champion Yokozuna. This inserted him neatly into a programme with the behemoth champion. At Royal Rumble 94 he fought Yoko but interference resulted in the champion retaining. It took Crush, The Great Kabuki, Genichiro Tenryu, Bam Bam Bigelow, Adam Bomb, Jeff Jarrett, The Headshrinkers (Samu and Fatu) and Diesel to shut The Undertaker in the casket to end the match. This resulted in Taker being written off the screen for 7 months, in reality to heal a back injury.

Soon after Wrestlemania X features aired of people having claimed to have seen The Undertaker. Soon, DiBiase introduced an Undertaker to the WWF fans, played by Brian Lee. DiBiase claimed to have brought The Undertaker back to the WWF. Paul Bearer informed the WWF fans that DiBiase’s Undertaker was an impostor and that Bearer had located the true Undertaker.

The event

This played out to a match at SummerSlam that saw the two Undertakers face each other. The rather cheesy buildup to the match featured Leslie Nielsen perform short segments trying to solve the mystery of how two Undertakers could exist in a spinoff of his roles on Police Squad! and The Naked Gun films.

SummerSlam 94 was headlined between the two Undertakers. Despite a lengthy build-up, and a lot of interest, the main event lasted just over 8 minutes and featured DiBiase’s fake Undertaker being barely able to land a blow on the genuine Undertaker.

The win came after several Tombstone Piledrivers before several druids came to the ring to take away the fake Undertaker in a casket.

Aftermath

Brian Lee returned to Smokey Mountain Wrestling soon after. A stint in Extreme Championship Wrestling followed before Lee returned to the WWF in 1997 where he performed as Chainz as part of the Disciples of Apocalypse. After leaving again in the summer of 1998, several years out of the limelight followed before showing up in TNA for a short period.

Since 2003 Lee has been largely inactive, appearing infrequently at independent shows.