Hey Scott, long time reader, love your work. I got a question about Mohammed Hassan. He debuted in the WWE around 2004 or so, they introduced the character & I seem to remember he got pretty over, but then I guess the character or storyline got too controversial or too out of hand. They felt pressure from I guess the media or whoever, so they pussied out and killed the character. My question is do you know what the original plans or goals were with him? What were they exactly trying to do with him, what was their motivation?
My biggest problem was that they made him a heel when to me he should have been a face or at least had all the workings of a face. Seriously he was an Arab AMERICAN (they even billed him from Detroit Michigan) living in a post 9/11 World where he gets discriminated against & hated JUST BECAUSE he's of Arab descent. Now he's upset & frustrated by the way he's treated in society, because now he's paying the price of some Arabs that attacked America, Arabs who he doesn't know, has no connection with and doesn't even agree with their views. He's guilty by association even though he had no association with them. Am I the only one who thought that his argument had a very good point? Did anyone else think that he was actually right in what he was saying? It really made no sense why they were trying to make him a heel. Was it just because he was Arab and people hated Arabs at the moment? It seems a bit simple to me.
I always felt that they seriously dropped the ball with that character. They could have used him to explore so many different social themes & bring so many social issues into the forefront, issues like patriotism, racism, stereotypes, prejudice, self awareness, betrayal. The character had a lot of depth (at least by today's standards), he could have made people think about their actions, like "why were they booing him, just because he's Arab?" He could have argued about the unfairness of suddenly being seen as what he was instead of who he was, I am sure a few groups of people not just Arabs could identify with that feeling. The angle where a bunch of guys in ski masks attacked the Undertaker, then the next day there was an article in a paper about how some "Arabs in ski masks" attacked the Undertaker, to which Hassan argued, "if they were wearing ski masks, how do you know they were Arabs", stuff like that could have made people think about their own prejudices. I mean you could write a whole fuckin novel about this sort of stuff. Its stuff like this that would make people stop & think and get engaged in a story but seems they for whatever reason just did not do it. This kind of stuff pretty much writes itself, I can't for the life of me understand why or how they could fuck it all up.
So what you think? What was the deal with him? Was the WWE just too blind to see what they had?
Thanks & Keep up the great work
For me, there were two main problems with the gimmick:
1) They were trying for a bold statement about racial prejudice, but the "Arab" character was played by an Italian, so really it was just the same nonsense perpetuated by wrestling all along. Plus no one bought Hassan as the person he was supposed to be playing, meaning they had to quickly retool the gimmick into Evil Foreign Heel.
2) He never got any momentum as a heel. He debuted with a TERRIBLE match against Jerry Lawler that ran forever instead of being a quick squash, and then got destroyed by Hogan and Michaels after Wrestlemania. There was just no way people were going to take him seriously after that.
As much as Vince & company like to think they have their fingers on the pulse of pop culture and social memes.....they don't. So every nuanced character they write ends up failing and dropping back into some sort of carny character. The only time a deeper character ever works is when the performer gets to develop it himself (ala heel Austin in summer 2001)
ReplyDeleteThat's a damn fine point, I have always wondered why they didn't have him as a face, and his eventual heel turn would have been epic! Also, I don't remember him being all that bad in the ring, or is that just me?
ReplyDeletewrestling fans tend to struggle with subtlety. I simply don't see fans having the understanding of the plight of this guy in a post 9/11 world. Remember this is a business where people of color have hard heads, Asians are always sneaky, and anyone slightly effiminate gets a fag chant.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, regardless of the merit of one's position, wrestlers who complain are treated as heels due to "whining." Happened to Bret in 97, Orndorff with Hogan, plus many other examples where logically the character was right, but fans hate "whiners" regardless of the merit of their points. Hassan would have fallen into this trap as well.
Third, racism and stereotypes are ugly. I don't know that wrestling fans are any more racist or prejudiced than any other particular demographic but at that point, there was sadly a large number of people that DID have an issue with anyone who looked Arabic (ask Indians who got dirty looks in airports from people who thought they were middle eastern).
the gimmick was dead in the water from day one. It would never work as a face and it was in poor taste as a heel.
We've had this discussion before, it's not what you say that makes you face or heel, it's how you say it. Hassan was a dick just like Punk's SES character.
ReplyDeleteArrogance and whining = heel no matter what words come out of your mouth.
People talk about Katie Vick or the Birth of the Hand as WWE's lowest moment. I'll pick the 2005 Rumble, when all the wrestlers from Smackdown and Raw joined forces to throw a 'Muslim' out of the ring.
ReplyDeleteThey were never going to get people to cheer an Arab in 2004.
ReplyDeleteYou could tell he was an evil Middle Easterner because he finished with the Camel Clutch.
ReplyDeleteDaivari is a great worker and FANTASTIC talker. Seriously one of the most underrated wrestlers of the last ten years. And the dude's only 28! That means he was only TWENTY when he was holding his own on the mic with Jim Ross, Jerry Lawler, Shawn Michaels, and Hulk Hogan!
ReplyDeleteHe's just an absolute natural.
I may be in the minority, but I think Big Show is a good actor, at least by pro-wrestling standards. He's one of the best (in WWE) at utilizing facial-expressions, body-language, and vocal inflection to convey emotion. He also improvs comedy really well.
ReplyDeleteI notice Foley seems to over-estimate how much the average fan can pick up on subtle story telling. Hardcore Diaries highlighted that problem, plus it wasn't the best idea to begin with.
ReplyDeleteFandango is only seven years late. Vince is getting better.
ReplyDeleteThe following quotes from Scott Keith's "Wrestling's Made Men" book sum up Hassan's run quite well:
ReplyDelete1) In the buildup to he and Daivari's tag team match against HBK and Hogan at Backlash 2005: "Hassan still wasn't getting over and could now add "can't draw heat by beating on Shawn Michaels and Hulk Hogan" to his impressive resume of failures to that point".
2) "Hassan was a major flop, both in the ring and as a potential draw, and by 2005 they were resorting to staged "terrorist attacks" on Smackdown to get him any heat at all. Despite the improvement of his talking skills, he was unable to put together a watchable match, even with great technicians like Chris Benoit and Shawn Michaels, and if you can't have a great match with either of those guys, you're worthless. He was fired, of course".
I still say the Melanie Pillman interview was WWE's lowest moment.
ReplyDeleteI think they could have been a viable tag team, going after the Haas/Benjamin 'all-american' team.
ReplyDeletethey are not bookers.
ReplyDeletethey arent good bookers
they arent good writers.
the only time they do something well is when they let wrestlers book their own shit... mostly...
Was that first line supposed to be a sentence?
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, that hasn't always stopped them before.
ReplyDeleteIt's more like "terrorism" is related to all the issues of the middle east (and even that's a gross oversimplification).
ReplyDeleteBasically a whole bunch of people who have been killing each other for thousands of years because they worship god(s) different and don't like the same type of food (much like how most people on earth have been killing each other for thousands of years cause they worship god(s) different and don't like the same type of food). And then America got involved cause of WWI and Israel and oil and fighting communists.
It's a gigantic clusterfuck. And I think wrestling's strengths are using clashes between culture trends and personality types rather than examining geopolitics.
Pretty sure that O.J. chase from Wrestlemania 12 is still going on somewhere in this world.
ReplyDeleteThe best part about Hassan was Daivari.
ReplyDeleteI wish I could upvote this more.
ReplyDeletehe was TERRIBLE.
ReplyDeleteIt's not ability, it's passion. Most wrestling fans are super casual and wait for the babyface to call the heel a silly word to cheer and the heel to call the fans lame to boo.
ReplyDeleteWeren't they actually thinking of putting the title on him, over Batista in DC no less?
ReplyDeleteOnly if he started doing the magic carpet ride
ReplyDeleteI was digging your post until the last paragraph.
ReplyDeleteBischoff does not deserve any props... he's still trying to make amends for the Warrior-Hogan-Bischoff mirror trick that managed to make no sense on about four or five different levels. That may be the worst offender in this category. Let's not forget Jeff Hardy's inner dialogue.
But I'm right there with you. As soon as the camera cut to another angle in the hotel room, I was completely taken out of the moment. I haven't watched the Halftime Heat match since it aired because the stupid forklift shot killed it for me.
The bottom line: Vince wants Raw to be thought of as a variety show of sorts. He's been trying to impress NBC/Universal execs since the mid 80s with this stuff and he's not going to stop. We're going to get backstage segments that defy logic and canon just so Simmons can walk in and say "Damn." We're going to get Tensai in lingerie. This will not stop until Vince retires.
I'm probably gonna sound real ignorant, but aren't most real-life issue of all people of Middle-Eastern descent usually related to terrorism or at least that's the stereotype.
ReplyDeleteBesides, I really can't blame Vince and co. too much for doing a gimmick like this, tensions were still pretty high between Middle Easterners and Americans in 05.
What bothered me is the bombings happened the day of the taping, and yet they still ran the angle on Smackdown that Friday anyway.
ReplyDeleteI heard that one too.
ReplyDelete"Really fucked me off"... I'm gonna start using that one.
ReplyDeleteBut Davari was small, so they had to go to the big Italian guy.
ReplyDeleteEver see the one with Hacksaw Jim Duggan's wife, after he and Iron Sheik got caught with a bunch of drugs in a car?
ReplyDeleteJust double checked the date of the bombings, and you're right. Damn, that was just seriously bad luck on WWE's part.
ReplyDeletePlus, having Hassan go full terrorist was dumb anyway.
No, the bombings happened the day Smackdown aired (which was still on Thursdays at this point in time, the move to Fridays didn't occur until that fall). They probably ran with the footage as is because the episode had already been mastered and there wouldn't have been enough time to pull the episode, remove the footage, remaster it and push it back out again (and that's assuming they would have had something ready to replace it with). They ran a bumper before the segment, but that's probably all they could have done with the time they had available; I, for one, never blamed the E for still running it given the circumstances. (You can rightly criticize them for booking and filming the segment to begin with, but at that moment in time, they were stuck with it.)
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's the amazing part: in Hassan and Davari's first year or so, they interacted with Hulk Hogan, Shawn Michaels, Jerry Lawler, Chris Jericho, and The Undertaker, among others. Makes you wonder what thy had planned for them had the gimmick been done well, and had gotten over.
ReplyDeleteThat's the point - give Hassan the Honky Tonk Man's original gimmick, coming in to be a "friend of Hogan" babyface, only to have the crowd turn on him and make him heel, justifying his anger. It would have been pretty easy to make it more nuanced than they did it back then.
ReplyDeleteIs there something that's clouding my memory or everyone else's memories here? I recall Hassan being a very effective heel in terms of his promo ability and in getting heat (even if it was cheap heat, it's still heat), with the only real detriment to the package being that he was an average-at-best in-ring performer, and that the ONLY reason the character failed was because the "Arabs in ski masks" angle happened the SAME DAY as the suicide bombings on the London Underground and the network interfered and TOLD Vince to take the character off the air or else. Up until that point I was CERTAIN Hassan was going to go over Undertaker at the Bash and go on to take the title from Batista for the most xenophobic main event run since Sgt. Slaughter, Iraqi Sympathizer.
ReplyDeleteit didnt help that hassan was the absolute drizzling shits in the ring.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest that's how I remember the angle also. Hassan was a crappy worker but his character was moderately interesting and he and Daivari were heat magnets. If the writers hadn't stupidly gone to the terrorist angle the character would have lasted for months longer.
ReplyDeleteDaivari definitely made that gimmick. Screaming in Farsi (despite JR and Cole calling it "an Arab language", ROTFLMAO) and being a great heel manager in every way. He carried an otherwise poor worker by bumping his ass off and having some charisma.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that it was incredibly off-putting. Its too bad that a lot of their audience - especially after the MNWs were over - is a bunch of rednecks (or at least Vince thinks that). So, instead of playing Fatshaw as the racist, right wing punk that he is and having Hassan/Daivari destroy him, they made Hassan/Daivari as whiny brown people with a victim complex.
Hell, I think the best thing Daivari ever did for his career is choking out that crazy guy on the light rail in Minneapolis.
Those things have gotten so ubiquitous that they're sort of a guilty pleasure of mine. Like when RAW goes off the air with Randy Orton attacking HHH in the parking lot. Why was there a live camera following HHH to his car at the end of the show? What if Orton hadn't jumped him there? Was RAW scheduled to end with HHH just getting into his rental car and driving back to his hotel? Because that would be its own kind of awesome.
ReplyDeleteI was 12 when he debuted so to me that gimmick will always have a place in my heart(plus I haven't watched a Hassan match since).
ReplyDeleteAnd then he went and bitched about Eddie doing it, b/c it was "his" to do, not realizing that Eddie's dad Nova'd the move.
ReplyDeleteWhile I do like the "hidden camera" aspect of TNA, the producers are not without fault.
ReplyDeleteFour words: Jeff Hardy's Inner Monologue
Fair point. Lowest 'in-universe' moment, then?
ReplyDelete