Last Updated on: 2nd January 2019, 05:15 pm
2019 seems to be getting off to a rather 2016-like start on the celebrity death front.
Mean Gene Okerlund and Super Dave Osborne both died today. Both were 76 and awesome in their own ways.
Mean Gene is the best wrestling interviewer I’ve ever seen. He had a way of making bad promos decent and good ones better that we could really use in wrestling today. Even in the era of big personalities that he worked in, he always seemed to know how to react and stand out just right and just enough to be useful and memorable. He could also be pretty subtly funny for a guy whose job it was to be a straight man. I feel bad for all the kids today cutting promos to themselves and their friends. They don’t have an easy starting point like “Well ya know somethin’ Mean Gene!” to fall back on the way we did.
Also, have this video of him interviewing The Crusher, because it’s hilarious. Wrestling today needs more Crushers and more Mean Genes.
Speaking of hilarious, even though it was kind of a one note joke, I can’t think of too many times when Super Dave Osborne didn’t make me laugh. Everything from “Saskatchewan seal skin bindings” to him cursing out Mike Walden and the assistants after he’d been maimed always brings back happy family memories for me.
That last one isn’t great quality, but I’m glad I found it because it used to be my sister’s favourite when she was little. I’m pretty sure somewhere my mom still has an old VHS tape of her dancing along to it on TV.
We’re still not used to saying 2019 yet, are we? And wow. That’s really miserable.
Oops. Clearly we are not. It’s been fixed.
Yesterday really wasn’t a good day to be a 76-year-old man. The Captain from The Captain & Tennille died too.