10 Forgotten Finishers Wrestlers Suddenly Abandoned
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00:00We all know that it's really important for a wrestler to establish a finisher,
00:04otherwise who's gonna kick out of it at WrestleMania?
00:06For some reason though, every now and then a sports entertainee will go,
00:09I need to change, man. So hello my friends, my name is Simon Miller,
00:14let's run down 10 of these right now.
00:16Number 10, Chris Jericho and a breakdown.
00:18Chris Jericho has reinvented himself so many times, often these new characters do come up
00:23with finishes. Sometimes fans like them, sometimes fans go, we don't want it.
00:29So when he first came to the WWF, he continued to use the Boston Crab,
00:32even though he's not even from Boston. When he returned in 2001 and 2002,
00:37he was trying the breakdown. If you need to know what it looks like,
00:40think about Jeff Jarrett's The Stroke or The Miz's Skull Crushing Finale,
00:43he was doing that face buster. You can see Chris use this at
00:46Vengeance 2002 against John Cena, or when he beat The Rock in 2001
00:50for the WCW World Championship. So let's not pretend we weren't trying here,
00:55we were going all in. Now he never really totally vanished,
00:57because he did keep it a part of his arsenal for a while, but of course,
01:00eventually he switched to the Codebreaker. That one has to get a massive round of applause.
01:04It's pretty much all time.
01:06Number 9, Kane and the Falling Powerbomb.
01:08I don't really understand why we ever thought about changing Kane's finisher.
01:12Like the reason he did the Chokeslam in the Tombstone
01:14is because he was The Undertaker's fake brother, so just keep on doing it.
01:19Now, of course, there is a reason behind this, and that's because Vince McMahon woke up one day and
01:22said, we cannot do Power Drivers anymore, because people are landing right on their heads.
01:27While The Undertaker was allowed to keep doing his, they must have sat the big red machine down
01:31and gone, you, you have to change it. So he did use a big old bomb of power for a while,
01:36and you can see him doing it to Christian here, but of course,
01:39he came down with them for ultimate effect. And look, it was okay, it was all right,
01:43but the problem is, when you do have the Tombstone as the manoeuvre,
01:47how are you going to win matches? Well, you've already perfected it,
01:50so eventually everyone decides, you know what, let's just return.
01:53And I guess it was an attempt to try and make Kane feel more unique,
01:56but he was a huge man in a red mask. I think we'd already done the job.
02:00Number eight, The Rock's Shoulder Breaker. Now, this was so early in The Rock's career,
02:04he was still Rocky Maivia. When he did walk into Madison Square Garden, shaking his fists in 1996,
02:10somebody had said, you can use the Shoulder Breaker as your finisher. And guess how many fans
02:16bought that? I tell you, it was one. His mum probably liked it, because that's just what
02:20mums do. Now, eventually, somebody must have clued up The Rock, because he switched it to
02:24a German suplex. Now, listen, back in the mid-90s, the German suplex wasn't as spammed as it is
02:29today, but people still looked at it and went, well, the guy just fell on his back, try again.
02:34This is why his heel turn was so important, because in 1997, not only did he start using
02:39the Yuranage that he called the Rock Bottom, but he got so over, as a character, of course,
02:44he then adopted the People's Elbow. And we haven't looked back since, good.
02:51So, let's just call him Dean Ambrose, I suppose, because that's what he was here,
02:55it's just easier. Now, I think this could be the same as The Rock, in the sense somebody must have
02:58gone up to Dean and said, listen, man, really great that you are doing that double arm DDT,
03:03but your current version kind of sucks. Now, this was 2012, and Ambrose would lock it in the same
03:08way, but he would basically do it in reverse, so I guess you could describe it as reverse DDT. Now,
03:12the issue here is when he did land it, oh my gosh, it looked brilliant, but 80% of the time,
03:18he did not do this, and it just looked a little bit squiffy. Moxie realised this as well after
03:23he tried to do it on Randy Orton. People don't understand this, I've met Randy Orton, he is a
03:28huge, huge man. You can't hit him with a weird reverse DDT buster, it doesn't work. Given that
03:33Dean was also living in the land of the giants, he did just go back to the more basic one,
03:37and it was the right move to make once again. Also, I'm pretty sure he borrowed this from
03:42Cactus Jack to begin with. Love it. Number six, Randy Orton and the Ozone. From now to one we
03:47have talked about a lot, because of course, Randy Orton in many ways would make his career courtesy
03:51of the RKO. Before this, he was using the Ozone, which was a finisher so many wrestlers tried,
03:57but by and large, none of them could get it to click. You may know it as the Overdrive as well,
04:01and there's no way I can explain it, so, you know, get some images on the screen,
04:05but you basically like put your leg over someone's neck, and then you grab their leg,
04:09and you kind of do a spinny thing. It's a lot like the Crossroads, right? Now, Cody always
04:12makes the Crossroads look good, but there are other people that try, and it just doesn't work
04:16in the way you would want. So, when it came to the Ozone, honestly, the success rate must have
04:20been one out of ten. It was just needlessly complicated, and it took so much cooperation,
04:25that if you were trying to do it on someone that had two left feet, you both looked like goobers.
04:29I don't know who went up to Randy and said, just do a cutter, man, but you can call it one of the
04:34best decisions in the history of pro wrestling. Number five, Seth Rollins' Rip Courtney. So,
04:38one day Vince McMahon woke up, and he said, I don't like the curb stomp, because he could
04:42imagine kids doing it to each other by the roadside. I mean, if that's true, just shut
04:47the whole thing down. So, after he had these visions, he told Seth Rollins he wasn't allowed
04:50to do it anymore, and poor Seth, he tried everything. I mean, he came up the other side
04:54of that feud with Triple H, and he wanted to get the pedigree as his own, and we just went, nah,
04:59brah, that belongs to the game. This led us to the Rip Courtney, which was essentially a rainmaker,
05:04but you used your leg. Listen, this would have been a decent extra thing to throw into your move
05:09set, but as a finisher, by and large, we would not have it. So, he really was fighting an uphill
05:14battle, because poor Seth was trying his ass off, when Vince, as he was wanting to do, just changed
05:19his mind, with the one small caveat being, we now just have to call it the stomp, and not the curb
05:24stomp, but thank goodness it did come back, because honestly, it's a bit like Randy Orton and the RKO.
05:29No move would ever suit Seth Rollins more. Before Shawn Michaels' teardrop suplex,
05:34a superkick is so attached to Shawn Michaels, there are fans in 2024 who have meltdowns when
05:39they see other guys using a kick that is super so much. Like, well, Shawn only needed to do it once,
05:44why do you have to do it 47 times? Who cares? It all comes down to wrestling evolving,
05:49but I do agree with you. Michaels' sweet chin music was one of the best wrestling finishers
05:53ever, because you could hit it out of nowhere. Shawn didn't start with this either, though,
05:57because in the early 90s, when he wanted to win a match, he would go, ha ha, I'm gonna hit you
06:02with the teardrop suplex. And no, that doesn't mean he would do a suplex while crying, although
06:06I guess that would work, but it wasn't until the mid-90s until he did adopt the superkick,
06:11and I think he in that moment also realised, pfft, this is way easier. Actually, too,
06:15when we do go back to the teardrop suplex, it didn't beat anyone with the damn thing.
06:20Go and watch his early matches with Bret Hart, the Hitman's kicking out all the time. It also
06:25had such a long set-up time, which of course was not the case with the sweet chin music.
06:30So yeah, I think if you are an up-and-coming wrestler, you need to come up with something
06:34like this. I mean, even though he's now, what, 55, 56, 57? He's not that old, but however old
06:39he is, I bet he could still pull it out if he needed to. Number three, The Undertaker's first
06:43chokeslam. Now, this is a tough one to find, but I assure you it does exist, and it was when we
06:47were still finessing The Undertaker character. I mean, he was walking to the ring, and sometimes
06:52we were calling him Kane the Undertaker, so you can see how that ties in. Come late 1991,
06:57the chokeslam we all knew and loved would come to fruition, but before that, the Deadman would
07:01whip his opponents into the ropes, and when they would come back, I suppose like a black hole slam,
07:06he would pick them up in the chokeslam position, when he too would fall to the max.
07:11Well, I don't want to be that guy, but maybe it actually looked even more devastating.
07:15Taker would also spin with it sometimes too, so I guess it was a little bit like Baron Corbin's
07:19Deep Six. And do you know why this was changed? Maybe rightfully so. Somebody in the back was
07:24like, isn't this guy meant to be a zombie? I think he's moving too much. So we scrapped that,
07:29and instead we made sure that we established the Tombstone as a super-duper finisher.
07:33Once again, if you were talking about the Mount Rushmore of finishing moves,
07:37well the Stone of the Tomb probably has got to be up there.
07:40Number two, Triple H's Cutter. So this is the best story, because when Triple H first turned
07:44up in the WWF, he had seen DDP and WCW using a cutter. He was like, well, I'm in a totally
07:50different promotion now. I'm going to steal it. The legend has always been that Diamond Adler's
07:55pay staring up Triple H and said, listen, man, I know what you're doing. I'm really trying to get
07:59that over as my move. Can you just not? And actually, fair play to Hunter. He said, you know
08:04what, man? You've helped me so much in my career. You got it. And he stopped. It was Michael Hayes
08:09who eventually gave the pedigree to Triple H, but he called it the Pandemonium Pedigree or the
08:14Pedigree Pandemonium, which is a terrible name. But once again, this was a terrific shift. It was
08:20like some kind of weird double underhook piledriver face buster thing. And when you see it, as we've
08:25already established, who do you think about? The man with three H's. I mean, he really did carve
08:30his own niche out with this to the point I don't think we'll ever forget. It's right up there with
08:34the Rock Bottom or the Stunner. It's a fair play to that guy. Number one, John Cena's Lightning
08:39Fist. So when John Cena returned to the WWE in the late 2000s, the late 2010s, he decided I needed
08:45a new move. So I'll just show the AA for a little bit. And instead, I'll do the Lightning Fist. So
08:51I'm pretty sure John was doing this with his tongue firmly in cheek because it was just
08:56punching somebody in the face. And the setup was him like wiggling and jiggling like he was about
09:00to kill you. And then he did it. I'm trying to be mean here, but it didn't actually have much
09:06impact at all. Some people have said that John did this because WWE was trying to appeal to the
09:11Asian market. And that sounds both stupid and absolutely offensive. So I'm going to draw a
09:16line through it right now. This didn't last very long, though. And I would say within six months,
09:20John Cena had gone back to his DVD slam. And that's never doing this again. All we want from
09:25John Cena in 2024 is nostalgia. He's about to come back for his return run. And imagine he did. And
09:31now he was like, nah, a clothesline is my finisher. We'd all be like, no, it isn't John.
09:36Try again. Also a little bit scared about that. The thing I can handle Cena retiring,
09:42mostly because it makes me look internal. Good grief, am I getting old? Now, of course,
09:46make sure you drop us a comment below and let us know about any other finishes that maybe you
09:49liked or you didn't like when they did get changed. Like the video, share the video and subscribe.
09:53If you click this video on the screen right now, I will hook you up with more wrestling trivia.
09:57Otherwise, thank you very much for joining me, my friends. See you on the next one.