An important thing to remember is that in the mid/late 80s, wrestling hadn't yet admitted that it wasn't real. I mean, I'm sure someone could have surmised this from the way fights didn't end in a single punch followed by a headlock and occasionally, a masked man would jump off of something tall, but it wasn't yet shouted from all the mountaintops. Nikita Koloff was still speaking broken Russian at the grocery store, Bill Watts was still firing people for losing bar fights, and if you were seven years old, there was no doubt. It was real, and it was important, and much like your parents or President Reagan, wrestling would never lie to us. Evil exists, and a lot of rasslers were its earthbound ambassadors. And sometimes, the very concept of the existence of some of these bad guys could really fuck me up, without one single triggering event. Bad Guys of Extraordinary Magnitude.

The Missing Link was one such villain whose field of menace was strong enough that he scarred my fragile psyche despite me being a WWF kid and him mostly running around various NWA territories by the time I found out about him. Because most wrestling villains were bad men, but at the end of the day, they were just men. Andre may have been a Giant, Jake may have been a Snake, Ted DiBiase might have wielded the corrupting influence of exactly one million dollars, and Adorable Adrian Adonis may have challenged the traditional views of gender instilled in us by our good Christian upbringings, but they were like us; they could feel pain, they could bleed from their foreheads, and they couldn't withstand the force of the Patented Hogan Leg Drop. They were mere mortal humans, when you get right down to it. But the Missing Link... Was not. Here was this crazy-haired, green-faced prehistoric sasquatch lizard sonofabitch who was made entirely of muscles, and if you had tried to convince me that he was an actual human being, I wouldn't have believed you. Humanoid maybe, but at best an unholy caveman/reptile hybrid. Like if he really was the Missing Link, it was a link between Homo Erectus and The Mighty Megalosaurus or something. And he was immune to headbutts, and he was allowed to roam freely on these streets. He coulda bit somebody and gave them rabies. Fuckin samsquamptches. Throughout all of the crap being a tiny wrestling fan put the through, The Missing Link was the only bad guy wrestler that I literally had nightmares about. (Unless you count the Greg Valentine dream, but that dream happened in the format of an A-Team episode. And yes, I will get to that one someday.)

Bad News Brown's backstory is simple: Stampede Wrestling star Bad News Allen signed with the WWF, Vince McMahon saw a Canadian former judo champion and immediately thought "angry black man from Harlem," and changed his name to Brown, because he's a huge racist. And man, when I was little, Bad News Brown scared the shit out of me. Like the big fear attached to most rasslin villains was that they would do bad things to our favorite good guys and take their championships and whatnot, but Bad News just seemed like he was coming after us personally. It reminds me of something Stone Cold Steve Austin said on his podcast about Ron Simmons (and I think he was paraphrasing someone else, so we got quoteception going on) that applies here: "He could stand in the ring and read the phone book, and you'd believe him, and you'd be scared." So even though I had never drank a beer or tilled the soil in place of paying rent, when he would call the crowd a bunch of beer-bellied sharecroppers, I just knew that he was talking about me, and I just knew he was coming to kick my ass somehow. Like I'd just be chilling in my room, and he'd bust in with the giant mutant sewer rats he had bred to kill Jake the Snake's python, he would just hit me with the Ghetto Blaster, (aka enzuigiri, aka that kick you could never get Fighter Hayabusa lined up right to do in NES Pro Wrestling) and I would be killed, and that would be it. After all, his big catchphrase was "take no prisoners, give no mercy," meaning that he would totally kill a dude in the ring if he had to. Looking back, I don't know if I was being subconsciously racist due to my Mississippi upbringing, honestly so much as I'm pretty sure I just thought he was a dude who didn't like white people. So as a six year old, I was pretty much the "well actually, the REAL racists are ______" guy that ruins your Facebook political conversations, at least as far as it pertained to the rasslin'. Jesus. Whitney Houston once told me that the children are our future, and it came true, and that's why we're fucked. As a former child, sorry about Donald Trump and whatever wars and famines he starts. My bad.

"Mr. Perfect" Curt Hennig was unique as a dude who scared the shit out of Little Me, in that he was neither monstrous in appearance like the Missing Link or filled with rage, like Bad News Brown. The problem with him as a villain was that he was, well, perfect. Absolutely perfect. And it wasn't no bullshit, neither, as they kept showing all these videos of him hitting holes-in-one and full-court basketball shots, and throwing passes to himself while Vikings tight end Steve Jordan looked on in awe. (and this also made sense, as I was already a Bears fan by this point, so of course the Vikings would be hanging out with Evil Men.) And I was a stupid sack of shit as a little kid, but I was familiar enough with a dictionary to know what "perfect" meant, and it meant a condition where nothing could ever possibly be better. This man was absolutely undefeatable in any situation, and he was coming for Hulk Hogan. Younger folks might not understand this, but Hulkamania was like the world's worst religion, and little kids were it's stupidest followers. And Hulk Hogan was both our god and our messiah, and our only contact with him was through watching him face severe physical harm. Imagine being a Christian and turning on your TV every week with the fear that this might be the episode where God dies. Yeah. Hulkamania fucks you up. And here comes this dude, who by the very definition of the words in his name could never lose, and his finishing move is The Perfect-Plex, a fisherman suplex hold that absolutely cannot be escaped. Seriously, he performed this Plex with such Perfection that if he so desired, he could hit you with it and just hold it there indefinitely, theoretically until his opponent simply passed on into death. And for all other wrestlers, ranging in alignment from lawful-good to chaotic-evil, the ultimate goal was the World Championship belt; the ultimate be-all, end-all symbol of everything in the noble sport of professional wrestling. And what did Mr. Perfect do when he stole the belt after cheating to help "The Genius" Lanny Poffo literally defeat Hogan by countout? He smashed it with a damn hammer. Not only was Mr. Perfect an insurmountable threat to the living avatar of human goodness, but this man was a fucking nihilist. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of Hulkamania, but at least it's an ethos.

NEXT TIME, IF I EVER GET AROUND TO IT: #3: Andre Joins the Dark Side