Originally posted: June 9, 2006 @ 10:38pm PST

Pictured: Earthquake (left) and Typhoon

I realize this is neither horror nor tokusatsu-oriented, but I wanted to mention it. I was saddened today to find out that one of my favorite wrestlers passed away recently. John Tenta, a man known more commonly in the United States as Earthquake, Golga, Avalanche or Shark, lost his long-time battle with stomach cancer. He was a great man, and will definitely be missed.

Looking back, I can vaguely remember when he was first introduced on the shows. He was brought in as back-up for Dino Bravo and was known, at first, as "The Canadian Earthquake". Of course, being partners with Dino Bravo didn’t help at that year’s Royal Rumble. When he was in the ring, almost everyone in the ring, good guy or bad, teamed up to get him tossed out. Dino rushed to his rescue, but he accidentally added the momentum to eliminate Quake from the match. That’s not all, though, there was more to come for Earthquake…

As he continued in the WWE, he had a big feud with Jake "The Snake" Roberts, which led to the "squashing" of Damien (Jake’s pet snake) and Earthquake’s giving away Quakeburgers on the next Prime Time Wrestling. Antics like that led to him winning the Most Hated Wrestler award in 1990. He went on to have a major feud with Hulk Hogan, as well, even turning Hogan’s best friend Tugboat against him to become Typhoon. Earthquake and Typhoon went on to form the team known as the Natural Disasters. Shortly after this, they became good guys.

Shortly after THAT, they left for WCW. I didn’t see much, if any, of his WCW tenure. I know that, because of the WWF owning the rights to the Earthquake name, he went by Avalanche there and then later, the Shark, when he joined the Dungeon of Doom. After that, he returned to the WWF as a good guy again, facing Yokozuna in a sumo match. He left the WWF shortly after that and years later he returned under the name Golga as a member of the Oddities group. I had fun watching him as Golga, it looked like all the members of the Oddities group had fun with their gimmicks. The last time I saw him in action was at Wrestlemania X-7, in the gimmick battle royale, which was one of my favorite events in a long time.

In addition to his wrestling career, he also was good friends with Randy Baer, aka RD Reynolds of the website WrestleCrap, even writing the foreword for RD’s first book. He also ran a wrestling school in Florida, where he lived until his passing. My biggest regret is that I never sent a get-well message of my own to him over the WrestleCrap forum, where he was a frequent poster. I wish now that I had overcome my shyness and at least sent him a message.

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Originally published: May 25, 2006 @ 04:44am PST

Almost 20 years ago, when I was just a little horror fan, the USA network aired a program called Shadow Theater that I watched every week that I could. It would air Friday nights at 9 PM, and every week at 9, I’d head back home from playing with my neighborhood friends to watch that show which, all too soon, went off the air. The series was hosted by Robert Englund, the actor who played Freddy Kreuger in the Nightmare on Elm Street series and spinoffs. This was, I believe, the first time I saw Englund without the Freddy makeup. He was really good on the show - also, he demonstrated a knowledge of old horror movies.

The series was basically a program that showed clips from old horror movies which Englund would introduce and narrate. There would sometimes be theme nights as I recall one episode where he showed nothing but clips from zombie movies. This was eye-opening to me, as it unveiled for me some scary movies that I had never even suspected existed.

Recently, I embarked on a web search to find what I could about the show and the answer was: surprisingly little. I couldn’t even find the program mentioned on the Internet Movie Database and that’s usually my first stop when it comes to TV shows or movies. Undaunted, I went to Google and searched there (for "Shadow Theater" and "Robert Eglund") and found considerably more, though a majority of them were just biography-style sites for Robert Englund himself.

One thing I located said that in 1995 a distribution company called Unapix had the rights to the series, along with other horror series from TV. However, in 2000, Unapix hit bankruptcy and in 2002 a class action suit was brought against them for misrepresenting their finances. The fate of the various TV series is a mystery to me, at the moment.

I apologize for the shortness of the article, but it due to the rarity of the series (Robert Englund himself doesn’t have any copies of the show). I welcome comments from other fans of Shadow Theater. From my memory, though, I give it 5 out of 5.

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