Okay then.  Back in 1995-96, World Championship Wrestling, for the first time pretty much ever, was presenting a serious threat to the World Wrestling Federation in the Neilsen Ratings.  To counter this, you would think that the WWF would try to raise the level of their programming.

Not even close.

Instead, they started airing skits lambasting their opposition.  The company portrayed in the skits is run by "Billionaire Ted," an old Southern gent who shops at Sears and knows nothing about the professional wrestling company that he owns.  His two main stars are "The Huckster," a balding old raving lunatic who books all his own angles, and the "Nacho Man," a balding old raving lunatic who is also afraid of women's shoes and coffee.

This was obviously a parody of WCW's owner, Ted Turner, and their two main stars, Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage--both of whom were former WWF stars.  (The shoes and coffee bit was making fun of Savage having lost a few matches due to being bopped with a WOMEN'S SHOE OF DOOM in one case and having HOT COFFEE OF AGONY spilled on him in another.)

Other personalities soon surfaced as well, including "Scheme" Gene (based on Mean Gene Okerland), a balding (notice a pattern?) employee who constantly shills his own telephone hotline despite not having anything to report.

Notable skits included Billionaire Ted being a contestant on Jeopardy wherein he got the simplest of wrestling questions wrong, and Ted having a nervous breakdown at a press conference (admitting that his goals in life were "Money, power, power, money, I want it all!")

World Championship Wrestling didn't find this satire to be quite so brilliant, and they sued the WWF for defamation of character and numerous other charges.  The skits were dropped as a result, but not before...

...Wrestlemania XII, where the Huckster faced the Nacho Man with Billionaire Ted as the special referee.  Both men collapsed of oxygen deprivation after about a minute and did a stretcher job to put the skits out of their misery once and for all.

This is another one of those things the WWF doesn't like to talk about; the skits haven't been mentioned on WWF TV since Wrestlemania XII.

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