Guest Author - Vance Rowe

There is a relatively new phrase making the rounds out there and it is called “Jumping the Shark”. I will continue that and start spreading the phrase as well.

Remember the 70’s sitcom giant, Happy Days?
Of course you do and it is this television show that the phrase actually originated from.
Remember when we were first introduced to Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli? He was a common hood who belonged to a gang and rode a motorcycle. He epitomized the word “Cool” and everyone had a new word in their vocabulary: “A-A-A-A-AY-Y-Y-Y” and held their thumbs up proudly. I guess you can say he was a cross between Elvis Presley as Danny Fisher, in the movie, “King Creole” and James Dean.

Finally, a show aired that saw the Happy Days gang in Hawaii. The Fonz, a tough inner city street thug performed a water skiing jump over a tank with a shark in it. He jumped the shark successfully, but that show spelled the end of Happy Days pretty much by itself. It lost all credibility it had with teenage angst in the 1950’s. Where did the Fonz learn how to water ski anyway?


WCW really “jumped the shark” when they had David Arquette win the World Heavyweight Championship as his feud with Diamond Dallas Page carried over from the movie they were in together. The movie “Ready to Rumble” was about two wrestling fans trying to get a washed up wrestler back into the ring. Oliver Platt played the wrestler, Jimmy King, who was humiliated in the ring and decided to leave the business and drink. David Arquette and Scott Caan were his die hard fans and went on a quest to get King to return to the ring. They succeeded and King crowned Diamond Dallas Page with a sound thrashing.

The WWE would never do anything like that would they? Oh wait…No Holds Barred. That great classic movie starring Hulk Hogan and Tom “Tiny” Lister. The two stars were locked in mortal combat with each other after Zeus, a former ex-con who killed a man in a wrestling ring after the match, was hired by a man named Brell to end Hogan’s career. Hogan played a character named Rip and his brother was hospitalized by Zeus. Of course this angered Rip and he decided to meet Zeus in the ring. Hogan won the match, Brell was electrocuted to death and Rip’s friends were free from being kidnapped and his brother was recovering in the hospital. Where do they come up with this stuff?

This movie was shown on Pay-Per-View and right after that was a pre-recorded tag team match pitting Hogan and Brutus Beefcake against Zeus and Randy “Macho Man” Savage in the steel cage. The WWE is still going strong though even though they have had plenty of “shark jumping” shows but come out unscathed. So, maybe the same will happen if Chris Jericho and Mickey Rourke battle each other on the “grandest wrestling stage of them all”, WRESTLEMANIA!