In 1995, World Wrestling Federation overlord Vince McMahon decided he needed a new gimmick-tastic villain, but not just any villain would do, no sir! He didn’t need another evil plumber, evil clown, evil dentist or evil school teacher. Taking inspiration from the upcoming holiday season (and the Mario/Wario dynamic), Vince decided what his company needed was an EVIL SANTA CLAUS! I give you…
XANTA KLAUS !!!
That’s right! There can be nothing so vile, so repulsive or so despicable as an evil Santa Claus. But this wasn’t Santa gone bad, this was Santa’s EVIL BROTHER and he lived at the SOUTH POLE and instead GIVING presents to children on December 25h, he TOOK them from them.
Quite odd that their parents would name one Santa and the other Xanta, don’t you think? Wouldn’t that have been confusing? And what’s with “Klaus” and “Claus”? Maybe Xanta has a little more respect for his family roots than his North Pole-based brother does.
What’s really funny is that the WWF seemingly tried to give this gimmick a bit of credibility by pairing him up with then-manager “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase and placing him in the Million Dollar Corporation. Granted, the MDC had Nikolai Volkoff in it — but c’mon, as poor of a wrestler Volkoff was, he wasn’t 100% pitiful gimmick.
Obviously, Xanta had an incredibly short shelf-life, lasting only a matter of weeks and just handful of appearances before never being mentioned again. Was there any other way? Did Vince imagine this character wrestling at Summerslam or something? And if he didn’t , why even bother to take the time to create this character and hire future ECW legend Balls Mahoney to play him (who left as soon as this character was done)?
1995 was a pretty bad year for wrestling, in my opinion. In fact, from 1993 to Summer 1996 was just terrible, but I remember thinking when I first saw this guy that the WWF had stooped to a new low and that whatever genius label Vince McMahon once had no longer applied.
