Ultimate Warrior



""I was sent in a capsule from a place long from here and I came here for one reason: to attack and keep coming. Not to ask but just to give. Not to want but just to send... send the power of the Warrior down everybody's throat in the WWF till they become sick of it. Well you're gonna get sick of it because this freak of nature right here is just beginning to swell. And when I get big enough, brother, there ain't gonna be room for anybody else but me and all the Warriors floating through the veins, and the power of the Warrior.""

""'How must I prepare?' You must ask yourself! 'Should I jump off the tallest building in the world? Should I lay on the lawn and let 'em run over me with lawnmowers? Should I go to Africa and let 'em trample me with raging elephants?'""

""Load the spaceship with the rocket fuel, load it with the words...""

The Ultimate Warrior is one of the most famous names of Professional Wrestling from the late 80s and early 90s. He is best-known for his appearances in the WWE in the late 80s and early 90s, where he had a famous match at Wrestlemania VI defeating Hulk Hogan for the WWE Championship. Back then he was seen as the next big legend of wrestling, the next Hogan, so to speak.

Unfortunately now, he's more infamous for being a Cloudcuckoolander, having legally changed his name from Jim Hellwig to Warrior in order to use it outside the WWE, his short-lived comic book containing bizarre imagery and walls of text (which was featured on The Spoony Experiment and Atop the Fourth Wall), his disastrous run in WCW in the late 90s, again feuding with Hogan in what is now seen as one of the worst pay-per-view matches in the history of pro wrestling, and his nonsensical promos (such as the one above).

He has an outside career as a conservative lecturer. Yes, really. Hence, you can call him "Professor Warrior".

As usual, That Other Wiki has a complete rundown on the Warrior's career.

Tropes associated with the Ultimate Warrior:
"Warrior: HOAK HOGAN!"
 * Angrish: Seriously, listen to ANY of his interviews and try to wonder what the hell he is saying.
 * Arch Enemy: In Real Life, Vince McMahon. In Kayfabe, HOAK HOGAN!!
 * Hogan is very much a Real Life example now.
 * Warrior also didn't appreciate what Ted DiBiase said about him in The Self-Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior and ripped into him.
 * Bobby Heenan has absolutely no love for Warrior either. He was by far the most vicious critic of Hellwig in The Self-Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior. You'll see Heenan take a cheap shot at the man every now and then.
 * Once, during an interview with Wrestlecrap, interviewer RD Reynolds asked Heenan about Warrior. Heenan told Reynolds to bring the microphone with him and lead Reynolds into a bathroom. He asked Reynolds to say Warrior's name again and once he did Heenan flushed a toilet repeatedly. He then stated something along the lines of "that's what I think of that man."
 * Becoming the Mask: It's generally believed that at some point, Jim Hellwig lost his original self to the Ultimate Warrior persona.
 * The Berserker: The Warrior's trademark. During his matches he would often enter a berserker rage and proceed to beat the ever-loving crap out of his opponent. Sometimes he would even begin the match in a berserker rage; one match versus Randy Savage lasted only a couple of minutes because the Warrior charged into the ring and proceeded to beat the crap out of Savage even before the bell rang. Within two minutes Savage was so demoralized that he fled back to the locker room, causing the Warrior to win by disqualification.
 * Boring Invincible Hero: The Warrior's career in the WWF is this personified. At first, Warrior was everything Vince loved in a wrestler at the time (insanely ripped, unique promo style, lots and lots of energy) and was built up as the next generation's Hogan. Warrior rarely ever lost and when he did, it was pretty much never cleanly. He ended the IC championship reign of the Honky Tonk Man (the longest reign ever), beat the likes of Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan, and capped off his career in the WWF by completely no-selling Triple H and the Pedigree. Chances are this treatment helped turn him into the person everyone knows today.
 * Cloudcuckoolander: Especially in Real Life.
 * Crowning Moment of Awesome : Winning the WWF Championship from Hulk Hogan at Wrestlemania VI. He and Hogan had the match planned out weeks in advance to ensure it was as good a match as possible.
 * His very first appearance on WCW. Your Mileage May Vary depending on whether you saw it on TV or live: Eric Bischoff claimed that the ratings slowly went down during that segment, but Warrior got some deafening pops every time he opened his mouth.
 * Does This Remind You of Anything?: During his promo quoted above, Warrior kept motioning his arms as if he was doing pelvic thrusts at the camera. Between that and his talks of how he would "keep coming" and would "swell" really big, it sounded really bad. Whether he wanted it to or not, the promo makes it sounds like he's describing how he gets an erection.
 * Do Not Call Me Paul: He legally changed his name to "Warrior".
 * Expy: The Renegade in WCW in 1995. Eventually the WWE sent a cease-and-desist letter about stealing the Warrior's gimmick, and WCW eventually fired him once the real Warrior showed up.
 * And not too much after that, Richard Williams, the man who played The Renegade, committed suicide... WCW aired a tribute where they called him "Rick Wilson"...
 * Facial Markings: His trademark facepainted mask symbol. It originally was on Warrior's right cheek, then the symbol was painted as a mask shape around his eyes, which then stuck with his persona.
 * Five Moves of Doom: A punch, two clotheslines, a gorilla press slam, and a running splash.
 * Hidden Depths: Jim Hellwig was a trained and licensed chiropractor.
 * Hot-Blooded
 * Large Ham: Without a doubt, Warrior literally hams it up.
 * Meaningless Meaningful Words: It's a mystery why no one has yet published a coffee table book entitled The Wit and Wisdom of the Ultimate Warrior.
 * Memetic Mutation:
 * "Queering... doesn't make the world work!"
 * To elaborate, the point he was apparently making was that humanity would die out if every person was gay. While seemingly true in principle, what makes it homophobic was the ludicrous way he tried using this Slippery Slope Fallacy to justify banning homosexuality altogether.
 * Thanks to Spoony: "HOAK HOGAN!". Or "SKRONK!"
 * "THE FAMILY THAT I LIVE FOR ONLY BREATHES THE AIR THAT SMELLS OF COMBAT!"
 * To say nothing of his gibberish-y, rambling promos. "LOAD THE SPACESHIP WITH THE ROCKET FUEL..."
 * No Indoor Voice
 * Parts Unknown: He's billed from there.
 * Perfectly Cromulent Word: Destrucity, Foke, Jet-Jack
 * Portmanteau: Destrucity is the truce between destiny and reality; in other words, staying true to what you are right now while striving for your ultimate destiny.
 * PSA: He did a hilariously over-the-top anti-smoking PSA, where he began chewing on a pack of cigarettes.
 * Made Hilarious in Hindsight when he (briefly) returned in 1996 and smoked a cigar during a match to mock Goldust.
 * Purple Prose: Much of what made his promos unique was his tendency to add odd and complicated metaphors and/or ridiculous hyperbole to get across his point. He couldn't just tell you he was going to beat Hulk Hogan, he had to let you know he was going to invade Hogan's plane in mid-flight to Wrestlemania and throw the controls into a nosedive. While it made him unique in the context of the other wrestlers, it's so overblown and complicated in comparison that nobody really grasps what he's saying. As a result, his promos are seen as deliciously narmy.
 * Sanity Slippage: From the fairly calm Dingo Warrior to... to... this. At this point, he's presumably lost his original personality to Warrior.
 * Screaming Warrior
 * Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: And how!
 * Squash Match: What most of his matches are.
 * Take That: He was the subject of the ultimate (no pun intended) Take That DVD, "The Self-Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior", released in 2005.
 * Tassels of Power: For one, there's his arm tassels, which in the comic book series is described as "belief banners".
 * Ungrateful Bastard
 * The Unintelligible: It is often difficult to make out exactly what he's saying, and if you actually do manage to work out what words he's saying, there's still a pretty good chance that it won't make sense.
 * In fairness, he at least speaks more clearly when he's not yelling every single word.
 * And to be perfectly fair, it really isn't that strange once you actually figure out what it means under all the buzz words and pop psychology. For example, most of his Warrior comic basically boils down to this: reality is at least partly subjective, and stuff we think and believe has as much power over reality as what we do. In other words, his personal philosophy is Clap Your Hands If You Believe. Taking that in, much of what he says actually fits with this--most of his promos, for example, revolve around him saying that basically he will defeat any force or opposition through sheer willpower. In other words: Clap Your Hands If You Believe mixed with Proud Warrior Race Guy. In that light it's not that crazy sounding, but it does prove that 1) the guy is married to Purple Prose, and 2) it makes him sound unintelligible to the majority of folks out there.
 * On the Self Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior DVD, Jerry Lawler states that his feud with Randy Savage worked because nobody could understand a word either of them said.
 * Verbal Tic: As mentioned above, his... bombastic delivery of his promos led to him slurring and over-enunciating certain words, which in turn led to his Fountain of Memes status.


 * Word Salad Philosophy: Destrucity.
 * The short-lived Warrior comic book was essentially a long promotional tract for his philosophical ideas. You can read an amusing summary of it here.