Canon Discontinuity/Professional Wrestling

Examples of Canon Discontinuity in Professional Wrestling include:

• Do you remember the time Rey Mysterio, Jr. was unmasked in WCW? WWE doesn't. This is probably for the best, though, as most feel he should have never been unmasked to begin with.
  • In fact, this is in part why he's simply called "Rey Mysterio" in WWE: Rey Jr. and the original Rey Misterio found a way around the strict rules in Mexico regarding luchadores losing their masks (if they lose it, they can't put it back on) - while Rey Misterio Jr. had been unmasked, Rey Misterio (the original) had not. The original Misterio gave Rey Jr. permission to use "Rey Mysterio" (minus the "Jr."), and Rey's mask was back on - this time, for good.
  • They also changed the "I" to a "Y" though that may have been WWE's move, as they took a similar naming theme with Chyna and Rhyno.
• Randy Orton won the World Heavyweight Championship for the first time at Summerslam 2004, but it's the damnedest thing... I can't seem to remember whom he won it from...
  • I think it might have been Hardcore Holly, but I don't really remember.
  • I remember when The Big Show won the Royal Rumble that year, yet he still had no clue until he fell out of the ring. And for some reason he gave up his title shot and chose to defend his United States Championship.
  • And at Wrestlemania 20, Triple H wrestled Shawn Michaels. In the end, Triple H choked on something, the match ended in a no contest, and that was the night the World Heavyweight Championship would be vacated for four months.
    • And then there was this succession of guys who came out to claim the vacated WHC, but in the end they wound up jobbing to...the air.
• Averted with the "Katie Vick incident." Everybody supposedly wants to forget it, but to this day the characters can't seem to resist bringing it up from time to time. Probably because it's just so damn funny to do so.
• Prior to the advent of the internet and on-line professional wrestling journalism, the World Wrestling Federation regularly ignored (at least on terrestrial TV, and to a lesser extent cable and pay-per-view) its vast history prior to Hulk Hogan winning the WWF Championship in 1984.
  • Perhaps the most outrageous example of this is the story of The Fabulous Moolah. She lost and regained the Women's Championship four times between 1956 and 1984, but once the Hulk Hogan era began, those four other reigns were expunged from WWE history and Moolah was billed as holding the Women's title continuously for 28 years! What is interesting here is that if WWE did recognize those four other reigns, Moolah's total number of runs with the title would be eight rather than four - thus breaking the record of the "official" holder of most title reigns, Trish Stratus (with seven). Either way, Moolah often held on to her title for years.
• Andre the Giant, one of professional wrestling's best-known stars, had been billed as "being undefeated for 15 years" (prior to WrestleMania III, although he had actually suffered a handful of losses. While most of the "Ls" were disqualification or countout losses, Andre was known to be pinned at least once (by Canek, during a match in Mexico) during the 15-year span. Moreover, claims were also made that Andre had never been slammed, although this was not true; one of the rare wrestlers who got to slam the big guy was a young Hulk Hogan, some 6 1/2 years before WrestleMania III.
• Kayfabe example: on the April 17, 2000 edition of Raw, Chris Jericho upset Triple H and won the WWF Championship, but Triple H - then running the show alongside his wife Stephanie McMahon - promised referee Earl Hebner that he would never touch him again while he was under contract if he reversed the decision. Hebner did just that, turning the WWF Championship back over to Trips and striking the match from the records; Trips rewarded Hebner by firing him and nailing the Pedigree. To this day, the official WWE records do not acknowledge Jericho's victory on that night.
  • Real Life example: According to the "official" WWE title history, Bob Backlund defeated "Superstar" Billy Graham for the WWWF Championship in February 1978, and lost it to The Iron Sheik in December 1983. However, in November of 1979, at a cross-promotional show in Japan, Antonio Inoki defeated Backlund cleanly for the title, and was announced and promoted at NWF (National Wrestling Federation, a subsidiary of the NWA) shows as being the WWWF Champion. He lost it back to Backlund a week later in December. Since the WWWF never authorized this title change, they never acknowledged Inoki as being their first/only Asian world champion (Yokozuna may have been billed from Japan, but he was actually a Pacific Islander).
    • Similarly, The Rockers won the WWF Tag-Team Championship from The Hart Foundation on the November 23rd 1990 edition of The Main Event. However, due to a ring rope malfunction during the match in the second fall, the title change was stricken. The Rockers never won the titles again.
• Chris Jericho and Shawn Michaels were engaged in a bitter feud throughout the summer and fall of 2008 that reached a boiling point after Jericho "accidentally" punched Michaels's wife in the face. Furious, Michaels challenged Jericho to an "Unsanctioned Match" wherein WWE would exempt itself from any responsibility for acts of violence inflicted by the participants on each other. At the Unforgiven pay-per-view event of that year, Michaels beat Jericho into unconsciousness and the referee had to stop the fight entirely to keep Jericho from getting killed. Meanwhile, backstage, Randy Orton punted World Heavyweight Champion CM Punk in the head, leaving Punk unable to defend his title in the RAW Championship Scramble Match that was to take place later that evening. So RAW General Manager Mike Adamle had no choice but to name a substitute for the five-man title match - and the man he chose was Chris Jericho, despite the fact that Jericho had just barely recovered from the assault by Michaels and could barely walk. Just before the Championship Scramble Match's clock ran out, Jericho simply covered a knocked-out Kane for a three-count and became the new World Heavyweight Champion. The next night on RAW, Jericho came down to the ring and declared that since the Unsanctioned Match had not been officially recognized by WWE, it had "never happened." This despite the fact that he had only moments earlier stripped off his shirt so that the audience could see the large red welts on his upper body from where Micheals had whipped him.
• One of the most irritating nights in modern professional wrestling history had to be January 1, 2007, when then-WWE Champion John Cena was actually pinned by Kevin Federline! (Long story....) Sure, Federline needed help from Umaga to do so. But even Cena-haters would probably love to expunge the memory of that night from their minds.
• What is this "WWF" you speak of? You mean the World Wildlife Foundation? Everyone knows WWE has always been called WWE. Though for a while it stood for "World Wrestling Federation" for some reason. And there was this weird era in the late 90's to early 2000's where WWE changed it's logo to a white and red blur. Wonder what that was about.^[1]

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1. ↑ To be fair, there are legal reasons why WWE has to pretend it was never called WWF.