Badd Company Or The Orient Express

Tanaka and Diamond were actually a very underrated team, and I don't think a lot of people who are even aware of them today actually knew that they reunited in the WWF. They never really went far enough with the Orient Express gimmick to make it seem like anything more than tag division filler though...

Nice thread.

Tanaka and Diamond were actually a very underrated team, and I don't think a lot of people who are even aware of them today actually knew that they reunited in the WWF.

They never really went far enough with the Orient Express gimmick to make it seem like anything more than tag division filler though... which isn't surprising because the WWF has never been great with Oriental gimmicks. I remember first seeing Tanaka and Sato, and it was either during, or shortly after Muta's run in the NWA. I kept hoping that this would be the WWF's take on that, because Muta in the NWA was amazing. Unfortunately it wasn't, and as well as they worked together, I never thought it looked right once Diamond came in to have the one masked guy and one guy without the mask. Definitely should have been repackaged at that point.

Would that have got them further? Possibly, but hard to say. I'd kinda look at it like the Beverly Brothers (Destruction Crew). Enos and Bloom were an excellent AWA team too, but their WWF gimmick just blew, and no matter how well they worked together, it was just hard to take them seriously as the Beverly Brothers. If Tanaka and Diamond were given a similar lame gimmick, I don't know that they were the type of guys to get the bad gimmick over, and Badd Company was too similar to other established gimmicks, so they wouldn't have been given that.

Their runs in the company would have probably been the exact same. Good hands. Great guys to fill out the tag division. Excellent people to have make your stars look better, but not really star material themselves.

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