The 5 Most Baffling Celebrity Cameos in Pro Wrestling

5 Jay Leno Takes on Hulk Hogan (and Wins)

In 1998, wrestling was red hot and firmly in the mainstream. Everybody wanted in on the act, and World Championship Wrestling (WCW) just refused to say no. This is how they wound up having Jay Leno (yup, that one) fight Hulk Hogan. And not just fight him, but beat his ass. If it's still not clear to you why this made wrestling fans groan and roll their eyes, just look at it:

We get that wrestling fans don't demand gritty realism from their sport -- they're not stupid, they understand the concept of suspension of disbelief. But regardless of how ridiculous the storylines can get, at the very least they have to make it somewhat plausible that the guy who wins the match could actually have done it. You know, because both guys in the ring are professional wrestlers and it's not, say, a muscle-bound superman versus a pudgy middle-aged desk jockey.

There was actually a storyline behind this (because if Leno just showed up and started whaling on Hulk out of nowhere, that wouldn't have made any sense). Basically, Hulk Hogan was a heel (bad guy) at the time, and his manager was Eric Bischoff, the real-life president of WCW and most likely the guy you can blame for all of this bullshit. Bischoff's character randomly decided he wanted to be a talk-show host and launched the excruciating Nightcap, 30 minutes of intentionally awful jokes smack dab in the middle of WCW television. Every fucking week.

The torture only stopped when Jay Leno voiced his fake concern and challenged Hogan and Bischoff to a fight, because wrestling. There are lots of ways they could have resolved this without pretending Leno could actually wrestle anyone for five minutes without coughing up a lung, such as having him manage a real wrestler (like the WWE did with Donald Trump), but no, they instead set up a tag-team match. Leno went and found himself an actual wrestler for a partner, and the match was on.

Since Bischoff was not a wrestler and Leno was even less of one, you would think the two would just stand in their corners and work the crowd while their actual-wrestler partners handled 100 percent of the work. But no: They had to make the fat talk show guy look like a menacing physical threat, because he was famous. All two moves he successfully pulled off were "sold" (made to look good) by Hogan and Bischoff like they were applied by the mighty Thor.

And yes, Leno won. But it's not like his teammate got the pin for him; that would have actually made a modicum of sense. Nope, Jay fucking Leno pinned a man to win a match (he actually pinned Bischoff and not Hogan -- you have to think that this is where Hogan put his foot down). So the moral of the story that the WCW was apparently trying to convey is that wrestling is easy and absolutely any flabby dude can come in and immediately dominate.

4 The Continuous Torture of Pete Rose

You don't have to be a sports fan to have at least heard of Pete Rose. Let's put it this way: They've been playing major league baseball for 138 years (yes, really), and in all that time, nobody has had more hits than Rose. The only reason he isn't in the Baseball Hall of Fame is because of a gambling scandal that came to light after he retired. So even with that black mark on his career, he's still regarded as a legend. Or he was. Which brings us to his time with the WWE.

Now, when celebrities appear on wrestling, they're usually there to shill some project. Their involvement is usually limited to looking pretty and maybe walking a certain wrestler to the ring. When they do get "physically involved," it's always like the Leno situation earlier: The WWE lets them boost their egos by letting them "win" against guys twice their size. So, for instance, they let Snoop Doggy Dogg drop a wrestler named Santino Marella -- who is legitimately trained in MMA and could break Snoop in half on accident -- and even freakin' Bob Barker got to beat up wrestler Chavo Guerrero.

But in the case of former major league player and manager Pete Rose, it was the exact opposite. In a bizarre storyline that lasted for several years, Rose would appear at random, only to get beat up and humiliated each time. It all started at Wrestlemania XIV, where Rose, in the role of "special ring announcer," started running down the audience and making fun of the hometown team. It wasn't long before WWE star Kane made his way to the ring and Rose -- an out-of-shape man in his late 50s -- was on the receiving end of a move called a tombstone pile driver, which is exactly what it sounds like.

This started a yearly tradition where Rose would attempt to exact revenge on Kane in a running comedy bit that consisted of nothing more than Rose getting degraded in increasingly elaborate ways (with his full cooperation). Did he just need the money? How deep would your gambling debts have to be in order to do this:

If you're not sure what you're looking at, that huge mass to the left is the ass of 400-pound wrestler Rikishi ...

... which he is rubbing vigorously in the face of the then 60-year-old baseball legend. This, if you were wondering, was Rikishi's signature move (called "the stinkface"). The events leading up to it started normally enough, with a guest appearance by the San Diego Chicken ...

... followed by Kane flying into a rage and trying to strangle said chicken to death (it's not completely clear if the chicken is an actual living being in the WWE universe, but more on that later):

At this point, Rose shows up with a baseball bat, intending to bash Kane's head in.

Rose is easily subdued, because he's a 60-year-old man, and given a choke slam that appears to have killed him. He is then propped in the corner of the ring, where Rikishi presses his asshole against Rose's mouth.

This "rivalry" lasted for several years, and every time, the result would be the same. They even filmed a Halloween-themed commercial centered on Rose getting tricked and then treated to another choke slam. Of course, it was not all in vain, as Pete Rose wound up being the first inductee in the celebrity wing of WWE's Hall of Fame, which is probably the only Hall of Fame he will end up being part of.

3 RoboCop Rescues Sting from a Giant Bird Cage

Now, say what you want about Leno and Rose, but at least they are actual people (and at least one was a former athlete). Where things get really confusing is when a promotional tie-in requires the wrestlers to treat some fictional character from a movie as real.

For instance, on one level, RoboCop makes way, way more sense as a celebrity wrestling guest than Jay Leno -- when he's on screen, he's usually throwing dudes across the room. But then you realize that the RoboCop franchise takes place in some unspecified future, presumably an alternate future where everyone owns both a robot and a Ford Taurus. So how the hell does he show up at a present-day wrestling match? Was there some kind of time portal? It doesn't have to be realistic, guys, just give us something to work with here.

The appearance happened at an NWA (National Wrestling Alliance) event in 1990. The NWA's most villainous group of baddies, the Four Horsemen, started a feud with Sting, the ultimate good-guy wrestler. Not even a valiant warrior like the Stinger could take on four men by himself, though, and, looking for someone to aid him in his fight, he went straight to the cyborg police of the future.

All right, this may in reality have had something to do with the fact that RoboCop 2 was opening and that the writers were instructed to work the character into a storyline while acknowledging the limitation that the guest actor can barely move while wearing the RoboCop suit.

Still, the NWA booked an entire show around this, even naming it "Capital Combat: Return of RoboCop." The only way they could think to include the character in the action -- knowing he couldn't do any actual wrestling in that suit without falling helplessly on his back like the little brother in A Christmas Story -- was to have the evil Horsemen trap Sting inside a "steel" cage ...

... prompting RoboCop to walk out very, very slowly (if you watch carefully, you can see the actor in the bulky suit almost trip at one point) ...

... and rescue Sting by bending the rubber bars of the cage and ripping off the door.

Naturally, the Horsemen acted like cowardly losers, pretending to be scared off by the terrifying robot man from the future. Again, you have to assume that any actual wrestling with the man imprisoned in the costume had to be avoided at all cost, even though that's what every fan in the building had presumably come to see. Although it could also be that they were unclear if RoboCop was actually there in his capacity as a law enforcement officer and they were unsure if he had the jurisdiction to arrest them.

Yet, even with the time paradoxes and endless contradictions it introduced, this was still not the strangest fictional character crossover. That would have to be ...

2 The Muppets Guest Star on Monday Night Raw

Again, no matter how silly you may think wrestling is, every fictional universe has to at least be somewhat consistent -- we'll buy a show about zombies, but you can't suddenly have Superman show up five seasons in.

With that in mind, remember when we pointed out that The X-Files and The Wire exist in the same fictional universe, because the same character appeared in both? Well, in 2011, wrestling fans found out that the WWE exists in the same universe as the Muppets. This created the hilarious and/or sad situation where the wrestlers were instructed to interact with the talking bags of felt as if they were actual people.

The man with the microphone there is Jack Swagger, former collegiate wrestling champion and former WWE world champion, reduced to cupping Kermit's mouth shut so he quits yammering. The look of disgust on his lady friend's face was supposedly over Miss Piggy insulting her, but it could easily be interpreted as disgust over having to do this shit in the first place.

They even had a segment where Miss Piggy outright hit on a wrestler, though at least the writers let the poor dude spurn her advances. Obviously they didn't have the wrestler bang Miss Piggy on prime time cable TV, because we would have mentioned it by now, and it would have already gone down in history as the last TV show ever produced before the world governments collaborated to force the medium to be shut down.

After that wrestler ran off, Miss Piggy proceeded to hit another wrestler, who acted like getting karate-chopped by a sock with hair actually made him double over in pain.

Hornswoggle, who we've talked about before, is indeed a midget. But he was booked to win a non-midget title once, so, according to WWE canon, he's a legitimate wrestler. And he got beat up by a puppet. Yet even that was not the least realistic interaction between wrestler and guest celebrity in the history of the sport ...

1 David Arquette Wins a World Championship

If you've already forgotten about David Arquette, or if you're confusing him in your head with Rob Schneider, it's this guy:

That is, a scrawny comedian who was probably more famous for being married to Courteney Cox of Friends fame. This is the type of guy who wrestling fans are happy to see turn up in guest appearances, if the goal is to have him run his mouth and then get tossed around the ring or thrown through a table. That's ... not quite how things played out.

The date was April 25, 2000. Arquette was starring in a wrestling-themed movie called Ready to Rumble, which featured roughly half the WCW's roster. So the whole thing was one big cross promotion, and obviously the star was going to appear on the broadcasts. But the WCW didn't just have Arquette appear for an interview. They didn't just stick in a meaningless undercard match where he could clown around at ringside and maybe have somebody pretend to hit him with a chair. No, they gave him a title match. A world title match. Suddenly, the scrawny idiot from Scream was challenging for the top championship in the company.

Did he win the thing? Of course he did! After all, any publicity is good publicity, even if it proves to be the final nail in the coffin for your company (WCW went out of business less than a year later).

As with Leno vs. Hogan, they didn't want to have Arquette pin the actual champion, Diamond Dallas Page (or maybe Page wouldn't allow it). So instead they set up a tag-team match where Arquette was actually on the same team as Page, and the pair would take on Jeff Jarrett and Eric Bischoff (yes, the same guy who lost to Leno). So how in the hell would this result in Arquette winning the belt if he wasn't even taking on the champ? Well, they rewrote the rules for this specific match so that whoever got the pin won the title. So by having the skinny actor pin the skinny promoter on the other team, the actor somehow won the title away from his own partner.

If that sounds ridiculously convoluted to the point of being insulting, well, there's one person who agrees with you: David Arquette himself. He was a longtime wrestling fan and knew that this was an incredibly bad idea, thus proving he had more common sense and knowledge of the business than the people who ran the company. His objection was overruled, and one of the most embarrassing scenes in wrestling history played out just as planned.

Arquette, to his credit, turned around and donated all of his WCW earnings to the families of deceased and disabled wrestlers. Considering that the movie bombed (only making half its budget back) and the WCW went belly up, it sounds like everyone got what they deserved.

Check out Mindguard, Andrei's science fiction novel that you can buy here. Or get in touch with Andrei on his website or follow him on Twitter.

For more cringe-worthy wrestling moments, check out The 8 Most Insane Moments in Professional Wrestling and The 10 Greatest Wrestler Glamour Shots of All Time.