Original subtitles

Undertaker and Kane were the most sinister, really evil

menacing characters in WWE.

There was no way to put a title on what it was that we did in the ring. It was

total destruction.

In the history of sports entertainment,

There has never been a more menacing bond in evil than the Brothers of

Destruction.

It's storytelling. It's mythology.

It's Shakespearean.

Brother against brother.

The Undertaker.

Kane. Together, they forged a bond. Mayhem and carnage. I was terrified

belief. It was such a work of genius.

By 1990, the WWE Universe bore witness to all types of fearsome villains.

Raging beef.

Cowardly cheaters.

Even enemies of the state.

But no one had ever faced the ultimate fear in the ring.

Death itself.

We were looking for a surprise.

four Survivor Series in 1990, and I knew that the best evil character is someone

that the audience genuinely fears.

And I said, okay, if this guy was just pure evil, I thought, what's the last

thing you're going to see before you're put into the ground?

So I pitched The Undertaker.

Pure, unadulterated evil.

But who could possibly take on the challenge to bring Death Incarnate to

From Houston, Texas, weighing 321 pounds,

Meem Mark!

I was working for WCW, and I'd been there a year.

Meem Mark walks the top rope.

I had a contract coming due, and they looked at me, and they went,

Honest with you, we don't feel like anyone's ever going to pay money to see

wrestle.

Hmm.

It let me know where my ceiling was there.

He was a character that I'd seen from the days that we first broke into the

wrestling business.

I thought he was really good, especially good for a big man.

I knew that he could play this character.

I got a phone call one day.

Hello?

It was Vince.

Uh, is this the Undertaker?

What?

Undertaker? What the?

Undertaker?

Yes, sir, this is the Undertaker. No clue what that meant, what it was.

The Undertaker was a descriptor that told you what he did.

The Undertaker buried souls.

I meet with Vince, and he shows me the storyboards.

The original character is based on the old Western -style Undertaker. The long

coat, the hat, two guys have a gunfight.

Whoever loses, the Undertaker comes out, measures them, and makes the pine box.

This guy's the reaper of wayward souls.

An evil being.

I was on board.

And Vince goes, ah, great.

Can you be up here tomorrow?

1980s slasher films helped provide the inspiration to the man who would embody

The Undertaker. I'm drawing on Friday the 13th, Jason Voorhees.

Halloween, Michael Myers.

Freddy Krueger.

I'm not so much trying to emulate what they did, but trying to take concepts

from what they did and make them my own.

From Death Valley, I give you The Undertaker.

The Undertaker has now revealed!

The Undertaker made his debut at the 1990 Survivor Series before a stunned

Universe.

Every step that I take, every time I turn my head, it's all planned.

All of those things were calculated to make this character as ominous as I

possibly could.

We knew it was going to take time for people to go, oh, my God.

It didn't take nearly as long as we thought

it would.

They feared the undertaker.

How many times have you been in an arena where a man has walked to the ring and

seen an audience just frozen and fixed on one person?

Not very often.

The Undertaker's ominous presence mesmerized the WWE universe.

People were just freaked out about the eye roll. It looks

demonic. The eye roll just happened. It just happened in the course of a match.

I was on my way to the back after the match was over and people were coming up

to me like, what was that? That was the freakiest thing that I've seen.

And

then

the choke slam.

That would get a huge reaction just because people understood that this is

beginning of the end.

My son Huey, he loved WWE, but he wouldn't go to the shows. And I said,

won't you go to the shows? He said, I'm scared of The Undertaker.

Lock your doors, he's loose in the World Wrestling Federation.

He was one of the great characters of the past 30 years.

That's The Undertaker.

He was such a stark contrast to everybody else.

I remember thinking he was some kind of evil cowboy. I was immediately drawn to

this character and this person.

The Undertaker is one of the best villains because of what he didn't have

say. He didn't have to talk much. It was like watching a foreign flick where you

had to read the subtitles, but you were so interested in the movie, there's no

way you were going to turn away.

I remember trying to leave arenas. The rest of the wrestlers, people would just

completely surround.

And then I would come out.

It would almost be like the sea parting.

I mean, people were scared.

They were still not sure where that character started and stopped.

I'm thinking, this is pretty cool that I have this effect on people.

Mark Calloway made the demon that is the dead man feel authentic.

Now it was time to give him a voice.

Bill Moody, he came in to talk about coming to work here. And the question

asked, what are you doing now?

I said, well, I'm a licensed mortician.

Please. To be led towards the ring by Paul Bearer,

the Undertaker.

Paul Bearer.

He had all of this insight into embalming the

funeral process.

It gives us a whole other layer of legitimacy.

Paul Bearer was the one that had to at least be the one that could control

the undertaker.

Paul Bearer would have that urn.

And it almost felt like The Undertaker got his power from that urn.

He dropped some power from that urn.

Keep going backwards.

I'm trying to say, Brain, that he's something other than human. You got it.

is a monster.

There was just something about Undertaker being that primal fear of

and the unknown that's scary.

When The Undertaker faced Hulk Hogan, it was a big moment because Hulk Hogan at

the time, he was completely unstoppable.

Hulk Hogan always said, he's never in that ring alone.

The Hulkamaniacs all over the world are in there with him.

Well, he's going to need all of them to beat The Undertaker.

And Hulk Hogan, he was all that is good in the world. These two are really

fuller opposites.

The Undertaker made me cry because he was beating up Hulk Hogan at that time.

When The Undertaker came in, that was spooky, though.

It was just a nail -biting experience watching this ultimate hero go against

this creature of darkness.

Now our savior, Hulk Hogan, has been defeated by The Undertaker.

Where do we go from here?

The dark days of the WWF have begun.

The Undertaker's reign of terror went on for years.

Void of emotion, impervious to pain, the phenom was seemingly invincible.

Everyone hits their signature move on the Undertaker, and it doesn't affect

I don't think you can hurt the Undertaker! He's not human!

Of course it doesn't affect this guy. He's the Undertaker.

He's something else altogether.

The Undertaker was almost invulnerable.

Invulnerable in a line of work where everything ends up in a fight.

No one could put Undertaker in jeopardy, so now what do we do?

First man that gets to the ring is the winner.

SummerSlam 1996.

A shocking turn of events.

foreshadowed a stunning revelation.

Nothing will stop The Undertaker!

I can't believe what I'm seeing.

How can The Undertaker possibly understand what has happened here?

Paul Bearer cracks me over the head when the iron turns on me.

I mean, people were, they were livid.

And time with Paul Bearer.

possession of the urn.

Paul Bearer's despicable act of treachery set off a cataclysmic course

events.

Paul Bearer and his henchmen! Paul Bearer and the Undertaker alive!

What?

He's alive!

Even Paul Bearer's betrayal could not stop Akuma.

It seemed that the Undertaker was impervious to all physical and emotional

threat.

It was time to write a new chapter in The Undertaker's story.

We needed something new. We needed something different. And we needed a

What if The Undertaker had a brother?

What if Undertaker thought that his brother was dead?

Oh, my God. What if there was like a horrible fire and Undertaker's mom, dad,

everybody perished in the fire? Oh, my God. What if it was Paul Bearer that

actually ran the funeral home? Everyone died. But Paul saved Undertaker's little

brother.

Burned beyond recognition. And it was this horrible thing.

We actually do that.

a very worthy nemesis for the undertaker would arise from the ashes of his past,

his very own brother.

It was a backstory of biblical proportions.

Cain and Abel, they were brothers.

In a biblical sense, you can't find anything more evil than Cain.

Cain was the first man that ever committed murder.

Cain murdered his brother Abel. That's evil.

So I picked the name Kane.

You have to wonder what Paul Bearer is about to say.

It starts off with Paul Bearer talking about how he has a secret from the

Undertaker's past.

The Undertaker's father was a mortician of excellence.

Now, I was the apprentice at the funeral home.

And there were two little kids there.

One kid was a little red -handed punk, whom you probably know as The

And then there was this sweet little kid named Kane.

The Undertaker was little Kane's hero.

One particular afternoon, I was leaving to go to school.

And what do I see?

I see fire trucks.

Someone burned down the funeral home.

I looked over to the bushes.

Who did I see in the bushes but the undertaker?

You can't defend the undertaker.

It was this horrible thing. Everyone died, but Paul saved.

Undertaker's little brother, and he was burned beyond recognition.

So the story was for Paul Bearer to bring back the brother of the Undertaker

that he didn't even know was still alive, Kane.

Kane is alive, Undertaker!

And Taker's like, who's alive?

Kane.

And he's coming for you.

Kane gave so many more layers to Undertaker. The darker I could go, the

that I could push that envelope, the better it was for my character.

The revelation that The Undertaker had a brother was intriguing

and actually magnified the mystique of the dead man.

Was Paul Bearer simply playing mind games?

If Kane was coming, then what was he waiting for?

It turns out he was simply waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

The first ever hell in a cell match.

Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker would be locked inside this diabolical

structure.

It was constructed to guarantee carnage.

and ensure that no one could escape or enter.

Michaels and Michaels alone must deal with the Undertaker. This is truly hell

a cell for Shawn Michaels.

Michaels. Underneath. Michaels now.

Shawn Michaels and I, we have this

extremely physical match.

I've got Shawn Michaels bleeding.

All I have to do is pin him.

Paul Bearer, and then here comes this mountain of a man behind Paul Bearer,

he's in this black and red suit with a mask.

And everyone knows instantly that's got to be Kane.

I just couldn't believe it that I'm staring face to face with my little

who I thought was dead for all these years.

He picks me up and uses my own move on me.

It was a huge deal when Kane debuted.

Could this entity be the one to defeat The Undertaker? Has Undertaker finally

met his match?

Kane's debut made shockwaves throughout the WWE Universe.

The Undertaker, the unstoppable reaper of souls, was now The Hunted.

At Hell in a Cell, the Undertaker was manhandled for the first time. The next

night, Paul Bearer gleefully introduced us to his new instrument of evil.

Let me present to you the Undertaker's little brother, Kane!

The entire world was watching that. That was actually the most important night

in the history of Kane.

Because that was...

The story of why Kane was there.

We are going to walk through the World Wrestling Federation. Take each wrestler

one by one and destroy them.

Until we meet you, Undertaker.

Welcome to your worst nightmare.

It just really captured people's imaginations that there could be someone

there. Just as strong, just as powerful, just as deranged as the Undertaker.

For Kane, the fire was representative of his genesis, of his beginning, when the

family funeral parlor caught on fire.

That's what drove the character, is that pent -up rage and

the anger and the explosiveness.

The key in taking ownership of a wild character is to in some crazy way

believe you are that character.

Glenn Jacobs really inhabited that character.

Brought subtleties and nuances to it.

I was just watching my dog one day.

This was her curious look, and then this was her hungry look.

Ended up being, like, the most creepy thing ever.

Putting the mask on definitely allows you to tap into something extremely

It's not playing a role.

It's playing a person that I already am, but I keep in check because of...

...fability.

Mad. They're scary for two reasons. They're scary for what's actually on the

mask. But I think they're more scary because they hide the person's identity.

When someone is doing something terrible to you and they're in a mask, you're

somewhat scared by the mask. You're much more scared by the fact that you don't

know who that person is.

You don't know what you're getting with the unpredictable psychological

monster.

I have a fascination with psychological thrillers like Hannibal Lecter, The

Silence of the Lambs. Let me help you now and I will trust you when it is all

over. Kane was a psychological monster.

The scariest character ever created is Michael Myers.

Michael Myers is very simple and might have a little supernatural power, we

don't know.

But he's very, very ordinary.

And he's very deliberate.

Kane and Undertaker more than anybody else at that time. It wasn't about one

-liners. It wasn't about championship titles.

It was about the art of storytelling.

As I looked into his eyes, I didn't see the love of a long -lost brother,

but the hatred of a man whose mind has been poisoned.

You'd see The Undertaker come somewhat out of character.

The Undertaker can't show the normal emotions that any other person would be

able to show.

Until it became family.

I will never fight Kane.

Normally, Undertaker would fight anybody.

And now he doesn't want to fight his brother.

Undertaker, you will live in hell until you step up and face

your brother.

For months after Kane's debut, he destroyed everyone on the roster.

One man, two men, it doesn't make any difference. Kane cannot be stopped.

Undertaker, all this carnage at the hands of your brother

Kane is your fault.

Kane unleashed a lifetime of repressed anger on anyone and everyone.

Kane keeps goading Undertaker into fighting him, and Undertaker won't do

Again, The Undertaker is steadfast in the thought that he will never, ever

his brother Kane.

What a hellacious situation.

Six men have pounded The Undertaker into oblivion. Kane coming to his brother

Kane. He is clear in the ring.

It appeared Kane saved his brother.

But Cain was enraged with vicious intent.

Cain has saved the Undertaker!

The Undertaker is in that casket! What is he

doing?

The devil's favorite demon attempted to send his brother straight into the fires

of hell.

I think that's it.

Kane's beaten the Undertaker.

How could he ever come back from this?

What?

Kane, I shall never rest in peace.

Father, father.

The devil himself stands before me in the form of my own flesh and blood.

He's giving me no other choice.

I had to fight.

After trying to set his brother on fire in some sort of evil poetic judgment,

Kane left the Undertaker with only one choice.

I will deliver you to the

fiery pit of eternal damnation, little brother.

It's crazy because you have the two biggest guys in the company, and

I'm in the fighting. People are just out of their minds crazy.

I've felt your wrath.

Now you're going to feel mine.

These brothers in destruction were on a collision course.

The anticipation of two titans finally battling one another had reached a fever

pitch.

Now I'm behind the Undertaker. So here's a guy that I feared all this time. And

now I'm completely emotionally invested in the Undertaker. And can the

Undertaker beat Kane?

For me personally, that excitement kind of turned to dread when I actually saw

The Undertaker come out.

This is all a mind game. This is all psychology in the sense that the

peril is on its way to the ring. Everything was geared to make Kane feel

okay, this is the end of the line. I've now come face -to -face with The

Undertaker.

I mean, this was the Undertaker. He was mad.

He's mad at me.

All the talk was over. All the vignettes were over. The story

building didn't matter. All of that is put aside because you have them face to

face in the ring.

Everything that's on his mind, with everything he's had to face, facing his

fears. At WrestleMania 14, could he overcome Kane?

Some of the things that they did

physically in the ring was unbelievably impressive for two men of that size to

take those kinds of risks.

He kicked out of the tombstone. This is crazy. So Undertaker picks him up, hits

him with a nether wall.

And you think, oh, well, that's it.

Nope. Kicks out again.

It's everything Undertaker has to beat Kane. He has to tombstone him three

times.

Seeing Undertaker beat Kane, it was the ultimate triumph.

But the exclamation point had to come

from Kane because this story couldn't end.

So even though Undertaker won the match, he was the one that got left lying.

And ultimately, Kane lived to fight another day.

We have witnessed a war, ladies and gentlemen, that is far, far from over.

The war between the two brothers continued to escalate.

I think everything had to get...

more and more extreme just to the story itself.

I mean, you have to keep raising the bar to keep upping the level of the

intensity of the feud.

Our whole storyline revolves around fire and our ability with

using the supernatural.

It was actually challenging figuring out how...

To have a match that would live up to the level of violence that people had

thought of.

Which ends up leading to one of the craziest matches ever designed, which

the Inferno match.

Oh my gosh!

This is amazing!

The only way to win is to light your brother on fire.

I remember hearing the initial pitch and looking at him like, you've got to be

kidding me.

Wait a minute.

We're legitimately going to light the ring ropes on fire and are going to have

match inside it.

Yeah, it'd be great.

Okay.

This is really awesome.

It's also dangerous.

So I kind of had to gather myself for the match.

Here we go.

Every time they're hitting the ring, fire's coming up.

As a fan watching this, every time you feel like they've done everything they

could do, they up the ante.

Diving over the top and knocking Kane into the ring post that set his arm on

fire. And then he ran out of the arena.

Chalk went up for the good guys that night.

They always seem to go to another level of evil each and every time they face.

As their rivalry continued to unfold, so too did a new revelation in the family

saga. The beauty of the Kane Undertaker story was that there were so many

chapters in it.

You would tell one chapter for a while, and then there would be the next one.

And after a while, it became really clear, is there anyone that could

stop them if they were together?

The anger born out of that fire so many years ago had the brothers on a path of

destruction. Instead of directing their hatred toward each other, the brothers

became bonded by their past.

Listen to me!

Undertaker and Kane fight, but what they really wanted to see was what

Undertaker and Kane could do together.

Having two big badasses like Kane and Undertaker together, the imagination

runs wild as to who and or what can stop them.

There was always the underlying element.

I still love him. He's my brother.

I think everyone who has siblings can identify.

There are certain times within the course of your life that you have a

out with a sibling and you make up.

No one makes better partners than better rivals. They eventually have to get

together.

We come together as the brothers of destruction.

They harness their anger to form an indestructible partnership of evil.

The brothers of destruction.

These guys have busted each other's heads for years, and now they're

What's the rest of this company going to do?

Family's family, and family always comes back together.

This was a time that the brothers could come back together in team and be

indestructible.

There were

people that were legitimately intimidated to be in the ring with us,

regardless of what the outcome was supposed to be.

We were just ultra.

The crazy thing was, the more evil that we got, the more it just made people

love us.

This made for a prototypical killer tag team.

The Brothers of Destruction were a mythological duo that dominated WWE.

But in the late 90s, mythology was giving way to reality.

Through some 50 years, the World Wrestling Federation has been an

mainstay. One of the reasons for that longevity is that the times have

So have we. So as the 90s came to an end, there was a shift in pro wrestling.

The Attitude Era came.

Attitude Era was based in reality, and people wanted to see things that were

more reality -based and real.

And we saw that happen with Undertaker and The King.

At times of awe, so too did the brothers, each in their own way, but

staying true to their origins.

During the Attitude Era with Stone Cold and The Rock and Kurt Angle and all

these guys that could put great promos.

For me to be successful, I need to be this, or these guys are going to chew me

up and spit me out. I remember him talking to me, saying he wanted to have

more realistic edge.

I became more of a striker.

Quick, fast, repetitive strikes.

As great as Kane and The Undertaker are, you're also confined to a certain

degree of what you can and cannot do.

The Undertaker character became iconic within a couple of years.

But in the long run, it was his ability to know when something needed adjusting

before the WWE Universe knew it needed adjusting.

That's why I kind of changed to make the character fresh again, but also give me

a chance to compete with those guys on the mic.

Let's let the pain and suffering begin.

But changing the one thing most closely associated with your persona is the

ultimate risk.

I felt that I had gone as far as I could with the mask.

So I talked to Vince about it, and Vince was very much on board.

He and I were the only people on board. Everybody else thought it was a terrible

idea. I didn't like the fact that Glenn was going to take the mask off, because

it's the theater of the mind.

When you talk about movies like Psycho,

And the birds from Alfred Hitchcock is usually more scary than the actual slash

and gash gory stuff.

You see a couple of pantomime slashes, but you don't really see it. So you have

to you have to imagine it.

Always speculated. Here it comes.

Come on, do it. Can't do it. The reveal of the mask was incredible.

He pulls it off and he's got that scraggle of hair. Turns out the hair was

of the mask.

The hell is this?

What the hell is this?

Is that a human?

He was even more evil without the mask.

Kane had never been burnt in the fire.

He thought he was. He thought he was deformed. And he internalized all that.

That was what was really scary.

The mask was a symptom of what was going on in Kane's mind. Tonight, I will once

again feast on fear and suffering. You can't play the same character from

under a mask that you do when the mask is gone. Think about it. Shaved his

changed his eyes. It became more of a human tortured character.

By God, our father.

And the Lord Jesus Christ!

Jesus Christ is alive!

It's King!

Once he got rid of the mask, it almost made him worse. You need to feel my

pain!

In hindsight, being 2020, I think it was probably great for Glenn because

it opened up so many more opportunities for him to do different things.

Now that evil is reality, and nothing is more evil than reality.

Now I do what I want.

Kane is no doubt a living, breathing monster.

Biggest reason Kane and Undertaker have endured as long as they have is...

The characters continued to change with the times. You saw the evolution before

your eyes. You didn't see the exact same character for the length of their time.

Pain and Undertaker

have got to be the greatest tag team in the history of wrestling.

At the end of the day, what The Undertaker and Kane both have in common,

both gave so much to the business.

They were both parts of such important moments in our wrestling

memory.

When they're standing in the ring as partners, it's sort of a happy ending to

their story, but you also feel like you just want to stand up and applaud.

You just appreciate it.

Everything just seemed like it was magic. I mean, it was just really gnarly

storytelling. Y 'all understand a sibling rivalry.

It's a work of art. The phenom, the Undertaker. The Undertaker and Kane were

able to raise the bar.

The demon Kane.

Of what was possible.

The brother of destruction.

People understood that, they accepted it, and they loved it.

I'm very proud of the story that we were able to tell through the years.

Our body of work will stand against any tag team.

There was really no other way to put a title on what it was that we did in the

ring.

Just utter destruction.

It's mythology.

It's Shakespearean.

You can't kill what won't die.

Rest in peace.