Projects I Won’t Do: Underfaker

As part of my New Year’s clearout, I went through the big list of possible projects I keep in my Notion. I realised, with some sadness, that some of these have been on there for years with absolutely no forward motion on them, and realistically are never going to happen, so I thought I'd salvage what I can of the ideas by posting the more entertaining ones on here.

So: a while back, the Undertaker retired. For those who aren't into wrestling this was interesting: because he's a man who has been very protective of his gimmick, very seldom doing interviews out of character (like many other wrestlers have). He did some wacky stuff in his time, sure—he's veered between "undead wizard" and uhh "guy who rides a motorcycle"—but he kept kayfabe, which, for all the goofy stuff he did gave him a certain... gravitas? That is what I mean, though I don't think the word really applies. It lent him an aura, anyway: he was a bit different from the other lads, a bit set apart.

Given all that, it seemed somewhat odd when in the run up to his retirement, he ended up doing Cameos for $1000 a pop. It felt a bit... I dunno, debasing? You spend all that time building up this separation and you throw it in to congratulate AllEliteScoobyDoo on getting married. They were also all clearly filmed at the same time, last about 30 seconds, for some reason he's wearing what appear to be MMA gloves? You can practically hear him saying "cash please" the second the camera stops rolling.

Anyway, given how homogenous the videos are, I thought it probably wouldn’t be that too tricky to deepfake the Undertaker standing in front of a purple curtain in his garage, wearing the outfit, rolling his eyes etc, and saying whatever stupid stuff people ask for. You would probably want to charge a lot less than $1000, but I reckon if you got it in front of the right wrestling memesters for promotion, it could be a nice little earner—until the lawyers get involved, of course.