Badd Company Or The Orient Express

[The Brain]

In the late 1980s Pat Tanaka and Paul Diamond teamed together as Badd Company while wrestling in the Memphis based Championship Wrestling Association. After a year and a few title reigns they moved to the fading but still well known AWA. There they took on Diamond Dallas Page as a manager and were given the theme song Bad Company by the group Bad Company which I guess you could say was fitting for the team called Badd Company. There they worked with future WWF rivals The Midnight Rockers and had a one year reign as tag team champions. The team split up in 1989 and left the AWA in early 1990.

Shortly before WrestleMania VI Tanaka showed up in the WWF with a new partner in Sato and Mr. Fuji as his manager. The new team was named the Orient Express despite Tanaka being from Hawaii. Besides a win at WM6 against the Rockers the Orient Express didn't have much success in the WWF. At the end of 1990 Sato left the company and Tanaka was reunited with Diamond. However, Diamond was now wrestling under a mask and was renamed Kato. The team was still called the Orient Express even though neither Tanaka or Kato (or Fuji for that matter) were from the Orient. Right away Tanaka and Diamond were paired up against their old AWA rivals and had an outstanding match in a losing effort against the Rockers at the 1991 Royal Rumble. Despite the great performance The Orient Express were left off WrestleMania VII and didn't really do anything of note for the next year before quietly going their separate ways in 1992.

Since Tanaka and Sato didn't have much impact as the Orient Express I think the transition from Sato to Kato could have been done differently. Instead of putting a mask on the Croatian and pretending he was Japanese I would have liked to have seen Tanaka and Diamond reunite as Badd Company. Maybe put them with Jimmy Hart instead of Mr. Fuji. That would have been a good fit and Hart would have made a good mouthpiece.

The WWF usually (not always) gave talent from other promotions new gimmicks, personalities, or names so it's not at all surprising they did not use Badd Company. They certainly weren't going to use the Bad Company theme song. Let's just use a little imagination. What if in January 1991 the WWF took the opportunity with Sato's departure and Kato's arrival to repackage the Orient Express as Badd Company? Sure, they were the same people, but as we all know a gimmick can make all the difference. Hell, I don't remember the Orient Express speaking much at all so just being allowed to talk would have helped them. I think the Badd Company gimmick with Jimmy Hart as the manager could have been much better than The Orient Express. Maybe they could have even gotten the tag titles from the Hart Foundation at WM7 instead of The Nasty Boys. Do you think Badd Company would have been better than The Orient Express in the WWF?

 

[MrMojoRisin]

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.

 

[THTRobtaylor]

This team was endemic of how Vince treated teams who had success outside the WWF at the time particularly from the AWA. The Rockers, Badd Company, Wrecking Crew (Beverly Brothers) and the Sheepherders (Bushwhackers) and Headshrinkers were all brought in ostensibly as "proper teams" but were basically jobber teams to make the WWF built teams look better.

In the OE's case Diamond was the replacement from Sato and the natural fit, but the damage was done to Tanaka from that period of jobbing. They couldn't bring themselves to push a non WWF team to the titles, that the Rockers got as close as they did was more luck than judgement. It was only when the Nasty's and LOD came over that they ever did and even then the Nasty's role was purely to job out to LOD.

Arguably this was down to the bad experience with Blanchard and Anderson walking out and was bolstered later with the Steiners... Vince soured on outside teams early and never got over it.

Badd Company were not a "great" team, but a strong one in that gimmick. As the Express part 2 they were a competent jobber team... not even jobbers to the stars but the bottom rung... along with the Bushwhackers.

Both guys probably deserved better and Diamond then double bad luck by being saddled with Konnan's Max Moon costume. Classic case of right guys, wrong company. In WCW of that era they would have been a seriously pushed team.