Chris Jericho has seen many fans’ signs over the years, but by far, his favorite is one that mixes wrestling with Star Wars.
Nowadays, the wrestling and ‘Star Wars’ worlds are more consistently linked due to Sasha Banks appearing in season 2 of The Mandalorian but back in 2002, somebody had a sign that equated Hulk Hogan to a Jedi. For Chris Jericho, this was the greatest sign he had ever seen a fan bring to a show, despite it resulting in him getting punched in the face by a fan.
Jericho recalled this story during an appearance on the Hollywood Raw podcast, and first explained how one fan’s sign backfired on him before dishing on Hogan’s apparent Force sensitivity.
“The best sign that I ever saw was when I was a bad guy and it said, ‘Chris Jericho is STU’… and then they ran out of room, ‘PID’. I was like, dude, come on. Chris Jericho is … You’re too f*cking stupid, sorry, to even space it out properly to say, Chris Jericho is—write the letters smaller! If you mess it up, rip it up and do it again. You’re really losing your point here, ‘Chris Jericho is stupid.’”
“The other one that I always love is when I was in about summer of 2002, I was working with Hulk Hogan. It was his last run in the WWE and we were doing all the live events non-televised. He was the good guy, I was the bad guy, and had so much fun. People just love Hogan and people just hated me. I remember one kid in the crowd had a sign that said ‘Hulk Hogan is a Jedi.’ It was right around when the second of the new Star Wars movies came up, Attack of the Clones. That just really bothered me.”
“I remember I cut a whole promo on this kid who wrote the sign that Hulk Hogan was a Jedi, and ‘how dare you compare the brilliance of a Jedi with the dumpster fire that’s Hulk Hogan.’ Then, at the end of the match, we ended up fighting ringside, and the kid who wrote it, Hogan held my arms behind me, he goes, “Hit him, kid.” And I’m like, ‘OK, what’s this kid going to do? Whatever.’ This kid, he’s probably eight years old ball up his fist and punched me in the face as hard as he could, and it really hurt. I was like, ‘Hulk, come on, man!’ He’s like, ‘Sorry, brother. I thought he would just give you a slap or whatever.’ I’m like, ‘Jeez, Louise, if you were such a Jedi, why don’t you use mind control and tell him not to punch me in the face. Mr. Jedi.’”
On a related note, WrestleZone recently spoke with Jericho to promote the new documentary that he produced, I’m Too Old For This Shit: A Heavy Metal Fairy Tale. Jericho talked about how the project came to fruition and said it’s a relatable story, especially in the wrestling world.
“If you look at Luther in AEW, that’s a perfect example of a guy who had all the tools and did all the work and it just never happened for him until he was in this advanced stage of his career. You know, Luther could be in this movie if you were talking about it in a wrestling sense. You know, [he] never got a national TV contract and last week, he kicks off the show cutting a promo on Brodie and getting his head stuffed in the cake, and he’s kind of one of the stars of the show. I mean, that doesn’t happen—but it did for him, and the same thing with Siren.”
