In the early 1990s, WWE owner Vince McMahon developed a fascination with pushing cartoonish characters like The Ultimate Warrior and Doink the Clown. One character who made a brief series of appearances was Max Moon, a masked wrestler who wore armor made to resemble a robot. Though he wasn’t the only one to don the Moon mask, the character was the vision of Konnan, who had pitched the idea to McMahon in 1991.
At the time, Konnan was a major star in Mexico. In addition to wrestling for CMLL, he was acting on a soap opera and preparing to release a hip-hop album. He came up with the Max Moon character and was able to pitch it to McMahon in a meeting, and the wrestling executive approved. An elaborate costume was created, and Konnan began making live appearances in WWE as Moon in early 1992.
According to Konnan, he gave up on the idea rather quickly, mostly because he grew tired of the intense travel schedule when he was doing perfectly fine just wrestling in Mexico. For that reason, he simply stopped showing up to tapings and was soon fired by McMahon.
Rather than giving up on the character, however, McMahon simply found someone else to play Max Moon. Wrestler Paul Diamond had been working under the name Kato, wearing a mask and tagging with Pat Tanaka in a team called The Orient Express. McMahon pulled Diamond from that gimmick into Max Moon, but he was never heavily pushed and his time with WWE ended in February 1993.
After leaving WWE, Konnan had continued success in Mexico, helping get Lucha Libre AAA off the ground, where he remains to this day. He’d make the jump over to wrestling regularly in the United States a few years later, but it would be for WCW.
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