Punching Day: WWF's Maximum Sweat

I grew up with very permissive parents, as far as the '90s went. While other parents barred their children from childhood-defining properties like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers, pretty much everything was fair game in our home. There were only a few things that were verboten: Ren and Stimpy, The Simpsons, and professional wrestling.

Ren and Stimpy was the bete noire of parents in that era — the generation raised on Looney Tunes was entering middle age and their brains were starting to calcify, leading them to see the gross-out cartoons of the '90s as an existential threat. I don't remember the ban on that show ever lifting in my household as it did for The Simpsons, which became a Sunday night family ritual. And wrestling? Forget about it — Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, and the rest of Vince McMahon's stable of meat mutants were never to darken our doorsteps or appear on our television screens.

But I had friends with even laxer parents, parents whose indulgence of their children bordered on neglectfulness in retrospect. It was in their homes that I was exposed to a few of the figureheads of professional wrestling. Later, I was allowed to play wrestling video games — I guess my parents figured that it would be pretty hypocritical of them to let me play Street Fighter but not WCW vs NWO.

Wrestling toys, though; these were always a bridge too far. And once I learned about WWF Maximum Sweat, I’m kind of glad that was the case. I mean, those Ballonatiks sheets messed me up something fierce, but at least we didn’t have these in the toybox.

WWF Maximum Sweat Figures are the kind of amphetamine-fueled insanity dreamed up by late '90s toy designers delving into gimmicks God never intended. You have to understand, this was the industry's equivalent of Rome under Nero. The art of selling plastic garbage to kids was honed to perfection in the late 80s, and it spent the following decade degenerating into madness. Executives became so preoccupied with whether they could that they never bothered to ask whether, well, you know how it goes. On that note, the Jurassic Park toys of the '90s were pretty deranged too, but that's a story for another time.

When it came to wrestling toys, companies like LJN had already covered the basics of casting the big names in plastic and putting out little rings for them to do battle in. Later, Jakks Pacific had given wrestlers guns and jetpacks, making them into perverse facsimiles of G.I. Joes. What else was there to do? Alexander wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer with roided-out muscle monsters. Unless... unless that was the salty, wet key. Not tears — wrestlers being physiologically incapable of crying because their tear ducts are too jacked — but sweat. They would produce wrestlers that sweated. A lot.

In another, more enlightened era, the man from whom the concept of sweaty plastic wrestlers sprung like Athena from the brow of Zeus would have been seen as the danger to himself and others that he obviously was. He would have been offered behavioral and chemical assistance to help him live a normal life, untroubled by visions of hyperhidrotic beef boys. Alas, this was not that era. Instead, his concept was immediately put into production.

And what a production it was. Not satisfied with the core concept of sweaty wrestlers, Jakks went the extra mile and rendered these men as terrifying homunculi, hideous creatures of pure muscle tissue with no pathetic human weaknesses like organs or bones. Some of them are merely upsetting, others are utterly terrifying. All of them look like they have acquired some degree of gigantism from overdosing on brain and nerve tonic.

Each WWF Maximum Sweat action figure came with an accessory or two and a small vial of "Official Federation Sweat." One might imagine that it was harvested from their real-life counterparts in a sterile medical facility, but everyone knows Vince McMahon doesn’t pay for doctors.

Alas, it was merely water. Children could use these vials to fill the figure with "sweat" through a port in their back. Once full to bursting, squeezing the figure would cause the fluid to trickle out through a number of small pores across its body in a twisted parody of human perspiration. Were any children actually excited about this? Sure, dolls that pee had been on the market for decades, but who was dying to play out a dry sauna scene with their action figures?

But then, the ‘90s were the decade of peak slime. Nickelodeon’s sticky ascendance made gross-out toys hot, and the trend continued even into the 2000s with products like the infamous Oozinator. (Probably the less said about that, the better.) So it seems likely that Maximum Sweat was an attempt to merge wrestling toys with bodily fluids. Did it work? Well, they made four series of them, twenty-four figures in total, so either they sold or someone at Jakks Pacific had a fetish for sweaty gorilla men. It's either the second one or both.

Before we get into the individual figures, can we talk about the cards for a moment? Maybe it's just me, but those lovingly-rendered depictions of The Rock and The Undertaker look like they were drawn by someone who has only ever drawn cum.

Sweat doesn't slide down your face in clearly-defined trails like that! You know what does? All I'm saying is maybe that isn't the People's Eyebrow at all. Maybe The Rock is just squinting because he got something in his eye. It's jizz. The something is jizz.

Am I just being tasteless here? Am I just being gross in a way that nobody ever intended when they developed these toys. Maybe. Maybe. But listen to the copy from the back of the cards, which says: "These bad boys are pumped up and ready to explode! Fill these hot heads with water and watch sweat ooze from their bodies as they heat things up in the ring!" It could simply be that all macho language loops around to the homoerotic. Or it could be that someone really wanted to make a Ken Shamrock toy that blasted ropes and this was as close as they could get.

But I’ve put it off for long enough. Let’s take a look at these bad boys. Fair warning: the first three rows will get wet, both sexually and because of all the sweat.

Starting things off, we’ve got Shawn “The Showstopper” Michaels. Now, Mr. Michaels was not an unattractive man in the 90s. He had the long, flowing hair and Texan charm of a rugged fella in a Ford F-150 ad. His Maximum Sweat incarnation looks like he just snuck some Warheads in the middle of a business meeting but is trying not to show it.

His facial features are fleeing the blasted outskirts to the promised land of his nose, and the fact that his wristbands are just painted on and thus appear as vascular as the rest of his arms really creeps me out.

Next up, is that latter-day Steven Seagal, fighting off an army of thugs from a seated position before calling up his close personal friend Vladimir Putin? No, it's Big Boss Man!

I remembered him as being much more cartoonish, kind of a husky prison guard, but I guess when the Attitude Era rolled around he was rebranded as the guy who open carries into a Starbucks and gets worked up if anyone asks why he's carrying an assault rifle to get a gingerbread latte. Coincidentally, in this sleeveless depiction he also looks kind of like the Terminator 2 figure whose face and torso rips off to fire a missile. He doesn't do that, though. He just gets kind of sweaty, like a guy climbing back into his lifted truck after causing a public scene at a Starbucks by rating the wokeness of their non-dairy milks. He doesn't even have a seductive ab window. What a ripoff.

The Rock got two Maximum Sweat figures. The second one looks fine, though it's possible that my judgment has been compromised by staring at these twisted imitations of man for so long. The first one, though, fuck, dude. This is the meanest thing I've ever said about anyone but it looks like a Spitting Image character. You know those British puppets from the "Land of Confusion" video? Like that.

Ken Shamrock looks like he's pushing out a turd sideways. That's all.

I'd never heard of Gangrel before now, but my understanding is that he's supposed to be some kind of vampire. That makes him a better fit for the grotesque, deformed caricature style of the Maximum Sweat line than perhaps any other wrestler featured, but there's just one problem. Do vampires sweat? They're dead, right?

I think Gangrel is taken from the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade, and I'm pretty sure in that mythos they sweat blood? I guess you could add some red food coloring to the Official Federation Sweat to make it a little more authentic.

As he was at the height of his popularity in the Y2K era, Stone Cold Steve Austin has a total of four Maximum Sweat figures, more than any other wrestler. Some of them are basically fine, though the caricature style takes Austin’s skull in some interesting directions.

But hey, what happened here?

This doesn’t even look like the photo of him on the package. Why are his eyes nestled within black sockets of pain? Why does it look like his brain is bleeding out of his nose? The overall effect suggests that he has borne witness to the unfettered, maddening chaos at the heart of the universe and his physical form is revolting against it. That, or he’s cosplaying as the skull on his shirt.

Now, admittedly I didn't pay much attention to wrestling in the late 90s, but I've absorbed enough through osmosis to know who guys like Mankind and Kane are. But who the fuck is Road Dogg?

This guy looks like a miniboss in a beat-em-up you'd only play because Final Fight and all of the backup games were occupied. And he got two figures! Two! You know how many Doink the Clown got? Or The Yeti, that guy who was inexplicably a mummy? None. Where’s the justice?

And who is Droz? When you Google him, most of the results are for "Dr. Oz." Apparently he played football before becoming a wrestler and his ring name before Droz (which is just a shortening of Drozdov) was "Puke" because he threw up all over the football.

His wrestling career was cut short after an injury paralyzed him, and he died earlier this year at 54. Bummer. To lighten the mood a bit, here's a picture of him wearing the hat from the Jamiroquai video.

Here we have The Big Show, looking like Chatterbox from Hellraiser cleaned himself up a little and got really into human growth hormone.

Did the designer just really hate The Big Show’s guts or something? One side of his face is like a full inch lower than the other. His teeth look like they slam up and down while a video game protagonist tries to dash between them. If a boardwalk cartoonist drew him like this, no court would convict him of lifting the guy over his head, spinning him around comically, and then tossing him off a pier. Mr. Show, I doubt you’re even aware that this figure exists, but I’m sorry anyway.

The Undertaker is one of those guys that everyone knew about in the ‘90s. Like Gangrel, as a kind of mixed-up zombie man he works better in the Maximum Sweat format than most other wrestlers. You’ve got one figure that comes with a gravestone, another with what I think are parts of a coffin — but then there’s this third one where he has a broom.

What’s the story here? Is he meant to be sweeping the graves of his fallen foes? Did they decide to go in a different direction in the storyline, having the Undertaker menace children not with the far-off, essentially unimaginable specter of death but with the far more imminent and real threat of housework? Who knows. Frankly, who cares anymore.

There were more Maximum Sweat figures — Kane, Billy Gunn, Triple H, and more — but much like Series 2 Stone Cold Steve Austin, I think we’ve seen enough.

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