Hulk Hogan: Real American

A Netflix Documentary Review

by Peter Edge

Join our resident historian Peter Edge as he recaps the Netflix Hulk Hogan documentary in such a viscerally colorful way that it will feel as if you’ve pressed play on it yourself. (It’s unclear whether this is a good thing or not.)

So, a quick behind the scenes look at the world of the Social Suplex universe: it’s Easter Monday and I’m with a friend having a curry (it’s tradition) and I see on a discord server the breaking news that Netflix released a trailer for the Hulk Hogan documentary that they have been threatening people with.

As the guy who wrote the critically acclaimed (Emiliana liked it and I spend a portion of my life trying to get the person who proofreads my work on SoSu happy) obituary of Hulk Hogan after his death, the thought I have is, “I have to review this don’t I?” Of course, I ask the chat, prompting Rich Latta to respond with one simple word:

Two and a half weeks later at 9pm on a Wednesday night, I throw my Nina Samuels coaster at the television. I don’t do that kind of thing and I’m a Tottenham Hotspur fan.

So how did we get to this point?

By opening my Netflix up and pressing play on the ‘Real American’ menu, where the first thing I see is footage of Hogan’s funeral – proving that Hulk did lose his only ever Casket Match. When we learn that “yep, that’s Hulk Hogan,” – for those wondering how he got here – we go back to the early years of Terry Bollea.
We see Linda (Hulk Hogan’s ex-wife), and as we go on we learn that she clearly wasn’t in any condition to perform and she flat out says Hogan was a “mistake child”.

So this is what it feels like when doves cry.

Talking about his childhood, we learn that daddy Hogan, whose name was Pete, was an overbearing father as per the sociopath playbook under the “bad parents” chapter, and Hulk saw wrestling and fell in love with it. Hogan says his favourite wrestler growing up was Dusty Rhodes. So that’s two wrestlers that we wish never existed that Dusty is responsible for.

Now, the main flaw with this claim is that Dusty made his Championship Wrestling from Florida debut in 1970, when Terry Bollea was 17, and even then it wasn’t the Dusty that hit it big-time as a singles wrestler, as Dusty came in with Dick Murdoch (JD Vance’s actual favorite wrestler, allegedly) as a heel team, and Dusty turned face in 1974.
Hogan talks about marking out while meeting Superstars Billy Graham and Brian Blair. He says, “And I didn’t realise they were grooming me,” as he is smartened up to wrestling being a work of fiction.
“I realised that you didn’t need to be a tough guy to be a wrestler.”

Guess that ‘fighting PRIDE fighters in Japan in the 70’s’ story wasn’t true after all.

Of course, it being a Hogan retrospective, the Matsuda leg breaking story is told and is as true of a story as the Diana Russini and Mike Vrabel denials were after those first photos came out.

Keith Elliot Greenberg is here, and he’s the resident historian for this series so this is going to end as well as both Russini’s and Vrabel’s marriages. (Is it obvious that I’m obsessed with this Russini and Vrabel story?)

We’re being told what the NWA is (like we’re all 10 years old) and we get the map displaying the territories in America, as per the laws of wrestling documentaries.
As we learn about Hogan’s time going through the different territories and names that Hogan ran through, with emphasis on Memphis, we learn that Jimmy Hart’s second best friend is Jerry Lawler. He knows how to pick them, for sure.

Hulk hated the Hogan surname because Bollea is “Italiano,” but as not mentioned in the doc, Sammartino was the Italian hero to the masses, and the likelihood is that Hogan would have been in the shadow of Bruno if he tried to keep his Italian surname, especially with the famous Larry Zbyszko mentor vs protégé feud that happened the next year.

Lock up your welfare funds, Ted Dibiase is here now and we see footage of Hogan’s MSG debut and the Million Dollar Welfare Fund Theft Man.

God, Hulk was aggressively average as a promo when starting up in the business. The lack of chat about the Hogan vs Andre the Giant match on the same card as the Bruno Sammartino vs Larry Cage match really telegraphs what the major talking point is when they get to the “WrestleMania III” portion of the documentary.

Now onto the Rocky III movie, and did you know it changed the way that wrestling was perceived by casual fans?

Linda and Hulk tell the story of their meeting, and Hogan says every guy in the bar stopped to look at her when she entered, apparently making it the first time that has happened for a 6.5 out of ten.

They tell of when they go back to his flat and Hogan does the Joey Tribbiani/lemonade trick that actually worked. Then Linda compares Hogan to a wooly mammoth, and she compares having sex with Hulk with having sex with a giant. The people interviewing Linda not bothering to ask if Terry Bollea’s penis size is the same as Hulk Hogan’s feels like a dereliction of duty.

Hulk says that the two places that everyone wanted to work in 1983 was New York (where he had just been fired) and Minnesota, a place that was notorious for paying only just better than Memphis, the famed “you can barely make a living” territory.

By the way, you can watch The Iron Claw on Amazon Prime in the UK and on HBO in America for a story of an actually hot territory (Dallas) in that time period, no matter how flawed the movie is.

We also don’t see any mention of his years in New Japan, but to be fair, I understand this because TV-Asahi would probably send a tank to Ted Sarandos’s house if NJPW footage turned up in the documentary.

They talk about Hogan getting great at promos. Hogan in one of those promos talks about “being up for 40 days and 40 nights”. Coke will do that for ya.

They say Reagan is an inspiration for ‘Hulkamania’. (If someone really wanted to impress Jodie Foster, they could have just made sure Hulkamania never happened). And then the episode ends with Hogan learning out of the blue that Vince Jr. wanted him to spearhead his new WWF, which omits the cooler version of Vince Sr. going to Japan to recruit him.

Episode 2 starts with ‘The Match Made in Hell’, then the Hulk/Linda wedding followed by Hogan looking through his old stuff in a lock-up garage, and then the story of him joining the Fed in ’84.

The documentary refers to the Iran hostage crisis in ’79 in connection to the Iron Sheik match that was to come, and Hogan is talking like the hostage crisis was in 1984, which I’m sure Jimmy Carter had wished was the case, and is conveniently forgetting that Sheik ran away from Iran to not be murdered by the authorities there, which believed that the Sheik was in league with the Shah. We learn that Hogan’s dad voted for Reagan. (God, he’s a plague to the good name of Peter.)

Also, did you know that the Hogan beating The Iron Sheik match at MSG was a shoot?

We’re onto the birth of “WrestleMania”, which pushes the usual myths that the WWE state media tells about that period (Vince would be in a perilous financial situation if “Mania” had failed, etc, etc.), but they do put over how famous Mr. T was (which is fairly true).

They talk about the press blitz for “Mania I” and don’t really want to touch on the famous SNL appearance, instead focusing on the Richard Belzer incident, which they do show but the talking heads (the Hogans) say was all Belzer’s fault. They say that the stand up comedian was being a smart ass and that Hogan had put him in the front face-lock to teach him a lesson and it went badly. That one time you show you know tekkers and it goes wrong. No wonder he decided to wrestle like shit for the next two decades.

Hulk relays the “Vince McMahon got wrestling out of the smoky arenas” myth and then the documentary goes through the hectic life and partying that was going on with Hogan, as well as Linda saying he did coke which leads to his brother Allan, mentioned earlier in the series, coming back for a brief cameo as Hulk talks about his brother’s death in 1986.

[Somber music plays.]

Hogan’s brother turns up at a show and asks if he can borrow money, having just come out of rehab. Hogan wants to take Allan on the road with him, because a great place for a drug addict to be around is the wrestling roadshow in the mid 80s (heavy sarcasm), and when Hogan tries to keep in contact, it turns out Allan died of an overdose.

Hulk really doesn’t want to talk about his brother dying, which is very telling and a look at the (this is me being kind here) at-times schizophrenic struggle that Hogan had in his battle to prevent Terry Bollea from showing himself to the public.

They spend time on his Make-a-Wish stuff with clips in the days where Make-a-Wish weren’t charged five figure amounts to have dying kids turn up to watch “WrestleMania”. (I’ll whisper this quietly: he does come across well meeting the M-a-W kids.)

We’re onto “Mania III” and here come the traditional big embellishments: he thought Andre was going to shoot on him; Andre had never lost before; Andre had never been slammed before – to be fair, Greenberg does say “in storyline” that Andre had never been slammed, which hints that they cut the bits where he says that Andre had been slammed by numerous people before.

God bless the editors trying to make this Hulk/Andre match the classic that Rich Latta claims it is in his tier list video about “Mania” main events.

Oh fuck off, Donald Trump is here.

Trump saying Hogan worked hard at “Mania IV” might be worse than anything he’s said, and that includes the AI Jesus photo and “civilisation will die” posts on Truth Social. Trump tries to do the ‘Hogan point’ that Hulk did in his ‘Hulk Up’ routine, and he looks more feeble than Biden did in THAT debate in 2024 (you know the one).

Brooke is born, and no one is asking why she isn’t a talking head in this documentary. Then the Nick pregnancy story is told and it’s wild. Linda stopped taking her birth control pills and surprised her husband by being pregnant.

P.S. On the “being in no condition to perform” scale, with 1 being CM Punk and 10 being Jeff Hardy at “Victory Road”, Linda is creeping to 8 here.

Turns out Nick is the only person in the family that liked Hulk until the end.

We’re onto “Mania 6” and Hogan wants to be home for a while, which is a funny way to spell “I want to make it in Hollywood”, and the heir apparent is The Ultimate Warrior.

“[Making Warrior champion] was the worst decision in pro wrestling history” is an actual quote from Hogan, LOL. We get an “Ultimate Shit” word association from Jake Roberts and “Everyone hated him,” says Ted Dibiase. I wonder if it was the racism from Hellwig that Ted hated or lack of welfare funds that he stole?

To be fair, this is the best bit of the documentary so far, even with more Hogan-isms, like Hulk saying Warrior wanted to ‘go home’ in the “Mania” main event after 3 minutes. They talk about Hogan’s post-match theatrics, and Cody Rhodes thought at the time that Hogan was cool for doing that.

Greenberg says that when business goes down, Vince goes back to what worked before, which is the most astute thing said so far in this documentary and more astute than anything that was said in the fucking McMahon documentary.

We are at the end of Episode 2, and the final bit is someone interviewing a black kid in the early nineties who says, “Hulkamania is gonna die.”

OK, that’s funny.

Two episodes in and on a group chat I’m on (which I might have tested some material out for this review) I had a hot take – Real American was tons better than Mr. McMahon. That’s not saying much, to be fair, though.

Mr. McMahon might have been one of the worst documentaries ever shown on the world’s leading paywalled streamer. Even taking the ethical issues of things like the Nancy Argentino murder having less time dedicated to it than the Kliq Curtain Call, Mr. McMahon was boring as heck: Episode 1 was the dullest first 30 minutes of a biographical documentary I’ve ever come across; Ep. 2 was a half decent true crime Netflix doc; Ep. 3 was another ‘Death of WCW’ documentary; Ep. 4 was a WWE ‘Attitude Era’ documentary; Ep. 5 was a WWE Network 24/7 documentary on how it covered Shane McMahon being back in the firm; and the final episode didn’t deal with the Janel Grant stuff well. (To be fair, I imagine – with the stories I’ve heard – that there were at least three dozen different edits of that final episode and that there was a lawyer stationed in the editing room that went “Yes, no, yes, no,” as he watched each edit.)

Two episodes in and Real American isn’t great or anything, but it’s a basic retelling of Hulkamania which has the trademark B.S. that Hogan does as if it’s autopilot, but I’ve gotten to the point with Hogan that it’s now funny more than it is offensive when he tells a lie about his career (unless it’s about dedicating an album he recorded in 1993 to Jamie Bulger – read my Hogan obituary for more details). But then things would take a turn in the second half of the four episode series.

At a certain point, this documentary decides to take the fat line of the coke Hulk and Linda were doing in the mid-eighties – which Hogan stopped doing, of course, when Allan died. (I think that might be a ‘bullshit’ moment.)

The third episode starts with everyone calling B.S. on Hogan “retiring” in 1992.

They talk about the “demandants” (train, vitamins, prayer) with Jesse Ventura, one of the two good talking heads saying, “You mean injectionables?” And holy drug usage, Batman! We’re onto the steroids.

Linda says that when they became illegal that “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” and Hogan says he was held to a different standard. Yes, because you went on and on about the vitamins.

Jimmy Hart says ‘fuck’ and instantly apologises, which prompts the Arsenio Hall appearance.

Ugh, David Shoemaker is on my television. Seriously, we couldn’t have Dave Meltzer on this? I know the answer to that. This thing is done in association with WWE and they want friendly people, but Keith Elliott Greenberg did write the AEW coffee table book…however, it does make sense that KEG is on this documentary, considering his affinity with two star products. (This Book Is All Elite isn’t good.)

At least with Big Dave, we’d have gotten the story of his then-girlfriend attacking him with a banana when he saw Hogan lie on Arsenio.

Bret Hart, the other good talking head, compares Hogan’s lies on Arsenio to Richard Nixon lying. Does that make Jimmy Hart his Henry Kissinger? We are told that Bret is Hogan’s anointed successor.

Does that mean Bret Hart getting kicked in the head by Goldberg meant, by synchronicity, Robert De Niro was incapable of making a good movie from that night?

Hogan buries Bret saying that Bret isn’t a headline actor, and we’re onto the second worst Vegas “Mania” night ever.

Bret says that Hulk blanked him at “Mania 9”. Hogan says he might have been high. (Didn’t Hogan crash the boat the day before that “Mania”?) Bret and Hulk taking shots at each other is funny, with Bret turning the Bret-ness up to 9.

It’s at this point that the line of coke I mentioned earlier has taken hold, as they are showing Hogan/Yokozuna at “KOTR ’93” to the soundtrack of “Broken Wings” – because why not? – with Hogan telling the story of Vince telling him to go away, prompting talk of the movie career.

They show Jonathan Ross interviewing Hulk from the Mr. Nanny press junket, in which he asks if Hogan “cross dresses in private,” which gets a ‘fuck you’ look from Hulk. We also learn that Christopher Lloyd is still alive.

Nick says Thunder in Paradise was cooler than Baywatch. Mate, the shitty Dwayne Baywatch movie was cooler than Thunder in Paradise. Hogan was apparently bored of making movies and wanted back into wrestling, and that is how we get onto the WCW section of the documentary.

Hogan and the documentary take a dump on WCW as a product before he was there. They showed all the WCWLOL moments (Black Scorpion, Big Josh, Robocop) but surprisingly didn’t show Shockmaster and his “Clash of the Champions” debut.

Did you know that Hogan had to give back some of his sign-on bonus so people didn’t get fired?

Onto the steroid trial, and Hogan thinks had he actually testified against Vince that he’d be running the wrestling business. That’s not how businesses work, brother. Everyone is shitting on Hogan’s run in 1994 and 1995 and Hogan is like, “It was a tremendous success.” There is no mention of the “Uncensored 1996” triple cage match, to the disappointment of Maxwell Jacob Friedman (let’s see if this joke is deleted).

Kevin Nash has turned up and he says he hated wrestling as a kid, LOL. That has been obvious since 1995, buddy.

Did you know the NWO storyline is the greatest storyline in wrestling history? That’s what Eric Bischoff tells me. Hogan is fascinated by this storyline and Hulk really wants to be a heel and needs no convincing whatsoever after being booed out of the building in the early days of “Nitro”.

Cody says he was there the night Hogan turned heel – the “Bash at the Beach”, I mean, and not one of the moments when Hogan was being a jerk to his friends in storyline, nor the night that Kevin Sullivan had him stay at his house so Hogan couldn’t run away, so scared he was of turning heel. (God, I hope that story is true.)

Cody says he heard some kid say when Hulk turned, “Daddy, why did he do that?” Ironically, I turned to my dad after Cody did that ‘curing racism’ promo and asked my dad the exact same question.
They proceed to play a montage of Hogan’s greatest hits as a heel, including the old lady on the front row who took a swing at Hulk. If you don’t know, her name was Beulah and she has so many awesome stories about her. I might one day do a bio on her for Social Suplex to talk about how wonderful and loyal of a fan of wrestling in the south she was.

Did you know everyone was cheering Hogan in 1997 and did you also know that “Nitro” beat “RAW” for 83 weeks? I don’t think it’s hardly mentioned.

They delve into Hogan’s fake presidential run and he says that he backed out because he was scared that he might win. I mean, with that 11 point lead in the polls George W. Bush could have been eradicated. If Arsenal can lose a double digits point lead, I guess George W. Bush could have lost his lead to Hogan.

Booker T is here and says that “there was lots of chaos going on, the finger wasn’t on the pulse, the foot wasn’t on the gas, it seemed like no one was in control.”

No, he isn’t talking about the booking for “WrestleMania 42”, he’s talking about WCW in 1998.

We’re onto the Finger Poke of Doom and they talk about the FoD as the nail in the coffin, and that’s not necessarily true, but more on that in my retro feature in this edition of Social Suplex.

Hogan slags off Vince Russo and his brand of booking, and surprisingly but also thankfully we don’t go into “Bash at the Beach 2000”, one of the faces of Mt. Rushmore of “incidents that get brought up over and over again ad-nauseum.”

We’re onto Vince buying WCW, and Hogan is back home (no mention of his contract being a Time Warner contract and not one of the contracts that Vince bought in the sale, or that he was being paid to stay at home), but Hogan isn’t happy. And then Vince calls and is told to ‘come home’ which for some reason makes that CM Punk promo post-WWE comeback (2023) even funnier.

We’re onto Hogan/Rock at “WrestleMania X8”. Cody thinks it’s the greatest match of all time, which explains the Codyverse in 2021. Somehow the crowd sweetened this match when airing it and they are clipping the ‘Hulk Up’ from “Mania X8” with the ‘Hulk Up’ from “Mania III” as if it’s the Any Given Sunday movie. The director is becoming a ‘fucking mark’ now.

Episode 3 ends with Hogan wishing that things had ended with “Mania X8”, and after watching the final episode, I wish it had, too.

Werner Herzog turns up at the beginning of the final episode talking about how great wrestling is, which is true but has he watched Invisible Man vs. Invisible Stan? Because if not, he can’t truly talk about how great wrestling is.

I hope someone has been mauled by a bear. I hope it’s Hogan. Seriously, watch Grizzly Man, it’s great, especially if you imagine it’s someone you dislike as the victim.

They talk about the Leg Drop of Doom and the amount of times he did it which caused damage to him.

They show the Shawn Michaels feud and his over-selling, and Hogan still feels resentful about it and doesn’t understand why Michaels, who had been on his best behaviour for four years, suddenly turned into 1996 HBK and didn’t need to do drugs to do it.

(Oh, Jesus, I just saw a pic of Hogan naked with only his hands over his bollocks. I might need to pick up a coke addiction to cure me of such sights.)

Linda says they needed a thing to do as a family and that’s how Hogan Knows Best happens. Me and my parents just went to the garden centre when I was bored as a kid. America is a weird country.

They show the Hogans on Howard Stern and I get why Brooke ended up hating her dad so much. As their marriage begins to crumble on air, we get into the divorce drama with Hogan saying that he understands why “O.J. did it.”

If Hulk knows that O.J. murdered Nicole, how the hell did 12 jurors do what they did?

They hint at the suicide stuff, which doesn’t include the context of Hulk saying in his second autobiography (yes, I read it – look, it was only a quid at a Cancer Research charity shop) that he thought about killing himself but a call to Muhammad Ali’s daughter Laila stopped him.

Laila went, “Um, no.”

Hulk says TNA saved him. So, that’s another thing we can blame TNA for.

Hogan was on a boatload of fentanyl. Hang on, is that why Trump invaded Venezuela? To avenge Hulk?

Annnnnnnnd we are on the sex tape. They talk to Hulk’s lawyer and I think he might be on fentanyl.

Ok, it’s becoming state media.

Gawker are portrayed as the heels in this section. For all the rubbish that Gawker were capable of and the decision makers were at times pieces of rubbish, the things Hogan and his defence did were bad and also gave power to Peter Thiel.

(Hang on, are all things ‘Peter’ evil? Are we Peters the bad guys?)

The lawyer says children could have watched that sex tape, because, can someone please think of the children.

Hogan might have won the battle against Gawker, but he lost the war, because the tape of him saying the n-word comes out but we only get to see the ramifications and everything to do with it in a two minute section.

Now, he regrets it, but is still in “don’t get caught” mode. Triple H turns up in this documentary multiple times (including one moment where he gives out about having to lose the WWE Undisputed belt to Hogan), but his big moment is saying that he “didn’t fire Hulk Hogan…[he] fired Terry Bollea”, in one of those really douchy lines he likes to say and people wonder why he’s rubbish at media appearances.

I’m not joking, the Mr. McMahon series spent more time on the Nancy Argentino stuff than this documentary did on its subject being a racist.

I wasn’t expecting 90 mins on the subject but this was pitiful. The documentary treated the thing he said – which wasn’t just the n-word he said, but a full blown racist rant, plus also his behaviour that night in Bubba the Love Sponge’s bed – as just a blip on the road.

They meet wife number three, after not mentioning his second wife, Jennifer McDaniel, at all and it seems obvious that the third wife, Sky Daily, is a religious nutjob and she informs the viewer that everyone has apparently forgiven Hogan for being a racist.

They spend five minutes on Hogan at the Republican Convention compared to the two on Hogan saying racist things and they treat Hogan being ultra-MAGA like it’s OK and heroic. He says he voted for Trump in ‘16 and ‘20 but was a coward for not wearing the MAGA cap, sounding like he had drunk a 1.5 litre bottle of Kool-Aid, with this assault on the eyes and ears ending with Hulk playing a Trump voicemail.

We move onto the “RAW” Netflix debut and they do show Hogan being booed. Triple H thought he was going to be booed because it was L.A.

“It’s a different vibe there, different mentality.”

What do you mean, Paul? What do you mean?

Hulk says that Jimmy Hart tried to tell him that he wasn’t booed. I can actually believe that, LOL.

Hogan said he could have sold out the building in LA if he wrestled again as a heel, because until the day he died, Hogan was a carny.

Then Hogan dies. Everyone is emotional. Bruce Prichard tears up, about Hogan’s death (I’m guessing) and not that shambolic performance in the McMahon documentary, with Linda crying as well. We go to something that was probably on the cutting room floor for Unreal, in which Triple H addresses the “geniuses” in the writing room that brought us the Cody vs Randy Orton feud, telling us that no one is perfect (I don’t know, the director of this seems to think he is), but that the business would end up like roller derby if it wasn’t for the Hulkster.

First off, that’s a passive aggressive shot at Dave Meltzer if I’ve ever seen one; and second, um, no, wrestling would have been fine without Hulkamania. As I mention in my obit of Hulk, very few would have that charisma and connection with an audience like Hogan did. Would the explosion in popularity happen if it was the second or third choice as Vince Jr.’s main character of the national expansion? Probably not, but wrestling was doing just fine before Vince Jr. got the Fed under his total control. Stadiums were holding big shows around the country, but that doesn’t fit the narrative the World Wide Wrestling Federation wants its lemmings to believe, and as we fade to black with the 10 bell salute to Hulk (with very few African Americans to see in that moment), you feel bludgeoned by the narrative that was forced onto you in the final 70 minute episode.

The final half of the final episode feels so much like a commercial for MAGA that I had to double check if Brett Ratner was directing. It turns out to be Bryan Storkel, who you may not remember from such projects as Untold: Hall of Shame, Bitconned and The Pez Outlaw. His filmography doesn’t look like someone who insists on wearing a red hat all the time like he’s a child. So how the hell did I spend a 45 minute period getting angrier by the minute at what I was watching?

In an era where we are seeing billionaires cosy up to the current Commander in Chief, with Amazon paying so much for a fly on the wall documentary to The First Lady, a person so dull and boring that the press conference she gave about Epstein caused this reaction from people. The reason why Melania is a thing that pops up on my smart TV on my recommendations in an attempt to get me to hate my life choices is that Jeff Bezos really would like regulatory support from Donald Trump’s administration to help in his dick measuring contest, I mean, space race against Elon Musk’s Space X program, and Melania being a Prime exclusive factored into that; and without wanting to sound like a conspiracy theorist, Netflix wanting to get in Trump’s good graces in a media world where allies of the President are getting their hands on media outlets isn’t the biggest jump a person has ever made to a conclusion in their life.

Yes, this documentary was never going to be a classic but it was aggressively OK, until it wasn’t. Even with a third episode that played into Hogan’s willingness to be less than honest and some eccentric editorial decisions, it became an affront to decency in its final 45 minutes.

It might sound preachy in what is a wrestling newsletter that I’m going on this tangent, but this documentary is a sign of what might be to come if the wrong people get their hands on media outlets. Look at CBS right now, and look what might happen to CNN, and remember the platform that this documentary released on almost acquired Warner Brothers Discovery but the Ellisons won the race to Trump approval. Would WBD have been in better shape with Netflix in charge? From what I saw in Real American, the answer is nope.