In the 1980s, there wasn't a more popular and marketable tag team in professional wrestling that the Road Warriors. For selling out arenas, they compared to someone like Andre the Giant as special attractions. When WWE couldn't get the Road Warriors, it made sense they would create their own version and Demolition was born.
Fairly, there was more to Demolition than just being a Road Warriors rip off. They had a lot of different things going into their gimmicks, and both Barry Darsow and Bill Eadie were great professional wrestlers with a lot of experience. Eadie had previously worked as The Masked Superstar for years and Darsow made his name with the Russian heel gimmick of Krusher Kruschev. While NWA fans dismissed them as Road Warriors wannabes, it wasn't surprising when they reached enormous levels of success. Four years later, the tag team died.
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When Luscious Johnny V first introduced Demolition to WWE fans in 1987, it was clearly a Road Warriors-inspired gimmick. Hawk and Animal were dominating in the NWA, and this gave WWE a chance to compete with fans who liked the rough-and-tumble tag team archetype. Renaming them Ax and Smash, Demolition wore black leather and hockey masks until they unmasked and wore red and white face paint.
While Hawk and Animal went for more biker-inspired looks, Ax and Smash wanted to align their appearance with slasher horror movies. Johnny V didn't last long as their manager and sold the contracts to Mr. Fuji, who then led Demolition to the WWE Tag Team Championship. What happened next was astonishing to anyone who always considered them a ripoff tag team. After beating Strike Force in 1988 for the tag titles, they held them for 478 days, the longest tag team title reign in WWE history.
Demolition ended up winning the tag team titles three times for a combined 698 days, with their last run coming in 1990. The third tag team title reign began at WrestleMania VI when they beat the Colossal Connection tag team of Andre the Giant and Haku. The match wasn't very good, as Andre the Giant's health was deteriorating, and he never tagged in. On top of that, at the time, Ax fell ill thanks to a shellfish allergy. Darsow explains how the decision came about, as WWE has signed Brian Adams and wanted to find a spot for him in the company. "When Bill went down, they couldn't just stop the Demolition because we already had all these dates booked," Darsow remembered. "So, they said, 'let's just put Brian into that spot.' He can be the third Demolition, and when Bill comes back we can go into six-mans and all that stuff."
There was a problem here. Fans never accepted Brian Adams as Crush, the third member of Demolition. Ax started to slow down his in-ring wrestling and WWE wanted to push the new, younger, muscular member of the team. "Brian was a really good guy, but Brian and Smash, or you know, Crush and Ax or whatever, it wasn't the same as Ax and Smash," Darsow said. Eadie added that Brian was a good guy, but he wasn't polished. "He wasn't at the degree of performance that we were. His interviews were okay, but [fans] were used to having Ax and Smash." He revealed that people talking about Demolition today only mention Ax, Smash, and Fuji, and no one ever mentions Crush.
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With Crush coming into Demolition and dragging the team down, it never had a chance to win the fans back over. As Darsow said, "Once the people don't believe it for a little bit, it goes from here [holding his hand up in the air] and if they don't believe it, it goes like this [dropping his hand fast]. And it's hard to get them to come back again." This hurt the most because, after years of trying, Vince McMahon finally signed the Road Warriors to WWE contracts. With the originals in WWE, it made Demolition seem lesser. If Crush had never joined, and considering many WWE fans didn't watch the NWA, the feud could have worked. However, Crush wasn't ready for this spotlight and the Demolition vs. Road Warriors feud never reached the levels that fans had dreamed.
Ax almost never wrestled in the matches between Demolition and the Road Warriors, so it was always Crush and Smash. When Ax was wrestling, the Road Warriors would bring in the WWE champion Ultimate Warrior as a third partner, and Demolition had no chance against these odds. After breaking records as tag team champions, WWE jobbed out Demolition to the Road Warriors regularly in 1990. Even bringing back Mr. Fuji as their manager couldn't save them. After Survivor Series, Ax left WWE and Demolition consisted solely of Smash and Crush, and they completely stopped winning any high-profile matches. In September 1991, Demolition finally broke up.
"It was a little bit anticlimactic," Bruce Prichard remembered. "Demoltiion was considered, at that time, the tag team of the WWF. They were the guys. To me, it was anticlimactic, and to the fans, I think it was anticlimactic as well." After the breakup, Ax moved on and kept the gimmick going outside of WWE, although a lawsuit from WWE made that hard. Crush ended up returning, keeping his name, but removing the Demolition face paint and dying his hair. Smash came back as Repo Man, a comedy gimmick, and the legend of Demolition died after just four years on top of the wrestling world.