This is a script for a video on my YouTube channel. You can find the video version here: https://youtu.be/2rAcexTbRoY
For almost a year in AEW, there was a noticeable man in the crowd. No, not you green shirt guy. Sorry it's not Vlad either. It was a man barely reacting, wearing a box on his head. It didn't take the internets version of Hercule Poirot to figure out that the man wearing the box was Kip Sabian, the man who won AEW's first ever singles match back on the Double of Nothing 2019 pre-show.
From around September 2021 to the following August Kip developed this not quite an angle from arranging his own meet and greets, to hanging around outside the arena, to eventually being on the front row. By the end he would try to get himself on camera as much as possible. Sometimes he would even be visible during major moments on AEW television, the one that sticks in my head is the first match between CM Punk and MJF.
Kip would return on the other side of the guardrail on the August 22nd 22 episode of Dynamite, when Pac would lock eyes with the man in the box. Taz would even note that Sabian had being doing this for months, so apparently we were supposed to know it was him all along. It had become a weekly occurrence of sorts to spot him in the crowd, but never once had the commentators mentioned him. Kip did note in the podcast that it wasn't exactly an angle or a storyline, so it would have been hard for them to mention him given that it wasn't leading to anything until Kip had healed enough. Weirdly though, Pac would remove the box to find a different man with tape over his mouth, who apparently had been sitting there throughout the show, only for Kip to attack Pac from behind. This would eventually lead to a match on the All Out pre-show where Kip would talk to the box as though he was the new Al Snow. Kip referred to the gimmick as resembling a "campy DC villain" which immediately brought me back to a sequence in Lego Batman showing various bafflingly awful villains such as Calendar man, Kite man and Polka dot man, only for the joke to really be that they all existed in DC comics.
Unless I missed it on AEW's myriad of weekly programming, I don't believe a purpose for this in storyline terms was ever explained. Finally this past week Kip Sabian explained the thought process on AEW's unrestricted podcast. I'm not someone who demands an explanation for everything in wrestling, but this was out there enough that it kind of did need one. I could also do with an explanation of how a random man with tape over his mouth willingly sat there waiting for Pac to unbox him. Granted Kip mentioned the serial killer vibe he was going for, but that part just came across as confusing. Maybe there was a jigsaw style trap in store if he didn't play along? We might never know. He also mentioned Michael Myers in particular as an influence. I'm guessing this is in reference to how Kip would barely react to anything, which is also one of the original inspirations for how Kane in his early days wouldn't sell any pain he might feel.
It turns out that the idea was inspired by Shia LeBeouf, which should be a red flag right there. In February 2014, Shia turned up on a red carpet at the Berlin Film Festival wearing a paper bag on his head with the message written on it "I'm not famous anymore". Kip also noted that he was due to spend around a year unable to wrestle following surgery, and he would rather have spent the time he was injured having something to do than sit at home doing nothing, so fair play to him for that. When Kip showed up in Chicago for All Out 2021 he couldn't find anywhere to buy a brown paper bag, so settled for a cardboard box. Full credit to Kip though, he was self aware enough to know that writing "I'm not over anymore" might not have been received well, so he came up with 'Underrated' which I would say he is, and 'Over it'.
I do like when I'm watching a wrestling show and there is something for me to notice and think about, like Bray Wyatt's puppets hanging out backstage. My own personal theory at the time was linked to the Alice in Chains song Man in the Box, also used by Tommy Dreamer in ECW, which lyrically would very much fit with the depression Kip describes having at the time. I quite liked looking for the man in the box each week. Kip even refers to it as an Easter Egg, which I suppose is what I'm referring to. I loved the Raw debut of Dexter Lumis last year; the Kevin Owens interview where the camera happend to end on a car accident in the background, then the mass of security running past the camera later on, leading to him making it to ringside and getting arrested off camera but visible on social media later on. I suppose the ultimate of that lately was the white rabbit, but that is on a whole other level.
I don't want you to get the impression that I'm dissing Kip, or the idea. I also want to draw attention to the next thing Kip says, that people would get in touch with him saying that some of the lines he was tweeting in this character such as "time doesn't heal, it changes you", seemed to actually help people going though difficult times. Respect Kip, but I still kind of want to know who the kidnapped guy is.
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