If you've never watched a pro wrestling match before--which is to say, if you've never been an 11-year-old boy--it might be hard to understand why people are still watching it now. It's been almost 20 years since the WWE (then the WWF) began calling itself "sports entertainment," and winking at its own fixed matches. It's been something like 14 years since I watched it, so I'm of no help, but I can tell you one thing that kept me enthralled through the summer I spent, as a 12-year-old, renting every old WWF tape at the video store: The theme music.

By the late '80s pro wrestling, once mostly the domain of people who looked like actual wrestlers, had filled with comic book characters, and each of them made his entrance to theme songs that were just as outlandish. It wasn't just Hulk Hogan and "Real American"--if you had a gimmick, you probably had a weirdly specific, synth-filled '80s theme song explaining it. What follows are, to the best of my knowledge, the 25 greatest '80s pro wrestling themes that came from the WWF's golden age of disbelief-suspension.

If you disagree--well, you'll just have to challenge me to a steel cage match at the Survivor Series.