Kane by a long shot.
I too had never even heard of Chris Jericho when he made the jump to the 'F'. I thought he was great on the mic and was interested to see what he could do in the ring with the WWF guys. Mere minutes after captivating my attention purely through a lengthy promo (which is difficult, because i hate long promos), The Rock tore through him with two catchphrases and his moment was gone. On to the next segment.
The ME of the night comes around, and Jericho does a run in to cost Rock his match and that was the grand sum of Chris Jericho's debut.
2 weeks later he's got Howard Finkel carrying hs bags and he's not even on the card at Summerslam, except to interrupt the Road Dogg, who was the guest ref in a hardcore match.
Plus the majority of the fans in attendance at that show already knew it was going to be Jericho coming through the curtain anyway. For those of you who are 'remembering the pop', go back and listen to the 'Jericho' chants that preceeded the end of the countdown. And when the camera pans through the crowd, look at the number of 'Jericho' signs there were in the audience that night.
Kane on the other hand......
It's 1997, the Deadman has been bashing Mankind and Paul Bearer for a fair while, won the title at WM13 from Sid, and lost it to Bret Hart because HBK smacked him with a chair accidentally.
A fued begins between the two, where after a PPV match ended in a no contest (due to DX interference, and injured refs/camera men) HBK and Taker competed in the first HIAC match at Bad Blood 1997.
Throughout the majority of the time frame i've just covered (and i'm talking months here), Paul Bearer, the Undertaker's former manager, has been talking about the arrival of Kane, the Undertaker's brother, not dead as the Phenom has led everyone to believe, or as he himself believed, but alive and well (minus the hideous "scarring") and with a taste for extreme bloody vengeance.
Now, fans are thinking, "Wtf? Taker's got a brother now? Is he supposed to be a zombie too?"
Anyway, there's a lot of talk and very little action going on around Kane, so people are focusing on HBK getting skinned alive by the Deadman inside a cage with a roof instead.
The match commences, there's no DX in sight, more camera men get beaten up, the combatants beat each other senseless, they breach the cage, scale it, battle further, and Shawn Michaels plummets to the ground in a stunt that would be completely forgotten some 10 months later.
As Taker throws his victim into the ring and delivers the killing stroke and moves to claim his vengeance in front of a capacity crowd, the lights go out, eerie and unfamiliar music starts playing and a loud fiery pyro ignites at the top of the ramp, and through the curtain comes Paul Bearer leading a man that stands even taller than the Undertaker, but instead of being a fat sack of crap like 'Giant' Gonzales or King Kong Bundy, this guy is built solid, clothing covering all but his left arm and a mask that simply shows two eyes, one a piercing white and the other a soulless black.
Vince McMahon is screaming in his headset that this must be Kane, in order to remind the confused viewers around the world who the hell this guy is supposed to be, and then suddenly confusion and Freddy Krueger comparisons become irrelevant as this guy literally rips the cage door off and gets in the ring and squares up to the Phenom. The camera changes and fans actually see the Deadman hesitate in fear and confusion.
Suddenly, Kane grabs his brother, hoists him up, and drills Taker with his signature move, the Tombstone Piledriver, leaving him laying in the ring, for HBK to crawl over and stick it to the Deadman again, 1,2,3.
Kane then went on to beat Taker down multiple times over, tore up the entire roster in a style that wasn't seen again until Brock Lesnar came along in '02, sent monsters like Vader back to the locker room a beaten mess, and even set Taker on fire inside a casket.
As someone already said, a debut isn't just about the very first day you turn up, it's about the immediate aftermath of that debut that makes your arrival significant. Making one big noise during a Rock promo and then doing nothing, surely pales far in comparison to walking in, leaving a ME'er laying, and continuing to do so for the next 6 months, and then becoming the freakin' champion over Austin of all people, 24 hour reign or not.
To be honest, The Radicalz had a better debut than Jericho, if you judge by the criteria i just listed. They turned up in the crowd during Raw and attacked Road Dogg and X-Pac during a hardcore tag match, and were in matches by the end of the night, and continued to be involved in the DX/Rock 'n' Sock/Two Cool scenario that went on during December of 1999. Ok, so Eddie broke his arm that first week, and everyone knew they'd never get ME material out of Saturn or Malenko, but Benoit just ran with it to the point that he was ME'ing before BOTH Jericho AND Kurt Angle, another of WWFs hottest acquisitions in late 1999.
Boy, i went on a tirade there didn't i? Thanks to all those who actually read it all, but yeah, i say Kane's was better. Purely because Kane's debut equalled a new ME player that was able to finally give us a decent 'Big Man' fued with Taker, whereas Jericho interrupted the Rock, then interrupted the Rock's match and was then just interrupting people that no one was interested in. It wasn't until his face turn that Jericho was being put in matches and being used prominently with guys like Kurt and Benoit who were pretty much cemented in the upper mid-card/ME tier boundary, despite BOTH joining the main roster AFTER him.
Word!
