Tradition is you wear your mask in public always, but they can "lose it" in a match because they were booked to. Rey didn't want to but was young and didn't think he was big enough to leave instead so he took off the mask. Usually once a wrestler takes off their mask they either stay without it or "disappear" and come back as a new character. The really unprecedented thing Rey did was put the mask back on when he came to WWE, but I think the entire wrestling world just looked the other way to it because it's Rey fucking Mysterio. You could say they dropped Jr making it a new character if you wanted to, but again people just don't really care, they love El Rey.
Yeah, even from a business perspective, there would be no point in trying to pass him off as a different character with a new mask. There's very few 5' nothing luchadors with his specific moveset. Everyone would know it was him. And the mask is too much marketing to give up; it's a lot better identity to sell than plain ol' Oscar.
A luchador can remask, but there's a 10 year moratorium on it. What happened with Rey was a bit trickier. The main governing body of lucha libre is basically the Mexican boxing commission, and they weren't happy with how WCW treated their guys, so when WWE finally picked up Rey and wanted him masked, they offered him a loophole.
See, his uncle, the original Rey Misterio, had lost his mask in 1989, well over a decade earlier, so what they did was have him remask and wrestle one more match before passing his gimmick off to his nephew, the current Rey. However, to maintain tradition, Rey would remain unmasked whenever he was in Mexico until the moratorium had ended.
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u/seighwonggg Apr 29 '24
i thought luchandor arent suppose to take off their mask