Alejandro Cruz

In 1948, the Mexican masked wrestler Black Shadow formed a famous tag-team with another well-known masked luchador named The Blue Demon, and the two became known in the ring as Los Hermanos Shadow (the Shadow Brothers) over the next few years. In 1952, the famous wrestler SANTO beat and unmasked The Black Shadow in the ring, which triggered a legendary feud between The Blue Demon and Santo that culminated in Blue Demon beating Santo in a well-publicized series of matches, one in 1952 and the other in 1953. Although they appeared together years later in a series of Mexican horror films, Santo always remembered his defeat at the Blue Demon's hands. Although the Black Shadow never really became a super-star of Mexican cinema like Santo or Blue Demon, he did appear in a number of Mexican wrestling/ action films (usually as a minor background character), listed alternatively as the Black Shadow or as Alejandro Cruz. In two separate Blue Demon films, the Black Shadow played the role of an evil clone or duplicate of the Blue Demon, committing crimes while wearing the Blue Demon's trademarked mask in order to incriminate him in the eyes of the police. Alejandro Cruz's listing as "Blue Demon" in the credits of these 2 films led many years later to the mistaken impression some fans had that Alejandro Cruz and the Blue Demon were the same person! In "The Champions Of Justice" (a 1970 film in which Blue Demon led a squad of masked Mexican superheroes to combat evil), the Black Shadow played a major role as the villain's Number One henchman, and as a result he got a lot more screen time in this film. But in most of his other films, he usually played an anonymous thug, goon, henchman, zombie or a contestant in the various wrestling sequences that were used to pad out the films' running times.