Rewatching WCW

[air_raid]

9 hours ago, eugenespeed said:

Just been reading a review of Superbrawl 2000 and it mentioned there was a lad in the crowd wearing a Sunderland top. 

Wondered if that was anyone on here? 

 

@METAL ON METALDon’t deny it.

[Merzbow]

Who would admit to both being a Sunderland fan and paying to watch 2000 WCW?

[Kamaras-Tash]

35 minutes ago, Merzbow said:

Who would admit to both being a Sunderland fan and paying to watch 2000 WCW?

 

We were pretty good in 2000 to be fair, the WCW part I can't disagree with though 

[air_raid]

SuperBrawl? Super Kev.

 

 

[METAL ON METAL]

11 hours ago, air_raid said:

@METAL ON METALDon’t deny it.

Sadly not, though a Milton Núñez 3:16 shirt would’ve been fitting for the occasion.

[WeeAl]

Nitro 23rd December 1996. 

Malenko has Regal beat for the TV title when the bell rings out of nowhere. The referee heads over to the timekeepers desk, picks up the title and it's announced that Regal has retained the title. Not why he has or how he has. Just that he has. Only Mike Tenay has told us on commentary that it's due to the ten minute time limit, but that's never announced to the live crowd, many of whom seem baffled. 

Jeff Jarrett Vs Rick Steiner. Right in the middle of the Steiner's ongoing 'whose side are you on Sting?' issue with the Stinger. nWo Sting waltzes down to the ring, gets a Steinerline from Rick, Jeff then pins Fake Sting. The ref counts the three. Jeff Jarrett beats Rick Steiner by pinning Fake Sting, who wasn't even in the match. 

Rey Misterio does a promo at the announce desk, telling Larry and Tony that Sting is not on the side of the nWo, that last week when Sting flipped Rey off his back in a big brawl, that it was a normal reaction and Sting didn't follow up the attack. He walked away, unlike Nash and The Giant in similar situations with Rey. He asks them to replay the footage that they showed earlier in the night of the brawl from the week before. Look at it from that perspective says Rey. So they decide to play an entirely different video that consisted pretty much entirely of Sting walking through various crowds, and then cut to a break. 

WCW was always WCW. Even in their best periods the shows are rife with stuff like this. 

However you do still get Lex Luger being the fucking man, racking every big bastard he can get his hands on. Clint 'Sting' Eastwood  Malenko Vs Regal, Arn Anderson Vs Kevin Sullivan in a really great, short, ass kicking brawl. Eddie Guerrero Vs Voldemort. You also have Hogan talking incessantly. Promos that just won't end. Public Enemy Vs The Amazing French Canadians. Konnan Vs Big Bubba. You take the good with the bad. 

[air_raid]

11 hours ago, WeeAl said:

Jeff Jarrett beats Rick Steiner by pinning Fake Sting, who wasn't even in the match. 

Good to see this fine tradition was implemented long before Russo arrived. Who can forget Shane Douglas being allowed to win a match he wasn’t in at Starrcade 99, and Sid Vicious winning a tag team match by pinning Hulk Hogan, his partner.

WWE like to pretend that WCW booked nonsensical shit that they never would, but let’s not forget, Cody Rhodes won his first tag team title with Ted Jr by beating Bob Holly and himself.

It would be a great entry for OT minor annoyances - in the story, what the fuck is the ref thinking in bullshit scenarios like this?? And why isn’t he sacked for it? Completely, completely illogical for the (fairly simple) parameters of who’s wrestling against who.

The only exception that I ever tolerated was in the first Triple Header match where Owen Hart was scheduled to be in the match, was purportedly AWOL and replaced by Smithers, but then entered the match anyway and found himself pinned by Big Daddy Cool. Here, Earl made an on-the-fly discretionary call that made sense to him at the time. To use a football analogy, Camp Cornette committed a foul, but Hebner saw the opposition with the advantage, allowed play to go on, and the other team scored. Not unlike Lugers title win on Nitro where “by the letter of the law” the nWo interfering should have seen Hogan disqualified, but (IIRC) Pee Wee Anderson let the match carry on as Lex still held the advantage. So re: In Your House - fuck Cornette and his shenanigans, they got what they deserved. Fine, I accept that. However, the naked fact is that Big Sexy pinned somebody that wasn’t actually in the match, so it’s also logical and justified that the result be overturned. I accept that too. The ONLY exception.

Maybe he should be allowed to do this because he’s Kevin Nash, but on the other hand, his partner is Shawn Michaels. If he’s allowed to lose multiple titles without actually losing, it works both ways, and in the raid rule book he’s definitely not allowed to win one without actually beating the defending champions.

Yes, that last sentence is a deliberate contradiction. For the sake of my own amusement. Fuck Shawn Michaels.

[wandshogun09]

52 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Who can forget Shane Douglas being allowed to win a match

I give that booking a D for Disgusting. 

[BomberPat]

1 hour ago, air_raid said:

It would be a great entry for OT minor annoyances - in the story, what the fuck is the ref thinking in bullshit scenarios like this?? And why isn’t he sacked for it? Completely, completely illogical for the (fairly simple) parameters of who’s wrestling against who

It's insane on any level, kayfabe or otherwise. From a booking perspective, how many people had to have some kind of sign off on that? Even if you assume that the wrestlers themselves, and the referee, weren't afforded any input on their own match, even if you assume there wasn't a full writers' room, it still required at bare minimum someone to think up that finish and someone else to agree to it. I can see someone getting to the end of a stressful day, burned out, and no one coming up with a satisfactory finish, and just blurting that out as an option, but that it got any further than that is preposterous. And, yeah, in kayfabe it's even worse. The absolute peak of "ah fuck it, it's only wrestling". 

A few years back, I was involved in booking a show, where we had a limited roster and a few people had to pull out, so we were pretty constrained in terms of what we could do. We had this babyface comedy act who were a masked hillbilly family - basically, they were a tag team and a manager, but the gimmick meant that every now and then we'd introduce new "relatives", as a good way to give new trainees their first spots in front of an audience with minimal pressure by sticking them under a mask - and we had a new girl who had joined them at ringside, and this was going to be her actual debut, in a six-person tag. Problem was, the way the card had panned out, and having lost someone we expected to be on the show, we had a shortage of heels on the other side - we had two guys who had teamed together before, but nobody to be their partner. 

What I pitched was that we had another guy available who was a babyface, but we'd been toying with turning him heel for a while. So we'd set up the match with him on the babyface team, then when the heels come out and say they'd like to introduce their partner, he jumps his team from behind and joins the heel team. The new girl then steps up and joins her team to make it a six-person tag. In my head, that seemed like a really logical way to get there, until the promoter said, "okay, but if she's already out there with them, and she's able to tag with them, why isn't she just their partner in the first place?". We spent over an hour, maybe closer to two hours, going back and forth on that point to make this angle - that played out in front of maybe 150 people, mostly kids, none of whom would have questioned it - until we came up with a solution; we tweak the girl's gimmick to be that, even though she's the only female member of her family and by far the smallest, she's the one that the rest of the team are scared of and can't control, so they never let her be their partner, until now, when they had no choice. That ended up working out better for everyone - she had a more fun gimmick to play around with, it added a great dynamic to the match, and it made the whole heel turn set-piece feel a lot more sensible.

The reason I tell that story here is that this was a midcard match on an inconsequential, nothing show, that was only ever seen by the people in that room. They're a consistently forgiving audience, and we could have easily got away with half-arsing it. Yet we probably spent more time discussing and planning the opening couple of minutes of that match - what happened before the bell had even rung - that night than anything else on the show, because the boss was adamant that it had to make sense. If we could manage that, it's insane that promotions as big as the WWF and WCW used to fairly frequently book the kind of finish and "swerve" and whatnot that didn't pass the most basic of "does that even make sense?" checks before they ended up on TV.

[mim731]

I know WCW were always ripping off popular-ish music, but hearing this as I rewatched Bash at the Beach 1996, I have no idea how Seal didn't sue them. Good lord. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKPmrJofZ6Y

 

 

[air_raid]

8 hours ago, mim731 said:

I know WCW were always ripping off popular-ish music, but hearing this as I rewatched Bash at the Beach 1996, I have no idea how Seal didn't sue them. Good lord. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKPmrJofZ6Y

I’ve watched it a hundred times and never even noticed the similarity but it’s jarring now you’ve pointed it out!

[WyattSheepMask]

I’ve been dipping in & out of rewatching The Monday War era on the network for a few years now. I did include watching Thunder for a little while but have given up on that as very little happens on it. You might on occasion get a completely random match that would likely never happen again, but there’s not enough there to keep it as part of the regular viewing.

Anyway, the most recent PPV in this rewatch was Road Wild 98. The war wasn’t over by this point, but the WWF is certainly the easier watch at this point in time. And it’s easy to see why when you see what a shocker of a show this was.

Barbarian and Meng kick the show off as The Faces of Fear explode! What better way to get the predominantly White biker crowd going than sticking the two Tongan lads out there. They just go from bit to bit without any rhyme or reason, with Meng going over in just under 5 minutes. Hugh Morrus comes out to help Barbarian and Jimmy Hart give Meng a kicking after the match, allowing for Hacksaw Jim Duggan to run in to make the save so that the crowd can go “America, Fuck Yeah!”

Next Up is The Dancing Fools, Disco Inferno and Alex Wright (with Tokyo Magnum) against The Public Enemy. 
They go a few minutes under standard Tag Team Rules which is just dying on it’s arse, before Wright brings a bin in and starts whacking Johnny Grunge as Rocco Rock runs off to grab weapons. 
The match then becomes a Weapons Based No DQ Street Fight for some reason, which was the style at the time. Bins, Baking Trays, you know the score with these matches, it’s all fairly unremarkable. A Triple Decker Table Spot takes an absolute Ice-Age to set up, but the impact when they finally execute it is fairly impressive and one of the rare occasions were you actually get multiple tables to actually break as they should. That would’ve been a good place to finish it had they just pinned Disco out there, but for one reason or another they have to drag him back into the ring so that they can do a Tokyo Magnum miscue spot where he misses a Top Rope Elbow for the finish, because being through 3 tables apparently wasn’t enough. Public Enemy go over in a little over Fifteen minutes.

What better way to follow up a No DQ Street Fight with, yep, a No DQ Street Fight. Oh sorry, it’s a ‘Raven’s Rules’ Match, which is definitely not the same thing. Saturn beats Raven and Kanyon in a Triple Threat which wasn’t actually that bad, but the placing of it coming right after a similar match let it down.

Rey and Psycosis have a decent match as they usual did around this time, but they were restricted by not being able to do any of their usual dives to the outside because the ring is raised up so much. From the ring canvas to the actual ground must be at least 7 foot.

Then, we get to this moment. Match 4 is Chavo Guerrero v Stevie Ray for the TV Title, Stevie having “claimed” the title due to an injury to Booker T. 
Chavo gets the kind of response you would expect from this crowd, and then Stevie Ray comes out. At this point, Stevie Ray is the first African-American to appear on the show, and as he comes out, the camera cuts to this guy doing the “Raise The Roof”

For fuck’s sake

Match is nothing, goes less than 3 minutes, less said about it the better.

Then, Brian Adams and Steve McMichael have one of the worst matches ever witnessed. 
They do a couple of lock up into Clean Break spots, Mongo bellowing “that’s how a good guy does it” after the first one. Mongo then fails to get low enough to duck a Clothesline, meaning that Brian has to raise his arm higher up to cover for Steve, who then hits one of the worst Shoulder Tackles ever seen. For a former Defensive Tackle who is a Super Bowl Champion, 2 time All Pro-Team and 2 time Pro Bowler, that was diabolical. 
Brian goes for a Piledriver, but Steve’s feet glance the referee, who goes down like he’s been shot by a Sniper. 
Some interference by Virgil doesn’t work out and Mongo wins in around 6 minutes of boring, botch filled action. 
You can give Steve the benefit of the doubt as he’s still only 2 years into the business, but Brian Adams at this point was closing in on 11 years into his career. Anyone even approaching halfway competent should’ve been able to put something together for that amount of time, but this stunk.

Juvi and Jericho have what is clearly the best match on the show for the Cruiserweight Title in a match which featured Dean Malenko as the Guest Referee, continuing his feud with Jericho.

The semi-Main Event is the nWo Invitational Battle Royale featuring members of nWo Black & White (Hall, Giant, Hennig and Norton), nWo Wolfpac (Nash, Sting, Luger and Konnan) and for some reason Goldberg because he put himself into the match a couple of weeks earlier because why not. 
Hall gets eliminated within 90 seconds by being thrown over the top after Goldberg reversed The Outsider’s Edge. 
Nash eliminates himself so that he can go after Hall, or more accurately because he’s not getting eliminated by anyone, as Goldberg takes out everyone except Luger, who gets tossed out by The Giant. 
Goldberg’s biggest challenge to date stands in front of him as he squares with the “500lb Giant”. Can he overcome the odds? 49 seconds (and one very impressive Jackhammer) later, turns out that yes he can, as Goldberg more less single-handedly takes out two factions that he isn’t even properly feuding with.
They had been doing an OK job of building B&W v Wolfpac on TV, not a great job but not a bad one. But 8 eliminations (one of which was self-inflicted) in under 8 minutes and the winner was a guy who wasn’t directly involved in the feud and whose World Title wasn’t at stake, he lost nothing and gained even less.
Since winning the World Title and despite still being massively over with the crowd, Goldberg has been a total afterthought on TV. The week after he won the belt at The Georgia Dome, during which time he also made his first defence of the title on PPV, he turns up right at the end of the show to beat Curt Hennig (who he’d already beaten the night before at Bash of the Beach) in 1:22. 
Hogan by comparison is all over the show, opening the show blaming Scott Hall for the loss the week before, tipping Buff Bagwell out of his wheelchair, attacking DDP following a match against  Disciple, then facing Scott Hall in the semi-Main, a match which saw Nash come down to save Hall from a beat down only for Hall to attack Nash and join back up with Hogan anyway. 
The whole thing is a fucking mess and seems to just serve as a way of getting Goldberg on the show, and in doing so makes both nWo factions look like chumps for losing their own Invitational Match.

Then it’s the famous Main Event of Hogan & Bischoff v DDP and Jay Leno. This show’s main event was built on a celebrity involvement that consisted of Jay Leno appearing on WCW TV not even once in the build up. Because Leno had a real job that paid him handsomely and NBC were never going him to take Mondays off, his entire involvement occurred on The Tonight Show, which admittedly wasn’t a bad idea as that drew a much larger audience than Nitro was doing at the time (an episode in May of 1998 featuring Jerry Seinfeld drew just shy of 15 million viewers, around 3 times the number of Nitro). 
Jay’s absence from WCW TV meant that Bischoff was often left to try and build the match on his own with his nWo Nightcap segments, in which he would recycle material that Leno had done previously on The Tonight Show. This might not have been so bad had it only taken up a couple of minutes of TV each week through July and early August. Instead, Bischoff rattles off not only mostly poor, but already used material like a bad stand-up comic for 15 minutes at time for 3 or 4 weeks, it’s excruciating. 
The match itself is fairly forgettable. It’s famous for Jay getting a wristlock on Hogan which Hogan sells like death, but DDP carries the bulk of the workload as he should do, and Jay’s involvement is fairly limited. 
The most memorable things coming out of it were Kevin Eubanks (the leader of The Tonight Show Band) delivering a pretty decent Diamond Cutter, and the WWE Network dubbing in a hilarious sounding generic Talk Show Theme. I had it in my mind that they came out to DDP’s Nirvana knockoff on the PPV.

So yeah, if your going to watch anything from this PPV, skip straight to Juvi v Jericho then turn it off

Edited April 27, 2022 by WyattSheepMask

[Your Fight Site]

One of the previous Wild events (can’t remember if it was ‘96 or ‘97) has Harlem Heat in a tag match, and the racial undertones from the crowd makes for uncomfortable viewing.

[air_raid]

1 hour ago, Your Fight Site said:

One of the previous Wild events (can’t remember if it was ‘96 or ‘97) has Harlem Heat in a tag match, and the racial undertones from the crowd makes for uncomfortable viewing.

They wrestled tags in 96 and 97 but I think it’s against the Steiners in 96 you refer to. I recall them getting cheered against the nWo in 97 but that might be because they had Jackie with them by then and… well, you know, tits.

[bAzTNM#1]

Been going thought the WCW Saturday Nights shows from 1992 and they are brilliant. Who is this K. Allen Frey? I imagine he was Bischoff's predecessor. I believe he called him "goofy as fuck" but I quite enjoyed him laying down the law. He had more business charisma than Bill Watts ever did.

Edited May 8, 2022 by bAzTNM#1