WWE Vault Appreciation Thread

[Chili]

Battlebowl is so awful and pointless you can't even enjoy it in a Jim Herd/Russo PPV that's gone batshit way. 

[wandshogun09]

Battlebowl was shit when they did it as a gimmick on Starrcades 91 and 92. Why they gave it its own standalone PPV in 93 always baffled me. Rotten stuff. I’ve slagged that show off before on here and I will every time it comes up. Literally nothing redeemable on it. Even booking a match with a Flair/Austin team and Scorpio in the opposite corner, in typical WCW fashion they shat on it by throwing Maxx Payne into the mix.

Look at the poster…

Look at the talent on that bastard. And they even left Vader off! Yeah they had a load of shite lower down the card at the time like the Kole Twins, Yoshi Kwan, Big Sky etc but they had enough top guys, in or close to their physical prime, to where there’s really no excuse to not be putting out PPVs with at least a consistently strong top half. You could take those eight guys on the poster there and mix and match almost any combination to make four belting singles matches that would’ve saved this show (I say ‘almost’ because we saw Flair vs Rude twice on the two previous PPVs before this and it was arse). But no. We needed to feature Charlie Norris, The Shockmaster and The Equalizer.

As much as I loved and miss WCW, like a great man said…

 

Edited Tuesday at 03:05 PM by wandshogun09

[Chico Torres]

Et tu @wandshogun09?! Be gone with that Maxx Payne slander!

Sacrilege on here I know but Bret Hart is a wet blanket and a complete flop in WCW so I will dismiss his bitter ramblings (Chico heel turn complete).

I remain a Battlebowl 1993 truther.

[tiger_rick]

2 minutes ago, Chico Torres said:

Bret Hart is a wet blanket

Chico

U

N

Torres

[Chico Torres]

Just call me The Mountie, pouring water over Bret and electrocuting the whiny prick

 

[Chili]

1 hour ago, wandshogun09 said:

Battlebowl was shit when they did it as a gimmick on Starrcades 91 and 92. Why they gave it its own standalone PPV in 93 always baffled me. Rotten stuff. I’ve slagged that show off before on here and I will every time it comes up. Literally nothing redeemable on it. Even booking a match with a Flair/Austin team and Scorpio in the opposite corner, in typical WCW fashion they shat on it by throwing Maxx Payne into the mix.

Look at the poster…

Look at the talent on that bastard. And they even left Vader off! Yeah they had a load of shite lower down the card at the time like the Kole Twins, Yoshi Kwan, Big Sky etc but they had enough top guys, in or close to their physical prime, to where there’s really no excuse to not be putting out PPVs with at least a consistently strong top half. You could take those eight guys on the poster there and mix and match almost any combination to make four belting singles matches that would’ve saved this show (I say ‘almost’ because we saw Flair vs Rude twice on the two previous PPVs before this and it was arse). But no. We needed to feature Charlie Norris, The Shockmaster and The Equalizer.

As much as I loved and miss WCW, like a great man said…

 

I'm in love with that picture they've used for Rick Rude there. A pissed, bleary dad at a wedding being asked to suddenly smile for a photo.

[Chico Torres]

After a spectacular misreading of the room with Battlebowl 1993 (one day the battle of the Godwinns will be appreciated), I have been racked with guilt about insulting our Bret, the leader of the New Generation. He didn’t deserve to get caught in the lethal (lottery) crossfire. As a peace offering I share this great new compilation of 1996 proto Stone Cold doing a much better job than I could have insulting the (s)hitman. In my view the last truly great WWF feud. I’m sorry Bret.

 

[wandshogun09]

Bret vs Austin was probably the last feud that I actually bought into. They both played their parts so well and so convincingly that I really believed they must genuinely have hated each other. And this was long past the point of me knowing what wrestling was and I was old enough to know better. They got me though. To the point it still felt weird to me seeing Austin up there on the stage inducting Bret into the Hall of Fame all those years later. 

[The King of Old School]

15 minutes ago, wandshogun09 said:

Bret vs Austin was probably the last feud that I actually bought into. They both played their parts so well and so convincingly that I really believed they must genuinely have hated each other. And this was long past the point of me knowing what wrestling was and I was old enough to know better. They got me though. To the point it still felt weird to me seeing Austin up there on the stage inducting Bret into the Hall of Fame all those years later. 

Out of interest would you have ever wanted to see them team up if Bret had stayed with the company?

I think the only feud that reminds of this one is the current Swerve/Hangman one, I know they have teamed a couple of times and that quite a lot on here seem to want that to be the eventual end game, but I couldn't think of anything worse. Leave them hating each other and cycle back to it whenever you want.

[SuperBacon]

35 minutes ago, wandshogun09 said:

They both played their parts so well and so convincingly that I really believed they must genuinely have hated each other

Same with DDP vs Savage. Maybe it was because I was 12 and still a massive mark, but I think, just like Bret and Austin, it's the intensity of it, which helps when you have chaotic nutters like Randy and Steve involved.

There's just a difference in their interactions, matches, promos that had a sharper edge than say Bret vs Shawn (who ironically genuinely hated each other at the time as we know) or Rock vs Austin, which always felt more about the belts (rightly) than just beating the shit out of each other. That's what the former feuds felt to me, they just wanted to batter each other.

Basically late 1996 and 1997 >>> 

[gmoney]

There's nothing like Savage when he's into a feud for believable intensity. I genuinely thought he hated Jake the Snake with burning fire. 

[Chico Torres]

Fully agree about Savage, no one managed to commit so fully to a feud with the intensity, blind hatred and emotional agony. You felt if he was around anyone he was feuding with he was going to kill them, no dueling promos in the ring but he would just lose self control and go for the kill.

Even in his final WWF feud with Crush, I believed that his friends betrayal completely broke him. When Todd tried to speak to him on the phone he wasn’t just his Mania co host but his friend trying to console this shattered shell of the usually wacky and colourful guy we knew. And just being in the same building at Survivor Series or the Rumble meant he wanted to murder Crush, consequences be damned (shame about the Mania match). The one guy you know who just sees red and stops acting rationally, both a tortured soul and a psychopath.

Its why if pressed I would go with Macho as the greatest of all time.

[The Gaffer]

I'm pretty sure most of that Austin/Bret stuff is in that Rise of Stone Cold timeline they uploaded awhile back, but I watched it all again anyway. The look and feel of the WWF shows - with that particular angle - is probably my favourite mini-era of wrestling ever. Pipebomb? Try showing up on Livewire and calling in angrily to the commentary desk during Raw!

The injection the product receives is genuinely night and day. It still feels like they just gave up on Austin and said "Look, we're really tired. We're losing money. You have a bee in your bonnet about something? Have this segment." Pure, organic, visceral anger directed at Bret - a man who, hilariously, wasn't even there and had never mentioned Steve before - and none of it was a shoot. It was all just wonderfully worked make-believe. 

Also Brian Pillman pulling faces with his cane and his Marilyn Monroe t-shirt might be the coolest a pro wrestler has ever looked. That him, Bret and Austin didn't get to do an entire year of swapping around in different combos in the main event scene at the start of the Attitude Era is my biggest "What If?" in history. 

[BomberPat]

2 hours ago, The Gaffer said:

Also Brian Pillman pulling faces with his cane and his Marilyn Monroe t-shirt might be the coolest a pro wrestler has ever looked. That him, Bret and Austin didn't get to do an entire year of swapping around in different combos in the main event scene at the start of the Attitude Era is my biggest "What If?" in history. 

I'd add Shawn into the mix there. The day that Shawn Michaels walked out citing an "unsafe working environment" after his fight with Bret, he was supposed to wrestle Brian Pillman on RAW, and that match never happened - they were never even opposite sides of a tag, never in a battle royal, never shared the ring at all. You've got arguably the defining high-flyer babyfaces of WWF and WCW in the early years of the decade, both turning into generational coked up nutters a few years later - taking that and interweaving it with the history between Bret, Shawn, Pillman, and Austin would have been magic.

[wandshogun09]

22 hours ago, The King of Old School said:

Out of interest would you have ever wanted to see them team up if Bret had stayed with the company?

Not really. The old ‘enemies teaming up’ concept sounds a bit too close to Battlebowl/Lethal Lottery and I think I’ve already made myself clear on where I stand on that 🤣 Although, contradicting myself a bit, I am a fan of the Wildcard match from Survivor Series 95 so it can work on occasion. Also loved the brief tag title run Steve Austin and Shawn Michaels had in mid 97. WCW probably could’ve made something enjoyable out of that concept themselves if they a) had someone with a clue booking it and b) restricted it to just a few matches instead of dedicating entire PPVs to it.

But yeah, I’d have preferred Bret and Austin to remain career long enemies myself. 

3 hours ago, BomberPat said:

with the history between Bret, Shawn, Pillman, and Austin would have been magic.

Now I’m raging that we never even got a one-off tag match of Bret and Pillman vs Shawn and Austin in 97. That feels like it absolutely could’ve happened but then you think about it and Bret was out injured when Shawn and Austin were teaming briefly. Then Shawn was in and out when Bret got healthy. Then Austin was out a few months later with the neck injury. Then Pillman tragedy happened before Austin could even make his in ring comeback. Just never lined up.