WWE Vault Appreciation Thread

[mim731]

12 minutes ago, Roy said:

It looks like it was also on CiTV in 1992. 

That sits about right for my memory and the timeframe/where I recall watching it on TV. It was also very confusing as I remember it, as I'd seen the Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior's respective Silvervision tapes, but not many of the early Hulkamania-era PPVs, so I had no idea who most of the characters were. 

I have a strong recollection about a baseball episode where one of the heels had a ball that was on a string attached to the pitcher's glove in an attempt to get the babyface out during a game, but not much else. 

Edited September 5, 2025 by mim731
Spelling (not witchcraft)

[tiger_rick]

My wife has never liked wrestling, and still doesn't but, her one wrestling memory when I met her was that my sister-in-law was obsessed with the Rock 'n' Wrestling cartoon, would dress up especially for it in a leotard and headband and would ask everyone "What are you wearing for Hulk Hogan?"

[DavidB6937]

3 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

My wife has never liked wrestling, and still doesn't but, her one wrestling memory when I met her was that my sister-in-law was obsessed with the Rock 'n' Wrestling cartoon, would dress up especially for it in a leotard and headband and would ask everyone "What are you wearing for Hulk Hogan?"

Might be worth a topic of its own (if it doesn't exist) but reminds me of my wife who also didn't like wrestling. We were on holiday in Florida one year during the TNA glory days (of sorts), and I managed to convince her to go to the taping at Universal while we were there because it was free! Hardly had a leg to stand on in that argument.

Of course it ended up being a long taping and she had to see Eric Young wrestle three times in the same sitting and she refused to ever go with me again. I saw her point.

[Dai]

Compare everything about this shower of shite to their Halloween Havoc match, which happened less than a year before. Sums up the insanely quick decline WCW went through around this time. Piss poor set with the glittery background curtain, crappy crowd, crappy WCW logo, DDP as a crappy heel in a crap stable, shit run in and interference, and an abysmal match for a PPV. Awful stuff!

 

 

[wandshogun09]

They’ve been uploading some right bollocks to the WCW Vault channel this week. Case in point…

We talked about this show fairly recently somewhere on here and I said then how shite this was. One of the worst War Games matches they ever did in the main event, made even worse by showcasing the Shockmaster and having him end the match via bearhug of all things. Flair vs Rude stink the place out in a 30 minute snoozer. The Nasty Boys and Paul Roma collectively manage to drag Arn Anderson to arguably the worst match of his entire career. You’ve got Cactus Jack piss arsing about with Yoshi Kwan. Absolute dross like Charlie Norris vs Big Sky and Ice Train vs Shanghai Pierce somehow being deemed worthy of PPV. Only slight glimmers of hope are the Scorpio/Bagwell vs Orndorff/Equalizer tag but that’s bogged down by the shitness of the Equalizer. And Steamboat vs Regal in the opener, but even that isn’t great and Regal ends up breaking his own neck delivering a bridging German suplex. An abortion of a show. Which they somehow topped with an even more diabolical PPV the following month with Battlebowl.

Madness. They actually had enough quality on the roster in 93 to put together some great shows. But for some reason decided we needed useless lummoxes like Big Sky and Charlie Norris taking up PPV time that Steve Austin and Brian Pillman should’ve had. They weren’t even on the show! 

[davertfnewman]

Hey, it does have backstage interviewer Scott Dunlap, give it that!

[CTXRussomark]

5 hours ago, Dai said:

Piss poor set with the glittery background curtain, crappy crowd, crappy WCW logo

To this day I'm bemused at the nosedive WCW took in terms of presentation in 1999.  Putting aside the creative issues (as there were various forces at play there) and even putting aside the shit new logo (as they spent a fortune on it so had to use it), the blandness and lifelessness of the production following the rebrand was so obvious to anyone watching.  At one point they lost the logos on the canvas AND the apron so it was just a sea of plain dull grey for most of the show.  I just don't get (other than its WCW) how that ever happened, who thought it was a good idea, and why it wasn't fixed immediately when it objectively looked terrible on TV. 

[Snitsky's back acne]

6 hours ago, wandshogun09 said:

They’ve been uploading some right bollocks to the WCW Vault channel this week. Case in point…

We talked about this show fairly recently somewhere on here and I said then how shite this was. One of the worst War Games matches they ever did in the main event, made even worse by showcasing the Shockmaster and having him end the match via bearhug of all things.

I know it was different regimes and all that but the fact this came a year after an ultra bloody, intense and gratuitously violent War Games match (and, arguably, the best War Games match ever) makes it even worse. War Games was never the same again. What had been a heated, violent match became a tame parody from then on.

[Browser Brady]

1 hour ago, CTXRussomark said:

To this day I'm bemused at the nosedive WCW took in terms of presentation in 1999.  Putting aside the creative issues (as there were various forces at play there) and even putting aside the shit new logo (as they spent a fortune on it so had to use it), the blandness and lifelessness of the production following the rebrand was so obvious to anyone watching.  At one point they lost the logos on the canvas AND the apron so it was just a sea of plain dull grey for most of the show.  I just don't get (other than its WCW) how that ever happened, who thought it was a good idea, and why it wasn't fixed immediately when it objectively looked terrible on TV. 

It’s like WCW took every wrong turn possible from May 99 onwards.

[wandshogun09]

4 hours ago, CTXRussomark said:

At one point they lost the logos on the canvas AND the apron so it was just a sea of plain dull grey for most of the show.  I just don't get (other than its WCW) how that ever happened, who thought it was a good idea, and why it wasn't fixed immediately when it objectively looked terrible on TV. 

Yeah was rotten. No idea why they took the logos off the apron. As for the canvas though, might not be related because it comes slightly later than 99 but I remember Lance Storm saying in an interview once that the logos they were using on the ring mats in 2000 were slippery as fuck and a bunch of the wrestlers were complaining about it. He told a story where he’d had a match where he’d been slipping all over the shop and when he came through the curtain moaning about the logos, Arn Anderson said “If that thing can make you look clumsy it’s gonna make the rest of these guys look like drunks chasing a hat in a wind storm”. Love that.

They were obviously using logos on the mat for years before this though with no issues so fuck knows. Just as a visual thing I always liked it myself and it was another thing that set WCW’s presentation apart from the WWF’s. I think at that point the only WWF show with a logo on the canvas was WrestleMania 12. So of course they got rid of it in favour of lots and lots of plain grey everywhere. 

Edited September 10, 2025 by wandshogun09

[tiger_rick]

I'm sure we've probably had the thread at some point but if there was a biggest downgrades in wrestling history thread, the WCW rebranding would be right up there. The kindest thing you could say about it was that it was completely on-brand, it was dull, lifeless, looked like some shit from 6 earlier and at a time when everything new in WCW was old again that was definitely fitting. The logo is absolutely atrocious. You can't even tell it says WCW which has got to be the first thing you see and say "Nope". The spiky wCw logo wasn't great but a major improvement because you could at least read it. An irony is the WCW logo they replaced is absolutley timeless. A company with a scruffy logo in 2025 would rebrand to that one because it's clean, useable in any physical and digital media, can be coloured as they wish and it fit beautifully into their WCW/nWo graphics. Absolute lunatics spending loads of money on the wrong stuff for no reason. 

Actually makes me cry that they replaced this:

[wandshogun09]

Yeah the original Nitro set from 95-98 was gorgeous. 

[The Gaffer]

I mean presentation goes a long way.

Russo's car crash booking in 2000 might get too much of a generous "Well at least stuff happened" read these days but it stands above 1999 for me for all the reasons mentioned above. Three hour Nitros in their elephant grey era were torture. Nitro with the blue ring mat and HBO boxing style red lighting on the crowd in 2000 was genuinely as good a wrestling show ever looked for me, and deserved a proper product happening. 

You could chart the exact time around autumn 2000 when they realised how much money they were haemorrhaging, as one week Nitro came on and everything was just in total darkness again. They even used blue ring ropes for both Nitro and Thunder toward the end. 

Edited September 11, 2025 by The Gaffer

[Roy]

19 hours ago, CTXRussomark said:

To this day I'm bemused at the nosedive WCW took in terms of presentation in 1999.  Putting aside the creative issues (as there were various forces at play there) and even putting aside the shit new logo (as they spent a fortune on it so had to use it), the blandness and lifelessness of the production following the rebrand was so obvious to anyone watching.  At one point they lost the logos on the canvas AND the apron so it was just a sea of plain dull grey for most of the show.  I just don't get (other than its WCW) how that ever happened, who thought it was a good idea, and why it wasn't fixed immediately when it objectively looked terrible on TV. 

Can't disagree with that. It was noticeable on TV how awful it looked. I don't think Fall Brawl 99 was after the rebrand (it may have been just before) but that period in WCW history made everything (rightly) seem hopeless.

[CTXRussomark]

Just to really stress the point, look at the state of this (hopefully the image works) from August 99:

Couldn't be more visually uninteresting if you tried.  About as much colour as a Chaplin film.  Compare that to just a year earlier (or indeed a year later, to @The Gaffer's point):

Unbelievable incompetence.