WWE Vault Appreciation Thread

[Chico Torres]

Nah holiday cover guy is the one who sneaks in Miz and Randy Orton material in to our beloved vault.

The recent Hogan comp is incredible

 

[tiger_rick]

1 minute ago, Chico Torres said:

The recent Hogan comp is incredible

No desire to watch him. He's not Benoit but he has the same effect. When he's on my screen, I just think about what a horrible racist cunt he is. Don't need to watch hours of him. Like I don't want one of Hitler's paintings on my wall.

[Chico Torres]

Absolutely your prerogative sir.

[westlondonmist]

Put Superbrawl 2 on. 30 odd years later Flyin Brian vs Liger had me on the edge of my seat. It's not super fast paced but thst works, when they pull out the big spots the crowd goes mental. The figure 4 spot has the crowd cheering like mad for Pillman. 

[AshC]

6 hours ago, Chico Torres said:

Nah holiday cover guy is the one who sneaks in Miz and Randy Orton material in to our beloved vault.

The recent Hogan comp is incredible

 

The Vader War Games stuff is incredible. 😂 

[Dai]

After Devons post, I went back to watch Superbrawl II. My main takeaway was Zbyszko's performance. Good grief, hes unbelievably good in this one, isnt he? Everything he does is perfect. especially the little touches he does when selling. A masterclass. Very Terry Funk-esque, I thought. He steals the show by a mile. 

Was looking forward to the Road Warriors one, but was disappointed it wasnt more squashes from the pre WWF run. 

 

They have released a Best of WCW Saturday Night of May 1996, and a quick skim of it looks like its 1 hour of gold. Steiners vs Fire and Ice? Two other Steiners matches? Alex Wright? Eddy? Liger? Thats a lot of greatness for an hour. The sad part of this means that the full episodes dont seem to be on the radar to be uploaded, which is a massive shame. Theyve spent way more time making this comp than what they could of done by just uploading the full shows. The beauty of these shows is that you see lots of random squashes and random pairings, so you lose that by doing comps. Still, a belting upload.

 

[wandshogun09]

Oh looking forward to giving that Saturday Night comp a watch. The great thing about that as well is, correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t even think they ever got around to adding the 1996 run of Saturday Night to the Network, did they? Pretty sure they only got up to 94 on there 

[Chico Torres]

One of the greatest tag matches ever just added between 2 of the greatest teams.

 

[Chili]

Another Coliseum upload, always fun. This one particularly for 1h42 in as they have the Repo Cam vignette, where Barry Darsow nicks a videocamera and shows us a day in the life of Repo Man, including carjacking Bill Alfonso and pinching a kids bike and riding off. I see where you got your material from Danhausen. A delight of a skit, crap gimmick but ol' Smash is so gung-ho in the role I can't hate Repo Man.

 

Edited May 10 by Chili

[Devon Malcolm]

Continuing my completely non-random, honest, bounce around NWA / WCW shows in the Vault, I watched this the other day:-

I'm assuming it's from when they toured the Bash around a few places for a while because it's such a weird show, complete with Tony Schiavone doing the least enthusiastic ring announcing outside of Tony Chimel.

Starts with Bugsy McGraw & Tim Horner beating the Western States Heritage Champion! Larry Zbyszko & Rip Morgan in an absolute waste of time. Even Larry didn't look arsed.

Then Ronnie Garvin vs The Italian Stallion! This was great. Garvin winds everyone up by telling Schiavone he wants to wrestle in the other ring (there are two set up for a War Games match), so they do. The bell rings, he locks up, immediately feigns a knee injury and when Stallion is distracted punches him in the face and pins him. Splendid business, the crowd were fuming.

Dick Murdoch battered Gary Royal slowly for a few minutes so I obviously enjoyed that. Inexplicably, Jimmy Garvin then beat Rick Steiner in just over a minute, no idea what that was about. No wonder Steiner looked pissed off before the match.

The Rock 'n Roll Express then had a predictably fun match beating The Sheepherders. That was followed by a snooze as Al Perez beat Brad Armstrong.

The Fantastics then beat The Midnight Express and Jim Cornette in a fantastic 'handicap' match. One thing that strikes me about Cornette when he did matches was that his stuff looks better than most of the actual wrestlers. He threw a superb punch especially.

Sting beat Mike Rotunda by DQ in a TV Title match. The usual Rotunda match, once you've seen one you've seen the entire boring as fuck lot of them.

The Road Warriors had a scaffold match with Ivan Koloff and the Russian Assassin. I hate scaffold matches, they've always been one of the stupidest gimmick matches in wrestling. Nobody can do anything and what's the logic for having them? Oh you hate each other so we're going to put you up on a scaffold. Anyway, at least it only lasted 5 minutes and guess who won.

The War Games match was Luger, Dusty, Nikita Koloff, Dr. Death and Ellering vs The Horsemen (the best line-up - Flair, Arn, Tully, Barry and JJ). The usual War Games match which the babyfaces won. Not one of the more memorable ones.

[SoloJones]

Vault has just put up a show from the 1996 Kuwait tour, and so far it's glorious. It opens with an unmasked Aldo Montoya vs Bushwacker Butch, in a babyface match where Butch actually puts in a bit of effort and it looks more like the biggest 90s indie show at this point rather than a WWF show. Doesn't outstay its welcome, and some of the match structure is a bit weird but its quite a fun opener, and just a weird sight. Babyface Yoko and Savio Vega vs Bob Backlund and Isaac Yankem is fine, with Yoko having trouble keeping a straight face, clearly having the time of his life. 

But then for the next match, Bret Hart comes out and the crowd loses their shit. I wasn't sure up to this point how much wrestling maybe they were getting on TV in Kuwait, but the Hitman was crazy over there. Undertaker gets an incredibly cool strobe lighting entrance as well, and they have a good match with Owen and Davey that gets wrapped up incredibly quickly after the hot tag.

I've still got HHH/Ahmed Johnson and HBK/Austin to watch, but so far it's been a lot of fun to watch. Between this and the recent Omni uploads, I feel like my favourite way to consume wrestling is a 2-3 camera edit, clear video quality and no commentary. I hope there's more shows like this in the Vault that they drip feed us.

 

Edited May 13 by SoloJones

[tiger_rick]

Steve Austin with pink taped arms and wrists on that thumbnail might be amongst the strangest wrestling photos ever.

[SoloJones]

10 minutes ago, tiger_rick said:

Steve Austin with pink taped arms and wrists on that thumbnail might be amongst the strangest wrestling photos ever.

Apparently he said on his podcast it was just done to pop Shawn.

[SaitoRyo]

29 minutes ago, SoloJones said:

Between this and the recent Omni uploads, I feel like my favourite way to consume wrestling is a 2-3 camera edit, clear video quality and no commentary. I hope there's more shows like this in the Vault that they drip feed us.

Hard agree on this. I'm so much more interested in seeing random house shows or dark matches or whatver than episodes of TV/matches from PPVs etc. 

I'm sure there will be more to come. Aside from classic content from the 80s/90s, WWE used to record a lot of house shows in the 2000s, both for talent to watch back later and for the company to use footage in hype videos on TV to promote tours/upcoming events. 

That Kuwait show looked like a lot of fun. Guys being loose and goofing off a bit, but still working hard and putting on a show. I don't ever need to see Triple H and Ahmed Johnson go twenty minutes, mind. 

[Chico Torres]

Unfortunately the WWE Vault is on a bit of a shocking run the last few days posting some utter shite but our WCW guy is coming through with some gems. With recent talk about Flair the last few days in the RAW thread here is some of Flair at his best as a Horseman beating up babyfaces, as well as one of his final matches with Steamboat in 1994, a classic long match from Saturday Night.