Jump to content
Pro Wrestling Only

Loss

Admins
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    46439

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Loss

  1. Loss
    Okay, Flair and Bret both need to grow up. They complement each other well and this is a great match. Really guys, get over yourselves. I guess Flair had his Wheaties and then some when he realized he was going out the door and headed to WCW, because this is the best performance and best match of his entire run. The flaws are minor and probably wrapped in compliments for the most part. For example, it's amazing how much heat holding the ropes and using them for leverage gets. It was cool five minutes into the match. It was really old 50 minutes into the match. But that's really the only major thing that stood out to me. For the first 20 minutes of this or so, this is Flair Flair Flair. Flair is on offense doing lots of arm work which looks great, some of the same stuff he does in that Wahoo match from Houston that people like. Interestingly, Bret keeps countering by putting Flair in the figure four. About 28 minutes in, Flair gets the first fall with a reverse rollup. Almost immediately, Flair lures Bret in and then starts targeting the leg. Flair gets a win at the 35-minute mark holding the ropes while applying the figure four, then does the same thing again a few minutes later to put him at 2-1. About 47 minutes in, there is an amazing nearfall when Bret gets a backslide and it could not possibly be any closer to a three count. Flair thumbs Bret right in the eye when he first comes to his feet, which is perfectly timed. The drama is off the charts in the last 5 minutes because Bret is down a fall. But with about four minutes to go, Flair submits to the sharpshooter, putting the match at 2-2. Heenan, who was earlier ejected from ringside, sneaks back down and passes Flair some brass knucks. Flair clobbers Bret and gets a great close fall, but Bret kicks out. Right before the 60-minute mark, Flair goes for the figure four once again, and this time, Bret rolls him up in an inside cradle to take the fall, and the match, as he beats Flair 3-2. Overall, they do a great job of keeping the crowd engaged for the full 60 minutes and the match is laid out really well. Way better than any of the other 60-minute Ironmans I've seen. This is largely a selling performance from Bret, and he's terrific in that regard. Flair has probably lost a step here from where he was a few years earlier, but he's not that far behind. It suffers from some of the same fate many 60 minute matches do, in that it can't help but meander at times because some stuff is very obviously designed to fill time and nothing more. But they usually fall on the right side here, and they usually do a great job of keeping the holds interesting instead of just laying on the mat. The best match of the set so far.
  2. Loss
    Not a GOAT candidate by any stretch, but I'm starting to think the second tier discussed before with guys like Vader and Steamboat should also include Riki Choshu.
  3. Loss
    Yes! 1993 had more segments than 1996 by far.
  4. Loss
    The kind of thinking man's match you don't see much anymore, with Windham going after Steamboat's arm pretty aggressively and Steamboat responding in kind. Steamboat's bridge hammerlock is tremendous. They have a great in-ring collision that looks pretty wicked, then Windham switches to the knee. Jim Ross is doing a lot of education at the booth explaining the arm submissions, which is a bit of forgotten stuff about the Watts era. Steamboat wins by DQ when Barry throws Steamboat over the top rope after a ref bump. I really enjoyed this match. Douglas comes out in Zubaz pants post-match to make the save, Austin and Pillman attack him, Dustin comes out to get a piece of Windham, and we've got ourselves a brawl!
  5. Loss
    Tony Schiavone has a ridiculous plaid shirt/red tie combo. Vader does a really good promo talking about his football background, but that that's in the past and now, the top prize is the WCW World title. He also has words for Sting and Simmons. I really like the format of interviewing a guy in a serious setting in an empty arena.
  6. Loss
    Before the match, the Stud Stable ask Dutch Mantell when they are going to get their title shot. He tells them he tried to get them one with Bob Armstrong, but he kicked Dutch out of the office. The nerve! Robert Fuller says Dutch should take a page from Cornette, who took a mediocre team like the Bodies, gave them a great nickname, and gets them title shots all the time. Jimmy Golden follows by calling the Rock & Roll Express drugstore toy champions! They then show a clip of the Rock & Rolls vs Bodies & Cornette at Christmas Chaos. Cornette does a middle-rope elbow drop (!!!) but misses. The Stud Stable show up at ringside and distract the Bodies to give the Rock & Rolls a win to retain their titles. After the match, the Bodies and Stud Stable brawl with the house lights up. Cornette gets in some good shots with the racket. The Rock & Rolls come back out. Morton and Gibson want a handshake, but the Stable beat them up and will have none of it. Now Tracy Smothers and Tim Horner come to the rescue, and the Stable bails. Then, we get an interview with Cornette and the Bodies. As the Stud Stable talked earlier about their great family lineage, Cornette says Robert Fuller's dad's only job he ever had was supervised by a man holding a shotgun, and that Jimmy Golden can have a family reunion when the parole board meets. Funny also to see anyone doing a promo with Cornette and getting to talk.
  7. Loss
    I think this is a gimmick that's going to look GREAT in hindsight, even though it was sort of hated at the time. Doink names himself for the first time, and in a great moment, they cut to a girl in the crowd who mouths, "He thinks he's so funny". Then he squirts Ray Rougeau in the face with water from the flower on his jacket.
  8. Loss
    They show Owen Hart being interviewed on Mania by Raymond Rougeau, talking about his background growing up. Razor Ramon crashes the party and beats up Owen to build to the Rumble. Gene Okerlund is absolutely appalled! Razor and Bret then do promos in front of green screens to hype the show. Ah, simple PPV builds, where did they go?
  9. Loss
    Kobashi plays FIP here, and he does a really good job. He tags out to Kikuchi, who does well, but only briefly. Finally, Misawa comes in and the match swings back in their favor, with Misawa landing a beautiful jumping lariat on Taue. The standing off of opponents during pin and submission attempts to prevent saves is an All Japan staple, and a nice touch. Misawa's team works really cohesively as a team, with stuff like Kobashi/Kikuchi doing the belly-to-back into somersault on opponent thing. This seems to prompt Taue's team that they need to do the same in order to survive. But it's all for naught, as Akiyama scores the win with a German suplex on Kikuchi, which I would imagine was a big win for him considering where he was at this point in time. Good match.
  10. Loss
    I must warn you all, I am about to start banging the Riki Choshu drum really loud. He has no case for GOAT, so I don't want to overstate his case. But I do think he compares very favorably to next-tier guys like Vader and Steamboat. This is a pretty tremendous spectacle. I really group Tenryu, Choshu and Hashimoto together as far as style -- basic, hard-hitting offense that translates well to big shows and main events. The tempers flaring stuff is great. This match just feels really huge, which is a testament to both guys. Four days into the year, the best match.
  11. Loss
    Is there a reason some people hate them so much? I remember hearing Jose Fernandez say they completely turned him off to ARSION.
  12. Loss
    The Steiners and the Road Warriors always work well together because their styles mesh well, and this was no exception. There are lots of fun power spots. Hawk was actually pretty good in the ring. I've always thought the Road Warriors were better in the ring than they were given credit for. Hawk and Sasaki do a Doomsday Device on Scott Steiner on the arena floor where he bumps off the guardrail, which is a ridiculous spot to even try. They go to a double-countout, a rarity in Japan by this time. Fun match!
  13. Loss
    I like both of these guys and was a bit disappointed in this match. They make great use of the apron for quite a few spots, but crowd reaction is polite at best, and the match just never really switches gears. I know this isn't hyped as their best match together or anything, but I would have expected this to be better than their '96 G-1 Climax match based on reputation. Chono locking in the STF is a terrific moment of drama, as submissions are over enough in New Japan that it seemed like it would be the finish. And from there on, the match does pick up. Muta wins the NWA title by finishing off Chono with two moonsaults, after the first one fails to put Chono away. Good match at times, but not really a great one.
  14. Loss
    High end mediocrity? I'm not sure how to describe this. The best stuff has been robbed time and time again in other matches, even if this is a really good wrestling match. I'm trying to forget about what came after it and look at the match in context since that is the whole point of the yearbook. And it does look good, but Ultimo is a little clumsy at times, and doesn't quite feel like he's become Super Worker yet. For all the talk of Tiger Mask/Dynamite Kid being such an influential series, and I guess it was in some ways, this match really feels that even more so, because so many of these ideas have been borrowed in other matches. Liger gets the win after a top rope huracanrana.
  15. Loss
    Arn does a nice sit-down interview with Jesse Ventura. I miss serious stuff talking about the downside of injuries and how tough competition forced him to improve. It's simple, but it's effective. Not a great, memorable segment or anything, but a nice addition to the set. Arn reveals that Bill Watts has not renewed his contract for 1993, which may have been a shoot for all I know. Arn tells Erik Watts Daddy may be able to protect him in WCW, but he can't protect him in movie theaters, parking lots, or when he's with his girlfriend "at one of these ice cream shops". I love this.
  16. Loss
    Eric Bischoff, who is a pretty bad narrator, tells us that Vader beat Ron Simmons at Baltimore Arena on December 30, as we see still pictures of them on the screen.
  17. Loss
    Lawler does an interview saying he hopes 1993 is a great year for wrestling. Here here. He laments the loss of the territories, but hopes that both the WWF and WCW can improve in the coming year. He says they asked him to come on TV because he's the most exciting guy in the country on TV. Lawler mentions that he saw Randy Savage, Curt Hennig and Jimmy Hart in the WWF locker room, all guys who broke into the business in Memphis. He then switches gears to cutting a promo on Mike Samples for costing him the win in a $10,000 battle royal, which he doesn't take lightly. They transition to a clip of the battle royal, and sure enough, Lawler is telling the truth -- Samples actually hit him with brass knucks. In wrestling of all things! Mike Miller comes out and attacks Lawler mid-sentence by throwing a chair at his head and then jumps on him and starts throwing punches. The locker room clears to pull Miller off of Lawler, but now Lawler is geared up and ready to fight himself. They get pulled apart. Gotta love Memphis.
  18. Loss
    Bill Dundee is leaving the USWA. So we get an incredibly sappy video to Barbara Streisand's "The Way We Were". There are some great clips of some really fun wrestling from the 70s and 80s included. Then he comes out for an interview. Dave Brown mentions that he has "accepted an executive position with another wrestling organization". Dundee promotes that he's going on tour everywhere the USWA will be for the next week.
  19. Loss
    This is definitely worth watching. It isn't terribly far behind Starrcade, which is a tremendous tag match as well. This is during the final months of the Bill Watts era. So the arena looks like a UWF TV taping and the wrestling style is a lot more focused and aggressive than it would be later in the year (at least how I remember the rest of '93 WCW being, we'll see). These guys work really hard, but this isn't a very responsive crowd, which is too bad, because I wouldn't blame the wrestlers for that at all. Windham lands some nice elbows to Douglas's eye. This heel turn was a good time for him because he started wrestling more like a grizzled veteran and changed his look. Nice FIP stuff on Douglas, and one thing I will say in defense of the Watts style is that because he made such a big deal out of the rules, heel cheating was way more meaningful, that's for sure. I don't know if '93 is the right platform for it since Watts leaves fairly early. 1992 might be a more relevant place to go into detail on it. But there is an interesting case to be made for how he properly understood what was wrong with wrestling at this point in time, but he prescribed the wrong medicine to fix it. As the match goes on, the heat picks up a little as Pillman and Windham continue pulverizing Douglas. But it's still disappointing and Steamboat's hot tag doesn't get near the response it deserves. A few minutes in, Windham DDTs Douglas on the concrete in a great looking spot and he's out of the match. Windham and Pillman continue working over Steamboat. Windham and Pillman do a rocket launcher! I miss tag team moves. Dustin Rhodes comes out to check on Douglas, then gets on the apron and Steamboat, in a daze, tags Dustin. Dustin comes in the ring and the ref says let it go?? What? You can imagine how Jesse Ventura responds to that. He then hits Windham in the face with the cast on his arm and scores a pinfall. Dumb booking, but this is a really good match in spite of all that. Ventura interviews Pillman and Windham after the match and they are furious, with Jesse talking about how they were jobbed.
  20. Loss
    ICOPRO wishes you a happy, healthy 1993, for what it's worth. In this update, Bobby Heenan hypes the debut of Narcissus, someone who is "beyond perfection", at the Royal Rumble. Gene Okerlund then reads the dictionary to provide the definition of the word "Narcissus". No wonder they changed it to The Narcissist.
  21. Loss
    Quite the memorable spot. You know the one. Bret is on his way to the ring and a kid is backstage with his dad and shouts "Breeeeeeeeeettttttt!" The camerawork zooming in to Bret turning around is incredible. I was thinking this was '94 for some reason when they gave him a bigger push as champ. It even has the modernized version of his entrance music included, which he didn't start using until after WM X. But I guess it was '93. Still, great way to start the set!
  22. Loss

    Feud of the year

    Loss replied to Loss's topic in 1996

    Angle of the year, no question. But feud of the year is where I get stuck. To me, a feud needs to have the same participants from beginning to end. So then it becomes Hogan/Hall/Nash vs ... um ... If the WCW side had been presented stronger and had there been anyone besides Luger who was consistently there from beginning to end, it would be my pick. I just don't like the idea of entities being feud of the year. To me, it should be wrestlers.
  23. Loss

    Gay jokes

    Loss replied to Loss's topic in Megathread archive

    Or he's just reading lines written by a writer.
  24. Loss

    Most Charismatic

    Loss posted a topic in 1996

    Shawn Michaels won. Um, no. No one touches Shinya Hashimoto and Hulk Hogan.
  25. Loss

    Best on Interviews

    Loss posted a topic in 1996

    Steve Austin won this in the WON awards, and I can't argue that too much, but my personal pick would be Hulk Hogan. Hogan is interesting to track as a promo after his heel turn. He's full of piss and vinegar in the month or so immediately after turning, and it feels overdone. He seems to realize this and relaxes quite a bit and really embraces the Hollywood role for all its worth, leading to the best interviews of his career. I guarantee you the Savage and Piper feuds would not have enjoyed the success they did without Hogan's tremendous interviews. He hit every point perfectly and was such a great, get-under-your-skin heel. It stands out even more when you see him next to Hall and Nash. I remember thinking at the time that Hall and Nash were the cool ones and should ditch Hogan. Really, that's a compliment toward *Hogan*. He was the money guy. The others added value to the group, but Hogan was the nucleus. Other good interviews in 1996 were Ric Flair (tremendous in the first few months of the year), Wolfie D, Austin obviously, Brian Pillman (although I think he tried too hard sometimes) and Arn Anderson's build to War Games was off the charts.
×
×
  • Create New...