thebrainfollower

The 1992 Royal Rumble Match. Hands down the best commentary in wrestling history (at least in English). Gorilla is able to make Barbarian and Haku, on their way out the door, seem interesting and important. The match is as much a triumph of the greatness of Bobby Heenan as it is Ric Flair. When Flair and Heenan (and Hennig but his contribution was zilch) cut that promo at the end you almost get the sense of two men who know they've just outperformed the entire company and are on cloud nine.

Coliseum Video was actually a small independent company owned by Evart Enterprises. It was NOT owned by the WWF though the WWF did the vast majority of their business.

Curious as to everyone's thoughts on this. In 80's WWF everything sort of seemed to exist in its own universe. Outside the occasional lumberjack match and the jobbers coming out to break up a brawl, wrestlers and issues rarely crossed over into each other. This hit me recently when I watched a late 89 Superstars where Boris Zhukov of all people cuts a generic promo where at the end he challenges Hulk Hogan. It struck me as absurdly funny because obviously it meant nothing and went nowhere. You never had Randy Savage and Elizabeth comment on what they thought about Jake Roberts-Rick Rude's feud for instance. Things took place in their own micro-universe. I always got the sense that if say 1988 Rockers had run into Andre the Giant in a backstage vignette, they wouldn't have fought, they probably wouldn't even known who the other person/team was. But from what I've seen, Crockett, Mid South and Memphis ran things differently. I'm not just talking about everyone being forced to namedrop Dusty Rhodes a lot (though this is one of the more annoying examples) I'm referring to the sense that ALL these guys knew, cared about, and interacted with one another. At least in 2 cases you can argue this is because the top face was the booker, but this falls apart in Mid South pretty badly as a rule. So is this a fair generalization I'm making and which style do you prefer?

One point about your post JDW SW wasn't made to sell merchandise. I completely agree with you on that. Having said that merchandising was a HUGE part in the decision making factor of the prequels (and even ROTJ hence the Ewoks). I know for a fact (this quote came from GL's son to me in private) that the reason the prequels all had a different villain, that the clones have so many darn colors, etc was merchandising. It was literally thought up at the time. Even someone as soulless as Joel Schumacher has talked about the extent that toy manufacturers were dictating what was going to happen in his Batman movies something WB had no problem with. So it might not have been a factor in merchandising then but it sure as heck is now. And that was when people saw the insane money you could make off this stuff. SW took Kenner, then Hasbro from being a small company to the only serious competition Mattel's ever had (Now Lego is #2 but that was only changed this year). I guarantee if John Cena sold ZERO action figures next year, he'd be sent down the card faster than Zach Ryder. Those things didn't START with SW or 80's WWF (well in the later case I would argue they did, merch pre Hogan was not terribly important) but it was a massive massive increase. It's a point I made with JVK but it's not usually the first success that changes things. Hollywood didn't get on the horror bandwagon in the 30's until Frankenstein, which was the second hit. Comic book movies didn't start coming everywhere till Spiderman which was after Xmen. So to be clear the Star Wars trilogy didn't create the summer blockbuster. Adolf Hitler didn't create Nazism either. But he darn sure had more of an impact than Von Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Dietrich Eckhart or Anton Drexler either. Likewise those 3 movies had a huge impact on summer blockbusters. There were summer blockbusters before SW. (Jaws being the most famous example). But I would argue SW was the most important summer blockbuster of all time. Because it made a TON of money and cemented in the general public's limited view that the summer was blockbuster time. And to your other broad point, I don't get defensive in the slightest when people knock 80's WWF. In my group of wrestling friends I'm almost always the first one to suggest Mid South or JCP or Memphis or something different whereas they want to pop in an old Coliseum Video. You basically made a point saying most people are idiots. Well yeah they can be a lot of the time. Unfortunately there's more of them and they can dictate a lot. And yes not every expert was out to get 80's WWF. Meltzer was in that era but you're right. I never said you hadn't credited Hogan and co for their success. As to that old house show cards issue my only point was that WWF ran 3 shows, Crockett one most of the time. That gave him a huge edge in a more focused house show lineup with storyline backed matches. His big cards also had fewer matches, again a huge edge in making each match important. But on any given night after 87 the WWF had usually almost as many or as many "Feud" based matches as Crockett did in total. I even admitted my original Kane reference was idiotic. Kane was a huge flop that nearly ruined RKO and Orson Welles (TMA finished him off there). That was a quick facile thing to compare it too. Gone with the Wind I am more comfortable. I'd say Wizard of Oz but actually it took nearly 20 years for that movie to really make money. And the Jazz Singer, well that wasn't as huge a change. The movie wasn't all sound, it took a few years and a few dozen successful sound movies for Hollywood and mainstream America to get on board with sound. It always take Hollywood a few hits to back anything really. Your points about SW and Reagan though seem to be a variation on the "you can't understand something you haven't lived through". Speaking as a history teacher than darn sure would put us all out of business fast. And I don't really agree with it that much anyway. I didn't mean to imply that everyone in Reagan's America believed what he did. But Vince I think did and promoted that same basic belief system through Hogan. It's just that when you compare Smokey to 80's WWF I laugh. Smoky was a time piece that was a hit, was fun and had really zero impact on its broader business. 80's WWF had a much bigger impact on pro wrestling. I would say in that way SW as a game changer is the better comparison.

This might sound heretical but if the dudes were played by 18 year olds the look for that time period might not be as stupid as it looks.

One story mentioned every now and again is how important video sales were to the WWF. That Wrestlemania didn't even bring the sort of instant cash revenue needed to keep things going nationally with the 3 crew roster they had but video sales helped smooth that over a lot. The deal with Coliseum Video was crucial to WWF's being able to remain a major national player in mid 1985. And today, from everything I've heard the action figure sales with Mattel are very very crucial to their success. Merchandising was NOT a small tiny unimportant part of the WWF 1984-2013. It was a HUGE part of it, from wrestlers making as much money on their LJN's (admittedly only in some cases when the figures, particularly the first few, sold really well) to videos to everything else in between. Since we are speaking I guess of just cold hard facts, that's a fact.

That's odd because clearly Candice was supposed to continue feuding with Beth for a few more months (look how long Beth just squashed Maria and Kelly Kelly for months until the Mickie James storyline) and beating someone 2-0 clean pretty much ends that feud dead. Why I am putting more thought than the writers did then is beyond me.

Here's my take on this. Modern cinema tends to view SW as a make or break point. Everything changed after SW. Is that right? To an extent, but the perception that that's what happened is extremely prevalent. It's likewise an extremely prevalent view that the Hulkamania era in the WWF represent THE major shift in pro wrestling in the US in the last 30 years. Is that factually correct? Maybe not but it's certainly how virtually everyone perceives things outside of a few experts. And the tendency of a few experts to tear apart these widely cherished beliefs sort of proves my point better than I ever could JDW, that's there's an elitist view in operation when condemning 80's WWF vs. other less successful promotions. That's not a bad thing. I consider myself a liberal elitist politically. It's not a good thing either. It's just an observation I've noticed. I've long believed that perception is more important than reality. Any study of modern politics proves that. If people think X happened that matters in many ways more than the cold hard facts. Is that good? Is that bad? I don't know but it seems to be that way. Merchandising is also a key point. SW was THE thing to buy as a kid growing up in that era (I should know, I have been buying figures for 30 of my 33 years). WWF took that sort of mega blitz merchandising and brought it to wrestling (there were things before that like Batman in the 60's but those were fads that died. SW and WWE/F merch is still going strong.) And yes Smoky and the Bandit made Burt Reynolds a star for five years. But if you were to write, say a five page history of Hollywood 1927-2013 I'd be bemused if he even got a mention. IF someone wrote a five page history of US wrestling in those same years and never mentioned Hulk Hogan I'd assume the person was a bit of an idiot. Also I sort of find Hogan's antics in the 80's a bit sickening. It's not payback it's "Hogan can break the rules because he's Hogan and he's BETTER so the rules don't apply to him". If that's not a metaphor for Reagan's America, I don't know what is. That was my point about finding the era disgusting. Really it's just Hogan that bothers me that way but he was the man in 80's WWF for more of it than anyone else.

With that match though, it was botched due to injury. Pretty sure the intention was 2-1 Beth.

You know what that would have been a v silly point. Esp given how much of a flop Kane was at its time. Gone with the Wind I'd argue sort of fits because despite being the most popular movie of its time its central moral message (The Southern system, and by implication slavery was good) is even more disgusting as Hogan's 80's morality is now. But Smokey and the Bandit did that ultimately alter the way movies were made? Did it change the genre in any appreciable way? Not really. I'd say a GOOD comparison (and I have to apologize for my original stupid comp) would be the Star Wars trilogy which pretty much changed movie making forever, buried low budget genre movies and brought us the era of the summer blockbuster (which seems to run about 10 months a year now but I digress). Which I guess makes Jaws the WTBS Georgia show in that it paved the way for that.

Ashamed to admit I've never even seen it John.

At age 11 I attended the July 29th 1991 Worcester Centrum TV taping headlined by the first ever Hogan-Undertaker match. As cool as that and seeing Sid's WWF debut were, the most shocking moment was Bobby Heenan coming out for a funeral parlor with the NWA title in hand and announcing that Ric Flair was coming to the WWF. Even though we had no cable I had heard of Ric Flair for years (along with the Road Warriors when they showed up) and was excited I had some major news to tell all my friends the next morning. The next day I stopped at my local video store. I had never seen a Ric Flair match but figured now that he was WWF bound I should catch up. I grabbed the one and only Betamax (yes my techodense parents still had this in 91) WCW/NWA tape my local video store had and went home, popped that sucker in and sat down with baited breath. And watched Starrcade 1990. At the end of which, after I figured out this Black Scorpion guy was Ric Flair I was aghast. Barry Horowitz was a better wrestlerr than this guy! (I obviously don't mean that now but if that was the only Flair match you saw and you assumed he worked them all like that, you might come to the same conclusion)

From what I've seen Superstars and even Challenge had more consistent marquee matchups during sweeps weeks (Feb, May and Nov) than JCP did. JCP had better ones though I'd agree with that wholeheartedly.

Rank I'd agree with you JVK. Compare and contrast why not?

Reviving a really old thread AWA - The big matches are definitely quite special, but I think this territory suffered from a fairly boring weekly TV show. I would put it far below WWF in that sense. Some great workers though, both older veterans and young guys trying to make it. Lousy commentary though. Georgia - I've seen tons of interviews, segments and angles but probably less than 50 matches. Seems like a fun fast paced territory that's a little disorganized at times. This might not make a lot of sense but I never see a "theme" to GCW the way you clearly see it with WWF, Crockett, or Memphis. Memphis - I have been watching the weekly TV show as I ended up with tons of them. This promotion seems hit and miss by year. I didn't care for much of the 80 or 81 stuff to be honest outside of Funk-Lawler and early Bobby Eaton then loved 82-84 then things sort of fell apart again until Rich and Idol sparked my interest. It's frustrating because so much is cut to pieces and hard to really rate, but what we have is great. A really good announce team though. World Class - Very overrated territory IMO. Other than Gordy's offense and Roberts bumping I don't care for the Freebirds. Kevin is a clueless idiot I'm not even sure knows wrestling is a work and Devastation Inc does nothing for me. Flair's appearances are great, but that's due to Ric not the territory. Decent announcing, good production values though. Florida - From what little I've seen this promotion seems dull. As in Mike Rotunda (a top guy there for years) dull. Mid-South - this SHOULD be my favorite territory but it's not. The reason is simple, Bill Watts. He's an arrogant conservative blowhard who represents everything I hate about certain philosophies. At least in the 80's Vince wasn't trying to preach "the word according to Bill" each and every week because honestly it makes me sick. I love just about everything else about this promotion, Dibiase, the R and R, Midnights, Duggan, Dr. Death you name it. If someone could just edit out Bill Watts hypocrisy (talking about your religion when you ran your business in such a way that was all but designed to break up families, cripes I wish he'd just shut up) WWF - I also grew up with the WWF and consider a lot of smart fans hatred of it in the same way some film fans bash Gone with the Wind or Kane. There's something easy about taking apart whatever is on top and explaining why a less successful product is better. 80's WWF was arguably the most successful NA Wrestling product of the last 50 years, they had to do something right. And they did. Except those awful house show first 2-3 matches with SD Jones and company. There's no possible defense for that garbage. NWA (Crockett) - I am not and never will be a huge Crockett fan. watching JCP is like dating a supermodel who knows you are out of her league. At the end of the day you will never get to the good stuff. JCP has some absolutely terrible finishes again and again and again and again. That's what I most love about the WWF, at the end of the day fans almost always got what they wanted. For Crockett it was about giving the workers something to keep them from hating each other, hence DQ after DQ. Having said that I LOVE all the workers and they always give an amazing show but the territory itself did them a MASSIVE injustice in how badly they were booked. AJPW - Just starting to get into this NJPW - Ditto Portland - Buddy Rose is pretty darn awesome, I cannot argue with this. Portland did a LOT with a little. St. Louis - Haven't seen much. Joshi - Haven't seen anything. Lucha - Not a big fan.

I'd say yes on the finish being a problem. This was Luger's last realistic shot at being the man in WCW and politics held him back as usual.

I feel the pain. I just got 300 plus episodes of Memphis TV 79-88. Where the heck do I find the time to watch all that?

I voted Taker. I admit bias but this board is filled with personal favorite bias. When I was a little kid I was huge fan of the Universal monsters of the 30's and 40's and the Undertaker and Paul Bearer seemed like characters from them. I stayed a fan throughout the dark years and maintain Undertaker is one of the best big men brawlers of the last 20 years. Huge longevity with a gimmick that should have lasted maybe 3 years at most and I DO think most of his big main events (except the Manias with Shawn and the first one with HHH) hold up. Don't think Goldust could have had that match with Punk this year at Mania either.

It was a great start thanks

prowrestlinghistory is indeed a great site and resource. Unfortunately it lists the Mid South Coliseum cards and what I was looking for was the weekly TV show.

Does anyone know of a website that lists Memphis 80-85 TV results? Just got a ton of episodes and don't have the time to watch them all, so curious as to what I got.

Anyone know which Brick and Mortar chains are carrying the blu ray? Wal Mart and Kmart seem to just have the DVD.

Dustin did face Taker 3 times on PPV on 96 but never in the main event. Shawn main evented all 3 of those so yeah Dustin Rhodes, amazing example.

You know thinking about this I'm pretty sure we could find more guys in the attitude era and today who never main evented anywhere. I mean for cripes sakes my first house show the Conquistadors main evented!

Buzz Sawyer I thought main evented a bunch against Tommy Rich and others in GA. Haku never main evented anywhere except a few random matches against Hogan but putting him on the same list as Ricky Morton and Arn Anderson? I don't know, the guy had many highlights but also a lot of boring Prime Time matches filled with nerve holds.