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garretta

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Everything posted by garretta

  1. garretta
    As some others have said, there was really only one possible ending for this match after Sarge's title win, and Vince had sense enough to book it. I know some of the "smart" internet fans complain about Hogan winning two Rumbles in a row, but he either won this one or there was going to be a legit full-scale riot in Miami. That said, he could have gotten there a little smarter. We get the same problem with Quake that we got at SummerSlam, where two splashes and a powerslam aren't enough to even faze Hogan, let alone hurt him. Plus, we have two spots where Quake's made to look blatantly stupid by going for pinfalls instead of tossing Hogan over the top. Ricky talked earlier about guys who could have been in Vince's doghouse based on how long they were made to stay in the Rumble; for my money, being made to look like a brainless warthog (to borrow Piper's phrase) certainly qualifies Quake for that distinction as well. I would have laughed if Savage had come out after the match and blindsided Hogan just because. Actually, that might not have been a bad finish if Randy hadn't been too hurt to work. Does anyone know what exactly his injury was? I'm wondering if they weren't at least contemplating a Tugboat heel turn at this point, based on the way he went after Hogan before Hogan tossed him. I'm not sure how good a Hogan/Tugboat series would have been, but if they had to extend the Hogan/Slaughter stuff to SummerSlam (which they definitely didn't, in my view), Tugboat might have made a good mercenary partner for Sarge. At least he'd have been better than an out-of-shape Sheik and a completely useless Adnan. Great idea for Hogan to forecast the Mania VII main event early. As much as certain people still wanted to see Hogan/Warrior II, they'd built up Sarge as too big a threat to America not to have Hogan be the one to take him down.
  2. garretta
    With Slaughter winning the title from Warrior and the pops for Hogan more or less automatic by now, this is the real feel-good moment of the night. I agree with everything that's been previously said about how perfect everything about this moment was, and the best is yet to come, as with Piper's help Virgil "becomes" quite a credible worker in the ring (Mike Jones had already had a short Memphis run, so he wasn't a complete stiff), good enough to win the Million Dollar Belt from DiBiase at SummerSlam. They couldn't have waited so much as one more day for this; it had to happen right then, and it did. This may be one of the few perfectly executed angles in WWF history from top to bottom, right up there with both the Ormdorff and Andre turns on Hogan, and this angle had the advantage of both main participants being able to work at full capacity from beginning to end, without stuff like Orndorff's neck injury/nerve damage and Andre's overall declining health. The one thing that would have put this over better was if Piper had had Piper's Pit to try and talk Virgil into turning on Teddy instead of having to rely on an offscreen "dinner". That might have required more mic skills than Virgil possessed at the time to pull off well, but Piper's impassioned pleas would have been enough to make it great TV regardless. I would say more about Dusty and Dustin leaving, but since both are headed to greener pastures in Atlanta (particularly Dustin), it's hard to feel sad for either of them. I like that Dusty lost on a fluke rollup instead of being put out by the Million Dollar Dream or some other "cleaner" finish. At least Vince had the common sense not to completely bury Dusty on the way out, though he no doubt knew exactly where Dusty was going and what his job was going to be when he got there. Some of Piper's comments about Dusty wanting to stop the match bordered on calling him soft, but Piper's been on the cusp of making fun of Dusty for being too concerned about Dustin to wrestle properly all through the angle, so you can't really call it a burial. I wonder if the proposed Savage/DiBiase '91 feud involved Teddy buying (or attempting to buy) Liz. If it did, no wonder Randy said no, as protective of her as he was.
  3. garretta
    Flair being Flair, he rips Scotty for challenging him, conveniently forgetting that he's the one who started the whole mess by baiting Rick and Scotty in the first place. It's interesting that they'd go all the way back to the gauntlet in mid-September to provide a foundation for this bout; I'm sure Scotty's not the only one who's pinned Flair since then. At any rate, we'll see what kind of a match we get with the title on the line. I was so focused on Flair and Scotty that I missed Rotundo high-fiving Barry. But that shouldn't have surprised anyone, considering that they're longtime tag team partners and brothers-in-law. I did see Mike kind of goofily waving to the camera for no good reason, which made me smile.
  4. garretta
    Arn's greatness in promos isn't exactly a revelation, but what happened to Barry? He's every bit Arn's equal here, just as chilling and hard-hitting. You could swear that they're headed for a long tag title reign to complement Flair's regaining of the World title, but it doesn't happen that way for various political reasons, and that's a shame. It's never good to waste money segments like this; they don't come around very often. I didn't quite hear the dog in the background, but I can see how that would make the effect even eerier. This really did look like one of those NWO vignettes from a few years later, but Hall and Nash never saw the day when they were as fearsome as this.
  5. garretta
    Surfer dudes don't sweat things like lost titles. Besides, Sting was probably relieved to lose the title, since all he did while he had it was get himself driven crazy at the hands of a bunch of jokers with black masks and altered voices. I agree that Sting sounded a bit unfocused, and there was no excuse for it considering that the promos were being done in front of a green screen and could be reshot if necessary, I'm guessing that he was told just to be energetic and lively and not to worry about how he sounded; Flair could always be counted on to deliver the real money promos they needed for the feud, as he did here. Hairstyle aside, he's back close to his mid-eighties peak on the mic, and WCW is much better for it.
  6. garretta
    Typical gender baiting from Heyman. I love how earnest JR is here; he acts a bit disappointed that we didn't see Paul actually working out, as if he could. Having read about Paul's mother being a survivor of the holocaust, I'd be willing to bet that this was a major acting job on his part. There's no conceivable way in my eyes that the off-camera Paul Heyman could feel the way the Paul E. Dangerously character does about women after what she had been through; she had to have taught him better, at least. I bring this up to praise Paul for the job he did here in making me forget this while I watched his antics on screen, which is an impressive feat under the circumstances.
  7. garretta
    Way to build your angle, guys. One week Missy slaps Paul silly, the next week she cries because he might expose her, shall we say, after-hours activities. She should have laid him out with the mic and stormed off, or if we had to have Terri involved, she should have kabonged him right over the head with the computer. At the very least, I'd have liked to have seen Rotundo menace Paul a little. As it is, Paul's a sexist pig, but Missy's an overemotional crybaby. Just who are we supposed to root for at the Clash? Too bad the York Foundation was done just as the Dangerous Alliance was getting started; a stable vs. stable feud with both sides staying heel might have freshened things up a bit in late '91/early '92.
  8. garretta
    Missy's actually acting somewhat serious here, which is weird to see. I agree that Paul oversold the slap, but he's supposed to be a wimp, so it fits. JR acting like a high school principal was the cherry on top. What I can't believe is that they got six months out of these two, complete with a match to close out the Bash pay-per-view. The undercard in WCW must have really been in rotten shape this year.
  9. garretta
    No Flair in this at all? I understand using Sting and Sid, and Hayes looks more like Uncle Sam than anyone else on the roster, but couldn't we at least have gotten a "WHOOOOOO!" from the soon-to-be champ? This was a lot better than the rap, if not quite as fun. Simple, direct and concise was definitely the way to go.
  10. garretta
    I don't think Bill Parcells was too happy that Taylor was doing something like this two days before the Giants' playoff game against the Bears. They blew the Bears out 31-3, but can you imagine the hue and cry if they'd lost and it had gotten out what Taylor was doing forty-eight hours before the big game? LT wasn't a very good interview here, with the constant gay jokes directed toward both Heyman and Hughes and his mumbling. Something tells me he wouldn't have dared to actually call Hughes a pansy to his face, football hero or not. JR keeps this on track as well as he can, but it's still not easy to sit through. Someone should have told Taylor to speak up a little. Luger won the match, which was a battle royal in football pads, in a little over two minutes. All that hype for a two-minute match? Talk about a waste of TV time, especially national TV time. I think they showed clips of this one along with the Flair/Sting title change from the same card, though, so it wasn't a total loss.
  11. garretta
    I think the schedule was the same as the one in one of the later commercials from '90 as well. I remember Missy having a day the last time we saw one of these. Maybe Heyman was the one who was new, if anyone was.
  12. garretta
    This would have been a good gimmick if they'd stayed with it. Rogers could have done a challenge every once in a while for matches like these, which would have given the bookers a reason to put him in longer TV matches without making his opponents look weak because they can't beat him. Maybe throw in a few bigger guys to change things up once in a while. They could have gotten a few months out of it at least. I liked Paul wondering how Rogers drinks mineral water without lime, like it's the most unnatural thing a human being could ever do.
  13. garretta
    I thought those interviews looked familiar. The only original material is Gordon's wraparounds, in which he refers to "the Starrcade", the same way as Bret Hart referred to "the Summerslam". It sounds just as weird coming from Gordon as it did from Bret.
  14. garretta
    When Sean Mooney and Lord Alfred Hayes have a grand old time tearing you to pieces, it's time to hang it up. They couldn't have done this segment before now, because if they had Brother Love would have been relegated to the Wrestlecrap scrap heap in short order. Absolutely no one except maybe Bruce Prichard takes this segment one bit seriously, and I'm not even sure about Prichard. It's too contrived and silly to even be insulting, really. The funniest part was at the very end, when Sean and His Lordship reveal that Paul, the man who was just supposedly "healed", was the cabdriver who brought them in from the Huntsville, Alabama (the site of the taping) airport that day. He'd also apparently carried their bags. For the record, the very night this aired on Prime Time, Brother Love's final set of appearances for more than four years were taped in Macon, Georgia. Interestingly enough, the first segment was the start of the Warrior/Taker feud that would blossom later in the summer, as both Brother Love and the debuting Paul Bearer predicted that Warrior would lose to Savage at Mania VII. We should have that segment when we get to February.
  15. garretta
    How a promotion could do a classy, positive segment like this and then turn around and do everything but shout from the rooftops that their soon-to-be champion is a tool of the very enemy the American troops are fighting boggles my mind. That said, no mere professional wrestling storyline can affect the message being sent here in any way whatsoever. Kudos to Vince and the WWF for letting the fans show our boys the support they needed!
  16. garretta
    This was nothing more than a setup for Savage's interference later in the card. I doubt Vince cared one iota about ruining the reputation of a champion who wasn't even going to have the title by the time the night was over. If I'd been Warrior, I'd have turned Sherri down too this time, fighting champion or not. To call him a coward one minute and fall all over him the next? This segment would have been a lot better if they'd chosen one tack for Sherri to take and stayed with it. Either be flirtatious or come on like the screaming, evil witch we all know she can be, but not both. Why should even a noble champion fall for such an obvious and piss-poor acting job as the one Sherri did? (I mean piss-poor in the sense of Sherri being an obvious liar, not a bad performer.) If Savage wants a title match, let him come out and demand one himself. Randy was his usual psycho self here, and you knew that trouble was brewing somehow for Warrior before all was said and done that night. As I said in one of the 1990 threads, had I been in charge Slaughter would have been paid off, let go, and forgotten about now that the U.S. was actually at war, and Warrior would have granted Savage a title shot that night in his place. I would have had Savage win the title and defend against either Hogan or Warrior at Mania VII, with his career not on the line. He loses to whomever (probably Hogan), Sherri turns on him, and Liz makes the save. In an interview right after Mania VII, Randy tells Okerlund that Liz doesn't want him getting hurt anymore, so he's taking time off at her request. This allows him to move to the booth, but still be ready for the Jake angle when it comes up later in the year.
  17. garretta
    This was excellent, as they tease Virgil's turn, then pull back at the very last second. Too much of a tease? I don't think so, Soup. There was only one way they could go with this, and they wanted the crowd to be ready for it when the time came instead of simply springing it on them. Maybe they shouldn't have involved Piper quite so soon, but Virgil's never really been his own man before, and he needs a push from someone who's always been his own man. Honky provides the dissenting view here, of course, and I'd love to have seen him involved in the feud somehow if he hadn't left, not with Virgil and Teddy so much as with Piper. I'm not sure what Teddy was holding over Virgil's head either; the only thing I dimly remember was something about his sick grandmother, but I could have this angle mixed up with another. Regardless, Virgil's acting is great, as he goes from fired up to completely cowed in a twinkling as Teddy laughs it up in the background. Tremendous stuff.
  18. garretta
    Maybe it's because Teddy's the best vignette actor in the company, but even though I know that his treatment of Virgil here is disgusting and racist in the extreme, it doesn't sicken me the way the Slaughter bullshit does. I want to see him get his butt kicked by Dusty and Dustin (and Virgil), while I just want to turn off Sarge and Adnan and wipe them out of my memory bank for good. I know one thing: Teddy's a lot easier to watch being lowdown and contemptible than Sarge is, and it has nothing to do with their material. Maybe if Sarge didn't bellow every last word of his promos at the top of his lungs, I could at least sit through his stuff a little more easily. I noticed the cowboy hat, but one thing was missing from Teddy's ensemble: the Million Dollar Belt. Did he forget it at home, or did someone figure out that a gold and diamond-studded belt may just get dirty, even by accident, in a barnyard?
  19. garretta
    More of the same crap from Slaughter and Adnan. There really isn't much new to say here. I'm surprised that at least some stations didn't pull Superstars and Challenge, and I'm doubly surprised that USA didn't complain about this stuff being rerun on Prime Time and All American. Either they all thought that no one with any sense could possibly be disgusted by pro wrasslin' or none of them were paying any attention to what was going out over their airwaves. I lay the percentage of each at about fifty-fifty.
  20. garretta
    I wonder if Saddam ever knew how close he came to feeling the Warrior's wrath. Makes those Patriot missiles look like child's toys, or so I hear. I can understand the overwrought metaphors, considering the promotion that we're talking about here, but even to imply that Saddam gave Slaughter those boots shows just how idiotic Vince and his crew was at this time. Forget the bad taste; we've been over and over that. What about some simple use of logic? Didn't Vince stop to think that if Saddam Hussein had made a present to an American professional wrestler of any kind whatsoever that it would have been plastered all over the news? Every other word on all three networks and cable was "Saddam", for heaven's sake. So if it wasn't on the news (which almost everyone was watching), then how did only the WWF ever know about it? Could it just be that they're (gasp, shudder) LYING to us? And if they're lying about that, what else could they be lying about? Yes, it's a variation on the old "expose the business" argument, but this was a lot easier to check up on than whether two wrestlers who were deadly enemies in one territory were tag team partners in another. It's a terrible chance for Vince to take in an era when there was still money to be made in at least trying to convince people that the majority of what they saw on their screens was real (unless you lived in New Jersey, that is). I don't think anyone was trying to imply that Saddam actually showed up at a WWF arena to give Sarge the boots, though; there's a limit to even Vince's cluelessness. Yes, Warrior's back to being the Ultimate Maniac. I guess the humanization process has failed once and for all. Considering the other crap going on around him, though, his insanity is the least of the WWF's problems at the moment.
  21. garretta
    I thought that this segment did what it was supposed to do, which is sell the Royal Rumble concept. I don't get how Hogan's an egomaniac and an asshole for wanting to eliminate Tugboat when that's the very idea of the match. If anything, the more egomaniacal statement he made was the one about wanting to draw number one so he could beat everyone else in the match. Not even Ric Flair a year later did that (he was number three). The real problem Hogan has here is that he has no hot-button issue, so they have to resurrect the Earhquake-Bravo feud to give him someone to cut a promo about Maybe he could have challenged the Warrior/Slaughter winner, or volunteered to try and take out Savage so Warrior could focus on Sarge (I know that the Rumble came after the title match, but that wasn't known by the audience at large until the nineteenth, so a threat like that still could have worked for the moment.) Interesting story about how Bruce Prichard became Brother Love, and it's fascinating to know that the Brother Love character was his idea and not Vince's. Trust Vince to suggest that awful red makeup in order to cover "imperfections" in Prichard's face. I wonder what they could have been that were so terrible, and who else could have done it without having to fake a Southern accent? The only person I could think of was Percy Pringle if they could have gotten him away from Jarrett/Fritz a couple of years earlier.
  22. garretta
    The promos here are about what you'd expect. I'm not a big fan of demonizing the entire Iraqi population either, but you have to remember that Vince is trying to dumb things down for the kiddies and not take up too much time talking about things that have nothing to do with his universe. It's so much simpler to make the entire nation of Iraq evil than to have to explain why decent people sometimes have an evil leader. Then again, if he'd simply wiped Slaughter's heel turn off the books somehow once real world events got too intense and given Savage the title shot at the Rumble, he wouldn't have had to explain anything at all. Loss says that when the WWF starts talking about the pressure a babyface champion is under, it means a title change. Well, when a wrestler says that he's not thinking about another wrestler, guess who's going to pop up and cost him something important? Yep, the forgotten wrestler.
  23. garretta
    Let's start, logically enough, with the ending. In true WCW fashion, the whole postmatch just missed taking too long, which would have left the pay-per-view audience with no payoff. We never did see a real closeup of Flair's face, and JR had no choice but to spoil that the Scorpion was Flair while he still had his back to the camera and the mask wasn't all the way off yet just to wrap the whole thing up. The beatdown should have been a lot shorter, or at least left until the unmasking which was the whole point of the match and angle, not that anyone involved in this travesty cared one bit for logic. If you want to know something scary, should Dusty have decided that he liked the angle and wanted to continue it, he could have, because we never saw definitively that the Scorpion was Flair. All JR would have had to claim was that he got mixed up in the rush to get off the air, and we would have been all set. The only change would have been that the Scorpion was now affiliated with the Horsemen. They could have even changed Scorpions and done this again at WrestleWar with Sid under the mask. (They couldn't have used Arn or Barry, since they were seen and identified in the beatdown, but Sid was nowhere in sight at any time before, during, or after the bout.) As for the actual match, I'm absolutely serious when I say that this might have been one of Flair's best performances ever. To go out and wrestle an entirely different style than he's used to, not be able to bump the same way, not be able to vocalize even by accident, and still look like a credible challenger to the World title is a feat not many could have pulled off. Sting looked a bit lost, since he couldn't do any of his familiar spots with Flair and risk giving the whole thing away before the time was right, but he adapted as well as he possibly could. Dick the Bruiser was harmless enough as the referee; the fans expected him to get a bit physical, and he did without harming things too much. He also threw some decent punches in the postmatch brawl, but there was so much craziness that he wasn't noticed at all. I liked Paul freaking out over the spaceship that brought Flair to the ring, and his reaction to the multiple Scorpions, even accusing JR of spiking his grapefruit juice. He analyzed the bout, and JR called the bout, as well as they could considering that at least JR knew damn well who was under the mask but couldn't even hint at it accidentally. He tended to guzzle Paul at times, but he does that to anyone not named Solie or Caudle. It's annoying as hell, but he's allowed to get away with it, fair or not. This was actually not too horrible considering the limitations these guys were under, but I think we can all sigh with relief that the Scorpion is a thing of the past, as is 1990 (at least for me). Looking forward to '91!
  24. garretta
    This actually was the championship match of the tournament; Hansen and Spivey were leading, with Doc and Bamm Bamm one point behind and needing a pinfall (worth two points) to win. Hansen and Spivey could escape with a draw and still win the tournament, so it made sense that they'd drag this out as long as they could and keep their game plan conservative as far as they were able. There was stil plenty of hard-hitting action both inside and outside the ring, and while the finish could certainly have been executed more crisply, it was still a huge deal for Doc to get the winning fall over Hansen. I expected a long, slow, kind of plodding match once I found out where the tournament stood before I sat down to watch this one, so the pace and even the lack of crowd involvement didn't bother me much. They'd already seen their "main event", as it were, in the last bout and probably wouldn't have reacted much to anything anyway. They were into this by the end, as evidenced by the American flags waving for Doc and Bamm Bamm in the postmatch. Nice humble interview from both men, although I heard Doc's last remark as "Giftwrap Baba!" Is this the five-star classic most of us expected? No, but it did its job as prescribed, which was to put over the Miracle Violence Connection as All-Japan's new team to beat. On that basis, I liked it just fine.
  25. garretta
    For the finish alone, this was a classic. Satanico is hosed out of the match for the one and only dirty maneuver he didn't perform in the entire half hour after jumping Dandy before the ring introductions were finished and spending the first two falls and the start of the third trying to disfigure him permanently. Dandy manages to fight back despite practically bleeding out five minutes into the bout and manages to steal the first fall before Satanico ties things up. Not only does the finish signify how far Dandy will go to win, it also points out his desperation. He can't possibly last much longer after the beating he's taken and he knows it, but losing his hair to such a heated rival is unacceptable, so he goes back to his rudo days for a finish that he knows perfectly well is about as cheap as they come and hopes that the referee buys it, which he does. I'd like to think that the ref wised up to what Dandy was trying to do, but refused to reverse the decision because of Satanico's actions in the first two falls; he certainly didn't deserve any benefit of the doubt. In the end, the chagrined look on his face as his head's being shaved says it all. So does Dandy's unrestrained joy at having put one over on Satanico; he does everything but dance a jig right in the poor guy's face. The finish doesn't take away from the great action that went before, though it will always be what this match is known for. The blood and brawling are off the charts; they almost bust out the wrestling moves because they can't think of any other ways to hurt each other. Also, Satanico's mounting frustration over Dandy kicking out just before several three counts, due mostly to the agonizingly slow counts by the referee, is a sight to behold. One thing that was absent: weapons. I don't even remember any chairshots; whatever damage was done happened as a result of the opponents' bodies and the ring itself, which is rare in a hate-filled match like this, and also kind of refreshing after so many ECW and indy matches where the participants literally use everything that isn't bolted to the floor. This is definitely my lucha Match of the Year. I'm not sure if I'm going to post my final overall rankings or not; I've completely forgotten to keep them up, and I'm not all that big on rankings and ballots for wrestling anyway. Suffice it to say that this is most definitely one of my top matches of the year overall. It's matches like this that inspire me not to completely give up on lucha despite my frustration with the trios style, which unfortunately persists, although it's not quite as bad as it used to be. Maybe '91 is the year in which all will finally be revealed, so to speak.
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