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garretta

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Everything posted by garretta

  1. garretta
    Another excellent serious promo from Rude and Heenan. If I recall correctly, Rude even stopped kissing women from the audience in an effort to be taken more seriously around this time. Matt, if you're still reading this, you say they should have "gone goofball" for Warrior's first major challenger. Did you have anyone specific in mind?
  2. garretta
    Seeing Greg in this garbage gimmick makes my soul weep. The idea of Greg and Honky as a team is actually a good one, certainly no worse than Valentine and Beefcake a few years earlier, and they turned out to be decent champions. The problem is making the Hammer into Roy Orbison (at least I think that's who they were going for, according to Greg), and forcing the gimmick to take over every aspect of their performance. Just put them together and let them wrestle; they'd already been a team at Mania V against the Harts and gotten at least one televised match against Demolition in the summer of '89. The combination of wacky Honky and dead-serious Valentine would have been a nice contrast. Instead we got this slop which benefitted nobody. Eventually (if I recall correctly) Valentine rebelled, and they let him go blonde again and dropped the Rhythm & Blues name from the team, but it was already too late. "Brother Rhythm" and "Brother Blues"? Let's just be glad that that was a Brother Love quirk and that Vince didn't actually simply start referring to one of them as "Rhythm" and the other as "Blues", as he's been known to do once other gimmicks got rolling.
  3. garretta
    Rude sounds like he's been drinking a bit of Warrior's leftover silly juice when he talks about "going beyond Parts Unknown" and such early in the segment, but recovers to deliver an excellent serious promo. Heenan's right there with him, sounding truly menacing for the first time since Andre turned on Hogan three years before. This is a bit of a quick makeover, but it works, mostly because we know how tough Rude was in real life. It'll be interesting to see how this buildup continues.
  4. garretta
    Those who try to fit Warrior and Hogan into the traditional babyface model are missing the point. The entire concept of their characters is that they don't need the fans' sympathy any more than Bobby Heenan does. Rather, they're such powerful forces of nature that any fan that doesn't follow them automatically just because they are who they are isn't with the program and better get on board before they're left behind for good. They'll live forever with or without fan support; it's the fans who will benefit by adopting them as heroes. Sure, they both pay lip service to needing the fans' support, but they can cast aside the "nonbelievers" because they know in their hearts that who and what they are is right regardless. Sounds kind of like Tully Blanchard or Ric Flair without the steroids, no? At any rate, other than the Warrior preaching togetherness for all instead of mass suicide, there's nothing terribly different here than there was before. As Loss said above, thank God the time for talking's over!
  5. garretta
    Actually, Steve knew a little bit about working with wrestlers; he was a wrestling announcer in Los Angeles during the early days of TV. Two things come to mind here: first, what good sports Nikolai and Boris were, and second, this skit took longer than their match with the Harts!
  6. garretta
    At the time, I thought it was weird that they were hyping Mania VII a year in advance. Maybe Vince knew ahead of time what an uphill climb selling out the Coliseum would be. If that was true, he was more right than he ever dreamed possible.
  7. garretta
    Piper was trying to work some "equality between the races" deal; it doesn't matter if you're black or white (or each) as long as you do whatever it is you do well. The problem was, he wasn't the right type of guy to cut a promo like that; he spends almost all of this interview talking about Bad News's physical "deformities" in a more-than-slightly racist manner. According to one interview I heard, he didn't give a damn how he came off because he was going home to Portland afterward, so he just said whatever nonsense came into his head, and that's exactly what it sounds like here. As an aside, he couldn't get the paint off of his body for weeks; someone (I think it might have been Andre) substituted regular paint for the washable kind as a rib!
  8. garretta
    Nice squash for Stunning Steve, but the story here is Adams getting the taste slapped out of his mouth by his ex-wife. She sounds like she knows her way around the mic at least a little, so it'll be interesting to see how big a part she takes in the ongoing Austin/Adams feud. I guess this also means that Austin's stay in Devastation Inc. is over. I wonder if we might see Gossett in his corner at some point, as Ronnie himself hinted. Austin may not have the in-ring skill he would later, but he's more than halfway to Stone Cold mic-wise. It's a shame he was probably too green to go to Memphis regularly at this time, as he would have been a fresh heel on that side of the promotion, which needed one desperately.
  9. garretta
    Nice musical retrospective of the King's latest heel run so far. The title of the song that's used says it all.
  10. garretta
    As Cox said, there's a lot of Piper in Borne's spiel, but he pulls it off well. Kerry's all over the place: does he want to kick Borne's butt for cheating against Kevin? Save him from being brainwashed by old videotapes of his father? Wrestle him cleanly like a friend for the Texas title? All three? What it really sounds like is that Kerry somehow was legitimately unprepared for Borne to be so intense and lost his train of thought, which is easy enough for him to do anyway. The post-production and heavy scripting involved in WWF promos even at this time can only help him in the coming months.
  11. garretta
    Nice promo from Lawler, but I want to know how Billy Joe turned babyface all of a sudden. Not only that, but he's teaming with Jarrett after they've spent the first part of the year trying to kill each other? How did this not make the set, and can someone please provide some background? For an obese manager with a heart condition, Gossett's gotten awfully athletic, to say the least.
  12. garretta
    Nothing special here. Once Lawler's helped to the back, there's nothing you haven't heard before and better from other guys. This is the first time I've seen Reggie B. Fine, and he's just kind of there. Brickhouse is decent, but they can keep Falcone. Dave does his usual flawless job as moral compass and format protector.
  13. garretta
    We get to see exactly what a technical loss is, as The King's still too loopy from Nitron's punch to wrestle The Thriller and has to be carried to the back by his flunkies. This segment was actually much more effective than Nitron's knockout was, if only because we didn't have Nate prattling on endlessly for five minutes before we got to the point. Loved how the flunkies tried to blame Dave for everything.
  14. garretta
    Just about at the point where I was going to turn this off for being pointless and ridiculous, Nitron comes out and knocks Lawler for a loop. How it is that Nitron, who had no career to speak of except as Nancy Sullivan's bodyguard, gets a full Lawler sell job and legit name wrestlers like JYD are dismissed with racist jokes and basically made to look like crap not fit to breathe Lawler's air, I can't begin to tell you. All this for a rare Memphis one-and-done? I didn't hear a lot from the crowd as others seemed to; they probably couldn't believe what they'd just seen. I know I didn't.
  15. garretta
    The fines and suspensions for outside interference definitely make sense. "Technical loss" is the same as disqualification, so there's really no change there except that there can be title changes off of them, but the Unified title goes back and forth at least once during every Lawler program, so what's the difference? I'll have to see the "sudden death knockdown" rule in action; it does seem like an excuse to create a new kind of screwjob finish. But this is Memphis, so that rule should fit right in. As long as the right man (Lawler) ends up champion at the end of more weeks than he doesn't, the fans should eat these rules up with a spoon for however long they last. As Soup mentioned, it sounded like Lawler was definitely talking to the crowd off-camera during Eddie's preamble, but that might be because of the rather thorough booing Eddie got when he came out. The only authority figure I've ever heard booed quite that much was Mr. McMahon, and he was supposed to be a heel at the time. I wonder what set them off that day?
  16. garretta
    I'm pretty certain that this was a legitimate talk show that happened to star Jerry Lawler. Sure there were wrestling guests, but there were also guests from other walks of life, and Lawler could play it straight when and if the time came. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
  17. garretta
    Typical local commercial featuring a wrestler. Why a heel like Gary Young, though? Were Kerry and Chris Adams busy that day?
  18. garretta
    It's unbelievable how even Lawler at his most obnoxious can't be booed for longer than a few minutes by the Memphis faithful. Even if they're booing him at the end of one show, they're back cheering him by the start of the next one. Most bookers would be scratching their heads trying to figure out where they went wrong, but in Lawler's case, he's one of the bookers himself, so it's all good. Can't wait to hear Eddie's announcement!
  19. garretta
    I had trouble envisioning this one in my head, but that doesn't detract from Lawler's efforts here; there are some matches that you just have to see to appreciate. The one major selling point is Jarrett, Dundee, and company getting to pick Gossett to gang up on and Lawler and his crew trying to prevent it. It sounds like that would be worth the price of admission alone, especially after this promo. Another winning effort from Lawler.
  20. garretta
    This could have been broken up into at least two or three shorter segments throughout the show. Loved Marc getting his digs in on Gossett the way he did on Garvin earlier in the set. Maybe I missed it, but where was Gossett trying to kill the segment's heat? He isn't Bobby Heenan in his prime, certainly, but I don't think he actively drags this down. Adams insisting that Embry was one of his best friends after all we've seen them go through was rich to say the least. If Lawler's a babyface miscast as a heel in Memphis, Embry's a heel miscast as a babyface in Texas. Threatening the camera guy (again), yelling at the matchmaker, interrupting Marc.........I don't know why they didn't just bring him back as a heel. Were they afraid he'd quit? If so, why? Adams and the Memphis guys were more than capable of representing the face side well. Would have loved to hear from Percy, since everyone else had a turn.
  21. garretta
    Well, that was interesting. Yes, Awesome sounds like a Hulkamaniac here, while Champion needs to lay off the triple espressos, especially pouring them over his head; his hair soaks them up and grows like mad. Come to think of it, I do remember Ronnie P. Gossett after all. He made Lou Albano at his most disgusting look like Twiggy. No wonder Lawler's basically wrestling Champion and Awesome two on one!
  22. garretta
    Not having seen Ronnie P. Gossett yet, I can't fully appreciate why he's such a weak link in the King's team. I know he's a manager, but not much else. Pretty standard Lawler promo here.
  23. garretta
    The best part is that Dave Brown plays this absolutely straight, selling Lawler's rather lame (sorry, Kingfish) jokes like they're egregious insults against the fine people of Memphis and acting like they're sabotaging the program. I love how he rather peevishly insists that Lawler get in the ring and wrestle like it says on the format sheet. The funny thing is, the jobber, whoever it was, was probably cracking up just out of camera range.
  24. garretta
    Another first-rate promo from the hometown boy. A Flair/Zbyszko feud wouldn't have benefitted anyone at this time. Both of them were too big as heels for one of them to turn, so they would have had a situation where the fans would have been chanting for Luger (or whoever the top AWA babyface was then) to run down and destroy them both, which would have made the match meaningless unless they actually planned to unify the belts. Since the AWA was so close to death, that wouldn't have meant much either except to have to pay Flair to come and defend the titles on how many ever cards the AWA would have had left. Zbyszko wasn't coming anywhere close to the NWA belt, Sting in the wings or not. What might have been interesting is not unifying the belts and having Larry come in as a close friend of the Horsemen who still claims the AWA title whether he defends it or not. That way, to get a shot at one champion, you have to beat another. I'm not sure about Larry as an actual Horseman; would Flair/Arn/Barry/Larry have been a better group than Flair/Arn/Barry/Sid? It would have been close, in my view.
  25. garretta
    Great Flair promo; as was said above, the thought of coming back home seems to have energized him. The commercial gets cut off; Zbyszko defended against Nikita Koloff, with Nick Bockwinkel acting as guest referee for both bouts. It seems like they were building for a second show with a title for title Flair/Zbyszko main event that obviously never happened. One question: Wouldn't it have made more sense for Zenk to get the title shot against Flair since he was a native of the Twin Cities? Why give it to Pillman?
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