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PeteF3

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  1. PeteF3
    Ah, the days before viral videos, DVRs, video uploads, and instant .gifs--meaning WWE is relatively safe from the Children's Television Workshop pounding down their doors in Stamford with court summons. Sunny, God knows how, actually manages to make this sexy. Elmo apologizes for breaking Sunny's trapeze (?!). The payoff gag to this was pretty eye-rolling but I don't know if one can be sorry for having watched this. It's better and shorter and more to the point than some of the really terrible '91 Prime Time skits.
  2. PeteF3
    And after a cozy 1-week run that's the end of the Sisters of Love. Pressure from Catholic interest groups, or fears of such?
  3. PeteF3
    This goes on too long and more than that takes too long to get to the meat of this segment, which is the brawling in the souvenir stand, hallway, and locker room, which was really cool. Raven shoves Stevie during the brawl and Sandman later emerges from their locker room with a BWO shirt--I believe the Richards babyface turn is underway, and clearly the explanation is something they're teasing and saving for another show. Both guys end up laid out in the ring, the "match" sort of a draw. Parts of this were enjoyable but they really needed to go straight into the crowd and dispense with the token "opening" portion.
  4. PeteF3
    Classy video--ECW was always good at couching its "extreme" attitude with respect for wrestling's past.
  5. PeteF3
    Fun match, but for a lot of outside reasons (i.e., Dusty and Tony having way too much fun on commentary--by the time Dusty talked about going deer-hunting in Psicosis' outfit--"They'd think ah wuz a doe o' somethin'"--I was losing it). The match itself is kind of awkward and secondary to the commentary, but still good. Oh, and let's not forget Psicosis successfully starting a "U-S-A" chant. Cheapo finish, but I do love Regal's reaction, and if this means another match between the two then I approve.
  6. PeteF3
    Fairly sure that's the Royal Albert Hall match from 6/18/81.
  7. PeteF3
    And this is the *re-take.* They had to do the match twice because the first time around, Lady Blossom gouged Eaton in full view of Patrick.
  8. PeteF3
    Bret didn't know Flair pre-WWF, but he seemed to know Austin (he's said he pushed Vince to go after the Hollywood Blonds). On the other hand, his book pretty strongly implies that he didn't and may still not know who Mitsuharu Misawa is. To him, the Tiger Mask he wrestled at the big Dome show was just a random, inferior substitute for the original.
  9. PeteF3
    Blood was supposedly BJH's idea, which of course is little excuse. Demolition was supposedly Randy Culley's idea, after all. (Culley was also Deadeye Dick, to answer an earlier question). The good news is that Dusty was turfed from TV right after this taping cycle. I forget if it was Herd who dropped the hammer or someone else higher-up, but Dusty was yanked from commentary and from doing the Bull Drop Inn. I foresee completely smooth sailing for WCW going forward in '91!
  10. PeteF3
    Fantastic match with great build to the high-spots and some truly creative finishes to each fall. Damiancito's unique rolling surfboard to end the segunda caida is one of those great-looking, original holds that you can pretty much only get from minis. Both guys look great but Cicloncito really carried the way until they started trading great near-falls down the stretch. I also appreciated how they threw in some false finishes in the first two falls, to keep them from feeling too perfunctory. Damiancito's celebration is one of the most laugh-out-loud moments of any Yearbook. I'm trying to think of comparable events and the only one that comes to mind is Dawna interviewing Tony Atlas.
  11. PeteF3
    "An upstart organization cannot just put on a pay-per-view--as other organizations have found out in the past few weeks." A rare ECW potshot from Schiavone! Nick Patrick takes the bump of the night here, getting HEAVED over the top rope and basically grazing Wallstreet or some other B-teamer on the floor. This was a FANTASTIC segment with incredible heat and felt about 15,000 times more urgent and suspenseful than anything on the staid, stale Raw. The end of the mass 4-week tapings can't come soon enough for that show. We get the usual NWO beatdown but with a twist--Sting leaves a bat for the unconscious Giant, and Vincent is the first man to feel his wrath when the Giant wakes up. Giant then holds off the rest of the NWO with a bat and in a GREAT bit of production, the image of Giant standing tall in the ring is crossfaded with a shot of Sting looking on stoically from up the aisle. That's legitimately one of the coolest bits of production WCW ever did. Schiavone also did a fine job to point out that Giant has no friends, having betrayed both WCW and the NWO. Fantastic stuff all around.
  12. PeteF3
    Shawn's a total fucking twerp here, as everyone has pointed out. My eyes almost rolled out of my head when he oh so cleverly predicted a Russian legsweep, "'cause it's the same all the time!" Stupid kayfabe-breaking sports-entertainmenty Russo bullshit. Imagine someone criticizing Mariano Rivera for throwing cut fastballs all the time. The match itself isn't that good either--Loss pointed out in the Shawn GWE thread about how Bret, Undertaker, Shawn et al were to call the shots when Vader was working with them. That's plainly evident here, as Bret calls for a number of spots that shouldn't really be called in an ideal Bret-Vader layout. I know Vader has been criticized for being too willing to let smaller guys throw him around, but Bret pulling up his knees to block the Vaderbomb makes no sense and he shouldn't be getting bodyslammed and suplexed like it's nothing. (The bringing up the knees leads to Shawn amusingly saying Vader's going to be "singing tenor" in the shower--uh, yeah). Badly executed finish on top of all that. Shawn goes from "having no friends, no allies" in his words to rushing to the aid of Pete Lothario. Yay consistency!
  13. PeteF3
    Indeed. But the rest of the promo was such a mess. How many grammatical errors there ? "You have to kick, or be kickin'!" Or was it, "You have to kick, or be kicken!"? Maybe he was going for some Middle English type effect. Sid's promo is a total mess saying almost nothing of note and stumbling through his rote phrases. Shawn comes out and strips for us, and teases/threatens to take his pants off as we cut to commercial.
  14. PeteF3
    Absolutely fucking horrible. Take everything El-P said in the WWECW thread about Flair and Foley working garbage brawls and it applies here. Kojika, who was an AJPW mid-carder of the 1970's, sports a ridiculous bright red dye job and looks about 65 years old, and it feels like we're seeing less of a grizzled veteran than a sad old man going through a mid-life crisis. He does nothing except throw horrible punches and bleed for no discernible reason. Matsunaga is the only one of these four who can actually work worth a shit, and the biggest highlight of the match comes in the first 3 minutes with his somersault senton off the scaffold into the barbed wire nest. This is a total extended squash with Nakamaki & Yamakawa getting in basically no offense. Finishing spot was crazy but wasn't built to because at no point was Matsunaga in the slightest bit of danger of losing. I guess I sort of get the geek show appeal but there are better examples in the '90s than this. Worst Match of the Year candidate early on.
  15. PeteF3
    Kudo is in more or less conventional wrestling gear. Kandori looks like a salaryman who's had enough of being overworked and snapped and is aiming to take it out on the next warm body she sees. Crazy match with some decent enough psychology behind it, including some well-done payback spots involving the table and the pile of chairs in the center of the ring. Kudo's bug-eyed sell after being hanged with the chain is one of the more horrifying images of any Yearbook. I don't get what Kandori was doing trying to fiddle with the turnbuckles, and it's the one thing in this match that's never really paid off. I can see why some would find the finish over the top, but I have to give it points for its audacity and sheer originality. Five days in and we have a new Match of the Year!
  16. PeteF3
    Marlena does look great. Backlund freaks out about her cleavage, but by the end of the show he'd see a lot more than that.
  17. PeteF3
    Brother Love is here to rescue us from the decadence of Shotgun and NYC. He re-dubs the Nuns as the Sisters of Love, and then actually manages to turn this into an honest-to-God wrestling promo. Generally I will never criticize a promo where someone rattles off a bunch of other wrestlers/tag teams on the roster, as Love does here.
  18. PeteF3
    From a looks and execution standpoint, the WWF actually knocks this out of the park. So rare to see this kind of outside-the-box thinking from the company at any point in time. Backlund harassing a taxi driver and holding up traffic in the intro is pretty funny. And hey--BikerTaker is in there! Todd Pettingill fills us in on Sister Angelica and Mother Smucker, the Flying Nuns, out of a Tibetan Order in the Himalayas...okay, call it a home run that's turned into a double upon replay review.
  19. PeteF3
    I was wondering just how freaking cold they must have been. This is jack-off material for people with an emotional connection to NYC, but since I'm not one of those people, the big highlight was Santa eating the Stevie Kick. "That's what you get for not bringing me that train set when I was 9!"
  20. PeteF3
    Choshu and Hashimoto together feel like the wrestling version of the Ramones--minimalists in their own way, who knew what they were doing more than they may have let on. They don't to a *ton* in the face of what the rest of wrestling was doing in '97, but they know how to make every move, indeed every motion, matter. A fitting climax to Choshu's career as a meaningful main event guy.
  21. PeteF3
    This looked much better than the last time these two faced off in a Dome, but still nothing blowaway. Dragon is possibly the coolest he's ever been during his entrance--even Ric Flair never got an intro like that. Liger busts out a Steiner Screwdriver to put Dragon away. Jushin not only wins all the belts, he apparently wins the girls, too.
  22. PeteF3
    That song got me a good laugh. Let's see if this is the only song in this set I will recognize (96 began with Macarena and after that I knew almost no songs at all). My first reaction to the music: "Is this the eels? ... (vocals kick in) Oh, wait, yeah..." Inauspicious start to 1997 from both a music and a match standpoint. Other than the red eye lenses and blond hair, they really made no attempt at differentiating Jericho's outfit. You'd think they could go all Black Tiger and make an evil black suit for him, at least. In any case, he can't really work under these conditions and we get a pretty poor finish.
  23. PeteF3
    Just looking at my '90s MOTY votes--I could easily see myself not voting for Masa Chono (G-1 final against Muto) or Toshiyo Yamada (AJW-JWP tag in '92).
  24. PeteF3
    He was on Meltzer's Eyada show back when that was a thing. The audio may well be out there somewhere.
  25. PeteF3
    Kobashi-Taue was the very last one off the ballot. I was just doing my final proofread when I realized I forgot the December MPro tag I loved so much wasn't on the list.
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