PeteF3
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Another shitty by-the-numbers finish for a Hogan PPV match, what else is new. Weirdly executed post-match angle as Tony and the Brain immediately sign off after the match and act like they're off the air for Flair & Arn's confrontation with Vader. Vader immediately cuts a promo to the camera demanding a 2-on-1 match. Yeah, this wasn't rushed as hell or anything. That made the Michaels babyface switch look like a slow burn. I don't mean to keep repeating this point, but ECW's appeal is growing with every single Big Two segment.
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Hogan deigns to make another appearance on WCW TV--good for him. Rodman is in red & yellow and helps cut a promo on Vader. Boy, did this feud peter out quickly. Bischoff, being the starfucking ninny that he is, gushes over being flanked by the ladies of Baywatch. Gina Lee Nolin, the Buddy Roberts of the Baywatch girls, gets some face time, as does a producer. Gene Okerlund is with his "long time close personal dear friend," an intro spiel that never fails to crack me up. This time it's a Harley-Davidson dealer. Hogan is brought out for a Make-a-Wish presentation and boy does this scream "angle." It's a new Harley! Because HOGAN should be the one receiving expensive gifts. Hulk graciously wants a second bike to be given to the kids. Then the Giant shows up and throws his Jerry Seinfeld puffy shirt at Hulk. "I know this shirt, this is Andre's!" Shyeah. Hulk is horrified. -
I tend to agree with the point that intergender matches--while not inherently offensive--are nearly impossible to pull off well. I say "nearly" because I think this is a match that accomplishes it. It's not great, but for what it is, it works. Luna being bloodied and beaten is a bit disturbing, but...well, it's Luna, and I can buy that she'd be fine with this sort of thing. Stevie is pushed as such a generally ineffective putz that Luna dominating him works too. Both people try some pretty daring offense, including cage dives and Luna doing a Vader Bomb-type thing off the top rope with the help of the cage. The finish and post-match are two of the more iconic moments in ECW history of course, as Raven gets crucified against the cage and leveled with the chairshot heard 'round the world. An effective way for Dreamer to exact some revenge while still holding out on the pinfall victory.
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There's not a more viscerally hated man in wrestling in '95 than Bill Alfonso. He has to duck trash from the crowd and gets a fan thrown out, which eggs the crowd on even more. He's out to shut down the show, but Tod Gordon is out to confront him. Alfonso gives him a ten-count to get out of the ring before he has the promotion shut down entirely and Gordon's license revoked, but Gordon clotheslines him at around 6. Gordon is pulled off by the ECW undercard, and it sounds like Alfonso is asking for the show to be shut down again. Not sure where this is going.
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Nitro (or a Monday night show, specifically) had been announced about a week before this, and probably wasn't known much longer before that if you take Bischoff's word at face value that it was almost an impromptu decision during a meeting with Turner. The jobbers holding down Savage didn't make a ton of sense, but I thought this was a lot of fun. Flair with a bevy of Space Mountainettes is the personification of cool, and I'm a sucker for any angle where Flair beats the crap out of some schlub while wearing his custom-made street clothes. The lifeguards taking Flair's instructions to the letter was LOLworthy and a great payoff, and they at least somewhat pay off the incompetent jobbers by having Savage beat them up. For justifiable reasons.
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YES! NO! YES! NO! The Zodiac is here! How could anyone not recognize this guy as Beefcake? He's STILL wearing his disturbing tights with holes in them. The Wizard sends the Shark back to the tidal waves and Zodiac back into the Land of Yin and Yang and promises one final warrior. Zodiac is in the running for Worst Gimmick of the Year in a year that has seen many, many candidates.
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Ricky Morton hasn't arrived at TV yet, so the scheduled match between the Rock 'n Rolls and Snow/Unabomb is off. But Bob Armstrong says there WILL be a championship match, as promised. Good TV match, with a spectacular springboard dive to the outside by Snow and a springboard legdrop by Unabomb. The THUGs take the Smoky Mountain tag belts...remember, not only was Unabomb leaving, but Snow was on his way out as well, off to the WWF with the amazingly successful Avatar gimmick. They were clearly saving Unabomb to get jobbed out by Undertaker, which is the right move. I thought this was the end of Ricky Morton in SMW, but the Rock 'n Rolls crash the locker room upset about what's happened. I can totally get behind a Rock 'n Rolls heel turn, as ill-fated as it may be.
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Years later but oh well...I think Loss meant Gordy was "gone" in a figurative sense. Which is correct. That's a pretty underwhelming babyface team.
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Undertaker vs. Unabomb...yay. This isn't a bad promo from UT, all told. They more or less telegraph that Undertaker will end Unabomb's career.
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The Hardyz get a good little flurry to start, but Jeff's dropkicks at the end are sub-Renegade quality. I'm loving seeing the switch flipped, with Randy Hales being characterized as the "most obnoxious man" Les Thatcher has ever met and Wolfie and JC regressing into arrogant douchebag heels.
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Another killer promo from Budro, who is--yes--the second-most compelling force on the microphone in 1995 past Cactus Jack. Except Buddy's not had the Shane Douglas albatross around his neck.
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The full match (or nearly full) is absolutely awesome as I recall, on the level of their Louisville bout. A standout performance by Robert Gibson (!) again. Here we just get the finish of PG-13 regaining the tag belts and a LONG post-match beatdown. Mark Curtis hands a spur off his cowboy boot to Ricky Morton to bust up Randy Hales and he drops legs on referee Bill Rush, while Gibson uses his high position in the ring to head off PG-13 and Brickhouse Brown. Hales is eventually stretchered out (the EMT yells at the cameraman to turn the thing off in a nice touch). Russell reports back in the studio that Hales looked like he was in "some horrible car wreck" with ultra-high blood pressure just to sell this angle even more. Lance puts over how the Rock 'n Rolls have been unable to adjust to a new era where PG-13 are a more popular team--it's like 1990 Sgt. Slaughter! Fantastic work from Lance. His balance between explaining the angle and his righteous disgust for their actions is stupendous. Mark Curtis cuts a promo comparing decrepit old fossil Lance Russell to "that old Indian in the commercials." The entire USWA--heel and babyfaces--are upset over the injury to Hales, which Curtis finds amusing. Eddie Marlin has now phoned up Bob Armstrong (a conversation I'd love to hear) and a Texas Death rematch is set for Monday. Great promo by Morton putting over the match stips. Lance declares that Smoky Mountain Wrestling is a HAVEN for outlaws. Now Curtis is out and they immediately take steps to make this look unplanned--shaky cameras, Curtis yanking the mic away from Russell and Lance swiping it back, etc. He and Lance almost get into a fight(!) before PG-13 run Curtis off. Wolfie cuts a very serious promo putting over what Randy Hales does for the company. The quality of the USWA has dipped quite a bit since 1990, but they've proven on multiple occasions this year that they can hit it out of the park when they have to.
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Couldn't get into this at all, and I like UWFI and even UWFI tags far more than most shootstyle.
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The Gangstas jump PE in back of the arena and spraypaint them after a brawl where all four guys are appearing to try not to break a nail. They follow up with a promo that rambles on quite a bit longer than New Jack did in SMW. It's fine, but I think they were more effective in Smoky Mountain precisely because they didn't "fit." Here, they're two garbage brawlers out of many.
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They're trying to push Sid as a coward as the apparent hook for the lumberjack match. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I'm no Sid fanboy but the USWA did a much better job of using him as a lawyering heel rather than a total fraidy-cat. Sid doesn't say much and we get an entirely too-close shot of his nostrils.
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WWF commercials were getting pretty cringe-worthy at this point. Bob Backlund is the highlight.
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A replay of an old Double J vignette from before his debut--Ronnie P. Gossett is sighted again. Now he's in Vegas celebrating the success of Ain't I Great? and he runs into an older, fatter Eddie Izzard Rip Taylor.
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Ross and Pettingill are in full-blown comedy mode, almost like Cole, Lawler, & JBL today with fewer product and Twitter plugs. This should have led to a semi-sustained push for Barry Horowitz, who had earned one, but he quickly settled into JTTS-dom soon after. Ross and Todd can't help but yammer while Sunny is talking.
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All the best bits have already been quoted, but dig the knock-off Jaws music when Shark first comes out.
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Whoops, Bullet Bob has vacated the title and put it up in a rematch.
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Another double Dusty finish, coming off the Raven/Richards-PE title switch. We get official-sounding soundbites from the ring announcer and Mark Curtis explaining what all happened.
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Awesome stuff all around. I love how Curtis can make himself come across as a non-wrestler despite being fully trained. An entertaining bullshit finish to the match at hand as Curtis takes it upon himself to clobber Wolfie D with a hubcap and fast-count the pin to net the Rock 'n Rolls the USWA tag titles. Really fun post-match, too. First PG-13 beat up Mark Curtis, then the Rock 'n Rolls beat up PG-13, then Randy Hales comes back to make the save and get his licks in on Mark Curtis. And a heel promo from the Rock 'n Rolls to boot. This is back-to-back matches I've watched now involving Evil Tsuyoshi Kikuchi and Evil Robert Gibson. Give the win to Robert on this one--his mannerisms and the way he carries himself is more convincing than almost anything he's done as a babyface in SMW.
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Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, & Jun Akiyama vs. Toshiaki Kawada, Tsuyoshi Kikuchi, & Yoshinari Ogawa (7/8) Because I couldn't go through '95 without getting a glimpse of EVIL KIKUCHI. He's even switched to evil black tights, though he eschewed the evil goatee. Sadly he seems pretty banged up and out of it by this point, so he doesn't do a ton and leaves the heavy lifting to his partners. The first half of this is all about setting up Kawada as a killer, as he chokes out Misawa and is basically treated almost as a no-selling monster heel from the way he carries himself and the urgency with which Kobashi and Akiyama take him on. After that it bogs down into a pretty through-the-motions tag, with a through-the-motions FIP segment on Akiyama and a through-the-motions finish with Misawa putting Ogawa away without a ton of trouble. One for AJPW completists, though I could get into Kikuchi & Ogawa as a ratfuck tag team.
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It wouldn't have changed much, since it was the pure Ronnie Garvin "win the title so he can drop it back to the champ" role, but Vader over Sid as WWF champ in late '96 is the pre-eminent instance for me.
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I'll just say that one of the very few post-2000 matches I really found myself getting emotionally invested in was Jeff's ladder match against the Undertaker on Raw. Jeff had me pretty much willing and praying for him to climb that thing and beat 'Taker. That has to count for something. I don't think I'd vote for Jeff but I actually could be persuaded. His level of psychology wasn't your Arn Anderson style in the least, but in terms of emotionally connecting with a crowd, I don't think it can be denied that he had something to that.