PeteF3
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Supposedly there's a new WWE logo on the way. They may be waiting for that to be unveiled. I don't mind having two belts around but I hope they're not deliberately leaving the possibility open of de-unifying them.
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Funk attempts to justify why he submitted at When Worlds Collide. He makes a strong case, actually. This starts of well and then goes off on a weird tangent about dreams and the World Series that doesn't seem to serve any purpose.
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If Naruse was legitimately knocked silly then I could almost understand it. Sometimes your bell is rung so hard you're not even aware of what happened. Choshu reacted similarly when Maeda shoot-kicked him. Or the reaction of noted shooter the Sandman when Cactus Jack hit him with a cast-iron skillet.
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Another thing that was what it was. They attempted to do some justice to the sumo concept, but this would ironically end up being 'quake's last appearance. Typhoon would be brought back to replace him on their house show run as soon as it began.
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Like I said earlier, this Lawler-Piper feud was a minimum of about 5 years too late. Alka-Seltzer! Nestle Crunch! Fast forwarding! Volkoff and DIBiase are out, with Nikolai in his old 1990 gear, standing there being demeaned by Ted and Jerry. Ted calls out Nikolai for his Russian flag jacket being out-of-date. This sure went on for awhile. This recreation of the Virgil angle actually could have gone somewhere with someone besides Nikolai, and if it...you know, WENT anywhere. Instead Nikolai wrestled for several months and vanished.
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They at least upgraded to a professional camera and maybe a boom mic for this one.
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This was what it was. Interesting to see Jake vs. Caras get pushed harder as an issue than Jake vs. Konnan. -
Oh, come the fuck ON. How many fucking false starts is this Panther turn going to get? Even Sting would probably think better of teaming up with Barr or Eddy again by this point. Yeah, I'm with Chad here--this was perfectly fine, I guess, but that's as much praise as I'm willing to dish out. I don't know what it is about adding two extra guys to a traditional lucha match but there was simply too much going on for me to care about this as a whole. And the Panther thing meant that this had two strikes against it from the start. Finish is a real eye-roller as Santo is killed with a brutal top-rope elbow by Psicosis but pops right up to bring him off the turnbuckle in a spot that would have this board throwing a collective fit if it were Kurt Angle or Davey Richards doing it. This is really only worth watching for the novelty of seeing Liger and TM3 in this environment, and they acquit themselves well and make you want to see Liger vs. Panther in a singles match.
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This is about as non-lucha as lucha gets without involving Jake the Snake. Sagrada is awkward as fuck, and has a weird way of selling every move by laying on his back and holding his fingers in the air. But he isn't terrible or anything here, and is willing to take every bit of offense that Black Cat has. Black Cat has a ton of shit that he can roll out, and the match is pretty well-structured with a good payback spot involving the chair and a comeback from Sagrada that looks like it means something considering he was blindsided before the opening bell. Cat finally loses his temper in the second fall and drops him with a cradle piledriver to get disqualified, and continuing the piledriver-centric story of Los Gringos Locos. Cat and Art Barr's visual demonstrations of a martinete as opposed to what BC did are laugh-out-loud funny. I wouldn't know enough to compare Sagrada to Rayo de Jalisco Jr. as far as aging lucha heavyweights go, but Rayo strikes me as a bit better. Good match here, though.
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Koechner was actually going to be brought in as a precursor to the RTC gimmick. He was shown on-camera a few times holding up a "World Wrestling Filth" sign, but the teased angle never went anywhere. This was in '99, I think, when Russo was still there.
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That's odd, because Arn works the majority of the match. Arn vs. Sabu looks WEIRD, as expected, but they actually work pretty well together. Parts of this are quite good, other parts are eye-rolling. Despite the "hardcore" image they're still making token attempts at keeping the referee distracted when the chair's in use, which starts to look ridiculous. Arn constantly DDT'ing Sabu and not covering, and then rolling Funk in the ring after he's been brutalized by Public Enemy, makes him look like an idiot. (And if you're going to tell me that Arn didn't cover because the turn was a set-up, then why the fuck is he killing Sabu at all?) I'm not sorry I saw it, just for the novelty of Arn and Bobby in the ECW Arena and for the fact that for all its faults, it did keep me guessing as to what would happen next. This is a fairly effective way to bring Dory in and set up Funks vs. PE, actually. Despite his proto-ECW battles with Abby & the Sheik, I expect Dory to fit into this environment about as well as Abdullah would on a World of Sport broadcast.
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Agree on this petering out towards the end--all those rollups and shoulderblocks and dropdowns were indicative of two guys who were seemingly out of things to do. I actually did like the finish as it was a nice subtle heel method for Flair to win, and the body of this match is pretty great. Flair busts out a kneedrop off the turnbuckle and a monkey flip here, which is about the only new offense I've ever seen from him from this time period onward. One of the best North American bouts of the year, but I hesitate to call it the best at this stage.
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Goddamn, fuck Lex Luger. The WWF should have given the Larryland Express, Made in the USA push to this guy, the Real Z-Man. That would have been money. Zbyszko as an antihero babyface is spectacular, and his jingoism is about 900% more authentic-sounding than anything the WWF has done to this point.
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Jake goads DWB with some terrific putdowns and gets a title shot on TV, a few weeks in advance. A lot of the "redneck" insults by the SMW heels came off as forced and rote, but Jake is a complete natural at it. Another thinking man's special from Jake. Not overall as good as the Dustin match but not far behind. Jake works over the eye with some help from Kendo the Samurai, who helpfully relieves the Dirty White Boy of his eyepatch. And an exceedingly clever finish with the flash bulb. I love Jake wincing a bit when the photographer snaps a picture of him, to get over the strength of the flash. Jake's redefined his character somewhat, being a scary and scheming type of guy but also being a colossal dick too. After leveling DWB with the DDT he just leans across with a hand to cover him, pretending to smoke a cigarette. What a way to win a title.
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Nobuhiko Takada vs. the Cobra from NJPW '86 was a pimped match for awhile, but during the '80s Project it inspired some true raw, visceral HATE from a lot of people. A lot of people had it in last place, and it may even have finished there. I was as down on Tiger Mask and Junior Koshinaka as much as anyone, but I still thought that match was very good, though not as great as I once thought. Cobra at least brought some selling to the proceedings, which put it several leagues ahead of many Sayama matches. Of all the Mid-South Coliseum matches I want to see in full, bizarrely enough one near the top of the list is the Lawler-Papa Shango Unified title match. The action we saw looked awesome and I'm pretty confident it would end up being the best Charles Wright match ever.
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Man, this is the week of low-budget promo videos from the Big Two. Tully Blanchard is back, a mere 12 months too late. Was he born-again by this point? His promo sort of sounds like it. More Horsemen talk, and it sounds like there were plans to bring Blanchard back for more than a one-off. Great piece of work here.
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They're really going for the Dusty/Ole thing here, but that was built up for a year or more of Ole as a babyface--after a long feud with the Heenan Family it truly felt like he had "seen the light" before suckering Rhodes in. This is just another weekly turn from a guy who was already a heel at one point in this very stint, and the later attempts at bringing up how Gilbert had strung us along for THREE WHOLE WEEKS just sound ridiculous. And the Jarrett stuff is completely nonsensical--the 3-on-1 last week was just fine with him, but this one is apparently over-the-top. I get the angle of him saving his grandfather, but Jarrett walked off in disgust before Marlin got involved. I agree with the previous comments here--this was set up as a major, life-altering event but it simply rings false, because there was pretty much nothing more that could shock people in Memphis other than maybe bringing in another WWF star. On the plus side, everyone here is so good at what they do that through all the bullshit and the real-life drama, this still ends up being a compelling piece of television. Gilbert, whether it leads anywhere or not, does cut one of the promos of his life (though I definitely wouldn't have it at the top). The action at the Mid-South Coliseum is good. The group of heels comes off as a legitimate threat the likes of which we really haven't seen in Memphis since Eric Embry's Texas brigade. Dave Brown is INCREDIBLE here--I wasn't buying what they were selling but damned if Dave doesn't do his best to get me to reconsider. He plays every note from disgust to annoyance to righteous anger absolutely perfectly, and it's one of the best things I've ever seen from him. The past clips of Gilbert's misdeeds as commercial bumpers are at the same time a very cool nod to history and a reminder of just what a non-event this latest turn was.
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I never liked the USWA dumping the Southern championship name so it could have a "Unified World" title and a USWA Heavyweight title. There were three major stories dominating the news in the first part of '94, and they're the ones Weird Al sang about in his Crash Test Dummies parody. Mercifully no company saw fit to run a John Wayne Bobbitt angle. Yet. Dave Brown doesn't seem all that comfortable with this. I wonder if he or Bob Caudle was easier to "break." Christopher brings out a caning expert to demonstrate the power of the Singapore cane on a fiberglass kidney protection device. Gilbert is laughing and smirking his way through this until he hears the smack, and then he's suddenly pretty worried.
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Did I just mention that this is rock bottom for the WWF? I think I'll mention it again.
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Another shittily-produced video. This time period may be rock bottom for the WWF in all facets.
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Diesel going from bodyguard to IC Champion to PPV World title challenger this quickly was just absurd, and was yet another example of the plummeting WWF roster quality. Bret outlines his plan to take down Diesel.
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I think this may have aired before the Funk/Arn promo, as that had Funk sticking up for his family. Very good segment--it doesn't seem like much but this was the little type of thing not being done by the Big Two at the time.
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Arn cuts the exact promo on Sabu you'd expect him to cut, if that makes sense. These two finally bring their A games together.
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Good Lord, the production values of this are awful--sub-Memphis quality. At first I thought this was some indy promotion video until he started talking about the Undertaker.
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That's actually the Japanese national anthem, and yet hilariously your description still isn't wrong. Earthquake recites his sumo career and has apparently issued a challenge to Yokozuna.