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PeteF3

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Everything posted by PeteF3

  1. PeteF3
    Good action with Richard Lee taking a surprising amount of punishment. I don't know if it's quite to the levels of Cornette in latter-day SMW but I think Lee should be selling the long-term effects of these beatings a little more. The Moondogs beat down the babyfaces afterward. I like the involvement of the Gilberts to freshen things up a bit but Lawler should probably be moving into his own separate thing now and leave the two tag teams to face each other.
  2. PeteF3
    No heat at all for this until Dustin and Barry start mixing it up. It's not a badly worked match but the crowd can't be compelled to care, and Rhodes comes off as more of the heel even though they make every attempt to make Windham look callous and Steamboat sympathetic. And the nod to Starrcade '87 was pretty great, though it went totally unnoticed by Ross. LOVED Windham crashing the locker room, a perfect exclamation point that saves a somewhat iffy angle.
  3. PeteF3
    Was Undertaker's promo from the video wall? I think this was the pre-taped Raw where Shawn went off-script and started repeatedly daring Undertaker to come to ringside if he was so bad, knowing that Undertaker wasn't actually in the building or wasn't supposed to come out, and was probably delivering this promo on tape. This resulted in a segment that had to be chopped to pieces and rebuilt because it made obviously made UT look foolish. That may explain why this would have felt "off." Says a lot about how secure Shawn felt his spot was--showing up the Undertaker that blatantly is something that I don't think had been attempted before or since. EDIT: Maybe it was the 9/8 interview. It was somewhere around here.
  4. PeteF3
    Sting turned in a very good performance and Rude did some fine selling, but it did taper off mightily when Rude was in control. I'm beginning to see the complaints about Rude sitting in holds, because we get a lot of that here. And yes, we suddenly have judges at ringside for the King of Cable matches. I like the idea, but Ventura in particular spends way too much time talking about how they're scoring points that the ending is pretty much a given. This was still a good match, but it like this whole tournament didn't feel very consequential, and I think these two have a better long match in them.
  5. PeteF3
    Someone was thinking, loading this video with ladies fawning over these guys so that it didn't overly resemble homoerotic beefcake videos that wrestling had seen before. This was what it was.
  6. PeteF3
    "Ghetto Odds"...sheesh. Some awkward announcing as Scorpio is a mystery replacement for Robbie Walker and they can't identify him by name. This is a particularly vivid Watts-era memory for me--Scorpio's 450 splash caused my MOTHER, who happened to be in the living room as this was on, to mark out. Scorp is instantly drawing a bigger reaction than Simmons--this is a guy who should have been way bigger of a star than he was. He was charismatic, he could fly, he had urban appeal, he could mat wrestle...he could do everything except talk, at least at this point.
  7. PeteF3
    What's interesting is some time ago I discovered on Youtube a Prime Time segment where McMahon and the babyface panelists called out Heenan for having Flair in the Rumble and not Perfect, which created tension before Heenan successfully reconciled the situation by show's end. So it seems they had a Perfect/Flair split in their back pocket for awhile, just like we know they had the Ringmaster gimmick in the can for a few years and probably had the idea of Nailz for as long. Anyway, everyone here is great but Heenan delivers a performance on par with his legendary work in the '92 Royal Rumble. I've liked WWF Flair a lot more than Loss, but I agree that this is him at his most Crockett-like. His work after Perfect makes the babyface turn official is the peak--"YOUR NAME IS HENNIG! YOU'RE NOT PERFECT ANYMORE!"
  8. PeteF3
    The "fighting champion" gimmick was a unique way to push Bret, but at the time there was certainly a perceived star power drop-off from Flair/Savage to Bret/Shawn.
  9. PeteF3
    It's hard for me to get into these early-'90s indy handheld bouts, since the build isn't there and these generally come off more as fantasy-booked dream matches than the culmination of some blood feud. The action is fine but these come off more as a product of their time than just about anything else during the year.
  10. PeteF3
    Good segment but the build to this still feels incomplete. In a perfect world I think they could have held Jannetty's return off until after the PPV and run a different hot angle with Shawn and Bret.
  11. PeteF3
    I like Flair putting over the Michaels title win and the Survivor Series title match.
  12. PeteF3
    It's been fun to see certain trends that have been (by sheer coincidence) popping up on various TV shows all at once on these Yearbooks. We had Racism Week in 1990, conflicting tag partners earlier this year, and now both of the Big Two are expressing a fetish for matches centered around injured backs. This is as complete of a Shawn singles match as we've seen, as he bumps great and even shows off some fresh offense. In a very weak year for the WWF this is probably the best match to air on free TV.
  13. PeteF3
    Good match with some great cut-offs by the Barbarian, especially his casual tossing off of Dustin when it looks like Dustin is about to make his big comeback and hit the bulldog. They also do a good job of establishing that Barb is somewhat lost without Cactus Jack at ringside. Rhodes gets in a rollup for the pin and Larry Z on commentary actually sells it pretty great. As far as Barb singles matches I think the Boss Man match is still better, but this is one for a comp should one exist.
  14. PeteF3
    Watts with a surprisingly straightforward announcement about Jake. Some people in charge would have talked about how Sting beat Jake up in a parking lot and sent him running.
  15. PeteF3
    Armstrong explains that Sullivan targeted Brian Lee because Armstrong wouldn't allow him to wrestle in the territory. He's going to allow Sullivan to wrestle, just not on television. With Lee out, Sullivan will be facing the Mongolian Stomper. Clips of a pretty intense fight between Armstrong and the Stomper. Once again Armstrong is doing Lee's work for him, but when the promos are that great, what are you going to do? Caudle reads a prepared statement prior to Sullivan's "paid advertisement." Sullivan blames Bob Armstrong for Brian Lee's condition, and laments how wrestling has become a sanitized kiddie show. I suspect Cornette is tacitly speaking through this promo, but it's instantly probably my favorite Sullivan promo ever.
  16. PeteF3
    The Moondogs are destroying a barn as Richard Lee has them restrained by barbed wire. Doug Gilbert makes the mistake of coming out isolated with Eddie Gilbert in Philly, and he gets assaulted by the Moondogs with a roll of barbed wire.
  17. PeteF3
    Hard to say if the Yearbook timeline got messed up or if the WWF was in just that much chaos. Perfect and Savage as trash-talking partners is so, so much fresher than Savage and Warrior as lovers.
  18. PeteF3
    Some neat spots here and good focused work around Rude's back, which pays off in various ways throughout the match. Kind of a weak ending out of the blue and not executed all that well. And have I mentioned yet that I'm going to miss Jake?
  19. PeteF3
    This is awesome, which makes it all the more frustrating that this is it for Jake in WCW. Jake makes threats towards every top babyface and the unfulfilled potential is just SMH-worthy.
  20. PeteF3
    Nice continuity, acknowledging the past partnership. Zenk declares Paul E. "is the epitome of bad attitude, LOSER." Pillman & Paul E. is presumably another alliance like Paul E./Hayes that didn't go anywhere.
  21. PeteF3
    Total chaos, and Sullivan was a great payoff to the Master stuff. Jobbers try to make the save, a cameraman tries to intervene, and BOB CAUDLE leaves his desk to try to get Sullivan to stop this. Mantell is so horrified that he says, "This shit will never get on TV anyway." We can barely hear that Bob Armstrong says that Sullivan will never be allowed on television again ("you son of a bitch"). Crazy as hell that this aired on weekend television. Everyone sells this great--one of the angles of the year.
  22. PeteF3
    It does tend to undermine the Texas Death stip that the teams come back and wrestle more matches the next 3 nights, but these guys are all so good that that doesn't matter.
  23. PeteF3
    I always thought this was a phantom switch in "Cleveland," but that must have been some other Unified title change. When Todd got his football letter jacket at Utah State, he asked somebody to read it to him. Lawler's been away from the title for quite awhile so it's nice to see him back on top. Champion still isn't good but he seems markedly improved from his Patriot days, and came off well the previous week on TV. To the point where I'm surprised the WWF never gave the guy a look. Lee has foregone the Heyman look for a total mountain man scuzzball. Lee takes us on a tour of the palatial estate bought with the Moondogs' tag team championship money. Lee's deadpan narration is hilarious.
  24. PeteF3
    I definitely associate this with WM10, including Stu's involvement. But this is clearly from '92, going by the clips used. Good tie-ins to the lyrics, too.
  25. PeteF3
    I actually liked this better than the first tag match. Maybe it's because Aja and Bull have such presence and a specific way of working that it overcomes one of my issue with joshi--that everyone seems to work at the same pace and in a similar style, so all the sequences in a tag match tend to run together the way that just doesn't happen in All-Japan or New Japan. I get that that's an oversimplification--I don't need to be told what sets apart someone like Toshiyo Yamada--but she still wrestles a similar pace with big kicks instead of other big moves. Anyway, that doesn't really come across here as even though they bump and give lots to their opponents, Bull and Aja still establish themselves as monsters. And there's a nicely focused closing run with Hokuto getting trapped into the ring and getting some great kickouts before a double-team puts her down. Definitely more satisfying on almost all levels than the first match.
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