PeteF3
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Bischoff makes sure to beat over our heads that veterans will always find a way to outsmart youngsters. The idea of Piper "knowing his own weaknesses" is...oh, I can't keep typing "LOL" or fake-laughing at every single WCW segment, but that's what it is. Eric is rambling about nothing in particular instead of putting over the finish. -
This is basically what the planned Ric Flair appearance at Over the Edge '98 was going to be (except they were also going to publicly honor the man named Flair who'd recently won a North Carolina wrestling championship, referring to Reid, and ohbytheway Ric's sitting next to him).
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Swoll is being put over already. My past shame is that in high school I was an obsessive Smashing Pumpkins fan and a regular reader of their old Usenet newsgroup, on which a quasi-feud erupted between Pumpkins fans and Master P fans because both of them were releasing albums at the same time and both fanbases wanted to be #1 on the Billboard charts. And that and his work as a sports agent is about my entire familiarity with Mr. P. Again, hitching onto him isn't a horrible idea in the abstract but this is carried out in about as uncool of a manner as possible. Chad is right about Mean Gene--"...of such hits as 'I Miss My Homies'..." was an LOLworthy moment in a veritable sea of LOLworthy WCW moments these past couple of weeks.
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Feelgood segments in wrestling. Whatever happened to them?
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Those sort of look like Guy Fawkes masks but I'll chalk that up to coincidence.
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Savage looks so horrible here, it's sad and almost disturbing to watch. The ladies have to do the heavy lifting because he has absolutely nothing left to offer. Fittingly the best spot in the match is Miss Madness hitting Nash with a missile dropkick. Nash has to beat up the women after the match because Savage only has so many bumps in him, then we get Sid. Honestly, he's not a horrible get for WCW at this point but I remember absolutely hating the gimmick of beating up cruiserweights and educating the crowd that the mid-card (a longtime point of difference from the WWF) doesn't matter anymore. I suppose we'll get to that when we get to it. As it is, I'd rather listen to Sid cut a promo than Savage, so this feud is actually starting to look up.
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Bryan Alvarez went on a huge rant today on F4W on how the WWE books its babyfaces to be complete bumbling idiots. That's a problem that goes back to late '90s WCW, because good Lord was Malenko a dumbass here. I'm okay with the Triad but this is just another excuse to emasculate the Vanilla Midgets some more. Not only are they not as good as the Old Guard, but they're stupid, too.
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Hahahahahahahahaha. Oh my God. That's--that's...HAHAHAHAHAHA. Six days after the funniest angle of the year, WCW tops themselves. Tony gamely attempting to put this over as the most heinous act he's ever seen just adds to it. The shot of Doug Dillenger and his track meet security team...I'm literally almost falling out of my chair here. I've heard of both of these angles but never seen them. They're more hilarious than I ever could have imagined. On a less happy note, this is now the birth of Rick Steiner being possibly my least favorite worker of all-time, certainly the worst of this time.
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Between the Sheets #101 (June 21-27, 1995) (Featuring Emil Jay)
PeteF3 replied to KrisZ's topic in Publications and Podcasts
Kudos to Emil for a gallant effort in defending a universally panned show, but I don't see the comparisons of Mabel to the ECW talent named holding up at all (though Emil's point about fans accepting this if it took place in the Arena with Joey Styles putting it over is a fair one, even if I think he exaggerates a bit). Chad Austin, Donn E. Allen, the weirdo Dudleys, Big Val...all jobbers or comedy figures. 911 wasn't, but as Bix said, he didn't really wrestle--he was essentially a team mascot. Mabel was being pushed as a nominative main eventer. I'm as down on ECW and its trained seal fans as just about anyone, but in the end my response to Emil's point is..."Well, that's how wrestling works." It's not really about "giving the fans what they want to see," it's about making fans want to see what you're giving them. At this point in the '90s Heyman was more successful in that regard than the objective failure that King of the Ring was. I think if Nelson Frazier had come along in 1983, he'd have been a sensation--a near Andre-sized guy who could actually move and sell. But until he went over Adam Bomb in the qualifier the previous month, he was a tag guy. Or, when Mo was out in '94, a mid-card singles guy putting over the likes of King Kong Bundy and Jeff Jarrett. Throw in his attire and his name, which I maintain is possibly the worst in the history of wrestling when you factor in what they wanted him to be, and this push was death from the start. I'm with Bix on the booking of Sid--the idea of booking Sid as a Honky Tonk Man-type coward was dumb on its surface. -
The video package gives us a few fill-ins on stuff we missed, like how Benoit & Malenko split from the Horsemen. The confrontation with Arn, naturally, seems to be the best part of this. Piper reads a top-10 list of why Flair shouldn't run WCW, which was a quasi-infamous bomb of a segment but admittedly the #1 reason is couched in pretty airtight logic. That said, WHO ON EARTH DECIDED TO RUN THIS MATCH A *SECOND* TIME? Is this Nash using Piper and Flair the way Dusty used Paul Jones and Jimmy Valiant, sticking them with each other so they don't dare screw up anyone else? Arn is the best part of the match and post-match as well. The idea of Buff as the leader of the new generation is whatever but there's a ton more wrong with WCW than that. Still, the execution of the Piper turn is pretty shitty since a.) there's a way to do it without having him align with Flair all of a sudden, and b.) the announcers, Tenay's "establishment sticks together" line notwithstanding, obviously aren't clued in and don't know how to get over that Piper turned on Bagwell for costing him the match and Presidency. Heenan even says Piper's "directing traffic" when he's doing no such thing.
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I don't think anyone saw this gimmick getting as big as it did. We get Booker T's catchphrase, months before he had it.
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Test gets friendzoned. This won't last. We see the apparent set-up for a Test-Double J Heat main event.
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Don't know how anyone would have thought this was a good idea. Speaking of bad ideas, who decided on the Price Is Right Cliffhanger yodeling music as the right theme for this ad?
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DON'T TICK ME OFF. This is an improvement over his action figure, whose t-shirt said DON'T MAKE ME MAD.
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I'm not sure why the Dudleys have to suddenly be comedic idiots now.
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You have to admire the Dudleys and Gertner's commitment to being scumbag heels.
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So many weird little things to get through before we get to the big stuff. The sudden presence of the Dirty White Boy, and Kimberly, neither of which I could have expected. I also had no idea that "BSK" was used as a kayfabe stable name at any point anywhere. Easily the best Power Pro segment ever to this point and one of the best segments of the year. This isn't far behind the all-time classic Memphis Yearbook segments like Lawler/Snowman and the big Jarrett/Gilbert confrontation. Doug Gilbert makes a surprise appearance clearly playing off real-life animosity between him and the PPW camp, as Dave Brown channels his distaste for the likes of Scott Bowden and takes that same tone of voice when dealing with Gilbert attempting to use a live mic. Knowing now that many of Brown's arguments with Bowden were shoots, this had *me* thinking that Dave was shooting again. It takes on another level with all the talk of Gilbert being a "loose cannon" who can't be trusted with a live mic knowing what's to come in that regard. And as pointed out, none of this is too inside-baseball for anyone to grasp. I don't know what the backstory is here, but I didn't need to--I could tell just from everyone's tone and the little bit of backstory that the heat between Gilbert and Hales was very much real. The highs in Memphis get fewer and farther between as the '90s go on, but this segment proved that when they get the opportunity they can still knock an angle out of the park.
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I still want more of the righteous indignant Corino over the sniveling coward, but he *is* really good at being a sniveling coward, isn't he? The "MAESTRO, HIT MY MAN'S MUSIC!" stuff was great. Corino begs off of a title match so Spike Dudley gets it instead. It goes about how you'd expect but Spike gets in a few offensive spots, like hitting the Acid Drop off the ring apron over the guardrail. Taz gives Spike a handshake afterward and to my shock and amazement doesn't immediately level him with a Tazplex.
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Loss summed up my feelings as well. The first 20 minutes or so of this are *great*, with some nice stiff matwork and really great laser-focused psychology. Kobashi starts off working the ribs with all kinds of shit he doesn't normally do, but the transition to arm work is pretty nicely done as Kobashi opens the door with a big armbreaker off the apron onto the guardrail. Again, we see stuff out of Kenta we simply don't see, and he manages to actually get some attempted arm submissions over as credible "near falls" despite the almost complete abandonment of submissions in the company. That said...it does go off the rails for sure. Not as badly as the '97 Misawa-Kawada match, the other big example of this trope, but it's a similar, better version of that match. Kobashi getting out of the TD '91 *and* making a comeback...I get that they wanted to top 1997 but that seemed to be a bridge too far for me. "Perplexing" is the right word for this, because it's absolutely a MOTY-level bit of work, but it's also problematic in the way that I found the '03 match to be problematic when I watched it (like 12 years ago). This will make the list--the good parts are as good or better than the Misawa-Kawada match and the bad, despite everyone's complaints, isn't nearly as bad. But they were clearly attempting to top the '97 matches and...well, maybe that was an impossible task considering 1/97 is my #1 AJPW match ever, but in the end they didn't do it.
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Nash promises to be about 90% for the Bash, and will be all right with the help of some cold beverages. Okay then. They try to make a huge deal about the elbow drop being reinstated for the match Sunday, which kind of loses its luster in the face of attempted vehicular homicide and internal injuries.
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As little as I care for her as a performer or even as a figure of beauty, I'm sort of torn on Sable--she wasn't in a conducive environment in regards to women's rights or health, and it's not like she barged into Titan Tower demanding to be pushed. Vince liked what he saw, pushed her to the moon, and she became a major ratings draw whether we like it or not. In the end, there was probably merit to her lawsuit, but not $140 million worth.
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God almighty, you don't normally associate Malenkos (real or fake) with stiffness, but was this a fucking war or what? There are slugging-it-out portions here that rivaled what we just saw with Tenryu and Hash, but these guys can also bring finesse and build to a climactic finish and intricate matwork and even some High-End Offense that the previous match simply lacked. Carl has been one of the biggest revelations of the past couple of years and I really need to see more of him, and I think he would have killed it in a bigger environment in Japan as well. Great intensity, great matwork, and some neat moves that I really don't think I've seen since. Maybe another MOTYC and I certainly don't remember seeing this many of these in 1998.
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Answering a question from two years ago: Gunn had been released in a post-WM purge along with Public Enemy, the Oddities, and some others. Barton looks out of place a few times but isn't offensive or anything, and I love how over his left hand is. Ace pins Akiyama after several near-falls and a million different Ace Crusher variations in what had to have been a pretty major upset. The foreigner well was drying up, so you have to give it the ol' college try with somebody, I guess. All in all a fun finishing stretch here.
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Hash's first match since the Dome disaster in January. He's dropped a lot of weight and otherwise looks like he never left. Why yes, I could in fact watch these two go at it all day. I wish it had gone 20+ and it might make a year-end list. As it is it's simply a very enjoyable slugfest between two of wrestling's greatest minimalists.
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I don't know where or how 411mania got that list but PWInsider said there are no extras. Which sucks.