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PeteF3

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Everything posted by PeteF3

  1. PeteF3
    Okay, more progress: if Malenko beats Barry Windham tonight, Flair gets his wish. But Dusty Rhodes (!!--out of the mothballs) will be the guest referee. I could say that there should be something else on the line, like Flair's fired if he loses, just to make the stakes higher, but this is another solid segment. I hope it was put over later just how much Dusty (the character, at least) hates Flair in addition to being in the bag for the NWO.
  2. PeteF3
    Generally Flair promos where he rattles off a bunch of names are better than the ones where he doesn't...okay, not really, but it was nice to see him go back to that. We now seem to finally be moving forward where things are happening again in this feud, first with Windham turning and now making it apparent that Flair vs. Bischoff one-on-one is in the cards.
  3. PeteF3
    Sigh. I wish I could say that Jericho singlehandedly dragged Konnan to the best match he's been in for years, but I have to grudgingly admit that he pulled his weight here, sort of. He offered quite a bit of fun offensive spots, even if his selling sucks and I hate him and I hate this result.
  4. PeteF3
    A disturbingly orange man with a follicle problem and no political experience announces his candidacy for President, promising to make America great again. How far we've come. Leno calls out Hogan for not declaring a political party, which is about the one and only instance of an actual confrontation on the Leno-era Tonight Show.
  5. PeteF3
    Jericho and Eddy heeling on a tribute to a man legitimately on the verge of dying is brazen as all hell, but I love it because it was so ballsy and because you know Hildebrand was probably 100% behind them, for the sake of the business. It even takes a little of the sting out of the "Eddy's in hell" crap...not enough, but some. On a happier note: yeah, this was one of my favorite US matches of the year, and it's precisely *because* of the setting. Ideally you would want this to be on television or PPV where people could see it, but the presentation and the atmosphere and the announcing would just kill it. Here there's no time cues, no commercials, no bickering announcers talking about the NWO, no one telling them to go home early because Hogan's talking segment ran long, no Nash or someone trying to piggyback on the moment, no desires to SWERVE anybody, and we're in Knoxville where Mark Curtis was already a known quantity with a rabid crowd squarely into the story of the match instead of looking to get seen on TV. Even if it's far from one of the high-end tag matches of the decade, taking away all those factors is one of the biggest additions by subtraction for any match you'll ever see. There are some good hot near-falls but this never really feels overindulgent--a good blend of '90s and territorial wrestling with the only possible finish. For a few minutes, Smoky Mountain Wrestling was alive and well again.
  6. PeteF3
    Those Keith ratings are classic SKeith: look at who's in the match and then pick your star rating from there. No need to actually watch much less analyze the bout. Edit: Okay, I don't want to spam the thread, so I'll start tacking on--there's a major reason for the timing issues with this show that Chad suggests, and also is the reason why this show was so heavily downplayed both at the time in retrospect. Initial advertising built this show around one of the money matches on the card of the Steiners vs. the Hell Raisers. But, the WWF pulled a power play and sent a cease & desist, saying that the Steiners were under contract to them and they had all PPV rights. So the match, by all rights the main event from a U.S. standpoint, had to be axed from the show and this 6-man full of (to the U.S. audience) nobodies had to be thrown on in its place.
  7. PeteF3
    Yeah, like I'm taking bait on doing Ron fucking Simmons research. Actually, you all pretty much nailed it. He did have the sort of weird heel turn in '94 and the beginnings of a teacher vs. protege feud with Ice Train, and then I think something with the Boss (Man, Is He Big), both of which went nowhere.
  8. PeteF3
    Austin can sell just about anything, even this crap angle.
  9. PeteF3
    THIS IS THE SAME FUCKING ANGLE THEY RAN WHEN TAZ FIRST TURNED HEEL AND JOINED WITH ALFONSO FOR THE LOVE OF--I give up. Taz is still whining about his broken neck from '95. Yeah, he really sounds like he's on the NJ Turnpike here.
  10. PeteF3
    At least the match was kept short with a minimum of near-falls, as Taz the invincible tough guy is taken out in easy fashion and is dead for the bulk of the match, and Douglas goes down soon afterward. RVD working heel against Shane Douglas working babyface is one of the most hilariously misaligned match-ups in wrestling history. Afterward Taz debuts the Tazmissionplex and this is sold like a Memphis piledriver onto a table in a rather pathetic attempt at emulating the Douglas-Pitbull angle. Except that angle had a clear good-evil divide and was something that people believed in--here it's an excuse for the trained seals in the Arena to do another E-C-Dub chant. So, what, are we double-turning Taz and Sabu AGAIN?
  11. PeteF3
    "I got something that TROY MARTIN and FRANCINE FOURNIER want to say to you." Oh, for fuck's sake. Douglas recounts all the ballsy stuff he's done in the ring, none of which is really all that ballsy. Douglas points out that he hasn't been able to shake Taz for five years--yeah, he's right, this build *has* felt five years long.
  12. PeteF3
    Yeah, this was a bit disappointing, as Rock didn't do much for his heat segment other than work the chinlock--again, gamely put over by JR as he ties it in to X-Pac's bad neck. X-Pac's comeback is pretty good though, and they manage to believably sell a long encounter even though this match is only 8 minutes and change. Shawn's turn is about the most Russoriffic Russo that ever Russo'd--all the elements are there: taking the chair away, then turning and whacking the babyface with it, for some reason not interfering when there were 3 or 4 times when it looked like X-Pac was going to win, etc. The quadruple Corporate Crotch Chop was a good way to close the show.
  13. PeteF3
    How the fuck did Undertaker and Bearer just get in and out of the hospital like that, dragging an unconscious patient with them? Why are cameramen filming and following this instead of calling the police? This is Russo's ego run amok and a bad sign for what's to come with this company. JR deserves some sort of weird props for going along with this and trying to sell this as best he can, but yeah, this is absolutely moronic and nonsensical and not really over-the-top enough to be entertaining, either. The Austin-Vince stuff after Judgment Day was bizarre and unsettling, but you at least sort of know what they were going for and it had a payoff that the crowd liked. This...no one could have derived entertainment from this. The upside is that the company is still hot enough that this segment is mostly forgotten about, rather than living on in infamy. They wouldn't be so lucky with something like Katie Vick. The one positive for me is I get to play spot-the-local-flavor with these bits--even though this is supposedly in San Jose, this Raw and these segments were in Columbus, and the funeral home (it's gone now) was one I drove by frequently. The hospital may or may not have been the one about two blocks from my current apartment. I love the idea of Kane walking the streets of Clintonville, casually strolling his way to making the save.
  14. PeteF3
    In exchange for Henry dropping his sexual harrassment suit, Chyna reluctantly agrees to go on a dinner date with him. Mark is entertainingly giddy.
  15. PeteF3
    Good way to get over the angle the previous week...too bad this is going to be the high point, I suspect.
  16. PeteF3
    In hindsight I think they telegraphed the swerve too much by talking about how Shawn and Vince don't see eye to eye and that Shawn can't be controlled--not to a Joey Styles extreme, but it was there.
  17. PeteF3
    This is pretty much it for the Giant--he's been past the point of being a real meaningful force as evidenced by doing a job to Rick Steiner, but this gets over pretty huge. It's incredible how EFFORTLESS Goldberg makes it look, to Jackhammer him. Yeah, you can really tell the fans were sick of this guy. Good post-match, too--as we can see here, even with Nash's involvement, there was no reason whatsoever not to headline Souled Out with Goldberg/Bigelow, maybe make it "unsanctioned" and lead to another match at SuperBrawl.
  18. PeteF3
    Well, this was depressing on every level. Jericho has gone from being one of the hottest acts in the company to feuding with Bobby Duncan, Jr.
  19. PeteF3
    Yeah, people point to this as the Beginning of the End, and there are certainly signs the Nash Regime to come all over this Nitro. But this strikes me as pretty good booking in a vacuum. Wrath gets put over pretty well and the match is pretty competitive and even well-worked.
  20. PeteF3
    For all the talk of "tradition" you'd think someone would be clued in on the fact that Windham was not an "original" Horseman, but I guess Ole has been Stalinized from history at this point. I didn't care much for the delayed execution of the Windham turn, nor for Bischoff telegraphing it. Windham's probably in a better role as an NWO B-teamer than a Horseman hanger-on, though.
  21. PeteF3
    Definitely a fun little match, with Kidman working to ground Rey and Rey playing hit-and-run, including turning a sunset flip into a bulldog...somehow. I guess Juventud's interference last week was a bit of accidentally-on-purpose work on the LWO's behalf.
  22. PeteF3
    "When he's got a 1 behind the 190, it's gonna be--MEEEEEE!" --Kevin "Antichristo" Nash. Then he makes fun of Goldberg for being overly intense despite Goldberg not really acting that way.
  23. PeteF3
    Eddie's little asides to the camera are hilarious. I don't recall Rey Jr. actually *signing* a contract last week, but whatever. Rey as an indentured servant seems like a decent mid-card angle since he's more over than Chavo, Jr.
  24. PeteF3
    Pretty shitty action, minus the Goldberg/Bigelow brawl. Absolutely flabbergasting that they didn't run that match as a headliner--even for Nitro (not counting the non-match last week). I don't see any reason for optimism just looking at this match in a vacuum. Benoit and Malenko get tossed like common jobbers and the divide between the Old Guard and those two, Booker, and Wrath is still rock-solid.
  25. PeteF3
    Don't really know what's going on here and God knows I'm not going to investigate further. Some NWO referee is officiating this apparent non-match, then Goldberg breaks up the party. Nothing segment, but listen to this Palace crowd and try to tell me that "Yeah, Goldberg had to lose at Starrcade, fans were getting sick of him." Bull-fucking-shit.
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