Jump to content
Pro Wrestling Only

PeteF3

Members
  • Posts

    10287
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by PeteF3

  1. A B-show-worthy interview, with nothing of note really happening. But B-show Flair and Arn are still the top.
  2. Pretty eh match with the stipulation seemingly carrying less weight than it should. The sudden finish feels less like the time expiring and more like a screwjob.
  3. A spotfest that really got worse and sloppier as the match went along--even the referee. I wasn't happy to see Tajiri go out so quickly, either, as he was probably the most fundamentally solid worker of the bunch. These guys all work hard and it's never particularly boring, but they clearly didn't have much of a plan beyond who was going over and when.
  4. You forgot the true originator of the All-American Olympic Heel gimmick, Bob Roop. Edit: Flair (of course) manages to drag a decent match out of Bobo Brazil in Mid-Atlantic, on the old garbage films.
  5. That and he was a Jim Cornette Guy, I believe, and Cornette would be one person to fight to keep him as is.
  6. Well, Andre *was* his WWF character, and there are myriad other guys in the early expansion era who kept their character: Savage, Billy Jack, Hercules, John Studd, the Freebirds, Killer Khan, Nikolai Volkoff, Windham in '84, and on and on and on. And just this calendar year you had Pillman.
  7. Crush was pretty badly exposed when he actually had to work a real match. There's an alternate universe where he actually develops into something working mid-card for another year while Doink carries out his originally planned feud with Davey Boy, but as it was, I can't see it.
  8. Vince sparing Shane is *almost* enough for me to think that my hypothesis, desperately trying to explain away why Shane re-hired Austin just to fuck him over, might actually be true. This was awesome and Vince was awesome--amazing how the WWF has again crafted a segment revolving around 3 old retirees and a WCW also-ran into something far more compelling than anything WCW could put together with its gaggle of legends.
  9. Fun match--nothing new under the sun, exactly, but the heat is incredible and it's cool to see these two again with the heel-face dynamics reversed. Shamrock is coming into his own surprisingly well as a heel. Vince's reactions during and after the match are just tremendous, and the direction is really quite good as well.
  10. I think it was determined later that this was definitively *not* the belt that Mr. Perfect smashed on SNME, but something made up specifically for this angle. I wonder if they realized how much mileage they'd get out of this title at this moment.
  11. This is a night for random sports cameos. This one I remember well, though. Supposedly Shaq was just back there visiting and they wrote him into a skit.
  12. I like confident, vindictive Vince over overacting abused Vince. Vince is such a good performer that he's bulletproof no matter how badly he's embarrassed, but after the past few weeks, Mr. McMahon desperately needs to get some heat back on himself.
  13. Jericho seems to legitimately break Gene Mean when he starts touting his own pro football career. The future-endeavors line was an eyebrow-raiser. This was amusing enough but pretty pointless.
  14. I appreciated Eddy outing Konnan as being an Anglo but I don't get why the 7 LWO guys didn't just kick K-Dawg's ass, too. Oh, sure, Eddy tries to explain it by saying he didn't want the Wolfpack coming out with their bats, but since when did the Wolfpack ever give a shit about saving their own? They sure haven't shown it on past episodes of TV. Fort Lauderdale was a good place to run this angle, though. I too had no recollection of A-Rod, who's remarkably skinny here...
  15. This is the start of the angle where it was revealed that Raven was a spoiled rich kid growing up, which I thought was a sensible twist to the character and fitting with his past gimmicks.
  16. I had a very narrow window as a gamer, limited almost entirely to the 16-bit era, so I missed on this. I did play No Mercy a lot, though, which I think was the same engine.
  17. These guys are working *way* too fast, because there's blown shit all over the place. Sabu steals the victory when Taz is on the verge of tapping Douglas out, leading to dissension in the New Triple Threat. Taz vs. Sabu again, what a bold direction for this company. Why is the World title still on Douglas?
  18. What a bunch of overbooked horseshit. The stuff with Jeff Jones and the Japanese dictionary is material that the WWE writing staff would be ashamed to pitch. Tanaka kicking out of the 3D should be a big moment...but guess what: that Great Announcer Joey Styles fucking telegraphs it by declaring the match over, which of course gives away that the opposite will happen. If my bitching about this sounds repetitive, then Joey should probably stop doing it.
  19. Why did they give away the Funk turn now instead of after Dreamer's match? The post hoc explanation was that Funk was pissed that Dreamer picked Jake Roberts as his mystery partner over him.
  20. Are they fucking baiting and switching us AGAIN between these two? I don't want to see this match myself, but god damn, guys. This is a strong contender for 1998's Worst Feud.
  21. Definite MOTYC--1/97 is still the peak of '90s AJPW much less this rivalry, but I definitely think this is more epic and memorable than 10/97. If you'd have told me this match would have had Kobashi kicking out of the TD'91 and the match continuing for another 5-6 minutes complete with a full Kobashi comeback, I'd have rolled my eyes--but that's what they did, and damned if they didn't make it work. I'm as cynical as anyone about self-conscious epics and just ranted about them again in the Olimpico review, but this is an instance where even if these two guys do overreach a bit, I still feel like applauding the effort instead of shaking my head. I think it's at least partly because the matwork they did for the first chunk of this was so well-done and so technically sound. Just strong work around holds, no rote preplanned chain wrestling sequences or contrived faceoffs to applause. I do find myself agreeing with what Chad said--Kobashi should have won this. He'd beaten Misawa twice already on this tour which sort of telegraphs this result, but if there ever was a time to change the AJPW formula, this was it. Yet, at year's end I could easily see this in the #1 spot. At the least, it's neck-and-neck with Kobashi's TC win over Kawada for the #1 spot for 1998 All-Japan.
  22. ECW's been pretty shallow and bad in '98 and I don't care about anything on this upcoming PPV, but this is about as good of an attempt as making chicken salad out of the chicken shit that is the N2R show as you can get.
  23. We see a very chilly-looking New Jack out in an alley somewhere. Dear God, New Jack and Jack Victory are STILL feuding? ECW loved to run angles where the Gangstas got attacked while doing pre-tapes.
  24. The Triple Threat lay out Sabu and the Dudleyz regain the ECW tag titles. Not much more to add to that.
  25. This was pretty good but it did have that "self-conscious epic" pall about it--Olimpico was GREAT at timing his kickouts for the last microsecond, but there reached a point where he almost seemed to be showing off how close he could make the count instead of building an organic story. It's also another point in favor of just doing a one-fall match if you're going to book a 2/3 fall match like this--I know, tradition and everything, but I say if you're going to get through the first two falls in like a minute apiece you may as well just skip them. Loved Halcon's funky reverse Gannosuke clutch to win the primera caida, though. I think I liked the first match better just because it was my first time seeing two relative unknowns. Here, they actually had expectations to live up to.
×
×
  • Create New...