PhilTLL

So it turns out the reason Rotunda told Ross not to ask too many questions, as Rotunda tells us on WCW 7/21/90, is that...Truckin' Norman is a tribute to his recently-deceased trucker dad. Jesus, that is one weird, sad twist. I think I liked my story better. Worldwide 7/21/90: More Tales of Steiner Squashes. Today's victims are tubby schlubs Crusher Knoff and Mike Thor. Scott helpfully intones "Boy, I'd hate to be those guys," and he is correct, as Knoff eats a release German from Scott to start and a ridiculously involuntary second rope belly to belly from Rick that Dutch Mantell calls a "crazy spot" on commentary. Thor gets the even worse end of the stick with a butterfly bomb from Scott that he doesn't get his head high enough for, making me think he is gravely injured, and at the end, a top rope DDT from off Rick's shoulders that is so absurdly vicious-looking that Nick Patrick scrapes him out of the ring like garbage, nWo-style. In the next match, Dutch hints at the Zeb Colter gimmick with a snide mention of H.W. Bush's "no new taxes" line. Edit: Jesus, they keep doing that top-rope/shoulders DDT, hitting it on 7/28 Pro on poor Joe Cazana. Wonder how long that continues. I have to say that pairing it with the Frankensteiner on the other guy is impressive as hell. You hit a guy you're not even pinning with a death move!

Here's some discussion about Hogan/Warrior 2 and why it might have been squashed for drawing reasons in the Hogan/Earthquake at SummerSlam Yearbook thread. I remember Meltzer specifically being surprised at how poorly Hogan/Flair drew in the Bay Area, too. Historyofwwe says it actually drew less in SF than Anaheim, 5k vs 6.3k, and SF drew around the 7's for Savage/Warrior, Slaughter/Warrior and Slaughter/Hogan in the same year.

That's a shame. The show actually started 1/1/85 with Ventura and Jack Reynolds. Over a year missing. Hopefully they upload the older ones.

I wonder just what percentage of Sting's promos include some variation of "I'm so worked up I don't know what to say/can't even talk right now!" It feels like at least half early in his career. Poor guy.

Arn and Pillman have a solid match on Main Event 7/8/90, a Pillman showcase with a skin of the teeth Arn escape. Would have been better/hotter if Arn got more offense in, but there are some really great bits of smooth, smart work there. Power Hour, 7/13/90: Ross and Pillman expound the virtues of the exciting new WCW Top 10, as though I couldn't remember they were heavily touting a Top 10 the previous year, for example as one of the starting points for the hottest feud of the year. Jim mentions that the exciting Great American Bash show at the Omni this weekend is brought to you by Schlitz Malt Liquor. Lex Luger wrestles a giant black guy in prison khaki named Deathrow (oooof). Norman is back as Truckin' Norman, wandering out randomly during a (good) Horsemen squash, and Jim tells us Rotunda told him not to ask too many questions about where he's been. Ooookay. I guess he was out picking up truckstop hookers. Michael Hayes and Tracy Smothers continue the Boys/Birds feud with a watchable if long main event, helped much by the always hot crowd at the Cobb County Civic Center. It feels like half of all WCW TV for 89-90 was taped there, and I can see why. Hayes taunting Smothers in the chinlock: "Come on, Tracy! Tell 'em you're from Green Bay! Tell 'em you've never set foot in the South!" They're two of the best at masking the fact they're going long. Work highlight: Smothers does a sitout splash across Hayes' knee that is so heavy it makes me wince. Finish is of course a schmozz because the teams facing off tomorrow night. As are Tommy Rich and Stan Hansen! Plus more about the exciting new Gauntlet! WCW the next day is clipped to 1 hour and shown in the afternoon due to a Braves doubleheader, and it is...uneven. You can see from the identical crowd and lack of sun through the CCCC's huge windows that this is later in the same taping as Power Hour. The Birds/Boys rematch is decent but pretty unremarkable. The low/highlight is Tim Horner needlessly repackaged (He was just wrestling as himself a week before! He will be again next week!) as "Starblazer" wrestling a terrible match against "Kola Kahn." Kahn is introduced from Ulan Bator in Upper Mongolia, which is evidently code for the joint. He is awful and Horner is likewise tonight, and this should be a straight-up Blue Blazer-style squash but isn't, leading to an absolutely full-throttle "BORING!" chant hand-conducted by grandmas in the front row. To be fair, they have taping fatigue. Horner looks like a minor-league hockey mascot. He botches a handspring elbow, landing a full three steps too early and being forced to backpedal into it. And then they replay that from an even worse angle in slo-mo, like they're making fun of him or something. "Starblazer" has a match against Rotunda ("Horner's" sometime tag team partner) at Clash 13 that I'm already skipping in my mind.

Due to the Commonwealth and the Special Relationship.

Really? I always took it as somewhat of a nod to VH1 Divas. They've been calling them divas since before the Real Housewives/Bridezillas era in pop culture. Sable was the first one to use it, says Wikipedia, and she was supposed to be (I know, I know) an empowered face shaking off her misogynist husband. But it's become muddled with Total Divas.

Bit of chicken and the egg here, as Benoit and Eddy among others played such a big role in culturing the "young workrate fan" generation that those later three made it big on (and were members of).

He got a huge pop for co-winning the battle royal at GAB '89. He could hardly let Spivey in the ring at Havoc '89 without hearing the "We Want Sid!" chants. Same at GAB '90 and he was with Arn Anderson and Barry Windham, for chrissakes. He could barely turn heel against Hulk Hogan. Actually, reimagining that angle as tweener vs. tweener makes it a lot more entertaining and better-booked. If Sid had been halfway decent at working to go with his off-the-charts charisma and look, and of course not such a nutcase on the mic and backstage, he would have been a huge star. Bless his goofy heart.

Rick Martel vs Randy Savage, 1/12/94 (Coliseum: WrestleFest '94) A really solid, smartly worked little Coliseum match, as good as I've seen from '93-94 for either guy, perhaps not great but very good. Martel's stooging is fun instead of lazy, which pays off in some hot transitions. Savage is moving pretty well and taking big bumps. I really love the smart work during the Savage-led "tenacious headlock" spot in the middle--it feels like they put some planning into it, as does most of the match, which is good since Model-era Martel can be rather ambling. Finish is a bit abrupt, but quite sensible. This is around 3.5* for me, and the best of the Model matches I've rewatched so far.

I'm switching for a bit from my WCW rewatch that started with 1989 and is now at GAB '90 to 1995 so I can watch some of the Flair/Savage feud and other semi-hidden gems from this very mixed bag of a company-year. Two things confused me immediately: (1) Why has Gordon Solie ramped up the enthusiasm so much? He opens Pro almost shouting at me. It is pretty endearing how excited he is to be with "the Pro Team!" - Solie/Dusty/Zbyszko is an inordinately loaded crew for the job. (2) Why is Blacktop Bully blasting an air horn like an unruly high school kid? Does that count as heeling? (Flyin' Brian on Baywatch!)

Power Hour, 7/6/90: Buddy Landell obliterates and embarrasses Stanley Little Bear, which is not surprising as Buddy is a squash master. What is surprising is the level of real life Jim Ross brings to his comments, openly referring to Buddy's wasted potential and self-destruction due to "attitude problems." He almost goes full-blown office at one point: "Buddy says he is completely refocused, and we have to take him at his word." Weird.

FYI, the Network version of GAB '90 has been updated to the full 169-minute runtime. If you dare. This was fine for what it was, much more enjoyable than Rotunda/Sheik (yikes) and Furnas/Dutch. Even Pillman/Landell was underwhelming. The high knee and swinging neckbreaker Harley hits here are so crisp they should be in training videos. Above his own high standards even at this late date.

It may have only been 6-8 hot years, but it's almost impossible to overstate what Vince did during those years. He rewrote the rules of the entire American wrestling industry, consolidated the vast majority of it, and developed an international marketing machine. That's not just WWE mythology. One thing that I wonder about is whether Vince would have survived the mid-90s without WCW's utter incompetence. They had him on the ropes from '95-97, and while Vince was definitely at his cagiest and most desperately creative, WCW shot their own feet over and over. Anyway, that's not the topic, I suppose. Just for me, I stopped watching on a semi-regular basis in 2009-10 or so. Not really sure why, just lost the spark. One issue I have with Vince is that he's apparently acquiesced to this sort of standardization of the product into a predictable but boring thing that is more concerned with stability than taking creative risks for possible growth. Whenever I do try to watch, I can't shake the feeling that most of the characters, work, stories, even the dialogue and announcing are interchangeable and pretty much the same as last year and the one before.

Speculating from afar, it always seemed to me that Carlito was very wary of and fed up with the business, and maybe more "normal" than most guys outside that context. But maybe he got there after years of being a dick.

I don't have a lot of stories, but a friend of mine in the production biz got to run sound for a bunch of WWE interviews at a TV taping here a few years ago. He said Edge and Show were two of the nicest guys there, and I told him that matches with their reputation, or at least what I always imagined.

Not as good as Heenan getting his team to chant "SURVIVE! SURVIVE!" in '8...whenever.

I've been kicked once and that's the only problem I've seen so far. Not even any video errors, though I haven't been staring at the screen at all times.

Yeah, that was going along fine except for a bit of muddling here and there, like fighting way too long on the top turnbuckle. Seems like there's a solid series/blowoff in them.

Holy cow, Vince's hair hasn't been that brown since powder blue suits with red WWF patches on them.

It's harder to apply to wrestling because fun is almost the entire name of the game, but other forms can be good without being fun, so much that you might not want to repeat them. Think Schindler's List, though certainly many movies, books, and music pieces fit. One match I can think of like that is Rock/Foley I Quit. It was a remarkable piece of gruesome drama, but I don't really ever want to see it again at this point in my life. "Guilty pleasure" to me isn't an actual feeling of guilt, it's an acknowledgement that whatever you're enjoying lacks a certain heft. Romance novels aren't great literature. I do think it's not all that useful a term for wrestling, where if you're in for a penny of silliness, you ought to be in for a pound, but I get what people mean by it. Something like Hogan/Kamala as opposed to Misawa/Kobashi.

Right, I should have said something like "match or element." That makes sense, though.

What does "high-end" typically mean? I feel like I've seen it used a few different ways, but maybe I'm making these up. Does it mean just a really good match? Matches with work, storytelling, or length that is particularly ambitious or high degree of difficulty, so a match could be "high-end" but not necessarily great? On the "high end" of a guy's body of work vs. the "low end"?

None of the series is, far as I can tell. I broke down and bought the repetitive piece of crap Best of MSG DVD, which I suspect had Boot Camp included just to entice such purchases. Totally worth it, though. Probably should have bought the Bluray, but I only have set top BR players and no BD-ROM drive, and I like portability. (You see, WWE? I will pay $10 for ONE MATCH if it's good and rare enough.)

(10 months later) They're almost certainly Roos. Shoes for your feet, pockets for your stuff!