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I got my copy and finished the first disc. My thoughts thus far: Did WWE save the old Nitro set pieces in a warehouse somewhere or did they re-create them for this DVD? I got a laugh out of Bischoff being so upset that Regal was bleeding pretty badly during the parking lot brawl. Regal was wearing a white T-shirt, which Ric Flair and Arn Anderson taught me, meant there was going to be blood. Regal has either his own or Finlay's blood staining the back of the shirt and Bischoff starts ordering the cameras to go wide. Why would you book that type of match with two guys who have no problem working that stiff against each other? The final moments of Chris Benoit vs. Lex Luger are included. Of course any mention of Benoit's name and a crowd sign reading "Benoit Rules" are edited out. I haven't seen any WWE DVD with Benoit on it yet so this was sort of surprising. There's a match where Ric Flair is escorted by Woman. I don't recall hearing her name mentioned at any point on the DVD, either. I thought that WCW had a pretty good story going with the Flair-Savage feud at the time. Elizabeth spending her divorce settlement on Ric Flair and Flair bragging about it driving Savage over the edge. As I recall, WCW had Savage getting arrested and beating up officials pretty regularly before Steve Austin was doing it on Raw. The Malenko-Mysterio draw is just kind of there, not sure why. Not the best work between these two but I guess they've exhausted their earlier matches on all the Rey DVD sets.

I just remembered this last night... I remember one of the PWI columnists ripping the first WCW Uncensored PPV to shreds for being so tame. They specifically attacked WCW for editing the "blacktop brawl." The column completely tore it apart, revealing that WCW filmed it the day before and were disgusted by the bleeding so they clipped it together. Their phrase was "edited down to cleanliness." The author said that Turner Broadcasting had a very strict no-violence policy and WCW was using a bait-and-switch knowing full well they couldn't get away with putting on an ECW-style card. I think it was a year later that Vince wrote his trademark Nasty Letter to Turner tattling on Eric Bischoff for advertising that there would be blood shed in the main event cage matches at SuperBrawl.

At times I felt Ross was the only one who lent an air of legitimacy to the "attitude" era in 1998. Then he just started saying the same stuff over and over again. "At home some idiot is sitting on the couch drinking a beer saying 'Oh, they know how to fall.'" "Busted him wide open, and I mean from ear-to-ear!" "That carpet/apron/anything isn't there for aesthetics!" "Out-quicking"

I used to have an old WCW Magazine where Tony Schiavone said at one of the Spring Break-Out shows (most likely 2000) that he got a major contact high from someone sitting behind him during the telecast. He said he began to laugh at everything, but considering he thought "hardcore" matches were hysterical I'm not sure there'd be much of a difference. My impression of Tony was that he seemed really good as the guy with the microphone conducting pre- and post-match interviews but being the lead play-by-play guy wasn't his calling. It became more apparent during the late 90s and onward as he seemed to be only capable of really describing and getting over simpler Crockett-style matches and angles and not the more edgy NWO and luchadore stuff. He seemed really, really, really pumped during the introduction to SummerSlam 1989. Was this his first appearance with the WWF?

My exposure to TNA during this time was extremely limited as I just didn't care about the promotion. I don't recall if it was 2002 or 2003, but the moment when Tony Schiavone appeared and he and Tenay had a face-off. A fan, directly across from the hard camera, holds up a sign reading "Total Nonstop Action has officially stopped." That just killed me.

I still see them at bookstores and department stores. What surprises me is that PWI is priced at something like $9 an issue now!

I remember when I was around 11 or 12 starting to wonder why London Publishing had so many damn monthly magazines and why weren't they all available at one bookstore?

That comes off as sad and grasping at straws. This set has a totally pro WCW feel. I'll take your word for it. I'll be picking my set up in the next week or so. The Monday Night War DVD pretty quickly turns into "all the things we did right and how we created Rock, Austin, and Foley and killed WCW" so a pro-WCW set would be nice to see. I really liked how they treated Starrcade on its set.

I picture Vince chewing him out backstage afterward for giving Horner too much offense or selling too much for him. I imagine Vince yelling, "Stop working that Crockett style, dammit, Barry!"

It may just be athletes not knowing how to really fake a wrestling angle. I recall Shawn Michaels writing in his autobiography that he was really worried Mike Tyson wouldn't be able to pull his punch at WrestleMania XIV because he was getting incredibly animated during rehearsals. I imagine football players aren't used to slamming into and picking up someone who is cooperating with 75% of the motion and thus could get manhandled pretty easily .

Goddamn I loved those things. I would buy a whole stack at Walden Books as often as I could, and all the little digest mags because they often reprinted articles I had missed. I think I really grew to love the Apter mags because as a young boy I was really sick of the Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan and they were often very negative towards both. I remember from about the summer of 1994 to when the NWO thing finally happened they were running a series of articles pushing that Sting was going to turn on WCW because of their protection of Hogan. There was also a spring 1995 story of Jimmy Hart giving Apter a floppy disk full of Hogan's journals and it revealed that Hogan pretty much thought everyone in WCW sucked and he didn't want to be associated with them. He called Renegade a "parasite", I remember. One 1995 issue of The Wrestler had a professional wrestling rulebook bound inside the magazine. I remembered cherishing this for some stupid reason. Also, I had two letters printed in PWI.

Part of me thinks that Shane just lost interest in wrestling altogether, as many men his age have done. He just may be more passionate about something else now.

My God, man, I'd forgotten how much I hated that card although the announcers seemed to be enjoying themselves. How could you forget Sting's match with Rick Steiner ending with Sting being mauled by dogs? About five minutes later Tony proclaims Sting will be ok because the dogs didn't actually hurt him. Then why shoot the angle? Just have Scott Steiner club him with a wrench when he gets behind the curtain.

Wait, Eric Bischoff challening Vince McMahon to a PPV match isn't on this thing? It was treated as a pretty big deal on the Monday Night War DVD.

Nobody cared about most of the celebrities, but the Titans brawl was a HUGE deal. Every local news outlet had that as their lead story the next day. Even TNA would have to know that they should've followed up on that, but it led to nothing even on the very next show. I'm assuming that the Titans management (if not the NFL higher-ups themselves) had a very stern talk with the players afterwards, ordering them to never do such a thing again. I have a vague memory of the Titans players getting some heat for doing a physical angle without permission. The angle was covered on many news stations, even here in Sacramento.

I remember Zybyszko always coming up with stupid nicknames for heels. The New World Odor, Chris Jerkico, etc. And burying the cruiserweight work pretty regularly.

This was also the time where Nash was booking the show with the theme that the camera crews and the TV viewers could see everything that was televised but the fellow wrestlers and announcers couldn't, correct? Something I remember pretty vividly from the late 90s, being that I was totally engrossed in pro wrestling back then, was how cheap WCW would be with their attempts to poach more Raw viewers. During the week where Shawn Michaels walked out on the WWF after his locker room brawl with Bret Hart the WCW shows began hinting almost every ten minutes that a "major superstar was defecting and could show up this very week on Nitro." I remember when Michaels returned to the WWF they just stopped mentioning it until Curt Hennig arrived. Also around that time some TBS newsmagazine show did a feature on the Power Plant. They found some guy who looked very much like Shawn Michaels and took him to Nitro, dressed him in jeans and a leather vest, and had him sit in the crowd. They showed various clips of him getting huge pops from the crowd and getting asked for autographs and the reporter was awestruck by how popular the guy was without having been in a ring yet. I remember thinking, "the crowd thinks it's Shawn Michaels and he's going to do a run-in tonight."

I don't watch the current TV product and had no idea this was out when I stumbled upon it at Wal-Mart this morning. I didn't want to purchase it until after I had read the contents online, especially after being so disappointed by the Raw 15th Anniversary DVD. I get the sense, much like the Rise and Fall of WCW DVD, that these segments are selected to first highlight people that work in WWE currently or moments that WWE editors think are important, no matter how many previous DVDs they've appeared on. The Hogan-Goldberg match and the Flair return being two examples. Contrast this with the Best of Saturday Night's Main Event, which was ridiculously thorough and even the Rey Mysterio 3-disc set that didn't seem to miss anything. I'll probably pick it up to add to my collection, though I certainly feel there is a lot of stuff that could have been included, such as the first Hogan-Sting match in 1995, Goldberg vs. Raven, or some of the NWO promos from the spring of 1997. Slightly off-topic, can someone explain why the staff of the Torch thought making DDP the champ in 1999 was such a bad idea? I remember reading a lot of hate for this decision, and Bruce Mitchell penned a column about WCW dying that summer and said making Page the champ was going to accelerate that (of course, I'm paraphrasing).

Right. I think it was around the summer of 1995 when Venom "quit" WWF Magazine and began publishing The Bite, which arrived looking almost exactly like the Torch did back then. Nothing really notable that I remember; the front-page story was written like it was from the Torch or Observer but it really just furthered an ongoing storyline. It was mainly wrap-ups of TV tapings and "backstage news" that just furthered storylines. I figure it did probably wind up becoming the Raw Magazine.

I feel the same way about the Doink character. Some people act like Goldust and Doink were these two very special characters that the WWF was going to set aside all their usual crap booking and one-dimensional storytelling for. That said, I think there were some interesting moments from both and the recent "Best of Raw" DVDs reminded me that the heel Doink was a pretty good worker. I remember loving the Goldust entrance with the flock of paparazzi and the music but being bored to tears by his ring work.

I'm with you on this, Loss. I used to read them as a youngster and wonder why they never got played up more on TV. In the 80s and 90s they were pushing them as the "only official source with access to WWF superstars!" but they seemed to do little more than provide recaps of the big angles and give you pictures to cut out to make your signs. Also, wasn't there a time when Vince wouldn't allow the Apter mags press credentials? I remember the WWF Magazine pushing really hard that the other magazines weren't allowed access to the wrestlers and for a long time the photography of WWF cards in the magazines always seemed to be from several rows away from the ring. Keep in mind I know those magazines were completely worked, yet I remember back then they never directly quoted a WWF talent. It was always, "A source close to Savage says..." or something like that.

I remember in 1995 Russo ran an angle in the WWF Magazine where he got upset at being censored (or something like that) so he "quit" and started publishing his own WWF dirtsheet, published by the WWF of course. I got a free trial subscription and it was mainly stuff like transcripts of McMahon chats on AOL and results of TV tapings before they aired but when you were twelve it was earth-shaking reading material.

FWIW, I remember reading some press criticism of the snake bite angle at the time, especially because it was airing on Saturday mornings, censored or not. I don't remember where or from who I read this but I have read that the damn snake did actually bite and wouldn't let go.

I was disappointed because both guys can really work and if they wanted to work a brawl they could have done a more imaginative one. It was really just a lot of punching and taunting and a few nice counters. I like the XV match better as a brawl and the XIX match was the best of them all by far, though it was a little weird to see Rock get so pissed at the referee (can't remember which) when he's trying to tell Austin how much he loves him that he shoves him away a few times.