[1995-03-19-WCW-Uncensored] Hulk Hogan vs Vader (Strap)

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Ric Flair doing a Ric Flair promo while wearing eyeliner and nail polish is awfully creepy. Flair and Vader have Hogan cornered when suddenly, it's time for the ULTIMATE SURPRISE! Fake Ultimate Warrior music starts playing and Renegade comes out. They try to hide his face at first. Flair tries to throw a punch and he grabs Flair's wrist. Flair sells it like he has been touched by an angry God! Between the Jimmy Hart return, Renegade, Flair and Arn, this is a pretty overbooked main event. I guess we can still safely say WCW-era Hogan throws the worst chairshots in the business, but in 2011, that's not the same level of criticism that it was in 1995. Terrible finish having Flair do the job in a Hogan/Vader match, and somehow it counts. Post-match, a masked man comes out and hits Flair and Vader with a chair while Arn comes out all tied up and gagged. The masked man is Savage. This is pretty far from a good match, but it's an entertaining one (even partially for the right reasons), and give Flair credit for carrying all of this.

[Tim Evans]

This is awful awful stuff. First, Why does Jimmy Hart come out so early? Shouldn't he have come out later if he was tied up? The Ultimate Surprise thing was sad. I guess people thought it was actually Warrior? And why does the Hogan dragging Flair thing count if the ref isn't even around? Just bad.

 

 

Also watching the main made me think of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGwrrFV5DN4...nyVLp0UV4kAOGk=

[El-P]

I don't see how any of his pile of shit can be defended in any level. This is not entertaining, this is the lowest low for Hogan and WCW until that point. Hogan proceed to take a huge crap on Vader, Flair and even Arn Anderson in the post-match, which is the shitty icing on the rotten cake. Everything is an abortion here, the match, Hogan's work, Renegade, Jimmy Hart showing up, the masked men, the amazingly dumb finish. Seriously up there with the worst of the worst Russo has ever done. Fuck you Hogan.

[PeteF3]

Vader mercifully shoves Tenay out of the way before he can ruin another interview segment. Flair looks creepy as hell in eye shadow and nail polish.

 

Buffer helpfully points out that this strap match is "sanctioned by WCW and the Mississippi State Athletic Commission." Way to sink the whole premise of the show, guys. This entire show needs to be mentioned among the all-time bait-and-switches, as they more or less promised a more violent, "adult" show, and ended up firing guys for blading and going to a wide angle on chair shots. This is objectively the second-finest strap match WCW held on PPV in the first half of the decade, but it's still a pretty terrible match. Somehow Flair works hotter sequences with the fucking Renegade outside than anything Hogan and Vader do. Both men liberally remove themselves from the strap, just because. Jimmy Hart shows up in tattered clothing, with no explanation after his disappearance was the running theme of the show the entire night. Hogan of course wins by dragging Flair to all four corners but gets double-teamed afterward, with Renegade "trying to get in the ring" sayeth Tony Schiavone. All for naught, as Hogan naturally makes his own comeback. Then some subterfuge involving Randy Savage disguised as a masked Arn Anderson--did the babyfaces just happen to have an extra black outfit with them? Arn gets embarrassed for the second time tonight after cutting such a gritty, realistic promo earlier.

 

I can't say that this was BORING, though the some of the work approached it so the focus could be on Flair and Renegade. But man is this garbage.

[DMJ]

I kinda liked this.

 

To start, if you include the pre-match promo from Flair and Vader and video package (which I do, even though I can't really defend it), the entertainment value starts pretty high. The stage is set thanks to providing context.

 

Then, the match begins, and you get the Renegade in all his cartoonish, over-the-top awfulness. Basically, from that moment on, there is not a single second when there isn't someone on screen doing something absurd/entertaining/interesting. Highlights (or lowlights, depending on your view) include Renegade's entrance (which gets a huge pop because the fans obviously thought the "Ultimate Surprise" would be Warrior, even though Renegade had been seen before in the background of a Hogan promo and looked nothing like him), Flair bouncing inside and outside of the ring in fear of the Renegade, Hogan getting chokeslammed, Vader running full steam into a ring post to try to add some sort of brutality to a very "soft" match, the Vader Bomb, the ridiculous arrivals of not only Jimmy Hart but also yet another "Masked Man," and then one of the most ridiculous, nonsensical endings imaginable. After the bell, things get even more ridiculous, with Arn Anderson waddling down the aisle, and the Macho Man and Hogan embracing and running the heels out.

 

This match is at the Three Stooges-meets-Marx Brothers level of lunacy. This is not an exhibition of any sort of quality wrestling in the athletic, competitive sense of the word and I can understand people hating the heck of this. I totally get that to some this unwatchable.

 

To me, though, it does have that "So Bad, It's Good" quality with just enough good work out of Vader and Flair to make it pretty hard to turn away from.

 

 

Meltzer gave this 3.5 stars and so would I.

[Mrzfn]

Awful, awful, awful. I actually enjoyed the first Hogan/Vader match so I was minorly hopeful for this, but what a horrible mess. Cheap Warrior clone, poorly explained Jimmy Hart "drama", Flair falling apart when anyone touched him, MORE masked men, nobody bothers with the strap, those truly terrible chair shots, Hogan can beat everyone himself anyway so why does he even need Renegade, and I don't even know what they were going for with Savage and Arn. So Arn was the original masked man who appeared in this match, but I guess Savage found him backstage, tied him up, had an identical outfit, put it on, appeared in the ring after Arn appeared (looking like a joke), and somehow Hogan and friends knew it was him... I guess? But even if you somehow accept all of that, for god's sake why do it? A mess of epic proportions and a great way to kill the shit out of anybody's interest in Vader (or Flair, or anyone...).

[Stiva]

An oddly entertaining trainwreck, helped by Flair's baffling determination to work as hard as possible throughout it. What this is, is maybe the perfect example of the hoops people had to jump through when booking Hogan. In order to placate him, they needed a fake Ultimate Warrior (who is unintentionally hilarious in that charming WCW way), a complete ignoring of the stip, Ric Flair dressed like one of the New York Dolls, Jimmy Hart miraculously freeing himself from whatever captivity he was in with no explanation and who only seems to be at ringside so they can use him to get Hogan back on offense, the usual no-selling nonsense, Arn Anderson doing a masked run-in and getting tied and gagged in the course of 5 minutes, Flair hitting Hogan with a chair, only to then be dragged around the ring, allowing Hogan to win the match and then Randy Savage for some reason. The only dude who ends up looking anywhere decent in the course of this bullshit was Hogan but, my god, what a way to go about it. If Hogan was laying these things out himself at the expense of everyone else, he's a twisted genius

Having said that, the opening moments are actually pretty fun. You have Hogan biting Vader, a few nice strap shots and some great stuff with Flair and Renegade as Flair is king-sized at selling complete fear of this absolute doofus. Vader is great at just ragdolling Hogan around with the strap, choking him and laying the shots in but that's honestly only about 4 minutes of a 20 minute stream of nonsense. This is probably worth a watch just for Flair being so goddamned incredible every time he encounters Renegade and Heenan cracking "I know he wears cheap clothes but this is ridiculous" when Jimmy Hart comes to the ring in rags.

[Superstar Sleeze]

WCW World Heavyweight Champion Hulk Hogan vs Vader - WCW Uncensored 1995 "Strap" Match

I am pleasantly surprised that some people liked this. It had its moments but it was more bad than good on the whole so I cant recommend it. Their SuperBrawl match is a classic, but this far less so. 

First thing's first, Flair in drag is absolutely glorious. He should have dressed as glam rocker the rest of the year. I have been watching a lot of his 1996 promo work post-Hogan turn. It approaches good, but it is too filled with non-sequiturs and scatter-brained to be good. Here he looks an absolute madman and he lays out the method to his madness. The professional jealousy and insecurity that ate him alive in the 80s only to be faced with the stark reality that it was all true that he is not as good as Hogan and worse yet not only is he not as good, Hogan stole the thing he loved most in the world his ability to wrestle! This is really powerful heel motivation. Some of the best character work ever and the make-up really enhances it all. I loved that promo! I think this rejuvenated the Flair/Hogan feud enough that could have went back to that well, but Flair/Savage was such a good feud that produced some amazing matches especially the Great American Bash 95 match that I am happy they didnt, but they could have. 

It is interesting they have already started bringing up Hogan going to the Dark Side. Hogan and WCW knew he needed an edge, but they didnt know how to get him there. The Renegade was ridiculous. Flair sold it like a million bucks. Fuck for one night only through the miraculous powers of Flair, it did work. Jimmy Hart coming out in tatters was fucking stupid. Why did that pip-squeak need a triumphant entrance? What was he going to do? All he did was distract for a mid-match turn the tide that was just one of many. The body of the match was very uneven. First off it was way too fucking long. It was 18 minutes. There was good stuff here like Vader taking the ringpsot shots, and feed for the nut shot. There was the VaderBomb and the Chokeslam. The Vadebomb happened what 5 minutes into the match. They sold too hard too fast. All the beginning spotlight was on Flair/Renegade. It fucked up their flow. It was a rather heatless match outside of the highspots. It was not well-paced. Now, if they gave this a proper finish, I think I would have gone in the ***-***1/2 even with Hogan mostly ignoring the stipulation and removing the strap. Hogan dragging Flair around to win is a bridge too far for me. 

I am pretty sure this was non-title. I think this was a perfect time for Vader to win, but what do I know. They have Arn Anderson come out and explode Wooden chairs against Renegade and Hogan. Flair gets in on the act. I wonder if Wooden chairs are the answer. They might hurt less than metal and they have the cool visual of exploding. If I was a a promoter or booker, I'd look into them. Vader has the match won only for Flair to ask him to try to splash Hogan. Vader misses the most ginger somersault. He looked like a four year old doing a somersault for the first time. Flair does something maybe a wooden chair shot but Hulk Up time. We cant have Vader jobbing again so it is time for Flair to get dragged around. 

I did like the ending with the Masked Man racing out. I was like he was moving way too fast and he is not stocky enough to be Double A. Then Arn comes out gagged and bound. That popped me. It is the Macho Man! Who decks the heels! O before this Hogan double clotheslines the heels, which is such a sickening Hogan ending. Ugh. 

There was some good stuff and some atrocious stuff. It is sub-three stars for me. I am glad I watched it. WCW 1995 before Nitro becomes a thing is really fascinating.