[1994-11-26-WWF-Superstars] Interview: Bob Backlund / Interview: Diesel / Henry Godwinn vignette

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Kevin Ridge]

It's a glorious day for the WWF title to be in the rightful owner of Mr. Backlund. Great crazy Bob promo. Diesel cannot beat Mr. Backlund. Uh oh. Good guy Diesel promo making references to cars that a good portion of the audience won't get. Backlund is a throw back. Diesel goes all USA on us. He will be the next WWF champion. I never realized at the time they were going to make Diesel the champion so soon. Guess it just happened so fast to consider. Henry Godwinn promo from Arkansas. Video of pigs. Once he gets to the WWF, he will be in hog heaven.

[Loss]

Backlund gloats about being the WWF champion. Good find, considering there weren't going to be very many of these. This is funny, as they seem to have decided to take some of his mistakes that they would normally cast as outtakes and edited them into a promo to make him seem batshit insane. Love it!

 

Next up is Diesel with incredibly thick eyebrows saying he's about to challenge for the title. Diesel points out that no one buys Ford Fairmonts like they did in 1978. This is rambling and he oddly goes into this xenophobic promo about American manufacturing and you'd think he was cutting a promo on an evil foreigner. O....kay then.

 

Finally, Henry Godwinn is about to be in hog heaven.

[Exposer]

Backlund was tremendous and Diesel was too but in a different way. His promo made no sense but was hilarious nonetheless. Henry Godwinn is soon going to be in hog heaven. Great stuff.

[soup23]

The backlund spliced together promo was great.

 

Diesel is still trying to find his voice especially as a babyface.

 

HOG was one of my least favorite wrestlers as a kid.

[Zenjo]

Backlunds batshit insane promo was awesome. Screaming, ranting, getting the words mixed up. The guy was such a tool. They should've given him a title reign until the Rumble.

 

Then the Diesel response was weird because he was obviously under instructions to play the American hero card. Come on Vince, it's time to move on from the Hogan era.

 

The Godwinn stuff was so crap it's hard to believe the gimmick lasted as long as it did.

[PeteF3]

In-between Backlund's near-falsetto rants about being the new champion, he finds time to complain to Jack Tunney (remember him?) about swapping Diesel in for the injured Bret Hart. Diesel is a big voluminous man, but he can't defeat Mr. Backlund.

 

Diesel rebuts. Nash makes a hip-with-the-times Barney Miller reference and proclaims himself the New Generation and goes into an odd non sequitur about American manufacturing. All-American Diesel is as bad or worse than Smily Happy Diesel. An early sign that Vince had learned absolutely fuck-all from the Lex Express push. Anti-heroes were in. Superhero babyfaces were out.

 

Bad promo from Diesel but this is a very cool find, as I suspect this only aired in New York. It had the feel of the late-'80s/early-'90s Event Centers, which seemed weird and out of place in '94.

 

Henry Godwinn stands by in Bitters, Arkansas. No clue how anyone expected an Evil Hillbilly Jim to get over.