[1990-11-24-NWA-World Championship Wrestling] Wrestling Wrap Up and WCW Hotline commercial

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

They show the finish of a recent Sting vs Buddy Landell match where a referee attacks Sting. Luger is doing the most half-assed save ever. They also show the Black Scorpion turning a person into a tiger at the Clash. The referee brainwash thing is cool, but everything else about this is some of the worst stuff I've ever seen. Sting promises to unmask Black Scorpion at Starrcade, which is the only redeemable part of this.

 

We close out with a commercial for Wrestling Wrap Up, and another for the hotline.

[PeteF3]

I'll admit, a rogue referee attacking Sting is kind of cool. It's the first single redeeming moment in this entire putrid saga. The babyfaces look like the biggest dumbasses alive, going after the rail-jumpers and completely ignoring the ref choking out Sting. We get Clash footage that I already exhausted everything there is to say about. Then more footage of Scorpion rambling over the PA.

 

Dueling promos. Enough of this already. Sting finally gets around to selling something--either the title changes hands or the Scorpion unmasks.

 

Between WCW and Florida, you could probably fill a full-length "Gordon Solie calls ridiculous shit" comp.

[soup23]

The referee stuff should have been what they were doing. Some dark Kevin Sullivan possessive type stuff. Instead this angle is mostly cheap theme park magic tricks. Its really awful.

[Kevin Ridge]

Solie is investigating the situation between Sting and Scorpion. Crap assignment Gordon. So Scorpion’s voice makes people go crazy. More magic tricks from Scorpion. He turns a person into a leopard. This is mind blowing.

 

Sting is putting the title on the line against Scorpion’s mask. Sting does another hyped up promo.

 

Wrestling Wrap up not available in stores.

 

Missy does mail. The hotlines must have been big business in 1990.

[garretta]

I don't ever want to hear again how WCW was dedicated to the sport of wrestling while the WWF was full of sports entertainment crap. The whole Scorpion angle was questionable to start with, and the patently lousy execution of it, with its embarrassingly bad and implausible magic tricks and random forays into human possession, makes the Gobbledygooker look like a Lou Thesz title defense. Worse yet, whoever was running the PA system at the Clash was too goddamn stupid to shut the lousy thing off while Sting and Heyman were arguing, so Ole just kept rambling and rambling with few hearing and even fewer caring. Even the referee attack just felt wrong; you'd think that WCW would check their referees out a little better to see if they can be influenced by things like disembodied voices and various other parlor tricks. Don't even get me started on the leopard transformation, which might be the most inexplicable and embarrassing thing I've seen or heard of in this sport that didn't involve a death.

 

I have to give credit to Gordon for actually reporting this heaping helping of horseshit as actual wrestling news; he kept a straight face and voice while hosting this segment, which speaks well of his professionalism but not of his continued mental health. I can just picture him thinking, "I turned down the WWF because I didn't want to take part in corny skits and have to put over cartoon characters, and look what I'm stuck with now!"

 

Gee, Sting sure is made happy easily enough. Just spend the last three months trying to drive him nuts and he's all sunshine and rainbows. Seriously, he's not even trying to sell fear or trepidation, which kind of makes the whole angle moot. You can bet that Hogan would be doing everything but visibly shaking in his boots if he was the one the Scorpion was after. Say what you will about the man as an athlete, but he could sell an angle like few others in history. That's a skill Sting either needs to learn or has already forgotten. Or maybe he figures that this whole mess is beyond repair and needs to be ignored as much as possible. If that's true, he's smarter than I thought.

 

The commercials actually made the most sense of anything about this whole mess, which ought to tell you just how messed up WCW was around this time.

[dawho5]

Part of me thinks that if WCW had their shit together the second half of 1990 they would have made up a TON of ground on the WWF. Instead they were doing this shit and somehow losing ground. Amazing stuff.