[1990-12-01-NWA-World Championship Wrestling] Chauffeur For A Day

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Let's see Teddy Long drive Ric Flair around. He announces that he has a big surprise at 3:00 -- Janet Jackson will join them! Uh huh. Long claims to have lost control of the car, and Flair knows he hasn't. He pulls over though, and a bunch of guys kidnap Ric Flair! Reed and Simmons happen to be there hanging out. What a delightful coincidence! This was fun.

[PeteF3]

AWESOME segment on all levels. Flair as the talker, Long as the disgruntled passive-aggressive driver (with the do-rag still under the chauffeur's cap), Long trying to hide his face from other drivers...and then a total left turn when Long engineers a kidnapping! Doom show up, Long cuts a quick but awesome promo for Starrcade, and they make off with the Horsemen limo! This is seriously one of the 2 or 3 best WCW angles of the year. Entertaining as hell but it also pushes Long and Doom hard, as the Godfather outdoes Flair and the Horsemen at their own game.

[soup23]

Good comedy segment but I stand by the fact that this didnt fit what this angle really needed and was to goofy.

[Kevin Ridge]

They should have gone with the Morgan Freeman look for Teddy. Flair enjoys rubbing it in to Teddy. Janet Jackson will be joining up with Flair at some point. Teddy proves to be a bad driver. Oh, set up! He drops Flair off in a bad neighborhood and Ric gets kidnapped. Teddy and Doom go for a ride in the limo.

[garretta]

I'd have appreciated this segment more if I hadn't known what it led to (Flair as the Scorpion). As it is, it's rather flimsy. Given two weeks, Flair should have been able to get away from his "kidnappers" somehow and shown up to wrestle Doom. Alternatively, the Horsemen should have found him, wherever he was, and broken him out, laying out Teddy's "kidnappers" in the process. Obviously, neither of the above happened.

 

In an earlier thread, Pete brought up the possibility of Doom actually being involved in the Scorpion conspiracy, and that might have been an interesting way to go. Have Teddy reveal that Flair and the Horsemen paid him off to "kidnap" Flair so Ric could skip out on the tag title match and dress as the Scorpion in an attempt to get the World title back. As for why he would help the same organization that's trying to take the World tag team titles from him, the answer is simple: money. The Horsemen had it and were willing to pay it. Reed's okay with this, Simmons isn't, and the seeds for Doom's breakup are planted. (This also leaves WCW without a "real" Scorpion, since Flair admitted that he's only dressing as him to take advantage of Sting. Guess what? Let Ole and Jim Herd figure out how to get out of that mess all by themselves, because I couldn't give less of a shit if my colon was removed.)

 

I liked Teddy hamming it up un the front of Flair's limo, do-rag and all. I wish we could have heard more of what he was saying to Flair, but the camera work was supposed to be amateurish this time, as opposed to all the other times when it's been that way through sheer incompetence. (By the way, why were most of the kidnappers white? Shouldn't Teddy have outsourced the job to a few brothers from the ghetto?)

 

As a standalone segment, this was pretty good. It's a shame that it's (indirectly) tied into the Scorpion mess and thus follows it into my junkpile for that reason alone.

[dawho5]

Again, I don't see this as a Flair thing. Did he really let his ego go so much that he couldn't see Teddy turning this around on him? Either way, it all ties into the nonsense shit that has been dominating WCW for a while. Such a wasted opportunity with the WWF struggling.