[1991-02-02-WCW-Saturday Night] Wrestling Wrap Up: Vader and Stan Hansen

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Jim Ross narrates a clip of Vader vs Hansen at the Tokyo Dome. I like that they kept showing this to build up the Wrestle War match.

[shoe]

They really are doing a good job building this match up and making it special.

[PeteF3]

A great unique kind of build to this, making this out to be a special kind of match that can only happen once and only on PPV.

 

Note that everyone constantly refers to this show as "the third annual WrestleWar." Real-world events had put a rather negative spin on that name and the WarGames concept as well.

[Kevin Ridge]

I do enjoy them showing clips of Hansen versus Vader from Japan. $400.00 per ringside seat in 1990? That’s a crazy amount. Ross lets us know that WCW will be holding an event in March in Tokyo Dome.

[Zenjo]

I couldn't believe they showed this much footage from a NJ match. Ross just broadly mentioned injuries rather than going into specifics about the eye.

[soup23]

The build up to this was really good and Jim Ross really put over the magnitude of it.

[garretta]

Considering how little of this that they were able to show, WCW used the Tokyo Dome footage very well, and JR really sold the brutality of the match, which as we all saw was very much legit. I like the idea of WCW actually outbidding all the promotions all over the world, presumably including New Japan and the WWF, for the rights to the rematch; it puts them over as a real worldwide player in the wrestling business. Those of us who watched the match know that they oversold the hospitalization stuff (although Vader most likely really went to have his eye treated), but it was still an effective sales tool.

 

Not only did they soft-peddle the war references in these segments as much as they possibly could, they tried to avoid references to blood, too. I'm sure plenty of children in the audience were rushing to their dictionaries to find out what "claret" was after they heard JR use that word. Maybe they should have just spelled it out, the way parents sometimes do when they don't want their children to know what they're saying. I can just hear JR now: "There was plenty of B-L-O-O-D in this match, ladies and gentlemen."

 

Does anybody know if ringside seats that night in the Tokyo Dome really cost four hundred American dollars? My instinct says that WCW's inflating the price, but I really don't know for sure.

[dawho5]

I wondered about both the hospital and $400.00 seat stuff myself. But I'm assuming somebody bought into it.