[1997-12-22-WCW-Nitro] NWO takes over Nitro

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

This has a reputation as possibly the all-time worst Nitro segment (pre-1998 anyway), but I actually thought this was awesome. The NWO completely take over not only the announce booth, but the crew and the set … everything. They do REAL TIME CONSTRUCTION, which takes almost 45 minutes including commercials. This seems like one of those ideas that should have never made it past the writers room when considering the logistics of making it happen. We end up getting a new set, new music, new everything.

 

Hogan is presented with two new motorcycles and a convertible stretch limo.

 

Then Bobby Heenan comes out and wants to talk business. He goes into groveling suck-up mode and for once, they have Heenan doing exactly what he should have been doing all along.

 

Later in the show, the NWO is back out and is presented with a ring that is an exact replica of the Big Gold Belt. A huge banner of the Sports Illustrated cover drops from the ceiling and another huge banner drops from the ceiling showing Hogan choking out Sylvester Stallone in Rocky III.

 

It was a really ballsy idea to do this on a live show. But I think it worked just because the whole thing was so shocking and might be better remembered if Starrcade was truly the end of the NWO once and for all.

[BruiserBrody]

I remember this gave me a legit stomach ache - it bothered me on a visceral level

[Kevin Ridge]

NWO run off the announcers and intimidate the cameramen/crew into putting on NWO shirts. They take apart the WCW Nitro set and invade the production trucks. No WCW guys. No security to stop this. I take away from this and for a good part of the year that WCW guys have little loyalty/fight for their organization. NWO has run rough shot because it gets so little resistance. We get NWO banners and signs. There is even a fancy introduction for NWO Nitro with graphics. Whole NWO comes down to the ring and it becomes a celebration for Hollywood Hogan. The amount of money spent on all this. This whole segment runs close to 35 minutes clock time. Bischoff’s shots at McMahon don’t seem to have the confidence behind them like it did previous months.

[Zenjo]

It took how long?!!!

 

I liked the Bobby Heenan grovelling as that's just what his WWF character would've done.

[soup23]

I thought this was one of the best things in 1997. When you do something like this as a wrestling promotion, you have to go all in. Bischoff went all in on making this moment work. Everything from who ran everyone off (the NWO B crew) to all the aesthetic changes with the banners and signs, to the glorious entrance of Bischoff on a hog made this go overboard and work for me. Hollywood is presented with two custom bikes one including his mural on it and a limo covertable with women and butler and Hogan does one of his most egregious entrances in history. Bobby begging for his job was even perfect and fit his persona to a tee. This set up perfectly for NWO to finally being extinguished as we know it at Starrcade. Syxx Pac gets a shout out as the whole NWO comes out once again to gloat. Hogan gets a ring that looks like the heavyweight championship that I have to admit is pretty swank. We then get a poster of his SI cover and Rocky III. This was the NWO at their peak fright before their big downfall as far as I'm concerned. You have to had it to Bischoff for taking chances.

[El-P]

This is right out of 1996 during the peak of the nWo take over. Sure was a ballsy move to spend so much time on live TV on this. Rick Rude is great in his role of intimidating the crew. Bischoff is at his heights of obnoxiousness. Hogan kissing him on the top of the head as he recieved the gift was pretty funny. Hey, Hogan drops a "ho ho ho" when he sees the girls in the limo. Yeah, it would have been really perfect is the nWo would have collapsed six days later. As it was, it only happened a bit too late when the angle already had lost some of its shine. Oh, and Bobby Heenan begging and being a total suck-up was one of his finest hours in WCW (weren't a whole lot either).

[PeteF3]

This is a flashback to the ballsy backstage attack at Disney that held Nitro up for a half hour, one of those things you can only do if you're confident you're going to win the week no matter what. This starts off *great*, actually, looking totally chaotic and out of control, but (here's a familiar refrain) it wears out its welcome. The fallout is near-legendary: Raw wins its first head-to-head hour in nearly 2 years, and the plan for the NWO owning Nitro and WCW owning Thunder--a planned brand split over 4 years before it was actually done--was shelved entirely. The NWO-only concept was so tainted that they didn't even want to do it for Thunder. Somehow, a promotion completely in the driver's seat was in a panic as plans were being completely redrawn from scratch, while the WWF had a focused vision for what they wanted to do for WrestleMania.

 

What led to all this? Well, I think I get why this segment failed on an artistic and more importantly a ratings level when the backstage attack and Piper tryouts didn't: there was no SUSPENSE. Even as we got a long, drawn-out ambulance scene or a long, drawn-out and completely baffling fight between Piper and a bunch of nobodies, people wanted to at least see what would happen next. In the summer of '96, Savage had chased after the NWO limo and there were rumors of a 4th man. The Piper tryout at least had you wanting to see what in the name of fuck was going to happen next. This has all kinds of cool attention to detail, but a few aesthetic overhauls with no commentary, no hype for what's coming or for what *could* happen, and no chance of any kind of attempted fighting back on the part of WCW (it had been *how* many weeks since a save was attempted by anyone from the locker room now?) isn't enough to keep people from wondering, "So what's Raw doing?" And while I guess you couldn't go straight from a hostile takeover to a straight-up wrestling match...I'm not sure a long gift-giving segment with nothing particularly new being said was the wisest choice of a first segment after the deconstruction and reconstruction. Oh, and the gift-giving is constantly held up by technical snafus and timing problems, making things drag out even more.

 

In the end, the planned brand split was a brilliant idea on paper that could have led to WCW sustaining its momentum for a long time by keeping wrestlers separate and making PPVs special and preventing TV from oversaturating. But the soil was poisoned and the earth salted after this. A glorious over-the-top celebration is in actuality WCW's "HE'S CUT! THE RUSSIAN IS CUT!" moment.