Demolition

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[victory]

I've never been a Demolition fan, so if this was a popularity poll they wouldn't be on it. Since it isn't, they'll be on it somewhere, as they were a great team. Most likely around 20 give or take two spots.

 

They consistently had good matches with a huge variety of opponents no matter if they were heel or face. With that being said Ax certainly carried this team, so they are a little uneven for me.

[Matt D]

Sometime about a year from now I'll have a big post.

[El-P]

Double ax handle. Double as handle. Zzzzzzz….. Great SM look and theme song. Too bad they couldn't convey the fact they were truly demolishing their opponents though. But still not as boring as the Fabs.

[Grimmas]

What I love about Demolition is that you can see strategy in their matches. They cut off the ring and double team and tag in and out like few tag teams. As heels they were great with structure and I enjoyed so many of their matches.

 

As babyfaces they were interesting and had some good matches like The Brainbusters series or The Twin Towers matches. They will probably make my list.

 

This is the ultimate great matches vs great performances debate.

[goc]

I say this as someone who grew up as a kid liking Demolition, but will anyone be voting for them that DOESN'T fall into that category?

[Grimmas]

I say this as someone who grew up as a kid liking Demolition, but will anyone be voting for them that DOESN'T fall into that category?

Matt D

 

EDIT: Also, look at what I said. I backed up my position and you said it is a nostalgia vote?

 

Do you think match structure and strategy is not important? How about working successfully as babyfaces and heels? What part of what I said was wrong or wrong enough for you to assume I am just trying to justify my nostalgia.

[Goodear]

I grew up watching Dino Bravo too and I won't be championing him anywhere.

 

Demolition works a very particular style predicated on ring positioning and frequent tags in and out of the ring. I personally love the internal logic their matches are based on since it rings truthfully in a wrestling context. They are somewhat big guys with lots of power that slowly grind people into dust over the course of a match. El-P intonated that they didn't really demolish opponents up thread but I would suggest they took things and broke them down over time as opposed to all at once. The obvious parrallel would be The Road Warriors who were wrecking balls that drove through people. Demolition was instead a slow grinding break down like the tide hitting a rock over and over again until it erroded.

 

The interesting thing about Demolition is you can even see this structure upset during the Collosal Connection title loss as they got crushed because they weren't allowed to use their common tactics, Ax literally never managed to make a tag and they lost because of it. Its an effective narrative choice you don't see other places.

 

There are arguments against Demolition obviously. They don't do a lot of the things people look for in epic matches like have near falls or do a lot of high spots. I just don't think that makes them boring.

[goodhelmet]

Nowhere near my list, Horrible offense. Weak strikes. Mediocre matches. Roadies ripoff vibe. Eadie has a shot at my singles list. Darsow is one of the worst wrestlers of the 80s.

[BillThompson]

Have a shot at my list simply because I do really think they are a far better version of the Road Warriors.

[Matt D]

I will post this, but to be honest, it's really more of a capsule look at how I was thinking about wrestling almost 5 years ago than anything else. In a lot of ways, I relearned to watch wrestling by watching Demolition in 2010.

 

http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/demolitionproject.htm

 

I'd say I'll have a post up in 9 months or so.

[Danish Dynamite]

I actually didn't like Demolition as a kid. Loved them facing each other in the rumble. Actively disliked (and still dislike) them when Crush joined. ... But the last five or six years have turned me. Somewhere around no 20 probably.

[Wade Garrett]

Not a chance. It will be very hard for a WWWF/WWF/WWE team to crack my list.

[Parties]

Darsow's best performance may be on the back of a flatbed in the match w/ Dustin. And Masked Superstar is wrestling personified as a character. But Demolition is one of the only acts on the Network who haven't looked better than I recalled. Almost everyone on a hot Saturday Night's Main Event is a better worker than you remember, but these dudes were so punch-stomp in their offense that I don't see the appeal. I guess I like them as promos, but Darsow had the same "Kick your stinking teeth in" lines for every gimmick he worked, and the characters were better as silent executioners wearing masks to the ring. Fuji actually added to their act, which you can't say for many. I agree with Naylor: wrestling needs more face paint. But paint is simply not enough for All-Time 25.

[Danish Dynamite]

Damn... Recently wrote they'd be around no 20 for me... Started a prelim list, and found out I had about 40 teams in my top 25 :-/ ... I think Demolition are out...

[El-P]

Darsow is one of the worst wrestlers of the 80s.

 

He's actually one of the worst (as in useless and boring) wrestler I can think of. Sucked in any incarnation (okay, Repo Man was funny, but it was all gimmick, it's not like he had any good matches), didn't bring anything to the tag teams he was a part of (except shouting "shut your stinking mouth" and stuff like this), could bring down any good worker (Dustin in WCW comes to mind, the Blacktop Bully matches sucked). At least Jim Neidhart played his limited part well. In the third version of Demolition, Crush was the "workhorse", for god's sake.

[funkdoc]

yea, stuff like the repo man & mr. hole-in-one was the only good use of darsow period

[Danish Dynamite]

El-P: True... I like Ax & Smash Demolition. I can't stand Smash & Crush Demolition. Have a funny feeling it's mainly Bill Eadie I like :-)

[Matt D]

Here's what I posted over on DVDVR this morning.

I just haven't had any time to post anything yet.

 

Do I think Demolition is the best team of all time? No. I don't. Do I think they accomplished something fairly impressive that completely and utterly bypasses most of the traditional metrics of "smart" fans appreciating wrestlers? Absolutely.

 

In fact, they helped me break free from the fallacy of workrate dogmatism in analyzing and rating pro wrestling.

 

How did they do that? Accidentally. Benoit died in the same month I moved in with my wife-to-be and stepson-to-be. I'd been relatively casual for a year or two before that, but after that happened, I stopped watching wrestling. I started back up a couple of years later (2009), as I had a chunk of free time most days on the exercise bike. We'd just stumbled through the highspot and bump laden 2000s though, and I didn't want to see a bunch of headdrops and stupid contrived indy moves, even if I cheered them as much as anyone seven years earlier. Instead I went for comfort food, back to the late 80s and early, early 90s WWF, mainly on Dailymotion which had whole shows of Superstars/Wrestling Challenge/PTW, etc. At first, I was just watching the SNME's and PPVs, but I started in on the MSG/Boston/Copps/etc. shows as well. This was as far from the Nitro and/or ROH style as you could get, and was, in a lot of ways, the first time in my adult watching life that I sought out whole shows instead of just highly pimped, highly rated matches. Instead I was watching a lot of matches that people generally told other people NOT to watch.

 

The last thing I was looking for was a bunch of Demolition matches. I had no love for them from when I was a kid. I liked small "technical" wrestlers or high-flyers. I liked the Rockers and the Hart Foundation. I'm sure I would have liked the babyface Rogs and Killer Bees and Bulldogs, etc. I liked Zenk and Pillman. I liked the Young Pistols. I had no use for the Road Warriors or Demolition or the Powers of Pain or Freebirds or Patriots or Murdoch/Slater. I liked the Orient Express and High Energy. I have absolutely no nostalgia for Demolition. As a kid I thought they were slow and plodding. Boring as could be.

 

But I was watching everything, so I watched them, and what I came to appreciate was how their matches varied, and how they worked so many different opponents so many different ways, both as babyfaces and heels, and always so logically. As heels, they would give their opponents offense, but it had to be earned. They would give in shines but their opponents had to keep on them, and if they let up for a moment, they'd take back the advantage. This was during an era where someone like Dynamite Kid would just eat people twice his size alive for 3/5th of a match, the "heel-in-peril" WWF house style of tag team wrestling. Demolition would make the faces grab and arm and work on it, to double team constantly, to find some way to overcome their size and intensity. It was a watered down but far more appropriate and giving way of doing what Brody and Hansen would do in AJPW. The difference was that they would sell. It just had to be earned. And it'd be different for different opponents. Michaels bitches about the 88 MSG match, but Eadie sells rapid fire for the Rockers' offense. When they face the Harts in 88 at Summerslam, they portray Bret as a huge deal, actually begging off from him. They had built up a large amount of karma, of reputation, over the last year and a half, and Bret, in that match was the beneficiary of it. That's how it was a lot of times. Teams, even in losses, came out of matches with Demolition looking better than they came in. You couldn't say that about a lot of other monster teams. In some ways, they're the exact opposite of the Road Warriors for a lot of their run.

 

I like most of their babyface work even more. There are some matches that just don't work, like the Bolsheviks squash or the Orient Express match or what's probably most remembered, the Powers of Pain feud, but in general, it's really satisfying to see how they work the Brainbusters completely different than the Twin Towers, and how they'd work them differently than the Colossal Connection. They play Face in Peril and manage just these great hot tags and house of fire sequences against the Towers, especially. They portray frustration so well and play right into the Brainbusters hands and then get righteous revenge against them. There's amazing variety in their work, even match to match in the same series (The Towers series is a great example of that).

 

I think Eadie is one of the most underrated guys in wrestling, but again, it's not about five star matches or workrate classics, so he's going to stay underrated. It's about logic and versatility, and elevating their opponents both in victory and loss, and keeping heat without stepping all over people, and knowing exactly why he's doing everything he does. It's about timing comebacks and cut off spots, about making shines and hot tags feel earned and thus all the more resonate. It's about being hot for a span of years without really being able to resort to a bunch of high spots and headdrops, both as faces and heels, against a plethora of opponents of all shapes and sizes.

 

I think Demolition was great and it's not due to the aura or nostalgia. The problem is that you can't really see it on one match, or two matches. You can't even fully see it just by watching Demolition matches. You have to watch their opponents against other teams too, to get a sense of the landscape. You need to really see the whole picture before it comes into focus, but once it does, you see just how impressive a picture it is. It's just that what makes them great relative to other teams goes against star ratings and workrate and everything else that we're used to looking at.

[Jimmy Redman]

That's pretty rad.

 

It's funny that you mention about it being an anti-smark workrate kind of thing, because I remember after watching the Demos vs Brainbusters I said...I can't remember but something like "these guys are working at such a high level, but using smarts and tag team spots. If they were working at the same level using movez and head drops people would go nuts calling it *****" Like, the exact same thought went through my head as you.

 

Demos are awesome. I really can't say much more than what you just did.