Loss
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Everything posted by Loss
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The Summerslam main event is set - Hogan vs Earthquake. They announce that Brutus Beefcake is injured, but that Mr. Perfect isn't off the hook and will still need to defend the IC title. We also get a clip of the Harts/Demolition stuff from Superstars, with brief promos afterward. Crush's face paint still looks not quite right. I wonder if they were ribbing him by making him do it himself?
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I really think Young Manami Toyota is outstanding. It's not fair to say she regressed, but she did change her style when she became a star. I like her a lot in the 1990 matches I've seen so far. She does her highspots, but she also allows breathing room between them to give people time to react and she makes everything fit her character. I realize this is true for a lot of her "peak" stuff as well, but I really like her in 1990 quite a bit. This is an excellent short match. Toyota takes a pretty jawdropping outside-in bump off a lariat just before the finish. I mentioned Toyota, but Bull is reliably great in her role, and carries herself really well as the champ. They do a lot with the little time they had. Do they have other singles matches?
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To their credit, they are sort of using Damien Sandow in this way. He's my favorite of all the younger guys, both in the ring and as a character. But he does represent the cultural elite in a way. I want to see him in main events, but I also see no reason to hurry that along.
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The United States is far more multicultural than it was 20 years ago. I don't think anti-American talk will get the heat it's gotten in the past. America is more populist than it's ever been. Wealth, privilege, greed, elitism ... those should be the themes they are exploiting.
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It isn't my fault people like shitty wrestlers Cue Schneider with a joke about your Jericho comp THAT will be when Loss comes in full force with unmistakable fury. Again, pulling me into arguments. I used to like Jericho quite a bit. I wouldn't say I dislike him now, but I am a lot more sober about his strengths and weaknesses.
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Tony Falk really hates these catfights. Anyway, this is the best match from this feud so far. This is worked very similarly to the previous match, but I like it better because there are more crowd-pleasing spots and Toni gets more prolonged revenge, which has been coming for a while. Austin is already taking crazy bumps. Toni ends up slugging Percy Pringle when he won't get out of her way. Chris Von Erich comes out to make the save, adding another dimension to this feud. Jeff Jarrett runs out when Chris starts getting attacked, which brings Iceman out, and it's total chaos. Jarrett and Parsons do not end up involved in this feud, but everyone else here does. This is great stuff. But if you're keeping score, Chris Adams is now carrying a very capable but inexperienced rookie, two non-working women, a manager and Chris Von Erich to one of the best feuds of the year. Pretty impressive.
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Solid match that stays pretty basic, but everything looks really good. I agree that this was building to something really excellent if it had gone just a few minutes longer. Hansen slugs the referee too. This leads to Hansen getting suspended from the NWA. In hindsight, they should have headlined Havoc with Sting vs Hansen and let Sid challenge Luger for the U.S. title second from the top. They should have been lining up great workers for Sting so his matches didn't seem like a disappointment after what WCW fans were used to on top with Flair. I don't know that it means Hansen would have had an All Japan quality main event in WCW, but I do think he and Sting would have worked well together.
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Clip of another match between the two from Mid South Coliseum. Lawler is a total babyface now. Snowman rolls Lawler up when he is distracted by Downtown Bruno, and Snowman retains the title. Immediately, Jeff Gaylord and Scott Braddock hit the ring and attack Lawler. Dundee makes the save, and the Dirty White Boys then come in to really outnumber everyone. Snowman never really gets involved in all of this, but finally comes to the rescue of the babyfaces and the fans go crazy. Now, Lawler, Dundee and Snowman are fighting off the heels together. Awesome. After they clear the ring, Snowman helps Lawler to his feet and they shake hands. The best feud of the year comes to a close, but we're in for some great times in the months ahead thanks to all the new talent in the territory. Snowman barely gets a word out in his interview when the super lame Jeff Gaylord interrupts. He shows off by doing push-ups. Jeff Gaylord is on crack.
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Lawler is back out with the baseball bat. Before he even gets into his current feuds, he has to run down his upcoming personal appearances. That's how you know he's turned babyface again. We get Lawler/Dundee vs DWB/Tatum from Mid South Coliseum, which looks outstanding based on what little we see and has a really hot crowd. Lawler and Dundee lose the match by TECHNICAL LOSS after piledriving John Tatum. Tom Burton runs in and the Dirty White Boys attack Lawler and Dundee while Tessa and Dirty White Girl brawl away from the ring. DWB grinds a high heel into Lawler's forehead until he bleeds. Lawler says this week, we'll have Lawler/Dundee vs Dirty White Boys this Monday night, but Tessa and Dirty White Girl will each be handcuffed to their respective corners of the ring. The winning team gets to unlock the handcuffs of their valet, who gets to do whatever she wants to the handcuffed valet. I'm not sure that setup is legal. We cut to a taped promo of Bill Dundee and Tessa also hyping the match. Then, DWB and Kimberly are out and aren't happy about how the match was set up on Monday night. We then cut to a post-match promo from Monday night of John Tatum nursing his neck while John Tatum screams. Tatum is great selling this. "I got an 86-year-old mother at home, and she's gotta eat, too!" He gives this ridiculous sob story about having a broken neck and being sidelined for six months, but what he cares about more than anything is that his mother can't eat. Back at the studio, DWB is wondering what he is going to do because Tom Burton can't be his partner because of the piledriver earlier on the show, and neither can John Tatum. Eddie Gilbert then comes out and says he'd be delighted to be his partner. Gilbert seems excited to finally have something to do, after spending nearly a year doing nothing in WCW. Dirty White Girl should never talk.
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Gilbert is STILL looking for his money! Move on, Eddie. He pulls BRIAN HILDEBRAND out of the crowd, a studio plant, who claims to be a big Eddie Gilbert fan. He offers to take a picture with him then socks him in the mouth. Gilbert snaps and really wants his $5000! He thinks Lawler has his money. Insert your own jokes about why Gilbert really needs this cash.
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Hogan does his big announcement promo. This is possibly the best babyface interview he ever did, talking about his recovery, thoughts of retirement and his ultimate decision to come back. This is fantastic, and it's such a welcome contrast to the ramblings of the Ultimate Warrior. It has some self aggrandizement but it's Hogan, and that's part of the deal. Anyone who thinks Hogan was just a product of the WWF machine (if anyone even thinks that anymore) should watch this. The guy had talent.
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Not quite as compelling as Lawler/Snowman, but not terribly far behind either. They work a really unique match in the same vein with lots of takedowns and stiff punches. They aim to make this look like a shoot, which I imagine is pretty tough to pull off. The crowd doesn't get as into this as they did in Memphis, but I suspect that's because the racial overtones weren't as strong in the buildup. But give Jeff Jarrett credit for working some excellent, very different matches so far in 1990. Post-match, Iceman promises to find him wherever, church or the store. This was awesome and I wish there had been rematches.
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Arn and Sid are grumpy after a rough night at the Great American Bash. Arn looks hung over over the Bash woes, and cuts a chilling promo. They are making a hit list of all of the people who contributed to Sting winning the title. Sid hints at restarting the feud with Luger. He says he doesn't have blond hair, but I'm too scared to point out to him that he actually does.
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This really was a terrific match. Fuchi works holds better than all but a few wrestlers in history, and Kikuchi sells exceptionally well, so it's a good marriage. I thought this was good in the early stages, but the match really went to another level in the last 5-10 minutes. It had the feel that they were trading bombs, even though they really weren't, if that makes any sense at all.
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I'd love to know what the reasoning was in not going 30+ minutes to give Sting a classic match for his title win. The only thing I can think of is that they were worried Sting couldn't work a long match that long since he had been out a few months. But he looked in great shape, and seemed to have trained hard for his return, so I suspect he could have held up. The match isn't really that good. The moment is a terrific one, but this was just 16 minutes of exchanges and spots with no real progression or structure behind them. It was overbooked beyond the point of necessity. I think there are probably things they could have done in hyping this up to signal to fans that if they bought the pay-per-view, they weren't going to be robbed of a conclusive finish for the third time in a row in the main event. Here though, Flair/Sting was surrounded by crap. I echoed Jim Ross's sentiments that he'd like to cut through all of that and get to the match. When Warrior beat Hogan, Hogan got a big chunk of Warrior's spotlight in the post-match because Hogan took it. Here, Flair got a big chunk of Sting's spotlight because Sting gave it to him. While it's in some ways classy that Sting put over Flair so strongly, considering how much heat Flair took to keep the belt so he could drop it to Sting when he returned, I don't think they were the right comments for that moment. I also wondered why Luger wasn't at ringside, or part of the post-match celebration. Perhaps the promotion knew deep down that Luger might overshadow Sting if he was part of the moment.
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My intent wasn't to single you out. I realize it did read like that. If you did discuss Fujinami and Choshu during that stretch, that's great. I stand corrected. But it didn't take off in the way the pimping posts did, or the Flair and Jumbo revisionism, or the Brody talk. Those are all things that seemed to get more traction.
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Also, generally speaking, Riki Choshu and Tatsumi Fujinami were talked about a lot by hardcore fans in the 80s and then ignored for most of the next 20 years. They certainly weren't as discussed as Misawa, Kobashi, Kawada, Liger, Jumbo, Benoit, Guerrero, Toyota, Vader, Otani and Hansen. Maybe it's not revisionism, but it's not like there has been anyone banging the drum for them consistently over time. You could say the same for just about every heavyweight to work in New Japan even through the 90s. The good ones got praise at the time the matches happened, but it wasn't sustained.