PeteF3
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Everything posted by PeteF3
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Omori does his best to kill this, but this is pretty high-quality the rest of the way. They attempt to re-do the old Jumbo/Misawa angle with Ogawa and Jun and they pull it off, mainly because Ogawa is so good at being an opportunistic ratfuck. This has some really heated exchanges between the two that climaxes with Ogawa PINNING JUN. Was that ever a stunner--it's like Riki Choshu booked this show. Clearly Baba or whoever felt that AJPW needed some freshening up because this feels like a pretty monumental card. For no particular reason I'll drop this hot take here: after two '80s sets and now most of the '90s, I've determined that I don't like Korakuen Hall as a venue. It's probably great to visit live and I like intimate atmospheres, but I don't like the feel of the place on tape at all. -
Kobashi accidentally knocks Ace off the apron, a la Owen & Bret. Ace recovers eventually, but seemingly gives up on attempting to save Kobashi from a Taue power bomb. Then he helps Kobashi to his feet...and drops him with a clothesline! Ace takes out a slew of young boys and lays out Kobashi with the cobra clutch suplex until Akiyama makes the save. Ace leaves seemingly having formed a new alliance of his own with Johnny Smith & The LaCrosse. A fun angle from a promotion not known for them--this might be the first involving main eventers since 1990. They do their best to work this angle close to the way it would go down in a real sport with the way that the other young boys react.
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A pretty good match that threatened to verge into greatness, but never quite got there, as this lose focus and peter out towards the end. The kick exchanges were great and some of the counterwrestling was just gorgeous, though. This probably peaked with Satomura's tremendous comeback leading into the Death Valley driver, but after that fails to put Kato away (after Satomura had just kicked out of Kato's finish as well), the ending is more of an anticlimax rather than a huge build into an inevitable result leaving you thirsty for more. Unquestionably a noble effort, though.
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I daresay this is the best AJW match I've seen in 1998! A definite MOTYC worldwide for all the reasons Loss mentioned. I don't know if Toyota slows down because Kandori forces her to, because of a stylistic choice, or if she simply has too many miles on her--or a little from all three columns. She's filled out some more since the last time we saw her and the springboards aren't as crisp or as high-flying as they used to be, but she gets the most out of what she can and Kandori paces this excellently, knowing when to slap on the submissions, when to unleash the High-End Offense, and when to start selling and bumping to put Toyota's offense over. I have no problem calling Kandori a great worker and one of the better joshi workers of her era--when she started busting out the wind-up headbutts, it struck me as to why: she's a female Fujiwara in a lot of ways. Maybe even more fun to watch, too.
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One of the best PPW segments so far, drawing on real events and somehow bringing up Lawler's divorce and probable cheating without heeling him, since Hales and Baxter are so loathsome. Hales thought Stacy was just a ring rat, but it turns out she was a mere softball rat. Baxter is revealed as Stacy's secret lover in Florida whenever Lawler is at Raw or at a PPV, and Baxter cuts a pretty hilarious promo about how they should reveal their love to the world. Stacy responds with a slap and is about to get double-teamed when Lawler and his spectacularly ugly tights make the save. Two big guys in Scream masks attack Lawler until Christopher saves. Between Hales, Paul Bearer, and even Stacy, it seems we're getting yet another last gasp for semi-traditional managers, to the point where I'll have to give out an Award at the end of the year.
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The Dudleys have RVD in a 2-on-1 match and of course can't put him away, and then we get 9 million run-ins. We go off the air with a cliffhanger as Taz contemplates forming a New Triple Threat with RVD and Sabu. Fonzie as a babyface manager is so, so wrong, though I guess not any more wrong than a bunch of other things in this angle.
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Tammy announces a new local channel in Philadelphia--channel 48, which she points out is 21 less than 69. While almost falling out of her leather halter top, she declares she's done wearing conservative clothing. Yes, Sunny was fired from the WWF at the end of July for refusing to enter rehab. It's all downhill from here.
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THIS IS NOT A MATCH, THIS IS A CONFRONTATION. A familiar refrain over past Raws and more Raws to come. That's one way to avoid the bait-and-switch accusations, and generally when the WWF did this, they hit you with something that made you forget that you didn't get the match that was hyped. I like this build better than anyone else, it seems.
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Pretty stiff fight--nothing fancy, but not boring and certainly heated. Eventually most of DX gets into it with Jeff Jarrett & Southern Justice on the floor, leaving Triple H to be beaten into oblivion by the Nation. Weird not to have HHH eat the pin after all that, but I guess it was rare enough to see DX get totally laid out as they did here.
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His criticism that Balor didn't do his Demon entrance for the main event is the stupidest fucking thing the dummy said in that whole thing. Jesus Christ, how bad are you at this, Russo? It's stupid enough leaving aside the fact that it takes like 4 hours to apply the demon paint.
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"I thought you were dead." "This dude must be your Barber." There you have it--two good lines in a segment that felt like it was 45 minutes. The second one seems to get a genuine laugh out of the Brain. Warrior gets a big pop and reaction but the reactions dissipate the longer, and longer, and longer this segment goes. Warrior saying "Let me introduce myself" at the 37-minute mark gets an ironic laugh out of me. WCW had about one shot to make something out of landing the Warrior and you can't say they made much of it tonight.
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Yep, total 2016 WWE-world entrance and promo where everything has to be like it'd be in a video game--no time to sell anything or really put over any kind of program. Hype for the 3-team WarGames--thinking it over now I have no idea how the fuck they're going to get Stevie Ray into this thing. Just a catchphrase-fest and the Wolfpack gets good live reactions but I don't think they're really over in the money-drawing sense. The problem is in the entire existence of the group the only real personal individual issue has been between Nash and Hall, the match-up that fans least want to see. Luger-Bret may have had something going but that's totally ignored now. Sting has been spinning his wheels for months. Konnan is essentially a team mascot at this point. No one has, to my knowledge, even mentioned Randy Savage since he went out.
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Terrible, desperate, nonsensical segment that the crowd didn't understand--hell, I had a subscription to a mid-level sheet and read the Internet at the time and didn't know what the fuck this was about until after the fact. Eddie says the phrase "you-know-what" a lot, so you can tell this is really authentic. Eddie's been a scumbag heel for the past year and a half and evidently we're not supposed to think he's a whiner here. It's a Japan- or Memphis-style angle based on real feelings that *may* have been redeemed with proper follow-up but of course that isn't going to happen.
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You could say this is overbooked but they work hard to throw as many twists at us as they can for a short TV main event. Even a mini-swerve finish as Randy gets pinned by Stacy right as they're about to throw things to commercial. Guy Coffee is brought out of the mothballs to shave Randy's head, but walks off when Hales threatens to fire him, so Lawler and Stacy do the job themselves. They set up and pay off a big main event on free TV, how about that.
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Fun little finishing stretch that's just as heated as the Nitro match. Good layout or is North Dakota just starved for entertainment? I'll take the less cynical side, actually. Really good near-fall off the DDT onto the chair, but the finish comes soon afterward.
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Why would anyone ever tag out to another team in this match? Okay, that aside, this starts off pretty good because with 8 guys in there it pretty much precludes any chance of the match dragging, but I'll be damned if that isn't exactly what happens the longer this goes. This has some long awkward stretches that I have no real explanation for--whether the match just wasn't thought out that well or if guys were zoning out on what the plan was. Undertaker gets a hot tag and he and Austin clean house, but Kane hits him with one chokeslam and pins him. Undertaker sits up immediately afterward. Ross isn't convinced, but Austin and Lawler both smell a rat.
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EATME. You know Vince loved that--both of them. Dustin remains as professional and committed as ever regardless of the material. JR says that Kaientai must have gotten the job done, just like DX was splitting up earlier. Nothing like telegraphing another SWERVE and nothing like two of these rather obvious fakeout angles in the span of an hour. Venis explains that the coldness of the butcher's block created shrinkage of a Costanza-esque proportion and John Wayne Bobbitt was the man who personally shut the lights off. Ooookay. Bobbitt is godawful here, as one might expect. Val begins his recurring trend of dumping women to babyface pops. This entire character ages horribly but at least we don't have to watch Mrs. Yamaguchi attempting to act anymore.
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Jackoffs jackoffs jackoffs jackoffs. After all the logical build to a potential breakup or at least conflict, DX reunites just because.
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A decent enough segment since Vince and Bearer trading verbal barbs is a fresh sight, but yes, a step down from Vince's peak in May. The "infirmed and invalids sicken me" line was okay but also sort of trying-too-hard.
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I find the sight of Michael Buffer doing his full-blown intro for Meng to be rather hilarious. I don't get this storyline or why the NWO are lumberjacks. Goldberg and Meng trading blows is actually a lot of fun and I agree on wanting to see a full match between these two. Instead we get a rather dumb ending where Meng releases the Tongan Death Grip for no real reason. Goldberg wins, Nash saves Goldberg from a postmatch Hogan attack, but Goldberg only sees Nash holding the chair and drops him with a spear. And there's your Starrcade main event. It might not be an ideal one but at least it shows some kind of foresight, assuming they had the main event in line at this point.
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Wasn't as high on this as the others, though the crowd was admittedly into it the whole way. I'm also really sour on the result--I mean, it's folly to think that there's any way of salvaging Bret Hart in WCW at this point but there was a hopelessly naive part of me that still thought they might be able to protect him until whatever the fuck they were going to do with him at Starrcade.
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