PeteF3
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Everything posted by PeteF3
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I'm dangerously close to agreeing with El-P here. I won't go as far as him, but this was decidedly less of a farce than the previous month's main event if only because they *knew* they had to work creative overtime to try to make this something close to watchable, and because Leno and Eubanks work hard with what they can do, with Eubanks actually looking pretty good. His exchanges with Hogan might well be the best parts of the match. This is not even a good celebrity match and it's an insult to have expected us to pay money to watch it and Bischoff is put over as badly as Leno is, but it's also not the total disaster that it could have been. It's still a sad sight to hear Tony and Tenay have to put over Leno's "quickness" and hard work "training," I agree. Goldberg chumming it up with Leno and DDP is more evidence that they don't really know what to do with the guy, too.
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Pretty bad 1980s WWF house show-esque action. WHY would you give away the big Goldberg-jackhammers-the-Giant spot in a nothing match like this? This is a match that could have main evented or semi-main evented a PPV based on the intrigue of whether or not Goldberg could pull the move off. Clearly WCW never really had a plan for what to do with this guy once he exploded, because they've been winging it with him since before he even won the U.S. title.
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An underwhelming end to Jericho's terrific run as Cruiserweight champ. I liked the finishing spot itself but before that Malenko was way too overinvolved. I've been a huge fan of Jericho's work and booking in this program but generally I think cruiser matches themselves needed to be mostly devoid of gaga like this.
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That ending may have been a little more ambitious than these two were able to pull off, but it's not egregiously bad compared to half a dozen Manami Toyota matches or anything. This is pretty much everything you'd want out of Hash vs. Tenryu, with a few neat twists like Tenryu teasing that fall off the turnbuckle. Tenryu gets the upset win to retain some title belt or another. Fairly comparable to the first match, actually, and it may require a rewatch to determine which was better.
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Finals to determine inaugural IWGP Junior Tag champions. Maybe our takeaway from this year and to a lesser extent 1997 is that Liger really is the top guy in this division and the glue holding everything together, because while this wasn't *bad* it was another messy, disjointed match--much like the Super Junior finals but without nearly as much heat or drama. I did like some of Wagner & Kanemoto's double teams, particularly the Splash Mountain/missile dropkick, but others took too long to set up, and at times all four guys seemed to resort to boot scraping not as a way to establish dominance but because they couldn't think of anything else to do.
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The first week of August was band camp for me (shut up), and I had to wait to get home to read about what happened on both shows. This was a fantastic week to miss--made up for me not being able to see SummerSlam the previous year.
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JR makes a token attempt to get Kaientai's athleticism over, but this is the WWF and no small man can beat a big man, at least not for another 15 years or so. The beatdown after Taka's turn was pretty well-done since that's Kaientai's forte, and the quadruple hip swivel was fun, too.
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Pretty good forearm shot by Chyna, at the conclusion of a decent TV bout. I think it may speak for Vince Russo's growing power and shrinking attention span that we've seen at least 3 matches between these two teammates on TV in X-Pac's 4 months with the company, when a properly built first match between the two--whether as teammates or after a split--could have been a PPV semi attraction.
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The NWO interrupt a Nitro Girls performance and Kimberly stands in the corner like an idiot instead of bailing. This is not only, as Chad says, a failure in being edgy and groundbreaking, it also reeks of copycatting the stuff with Vince and Sable. WCW would be accused of doing stuff like that very often--sometimes for good reason, sometimes not, but this is about as blatant of a WWF ripoff angle as it gets in the pre-Russo era. Is anyone here old enough to remember when late-'80s SNL when they were first allowed to use the word "penis," so Conan O'Brien wrote a nude beach sketch that used the word 43 times? That's how I feel about all the mild profanity we're getting on this particular episode of Nitro. They've gotten some of the censorship lifted so they're going to milk it for everything it's worth. Indescribably awful segment. Bischoff and Hogan are SO bad here, to the point where I was praying we'd return to the NWO Nightcap desk. Hogan invites Kimberly to Hollywood's house next time she needs some loving, because Daddy has some loving for her--yeah, Hulk's not trying way too hard here or anything. Schiavone has totally checked out at this point and clearly no longer has any fucks left to give. Hey, as long as we're on a nostalgia kick in this post, does anyone remember a guy named Bret Hart? Whatever happened to him?
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Holy God, *another* phony fakeout angle, and there's MULTIPLE COPIES OF THIS SET-UP IN THIS FEUD STILL TO COME. Scott Steiner's mother makes her presence felt for the first time since SummerSlam '93, as she allegedly called Scott on the phone and talked him out of being part of the NWO. Scott cuts a bad promo even though it's *supposed* to be insincere and this crowd just dies. This is so not the right character for him--he needs to be a madman all the way, but I guess I'm stating the obvious. It just kills me that someone backstage obviously thinks these skits are the height of merriment.
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Good Lord, this makes the Bischoff grandstand challenge of Slamboree look subtle and restrained. I don't know if this is another one of Bischoff's monologues that's cribbed directly from the Leno monologue the previous night, which is the angle that kickstarted this whole mess, but it does speak to the power of Leno's delivery and timing in comedy in general, regardless of what you think of Jay as a comedian. And another 9 million chin jokes...to call that "low-hanging fruit" would be an insult to the term. I don't think I can properly explain the difference between this kind of attempted humor and what the WWF has been doing with Vince and his stooges. But it's just as well, because the difference in tone and delivery is pretty hard to miss. I think the bottom line is Bischoff's refusal to commit to looking like a buffoon, the way Vince was willing to. He still wants to try to portray himself as "cool" somehow. Notice that Tony & co. aren't allowed to talk over this.
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Bischoff actually takes a bump for Leno! Better than having Hogan do it. Hogan gets bleeped a bunch of times to try to desperately give this some sort of Andy Kaufman vibe. In isolation this actually is a fairly cool segment, but of course it's killed by what it's building to. Leno is incapable of acting like anything other than a talk show host giving a performance, so this doesn't really get the "legit" weight that something like the Letterman incident did. It doesn't speak much for his talents that Kevin Eubanks comes off as the better actor. And yeah, like this audience of housewives and retirees is really pumped over the possibility of Leno wrestling on PPV in front of a bunch of bikers and faux-bikers.
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If you know the song there's no way to listen to his and not start humming, First we take Manhattan...then we take Berlin. Though I suppose the more applicable line to late '90s wrestling is "They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom." I'm okay with Goldberg selling for the Giant but trying to build heat off a trashed locker room is obviously weak sauce. Still, if you must try to get that over as some major event, have Goldberg speak *after* the angle.
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I guess this served its purpose, but I cared about it far less than Taz/Bam Bam. I don't know if it's a sign of total desperation or just sheer barely-hidden contempt for his audience that Paul E. is attempting to push Jack Victory and his giant ass as a threat in 1998. Absolutely laughable. Memphis Power Pro wouldn't resort to trying to foist him on their audience as a top heel.
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Uh, note to Shane and Joey: you can't "reach for the ropes" in a fucking falls-count-anywhere match. Or at least you SHOULDN'T be able to. That aside, I have to say I enjoyed this more than their first PPV match. Taz isn't really suited for working underneath but Bam Bam is a guy who can more or less force him to do so, and they make it work here for the most part. As far as ramp stunts go, this was pretty well-done for what it was and did build off the previous match. And, like with Awesome going through the table, everyone involved did their damnedest to get the spot over as something memorable and significant.
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Yeah, this was pretty good, and even a bit less spotfesty than you might expect as they built well to Awesome finally going down. And the spots *do* hit, which is all you can ask for in a match like this. Some of this stuff is incredibly cringeworthy in retrospect, as you can't help but think that Awesome's bump through the table was probably one of the concussions that killed him. I won't say that it's aged all that well but it's easy to see why this series was so loved at the time.
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Rock & Owen Hart somehow got past Kane & Mankind to get a tag title shot on Raw. Austin is nonplussed both with them and with the Undertaker. Having Vince and Austin on the premiere show (and this was originally just a one-month test run, not any kind of committed series yet) was a good idea but they sure didn't get much to do. I guess it didn't matter. This wasn't much of a TV episode but it was one of those shows you can get away with when you're red-hot.
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