PeteF3
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Everything posted by PeteF3
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Plus, he's not trying to get over at expense of the wrestlers--he's getting over at the expense of Cornette but also getting Cornette over at the same time. I don't think it's much of a stretch for anyone, familiar or not with Patrick's background, to buy that he could take Cornette out if he wanted. -
This kind of thing probably had more appeal in a pre-Internet age (more or less), when it took desire, time, and effort to try to track down these bootleg-esque videos from shady dealers--atrocities like the Faces of Death series, the R. Budd Dwyer suicide, or the Star Wars Holiday Special. At some point Jado and Nakamaki turn on their partners and this turns into either a match involving separate teams or a four-way. Fucking psychotic finish as Kanemura is power bombed into fire and the match is immediately called. Can't say there wasn't truth in advertising here. Other highlights, if you want to call them that, involved somebody swinging a torch like a baseball bat and Kanemura lighting his elbow pad on fire and clotheslining Gedo with it.
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WCW was just papering these TV tapings to death in a desperate effort to look major league on television, which would explain the lack of heat. Flair works really hard, busting out a top-rope chop to the floor and being really energetic on offense. His offensive flurries are the best part of the match. Honestly, Sid tries too--he's just incapable of putting three or more moves together without pausing to stare at the crowd or bail out. Easily the best parts of this are Sid selling for Flair's big chops--not often that Sid's selling carries a match, but here it is. Unfortunately the segments with Sid on top feel like they last about 6 years. I'm all bearhugged out at this point, even if they worked two-counts out of it. Fuck finish as Sid reverses the figure four, but Col. Parker is already in the ring kicking away at Flair, giving him a DQ win and title shot at Vader for the Clash. Sid cements his babyface turn after the match by giving the Colonel a chokeslam as they go off the air. WCW would have been really, really babyface-heavy if that had amounted to anything. They gave it the old college try here but I can't say this was a good match.
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Who was hired and fired more often, Marty Jannetty in the WWF or Chris Cruise in WCW? Another montage of wrestlers explaining the Lethal Lottery and BattleBowl, but since this is the Bischoff Era we get stupid stock horror music underneath it. Once again everyone is in Pure Sports Build...except Johnny B. Badd, camping it up bigger than ever.
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The Million Dollar Man gimmick barely worked in some of the industrial basements Raw was being taped in--it works even less in a high school gym. Dr. Mark Curtis isn't the most inspiring manager for him, either. There is some okay work here but overall it's not much of a match, and the finish is rather cheap. Funk going nuts on Curtis afterward is the most fun part.
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Kyoko Inoue vs. Shinobu Kandori, 8/5 Kandori's entire persona is that of someone in a huge hurry who's stuck in a line at Subway behind a person taking 5 minutes to decide what type of cheese they want--just a perpetual grump. It makes for a great contrast with the eternally bubbly Kyoko. This is a marvelously well-built match, with Inoue really working outside of her comfort zone. There are some fantastic reversals and counters, like a more intense version of the Kawada/Taue CC match. After a few heart-rendering near-falls, we got a finish that I actually really liked, and was built to just as well as the rest of the match. Some of the most dramatic rope escapes you'll ever see, which sets up the winning submission pretty spectacularly. Kandori may have been involved in the two best joshi singles matches of the year. Akira Hokuto & Suzuka Minami vs. Yumiko Hotta & Takako Inoue, 9/5 Had a lot more trouble getting into this. It's a fine performance from Hokuto but it felt like she was wrestling for four here. Minami is possibly the least charismatic wrestler in the history of joshi if not all of Japan, and Hotta and Inoue were mostly uninspiring until the end when we got to Hotta murdering Hokuto with bombs. I'm about to commit heresy, but I think I'm already over the "Hokuto suffers a crippling injury and fights through it" story--regardless of how entrenched it is in real life. I'm starting to prefer matches like the Saito one where she's the woman in charge and wrestles accordingly.
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You haven't seen a true spotlight hog until you've seen David Manning.
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Cornette is bringing in the Moondogs to take out the Rock 'n Roll Express--the matches will be unsanctioned because Smoky Mountain refuses to license the Dogs. Then he calls out the Bruise Brothers, and Cornette continues to be an expert at angles and promos that strike a nerve in his audience, discussing management & labor with regard to the Bruise Brothers failing to do their jobs properly. Prichard and Del Ray are hilarious doing a mock-drunk act when Cornette talks about sending the Bruise (Booze?) Brothers back to their old biker bar. Lee and Fytch are proud of themselves for what they did to Ron Wright. Lee makes the mistake of daring the White Boy to come out and earns a chair shot to the head. White Boy is SEETHING--when Anthony is speaking quietly, you know some heavy shit is going down. His line about being the old Bucksnort, Tennessee Dirty White Boy gets a HUGE reaction. SMW is hot up and down the card right now.
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Candido extolls the beauty of New Jersey's beaches in comparison to the river he's at now, where he plans on throwing away the U.S. junior heavyweight title. Bobby Blaze tries to stop him, and ends up taking a bath instead of the belt. Blaze cuts a pretty good promo in response. I strongly suspect, looking at the background, that this was in fact taped before the fight in the river. Accuse me of being a tinfoil hat-wearer if you must.
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Really good match leading to a great, great angle. Lee is on a roll, and this is a hell of a performance from the DWB as well, building up sympathy even before the big post-match. Wright gets in one awesome punch before inevitably going down, and the image of White Boy crawling over a fallen Wright with tears in his eyes is a powerful one. Part of what made this so effective was the DWB constantly treating Wright as a legitimate father figure--even when they were heels, the affection felt true and authentic.
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Midget D is now in the corner of PG-13. He's a midget, not a dwarf, and has a pacifier in his mouth--could PG-13 have been ahead of their time with regard to rave culture as well as hip-hop? Good studio match follows, with JC Ice and Dave Brown bickering the whole way through. Midget D breaks up a pin attempt and Christopher, God bless him, actually sells for him. Little Eagle comes out to even up the sides.
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A convoluted angle involving the Moondogs and Mike Anthony resulted in the USWA tag titles getting held up, won by former enemies Jeff Jarrett & Brian Christopher in a tournament. Christopher high fives the fans but takes all the credit for the victory, as it was Jarrett listening to him, and seems to say "his fans" with audible scare quotes.
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Borga no-sells most of Tatanka's offense and is pushed huge, but doesn't offer much on offense besides chinlocks and a nice clothesline. And holding his arms out. Kudos to Tatanka for selling his ass off for this--he honest-to-God carries this by selling the rib injury. That said, for Tatanka to be knocked out for 5 minutes from one chairshot to the back was a little excessive, even if the one-finger pin was a great touch. Yokozuna squashes his ribs further after the match, though I would think Tatanka being out that long would be evidence of some major brain damage at this point and a far bigger concern than some rib injuries. Cut to the back as the Quebecers are holding off Lex Luger. Borga was a shitty worker but this was a hot segment, and if they were going to push him as a main eventer then this was a victory he needed. I really don't like Luger singlehandedly running Borga and Yoko off, though.
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I think this is the #2 match in the series, better than the 2nd match but not as good as the 1st. Still not an ideal, decisive finish as botched interference from American Love Machine (I like to think of the drink as being a cup of Everclear) leads to a Santo victory. This was the first match where Metal really came across as pulling his weight instead of this being a Santo carryjob, so it had that going for it. Metal turns technico after the match, and he and Octagon team up to take out Love Machine. Barr seems to a force driving every significant AAA angle and turn this year.
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Jarrett can't get a break from Buddy Lee Attractions, so he's going to get it through wrestling. Ah, the Richard Lee gambit. Jarrett goes on and on about 95-year old decrepit Willie Nelson. A country music gimmick could work, but this is kind of a flimsy premise. Honky Tonk Man, who was basically portrayed as being completely deluded, pulled it off better.
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A step down from their All-American match, as we have a slow start and Johnny Polo making a nuisance of himself at ringside. For a cheap DCOR finish this is a clever one--Kid goes for a tope but Polo shoves Jannetty into the post, causing the Kid to miss and taking out both guys at the same time.
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Mercifully Capetski handles the intros and rule explanations to this and not Buffer. Schiavone is STILL clinging to the amnesia bullshit, and it's way past the point that we can blame this on bad internal communication. Cactus has been making it clear in interviews YOU conducted, Tony. You've had a good year behind the mic, quit ruining it with this 1999-levels-of-indifference crap. I don't mind Texas Death Matches, but I don't like 30-second rest periods either. Just start counting. Those breaks give this a really disjointed feel, though the action is about the stiffest you'll ever see in North America. A lot of it's masturbatory and needlessly dangerous and downright masochistic--as revealed in his first book, that backwards bump on the entrance ramp was a deliberate attempt by Jack to end his own career and cash in on a Lloyd's of London policy--but I can't say it wasn't effective at drawing me in. Jack, when he's on, is still something fresh and invigorating in a totally sterile company. Another cheap stupid ending badly executed--this show had Dusty's fingerprints all over it in the worst possible sense of the term. I actually liked the body of this more than anyone else here, but the finish wasn't satisfying for anybody.
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Not a great match with stunningly disappointing crowd heat. Flair busts out a Rude Awakening, which is awesome (don't ask me why this is still awesome in the face of modern-day finisher-stealing while I complained about the chop exchanges in Kawada/Kobashi. Flair busting out new offense is always cool). Randy Anderson gets bumped, and outside referee Terry Taylor (?!) takes over...and immediately gets knocked out. Schiavone's "Oh, for crying out loud..." sounded legit--you speak for all of us, Tony. Rude breaks out the knucks again, Flair gets them, Taylor counts two, Randy Anderson saw Flair use the object and disqualifies him. Cheap-ass, by-the-numbers Dusty finish. Rude tries to carry off Fifi afterward but Flair saves her. I actually liked this feud more than just about anybody else, insofar as I didn't hate it. And I didn't really hate this match, either--just the stupid, stupid ending. But it certainly was disappointing. And yeah, I have no clue why that ring crew guy felt the need to interject himself and grab the foreign object. Best Rude tight designs, off the top of my head: 5. The road signs design from the first Survivor Series 4. Survivor Series '89, with his Rude's Brood teammates on the front 3. These--black-eyed Flair on one leg, Fifi on the other, jack-o'-lantern on the back 2. "I BEAT 'EM" over the heads of the top WCW babyfaces 1. The SummerSlam '88 double-secret pull-down reveal tights with Cheryl Roberts' face on them
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I like Missy with short hair. She actually gets a double noggin knocker, but while that's going on and Scorpio's hitting the 450, Sags whacks 2 Cold with his boot and the Nasties get the belts back. Two good performances in a row from Bagwell/Scorp, who deserved better than glorified JTTS status.