PeteF3
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Everything posted by PeteF3
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We get a brief glimpse of the first GTV bit, with Mark Henry stinking up a bathroom to the consternation of D'Lo. As enthralling as it was the first time. Austin refuses to divulge the identity of the Greater Power as he's interviewed by some guy I've never seen or heard of before, and who definitely does not fit the description of the ideal WWE Announcer that Kris and Bix talked about on the last BTS. -
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Somehow Dave Brown is missing and Corey Macklin is locked inside a cage in the parking lot. Only in Memphis. Angle looks promising in his move execution and we get Fatu's requisite inside-out clothesline bump but Angle doesn't seem to be over at all. Neither does anyone else involved in this, really. Angle attempts a gratuitous dive off the top turnbuckle after the match is over and hurts his knee when he misses, then Smooth goes to town on it with a chair. Well, you pretty much brought all that on yourself, Kurt.
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I thought this was a total blast, maybe a bigger fan of it than anyone else here. I think the most compelling facet of this oddball matchup is that it takes almost any sense of predictability away. Even in a great Four Corners tag there are spots you can call when they happen, and you don't really get that at all here, even though both teams mesh surprisingly well. Seeing Misawa and Taue pull off double-teams together just feels fresher, as does seeing Kobashi and Kawada doing their sandwich-style double-teams and making saves for each other. Another MOTYC and Japan feels really hot all around at the moment.
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A really fun TV main event, brought down by some horrible commentary by Larry Zbyszko. The talk about how wrestlers don't age like football players and boxers is just so weird and nonsensical, and then Larry goes into a weird tangent about Shaolin monks (I'm not making this up) while lambasting the younger talent in WCW who aren't at *all* being held back by the veterans. (Not to mention that pinning the "holding back" of youngsters on Ric freaking Flair is the height of absurdity as well). You'd think a guy with Larry's WWF past would be a little more sympathetic to the youngsters' cause. Anyway, that unpleasantness aside Flair keeps up with Benoit very well.
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I still like the '96 match better but this was a ride and a half. They take us from extremely focused body-part work--Samurai targeting Otani's arm and shoulder, Otani targeting the leg--and then move into bomb-trading but do it in an organic way. And Otani busts out a few leg submissions down the stretch as false finishes to keep a psychological thread running through this. Otani is still a master seller, not just of damage done to him but of damage that *could* be done to him (watch as he scrambles to not let Samurai do the inverted DDT off the turnbuckle) and reacting to other moments in the match (like Samurai kicking out of the German suplex). And good Lord are there some vicious dropkicks thrown here, of all kinds and varieties. When the time limit expires I groaned but it was the good kind of groaning, where I wanted to see these two continue and am extremely hopeful that there's another singles match to come in '99. If not on the Yearbook, at least one that I can find. Definite MOTYC and off the top of my head probably New Japan's best effort of the year so far.
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Dave: "He [Russo] told me personally that Bagwell had more charisma than Dwayne Johnson. I mean, can you imagine?"
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Nothing blowaway great but a super-hot crowd can carry almost any match, and the work here is perfectly fine, just perfunctory in setting up the big post-match. A good cliffhanger ending...maybe a little too good considering what's to come.
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Mankind successfully (apparently) goads HHH into a hardcore match by informing him that Chyna has been checking him out in the locker room. This is only about a million times better executed than the mess with Savage and the fake Nash, as if that needed saying. I agree that Mankind's sort of been lost in the wilderness really since losing the title--on the other hand, he was banged up more than usual and several months of working light probably allowed him to have that final classic run starting about 6 months from now.
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The Beav is nervous about his debut match but finds solace in his mom's boobs. Amazing that Beaver Cleavage always seems to turn up just in time to remind me that the Savage-Nash feud could be even worse than it actually was.
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The problem is Austin's mass-destruction act doesn't work with a guy as laid-back and too-cool-for-school as Nash. He just comes off as a sociopath instead of someone perpetually angry. Madusa: "YOU BIG NEANDERT'AL PIECE O' LOOKIN' CRAP!" Did Madusa *ever* successfully get through a promo without a blown line?
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Bischoff has the chutzpah to say, "This is classic" as a Cloudy impersonator walks out. So apparently the idea here is that Savage thinks Nash is a woman, am I getting these last few weeks of brilliant storytelling correctly? Bischoff's comments about Mona are the most offensive thing (among many) about this, and honestly as bad or worse than the "Molly has a big ass" stuff later on in WWE. Miss Madness is a guy because she can do a top-rope huracanrana, apparently.
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Still not really sold on Koji as any kind of superworker but he looked far, far better here than in his other recent matches that were pimped heavily. Maybe it's because he concentrated on submissions instead of unleashing his mostly mediocre High-End Offense (except for the moonsault). And of course Liger is a master.
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"One can't grieve forever," as Jerry Lawler said after the Hawk suicide angle. The WWF had a title change scheduled at Over the Edge, and we can't have anything getting in the way of that. Undertaker rebuts Austin's promo with a possibly unintentional Police lyric. The Greater Power hype is now in full force, and no question, it was a compelling mystery.
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I'll give them credit for making the flaming table out to be a big deal--and even done with psychology, since it pays back Balls burning Joel Gertner, Bubba Ray and D-Von really sell it as a convenient set of circumstances that they ended up with the lighter fluid available to use, and the bump is sold and put over properly.
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There's one IWE match of his circulating, against Ashura Hara. It's on one of the IWE commercial box sets, I believe.
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Thunder is now very much a "go out and wrestle and fill 15 minutes" show, as we've seen in post-buyout UWF, 1984 New Japan, and other promotions nearing death's door. It doesn't lead to ratings or a hot product but it can lead to really, really good matches like this. I knew they wouldn't deign to have Benoit actually beat Page by pin or submission but I was actually okay with the finish, since it put Benoit over that DDP needed "saving" from him. I have no idea why Flair and Benoit are enemies now, though.
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What was the date of this pls? 5/10/86.
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The Macho Mid-Life Crisis tour continues, oooh yeah. It may say something about the state of 1999 wrestling in general, and WCW specifically, that I have to give this promo some relative props because it's mostly, "On June 13 at the Bash I'm gonna take Nash's title." I have no idea what the point was of Gene trying to pole poll the ladies, though.