Talk about it here.

Now Savage is back and wouldn't you know, he's wearing the exact same clothes he was wearing on USWA TV.

 

Bret drops by to make sure this Yo Kazuna cat knows he's prepared and Savage gives him some advice.

I kinda thought Bret gets a bit buried here. Since he does lose to Yoko. I wonder if they knew he was doing the honors for Yoko yet. Plus the focus was more on Savage than the champ. I did like how Bret entered and bumped Lawler out of the way.

The story is that until the afternoon of the show, Bret didn't know the finish. He had a mutual friend ask Dave if he knew the finish.

That's kinda funny.

Wow, I never knew that. It actually seems like you hear very little about IX nowadays, and what you do hear centers around Hogan.

 

The irony of WWF playing that "Respect" Bret Hart video a lot around this time isn't lost on me.

Now we have Savage and Lawler together. Bret shows up wearing full ring gear and his jacket.

Good solid promos. Lawler's pretty funny getting bumped to the back by Bret and vainly attempting to get a word in.

Basic promo by Hart the day before Mania, not afraid of Yoko and a little sore from the attack at the contract signing, but otherwise in okay shape.

Awful if Bret didn't know. Him bumping away Lawler was the highlight here and foreshadowing something that will happen later in the year.

I'm surprised that Bret couldn't figure out the finish by himself. If someone as small as he is beats a guy Yoko's size, the guy who's Yoko's size becomes a laughingstock unless it's a longer match where the bigger guy gets visibly worn out. Vince didn't do non-pinfall finishes in Mania main events (Hogan-Sid being an obvious exception, and that's only because Hogan was leaving), so he should have guess that he was going down at least semi-clean. Whether he would have ever dreamed about Hogan taking the belt so soon and thus screwing him out of rematches (at least in the short term) is another matter.

 

Match the previous weekend or no, I found it odd that Randy got almost all the screen time with Bret here while Vince and Lawler got almost none. Had I been asked to guess which direction the company was going, I would have said that they were subtly setting up a Savage heel turn and a Savage-Hart feud, whether the title was involved or not.

 

Bret's actual promo was about what you'd expect. I was a little annoyed at Savage for constantly spelling "respect" instead of saying the word. Then again, he's always done that going back to his original WWF heel run, and he probably did it in Memphis and his dad's promotion too.

 

Lawler looked like a goof smiling at nothing while Bret was talking. I had no idea he was this bad this soon; if I didn't already know that this was the same guy who was the top babyface in Memphis, and was actually taken seriously in that role, I never would have guessed it from seeing this.

 

They're really pushing the toga idea; I can't wait to see how ridiculous guys like JR, Gino, and Heenan look in theirs. I also can't wait to see Savage's idea of a "Macho Toga".