Talk about it here.

The first vignette hyping Steamboat's return. He would simply be The Dragon. This doesn't show his face, so it's not clear that it's him.

When Steamer came back to the WWF I was legit angry at this stuff . He didn't fit in the WWF. The one thing I wanted out of his run there was a match with Perfect. I never got it. I'm so glad he ended up back in WCW. I feel he could had been pushed harder because he was white hot at the Clash. Still he was able to cement himself as a great worker. FYI Steamboat is my favorite wrestler.

What a big fat fucking waste this all turned out to be. Somewhere in an alternate universe, Tony Atlas helped sell a mid-card PPV feud blowoff on the mic and Ricky Steamboat carried him to a ***1/2 affair.

Very brief vignette of Dragon blowing fire. Steamboat coming back to WWF. I figured he came in after WrestleMania. Nothing for him to show up at WrestleMania?

Probably Vince still pissed off about how he left before.

Its still weird to think about in retrospect how wasted Steamboats run is from mid 1989 until November 1991. Thats two year gap really hurts his overall candidacy in my mind. It is like a major athlete having an ACL injury during his peak.

This might have been all right for Steamer if Vince had had plans for the gimmick. Wearing a headdress and breathing fire aren't exactly the worst things in the world for a wrestler. It was the fact that the whole thing led to absolutely nothing that made it so awful. Steamboat/Hennig wasn't in the cards because of Curt's injury, but why not renew Steamboat/Jake later in the fall until Savage is ready? That would have also possibly given him a series against Taker, who was Jake's main ally, and they could have really played it up big when Taker went over (as he certainly would have, given how he was being built up). It could have made at least some money, but just like Tony Atlas and Saba Simba, the gimmick ultimately went nowhere (although Steamboat used the fire-breathing entrance at least occasionally in WCW).

 

I don't know if Vince was still mad about Steamboat leaving in the middle of his IC run, but Ricky himself admitted that Vince never trusted him to do anything major again, which would explain why he was just gimmick filler during this run instead of anything substantial. What a shame.

I agree on the point that Steamer didn't have a *terrible* gimmick for the time (any worse than being introduced on his original run as a Bruce Lee type) but they did nothing with him. The more perplexing thing was implying they had no idea who he was, after being the no. 2 babyface on the company's self-professed biggest show of all time.

I forgot to mention that, Dooley. Then again, if they only planned on him being a warm body, what did it matter who he was or what he'd dome previously? He wasn't there to be Ricky Steamboat, champion wrestler. He was there to be the literal personification of a dragon, presumably one who didn't have much experience wrestling humans. As a dragon (note the small D), his accomplishments were thus limited and irrelevant.

 

Yes, I absolutely believe that we were supposed to see Steamer as an actual dragon, not a human being. The only animal-type wrestler to get away with appearing human for very long was Jake Roberts, and if I remember right, someone- I'm thinking it was Dick Ebersol- actually wanted him to slither and hiss like a snake during his interviews, at least on SNME. He was promptly told by Jake where he could go and how long he could take getting there.