SirSmUgly

Jarrett KABONGing Pam doesn't bother me in a vacuum. It's more like this: Russo is consistently weird about women. Russo loves having dudes randomly call women BITCHes in like the most aggressive ways. Like when Saturn randomly started calling Asya a BITCH for like NO REASON in storyline and then everyone else in the Revolution did it, too. Why is Goldberg calling Midajah a BITCH and then Jackhammering her through a table? That spot a couple Nitros ago was the least Goldberg-like thing I've ever seen. Remember people acting like weirdo Goldust putting a wig on Goldberg's head was some sort of egregious worst-case booking of Goldberg? Goldberg just cut an interview about wanting to be a hero for the kids! Why did he agree to then do that spot just a couple of weeks later? Russo is fucking weird when it comes to women to a point that even some of that crowd of dudes who would hate this sort of gender analysis would probably notice it. Shades of gray means that everyone's a heel. Goldberg Jackhammering Midajah is one even though I think Goldberg is a face again? Maybe? It's SHADES OF GRAY, BRO. But also, something like Kevin Nash making I'M GONNA RAPE U threats to a tied-up Jeff Jarrett by quoting Deliverance a few months ago is just weird and fucked up. Speaking of: This guy Russo's obsession with rape is so obvious that someone should put him either on a watchlist or on the writing team for Law & Order. Maybe both. The point is, for example, Billy Kidman making things really weird with Torrie is not a babyface move. Or Billy Kidman robbing Ric Flair along with the rest of the Filthy Animals, for that matter. Billy Kidman has secretly been a heel for the past year, not just for a few months in the late spring/early summer. Finally, the babyfaces lose so, so much because this is Russo's grimdark idea of grittiness (with the exception of Bischoff and the Millionaire's Club being active): I complained about Sting destroying Vampiro, but as soon as Bischoff's influence waned, Sting went back to getting destroyed by every heel he came across. It sucks. I want Sting to win sometimes. Hey, look, here's zendragon making yet another excellent point: They have a long-ish term babyface champ for the first time since Sid (note that while Flair, Nash, and the Hulkster were all babyfaces when they won the gold, those reigns lasted anywhere from a few days to a few minutes). What do they do with the guy? Job him out to anybody and everybody, from Goldberg to Chuck Palumbo. He's always falling for the okey doke, almost always getting left laying. Jeff Jarrett killed this dude throughout their feud and just had him beat for the title if Goldberg hadn't intervened. I didn't realize how bad Booker was booked after being positioned as champ until coming back through and watching all this. And most of this happens in the midcard! Booker is also basically a pure babyface, note. He's getting booked basically like Sting, another pure babyface - very dumb, completely incapable of handling himself in the midst of a bunch of SHADES OF GRAY, BRO tweeners. So for me, it's one thing to have Jeff Jarrett KABONG Paulshock. Actually, Jarrett isn't working his misogynist gimmick so strongly anymore; he'd KABONG Tenay or Okerlund or damn near anyone he wanted to. It's another to have all this edgy bullshit permeating these shows.

Show #254– 21 August 2000 "The one with a bunch of entertaining midcard acts that can't quite fend off the enveloping darkness that is Vince Russo's idea of intrigue" OK, this Nitro opens with a small (and sad) mystery. A title card reads: In memory of Peter Seligman, 1969 – 2000…Thank you for everything. Alright, a quick Google search doesn’t reveal much about this fella until I see a news headline from the New York Times: Groom-to-Be in Fatal Fall on Way to Get the License. That’s paywalled, but instead of un-paywalling it, I just take a peek at the ABC News link right next to it that’s free. It tells the story of a PR agent who was soon to be married to his PR agent fiancée and, while going to get their marriage license, got dizzy while on the subway train, fainted, and fell onto the electrocuted rail and died. This gentleman handled “a number of sports accounts,” so yeah, that’s the guy. Well, that’s a heck of a way to start a Nitro. Recap: And yet we press on by remembering last week’s mediocre-to-bad Nitro. Vince Russo talks to Scott Steiner on the phone and tells him that it’s on tonight, which is when Jeff Jarrett busts in and wants to also fuck up Goldberg on account of Goldberg costing him the big gold belt last week. Apparently, Nash, Steiner, and now Jarrett are going to lay in wait for this guy so they can get at him when he arrives. Elix Skipper (w/Lance Storm) does not have his “Party Up” knockoff on this recording, so whether I’m getting a dub or he simply hasn’t had it made for him yet, let me just mute this sucker and head to YouTube. Y’ALL SHOULD KNOW WHO BUILT THIS HOUSE/PRIME TIME DID, PRIME TIME DID. Jimmy Hart remains unbeaten! Skip takes the mic and rips off Rod Tidwell. Not a bad character to rip off, honestly. I’m surprised that no one on a national stage has tried it since Montel Vontavious Porter. Or maybe someone has and I missed it because holy shit, I just realized it has been about nine years since I last regularly watched a modern major wrestling company’s television! Okay, let me ignore the seemingly increasingly rapid passing of time for now; Storm joins commentary as Skipper's opponent Lt. Loco (w/General Rection) shoots a Super Soaker everywhere, including at Skipper himself when he makes it to the ring. Loco lands body slams, a nice dropkick, and a lariat before backing Skipper into the corner and landing some loud chops. He shoots Skipper in, and Skip slips because he’s wrestling in Jordans for some insane reason, but they connect on a headscissors spot anyway. Loco goes up top, but Storm gets up from the desk and hits Loco with a Canadian flagpole. Rection chases Storm off; back in the ring, Skip whiffs on a chair shot, but when Loco tries to use the chair, the ref pulls it away. Neither Loco nor the ref see Skipper load his fist with his Grey Cup ring; Skipper tees off and scores three. I admit to being excited to watch this match for a few seconds, but of course, Vince Russo is still kicking around and being worthless, so I quickly tamped down my hopes. Good call on my part! Goldberg is in the building and asking random WCW techs backstage about where all his opps are; Vince Russo tells Scott Steiner that Goldberg is in the arena, and we cut to Scotty in a hotel room somewhere thanking Russo for letting him know. Promotional considerations: Slim Jim (I still miss Randy Savage) and a WCW collectible card game that was made by (or sold by, or both) Wizards of the Coast. Huh. That seems like a cool piece of WCW merch to own, and I wouldn’t mind having one on my shelf. A hundred and twenty-five bucks sealed on eBay isn’t that crazy, either, at least if you have the economic security to spend money on a 25-year-old CCG that you plan never to open or play. Vince Russo (w/R Security, no &B anymore) is in the ring to suck at talking. Russo refers to the Wizard of Oz to call the whole of Wichita gay, but hold on, were there fairies in the Wizard of Oz? I thought it was all witches and sparkly shoes and studio mandated cigarette-and-diet-pills lunch breaks for Judy Garland that got her back to Kansas? Anyway, Russo is a fucking idiot, and he makes Madden worse in the bargain because Madden unfunnily riffs on the unfunny shit that Russo says. Russo quotes Al Pacino from the third part of the Godfather, too. I could be watching the Godfather or The Wizard of Oz or hell, Zardoz at this point, you know. At least Goldberg sneaks into the ring from behind almost immediately; he clears the ring, and Russo threatens to fire him if Goldberg doesn't exercise self control and tries to mangle him. SET THE EXAMPLE FOR THA KIDS, yells Russo, but Goldberg Jackhammered a woman he called a BITCH through a table, so that’s probably out at this point. Anyway, Russo says that he can’t fire Goldberg, but he can offer Goldberg his release from WCW, and I’m thinking YEAH, GIMME GOLDBERG/AUSTIN. The crowd is actually bummed when Russo says that Goldberg “can show up next Monday night wherever the hell [he wants],” but Goldberg rips up the unconditional release form, and the crowd is stoked again. Russo says that the triumvirate of Nash, Jarrett, and Scotty Steiner are coming after Goldberg tonight, and then mentions Goldberg’s lady partner Beth. Goldberg chokes Russo at the mention of her name, which is when Scotty Steiner shows up on the TurnerTron at the hotel where Goldberg’s lady partner Beth is at. Paraphrased, he basically says this: You hurt Midajah, so I’m about to rape your girlfriend. And no, I am not kidding about that. Then he busts into Beth’s hotel room, grabs her, and forcibly turns the camera following him off by slapping at it. So that’s a thing that happened. Goldberg rushes out of the arena while Russo celebrates. Before Russo can make his triumphant exit, Booker T. walks to the ring; Russo yells WHAT DO YOU WANT? Russo would like props for putting Booker T. in a position to be champ, but Booker just wants Russo to pass a message along to his buddy Nash that basically Booker is going to fuck him up the next time he sees him. Russo is all mad that Booker told him to do something and then is basically like BOY, I MADE A MISTAKE PUSHING YOU, DIDN’T I?! Russo tells Booker GET TO STEPPIN’, and Booker maliciously complies by stepping back, punts Russo in the gut, and nails an axe kick. So, if Russo would fire Goldberg without another thought if Goldberg attacked him, wouldn’t Booker be getting the axe (no kick) himself after that? Something something end of the day, something something logic. Goldberg takes off on his motorcycle. No helmet, but I guess I understand that he’s in kind of a rush. The Natural Born Thrillers, who in fact are now named that based on their shirts, help Vince Russo to the back. Russo tells Chuck Palumbo that if Nash is late to the arena – which is pretty likely to happen considering who we're talking about – Palumbo can have a world title shot, and Russo guarantees that he will win. So, Kwee Wee walks out here with Paisley. Commentary is just like, Papaya is gone now; we don’t know what else to tell you. OK, sure. Cpl. Cajun (w/Major Gunns) is Kwee Wee’s opponent. Tony S. promises us that WCW is sending a camera person to follow Goldberg to the hotel room. I don’t like it, I’ll tell you. I don’t like it. This match is a mixed-tag match and not a singles match, by the way. I don’t like it, I tell you. I don’t like it. Gunns does a very slow sunset flip to Kwee Wee that gets less than one. Is that the highlight of this match? I actually think Allan Funk has some talent and should be a useful part of this roster, but instead, he’s doing awkward slingshot spots where he crashes into Paisley, who is then missed so badly on a Gunns ass charge (yes, I wrote what I wrote) that the crowd dies. Anyway, Gunns lands an assisted crossbody on the hapless Paisley for three. The heels attack the babyfaces after the match. Russo calls Scotty Steiner and tells him that Goldberg is on his way. We return to a partially-cut segment in which we missed Tank Abbott and Three Count dancing. Apparently, the new jam that they danced to was one that the WWE did not purchase the rights to. Abbott, ever the perfectionist, storms away angrily at Three Count’s poor performance, and soon he is jumped by the Dark Carnival. The Carnival continues to the ring, toss Three Count to the floor, and then in a hilariously terrible promo that I think I actually loved, Vampiro puts over Juggalo Championship Wrestling and the JCW title. OK, here’s some stuff Vampiro says in this promo: HELL YEAH, JUGGALOS. WE’RE HERE FOR TWO REASONS. FIRST THING, THIS RIGHT HERE IS THE DARK CARNIVAL. THE SECOND THING, THANKS TO MY HOMIE EVIL DEAD WHO CAN’T BE HERE WITH ME BECAUSE **thinks about it for a sec** well, he’s dead, I AM ABOUT TO INTRODUCE THE SICKEST, TWISTED, DARKEST, EVILEST FORM OF ARENA COMBAT THERE IS IN THE ENTIRE WORLD: JUGGALO CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING IS OFFICIALLY TAKING OVER THIS PIECE OF SHIT WCW RIGHT HERE, TONIGHT! **holds up JCW Championship** THIS IS THE ONLY TITLE THAT MEANS ANYTHING TO ME: THE JUGGALO CHAMPIONSHIP HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION BELT. THIS IS FROM THE STREET! THE STREETS OF DETROIT! AND THIS IS FOR JUGGALOS! BY JUGGALOS! BECAUSE FOR TOO LONG, WCW HAS HELD ME BACK AND THE POLITICS OF THIS COMPANY HAS NEVER LET ME UNLEASH TRUE VIOLENCE IN THIS RING. BUT WHAT THOSE MORONS IN THE BACK CAN’T FIGURE OUT IS THAT THEY CAN’T HANDLE THE DOMINATION OF THE JUGGALO NATION. Then it gets dumber from there because he’s like Sting is just an actor, politics in the back, etc. But I mean, the first two-thirds of that promo were so awful that they were fantastic. Tank Abbott gets back in the ring and the Dark Carnival scatters. Tank talks, and it’s pretty good in an equally bad and dumb way: VAMPIRO, YOU DON’T KNOW NOTHIN’ ABOUT THE STREETS. YOU DRESSED UP LIKE A SILLY CLOWN AND THINK YOU’RE TOUGH? I’LL TAKE THAT BELT FROM YOU TONIGHT, BOY. LATER ON TONIGHT, ME AND YOU ARE GOIN’ **snatches at goatee exactly like Jim Neidhart does**. Terrible fucking television. I loved it. Led by Mike Sanders, the talker of the bunch, the Natural Born Thrillers saunter to the ring. I don’t see Palumbo, actually, as he’s probably getting ready for his upcoming title shot. Sanders says that he doesn’t think it’s cool that the main eventers “draw above-average paychecks with below-average ratings” and that they had to put up with an unnamed person being a dick to them at the Power Plant. I mean, just say “Sarge,” dude. Sanders puts the fellas in the ring over. Sanders reads these dudes' measurements with a certain amount of lasciviousness in his voice and says that he knows “stylin’ and profilin’,” which makes me think that maybe Ric Flair might be kicking around somewhere in the back. Maybe? I will say that Sanders is a good enough talker that this group would be dead in the water without him. The Filthy Animals walk onto the ramp and let their spokesman Konnan respond. His response starts like so: “And I thought Tank Abbott’s promos were bad **shudders**, ugh.” Completely unfair assessment, but that got a genuine laugh out of me. Konnan points out how decorated his crew is, says that the NBTs don’t got it like that, and then after a break, joins commentary while Disco, Rey, and Juvi wrestle O’Haire, Jindrak, and Sanders. Juvi is in trouble, but gets out of trouble when Rey gets a tag. I think Stasiak’s also on commentary. Yeah, he is, and Konnan mis-calls him Stan and then says that he’s the least of the workers in the NBTs, so it’s a mystery as to how he hurt his knee. Stasiak is a dolt and this is an unfair matchup at the desk. Disco is the next guy to run into trouble after he gets a knee to the back on a rope run and eats a lariat shortly after that. O’Haire beats up Disco, and in a cool move, tags out with his boot while holding Disco in place by his hair. Why don’t more tall dudes do that? This is a pretty fun match, but everyone in this ring is at least solid (if green); the Animals are all excellent workers. The Thrillers keep the pace by doing dope double-team moves like Sanders boosting Rey into a floatover powerslam. I know that everyone says this, but yeah, O’Haire should have had a better career than he did. So, Rey manages to dodge an O’Haire attack; O’Haire crashes into Jindrak and Juvi gets the hot tag and lands a couple of gorgeous headscissors. Sanders ends up eating a Bronco Buster; Disco DDT’s O’Haire and lines him up for a Bronco Buster. Juvi dropkicks Jindrak into the corner and Tygress hits a Bronco Buster while Konnan yells A FACE FULLA STUFF over and over, *sigh*. You know what, it’s whatever. The ring clears; only Disco and Sanders remain, and Sanders manages to twist behind Disco and land a 3.0 for the victory. Tygress hops back in the ring, and Sanders slams her into place for an O’Haire Seanton Bomb that O’Haire hits perfectly considering his target; he lightly grazes Tygress’s tummy with his head, but I still buy that probably hurt her in kayfabe. The commentary situation was awful, but the match itself was legitimately fun even though we were thirty seconds in when we came back from break. In a better company, this would have been a great match, but it was still a match worth plonking on your playlist. Goldberg tears up to the hotel, parks his bike, and hustles into the lobby. Pam Paulshock notes that Kevin Nash isn’t here yet, so Chuck Palumbo gets the title shot. Palumbo nervously crunches the Lex Flexer while cutting a boilerplate promo about the NBTs asserting their greatness. Booker T. comes to the ring to defend the gold against Palumbo. Booker dragged Shawn Stasiak to something decent, if overlong, a few PPVs ago. Palumbo is clearly better than Stasiak, but on the flip side, we’re on a Russo-booked Nitro, so who knows if they’ll have the time or space to do something decent here. Wait, what am I saying, obviously they won’t: Vince Russo walks out here with a ref’s shirt on. The ref’s shirt has a blood-red New York Yankees logo on it. Isn’t Russo from Long Island? Shouldn’t he be a Mets fan? I’ve probably suggested this before, huh? Anyway, the star of this match is Russo, so while Booker hits some nice offense to open the bout, I’m just ready to fast-forward this thing to the dumbass finish. Booker fights for a vertical suplex, but finally lands it. Palumbo pokes Booker in the eye and does nothing with that advantage; Booker hits a spinebuster and a jackknife pin that Russo doesn’t bother to count. Booker tries to strangle Russo – a natural response to seeing Vince Russo nearby – which allows Palumbo to attack from behind. Russo quick counts Palumbo’s pinfall attempts, of course. Palumbo lands a bit of nice offense in there, including a stalling vertical and an impactful floatover powerslam. Book fights up from a resthold pretty quickly, like there was almost no time to rest at all, and lands a flying forearm to trigger a comeback. Book manages a back suplex after Palumbo reverses his whip and is reversed in turn. Huh, this has been strangely good? I can’t believe it. Booker lands a pancake and Spinaroonies up, then scores a Houston Side Kick. The NBT’s rush the ring, and Booker handles them all until Reno hops in the ring and grabs Booker from behind. Reno lands a Roll of the Dice, but Vito hits the ring with a pipe and takes out the NBTs. Nash runs into the ring with a chair and hits Booker in the head. Palumbo covers, and after endlessly bickering with Vito, Russo turns around for long enough to count three because Booker taking Ls is a constant since the start of 1999. Before Palumbo can celebrate too much, Commissioner Cat walks to the ring next to Ms. Jones. What can I say about Ms. Jones that I won’t say again many times while she’s still in this company? She’s insanely good looking. Her beauty is celestial. God should make a constellation out of her face. Anyway, the Cat is like, Dude, I’m the commissioner; your buddy Eric Bischoff made me commish, remember? Therefore, since I didn’t make this match, it wasn’t official. Fuck off and fuck you. Booker doesn’t want to win it that way, so the Cat restarts the match, banishes THAT WRITER (ugh) Vince Russo to sit next to “that big ol’ fat ass Mark Madden” (Madden: WHAT?!?!), and then pulls off his shirt to reveal a ref shirt. The bell rings while Russo complains on commentary, but he doesn't have to sit there for very long; Booker destroys Palumbo and wins it with a Book End. It took Goldberg like two segments to get from the lobby to the stairwell. He finally bursts into the room. Scotty Steiner has used Beth’s lipstick to leave Goldberg a message on a mirror: GOLDBERG, SEE YOU AT THE ARENA. SHE’S OKAY…FOR NOW. MISTER GOLDBERG, YOU COULDA SAVED HER. I GAVE YOU ALL THE CLUES. No, wait, only the first two ALL CAPS sentences were written on the mirror. Ignore those last two. Vampiro (w/ICP wearing suits) comes to the ring. Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope clear out the guys at the desk and do their typical commentary characters. It’s so absurd that it’s stupid fun. How can I even call this match? I am mesmerized by the utter nonsense that these two idiots on commentary are spewing. Tank throws a right at Vamp, but Vamp ducks and the ref gets it. Tank does land a second right on Vamp, which is when the ICP run in and get their asses kicked. Muta slides into the ring and mists Tank, who gets stomped out. That’s it. The match is over. Three Count run in well late for the save and give him a towel to wipe his face with. Tank’s upset about the lateness or maybe still the poor production on their new song and stomps off. Scott Steiner drags poor ol’ Beth through the halls. Vito and Russo yell at one another; Russo is like BRUH, I GAVE YOU THIS JOB IN THE FIRST DAMN PLACE and then books Vito against Kevin Nash. You know, Vito has been getting over as a midcard babyface lately; this seems like the perfect time for Kevin Nash to step in and halt that momentum! In a confounding bit of booking, Norman Smiley has apparently asked to defend his hardcore belt against KroniK so that he can lose this belt. Hudson actually asks a salient question: “Can’t he just forfeit?” Of course, the capricious Cat ain’t accepting forfeits, so that’s a no. Actually, Clark is wrestling Smiley, I guess; Adams joins commentary and confirms that Norm challenged them both, but he’s not going to waste his time beating the shit out of the guy and will let his buddy get all the fun of doing so. Anyway, this match doesn’t matter. Norm still tries to win for some reason instead of taking an immediate dive. Adams shoulderblocks Norm to the floor, and Norm slaps Adams in the face, which brings Adams into the ring to slaughter Norm. Of course, Norm gets the crap beaten out of him and still wins after taking all of these big moves because the Harris Bros attack KroniK and put him on top of Clark for three. The Cat had a plan for Team Canada, part of which apparently was getting PCO’s visa revoked. The other part is that he books Lance Storm in a tag match against General Rection and Mike Awesome; the Cat will pick Storm’s partner, and if anyone pins Storm, including his mystery partner, Storm loses the Canadian Championship. Storm is disgusted at this scandalous American behavior. Scotty Steiner yells at Beth in some backstage area somewhere. Vito cuts a promo on Russo and Nash with Pam Paulshock. It’s not good, per usual. He has two words for Nash: **many words about the Staten Island Express**. That was pretty funny whether he meant to do it or not. Kevin Nash strolls out and hits some V E R Y S L O W offense. Vito leaps away from a Nash slam attempt and hits a flurry of moves, including a vertical suplex and a Savage Elbow for about 2.8. Vito unloads with everything he has, lands a couple of legdrops, and then goes up for a flying headbutt that gets another 2.8. Vito scores a few soupbones, but runs into a back elbow and gets annihilated with a Snake Eyes, a side slam, and a chokeslam that gets two. Nash follows up with a big boot and looks for a Jackknife, which he lands. Nash calls for another one, which give Booker T. time to run in, attack Nash and clear him out with a series of kicks. After a break, Vito rudely waves off the trainer’s attempt at care. Mic in hand, Lance Storm shares his disappointment in the United States and its fans before standing at attention for his anthem. A theme cuts the anthem off; it’s his mystery partner, Jeff Jarrett, who is being featured at the proper level for his talent tonight. Of course, Mike Awesome and General Rection are their opponents. This bout is nonsense, but you knew that. Storm tries to sneak a pinfall whenever he can, including after a superkick on Rection. He manages to score a series of two counts, but Jarrett yanks Storm off a cover. I would guess that he wants to be champ except that he shoves Storm right into a Rection roll-up and just celebrates instead of stopping that pinfall, so who the hell knows what his motivation is. This match is dumb. Alright, here’s the finish: Rection lands a No Laughing Matter, but the ref is distracted and doesn’t count the pin. Elix Skipper hustles out barely grazes Rection’s head with a guillotine legdrop. Rection tangles with Skipper outside the ring while Awesome prepares an Awesome Bomb on Storm, but Storm hops out and Jarrett blindly swings his guitar and KABONGs Awesome in the back; Storm covers for three and gets out of dodge. Actually, scratch what I said about Jarrett being U.S. Championship level: Is this really the best we can do with, like, every guy in this match except for Rection? Scotty Steiner drags Beth to the ring to end the show. Steiner is upset that Goldberg actually messed with one of the few things that he likes in life – namely, his freaks. He normally wouldn’t stand next to someone of Beth’s looks, is what he says, but not in these more mild words that I have chosen for this paraphrase, and Goldberg marches out here. Jeff Jarrett jumps him with a chair, then dumps him in the ring so that he and Scotty can stomp the guy out. Booker T. runs in to make the save, but Kevin Nash soon follows and jumps Book from behind. Of course, two-on-three isn’t really two-on-three when Goldberg is one of the two, so Rick Steiner has to show up with a lead pipe and handcuffs to give the heels one final advantage. This sucks. Also, they just randomly turned Nash heel again even though the crowd is disinterested in him being anything but a babyface. Vince Russo makes everything so dark and shitty. I don’t want to see the heels do stuff like putting a woman in a Steiner Recliner. Of course, I don’t want my babyfaces to crash women through tables, so there’s also that. Russo’s world is one of tawdriness and tasteless violence, and I do not enjoy visiting it in the least. -25 out of 5 Stinger Splashes.

Thunder Interlude – show number one hundred and twenty-three – 16 August 2000 "The WCW Gang spins its wheels on the road to the final Fall Brawl" Let’s Thunder, folks… Recap: Nitro comes off as very stupid and unappealing via this recap…None of the good stuff made it in… Rick Steiner walks up and shits on Kevin Nash for being the number one contender instead of his brother Scotty…Nash challenges him to a match for number one contendership...Ricky is a moron, but even he wonders how Kevin Nash has matchmaking powers…Kev somehow makes the match anyway… The crowd in Kamloops cheers at the sight of Lance Storm’s limousine making its way into the parking lot…Kamloops!...I love our Pacific Northwestern names of towns and cities based on indigenous languages…The Giant Bomb crew used to get a huge kick out of the town name Tumwater…Canada also has some fun English-derived town names, too…WCW should head to Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat, and Whitehorse next… Anyway, Team Canada steps out of the limo, where they are met by the Cat…The Cat books them against M.I.A. for later in the show... Once we get past the show’s opening reel, we cut to the arena and KroniK enters the ring… Adams talks, unfortunately…They are very over, though…This is one of WCW’s booking success stories from the period...Even WCW can’t screw up sticking two athletic midcard big men together and having them toss opponents around…Adams threatens the Harris Bros., then says that WCW sent four guys in to show them a bit of humility, but they can beat all four guys in two minutes…I perk up a bit, wondering if caley’s huge local wrestler guy with the poorly-fitted pants will be out here soon… Bryan Clark takes the mic and establishes BREAKIN’ NECKS AND CASHIN’ CHECKS as KroniK’s catchphrase…Sure, why the hell not…Anyway, here come the four jobbers and YEAHHHHH, it’s THE JUGGERNAUT, BITCHES…Also, there are three other dudes…I don’t care about them, though...The jobbers are generally terrible, by the way…The one in yellow pants totally botches a leap where he’s supposed to be snagged out of mid-air, but he gets two feet off the ground and flops on his back…Juggernaut’s shirt says SIZE DOES MATTER on the back…He’s a pretty good bumper in his limited showcasing, though…Stevie Ray only mentions his Bigelow-like britches once…Kronik doesn’t even need seven-eighths of the time allotted to pin all four guys… These dopey-ass Harris Bros. show up on the TurnerTron after the match…They cut a bad promo and drive away on their bikes…They suck ass... Other than the matches the Cat made in the opening, Tony S. promotes a Juvi/Rey tag title defense, a sit-down interview with Jeff Jarrett, and of course Gene Okerlund vs. Mark Madden…In a decent gag, we see a sign on a door that indicates that it’s Madden’s dressing room, but we hear a flush and he walks out, and the slight pan out reveals that he’s only been given a bathroom stall in which to prepare...Yes, he does wash his hands…Meanwhile, Gene’s wearing a Kamloops Blazers hockey jersey…I’m guessing they’re a WHL farm team for the Calgary Flames based on the name and logo… After a break, Mike Sanders says that he can offer the Filthy Animals intel on the Natural Born Thrillers, whom Reno has apparently joined…Disco suggests that Sanders should join the Animals, but the rest of the Animals are against it because Sanders looks, talks, and acts like a cornball, basically… Vampiro complains about the KISS Demon and cuts a bad promo in the bargain…Muta-san’s growled Japanese manages to save the promo, though, and I didn’t even understand it!... David Flair enters the ring and asks Stacy to join him…She walks to the ring, and I know I was a bit much in the previous Nitro review, but she is insanely hot tonight…My goodness…I’m not typically attracted to blondes based only on looks, so when I do find a blonde woman to be physically attractive, that means something….To be fair, though, she’s also attractive because she’s very funny…Dopey Dave has this long, rambling preamble to his eventual and obvious marriage proposal, and she just wants her diamond already, dammit... She immediately signals that he should wrap that shit up and pop the question with impatient hand motions, which makes me laugh, and ends up aggy enough that she’s yelling JUST SAY IT as the M.I.A. theme hits... Why is the whole dumbass M.I.A. here?...SGT. A-WALL obliterates Dopey Dave while the fellas cordon off Stacy Hancock (that’s her name now; that’s what I’ve decided)…Stace is pretty relaxed about this ass whipping her man is taking…Major Gunns grabs a mic and lets Dave know that this is a receipt for touching her on Monday…Stace grabs the mic when they leave, yells DAVID, YOU COULDN’T EVEN DO THIS RIGHT, and then reaches into his pocket, takes the diamond ring, puts it on, and excitedly dances as she admires the stone…That was absolutely hilarious!...Holy shit, was she on point tonight…This angle had a misstep with the miscarriage spot, but Hancock's got enough charisma that, as with her feud with Daffney over David, the full angle actually might end up as some dumb daytime soap-style fun… Canada is gorgeous; we see a snippet of the Jeff Jarrett interview, which takes place on a beach…Jarrett talks about the kids not being able to work in this snippet… General Rection yanks the mic away from Pam Paulshock and attempts to fire up the Misfits for their match against Team Canada….Obviously, the crowd doesn’t support them or their nonsense... Crowbar tells Daffney that he’s ready to support her in these trying times, what with Dopey Dave having fully moved on to being engaged with Stacy Hancock and all...Daffney is perky, though...Shge says that she’s feeling good and is way over David **Crowbar is pleased**, and anyway, her secret admirer sent her these yummy chocolates **Crowbar is bummed**...JUST ASK HER OUT, STUPID. TELL HER THAT IF SHE’S NOT INTERESTED, YOU UNDERSTAND AND VALUE HER FRIENDSHIP EITHER WAY, BUT YOU HAD TO SHOOT YOUR SHOT WITH A WOMAN LIKE HER... DAMMIT… The romance and relationship angles on this show are working for me, now that I look back at how I felt about these last couple of segments…I do love me a good romance/relationship angle… Rey Misterio Jr. and Juventud Guerrera (w/the Filthy Animals) invade the ring…Disco has brought Sanders out here, and they say things like WHOOPTY WHOOP, JIGGA WHAT and WORD TO YA MUTHA…It elicits a chuckle from me…Anyway, Jindrak and O’Haire are getting the tag title shot tonight…I assume that Sanders will be tilting the field in their direction tonight?... If you’re going to have all these big man tag teams (TPE, Jindrak and O’Haire, KroniK, the Harris Bros.), it would behoove you to push a contrasting high-flying team like Rey and Juvi more seriously than WCW is currently doing...And also as pure babyfaces…Konnan joins commentary and agrees with Stevie that SUCKAS GOTS TA KNOW how for real Rey and Juvi are…Rey is so good, man, give me Rey/O’Haire for ten minutes on a random Thunder before it gets canceled…Since KroniK are the only babyfaces in the tag division, apparently, Rey’s hot tag is again muted, though Kamloops is more behind him in general and it comes off much better…A bulldog/springboard legdrop combo gets two on Jindrak…The match breaks down…Jindrak plants Rey with a tilt-a-whirl slam for two…Rey and Jindrak fuck up the spacing on a Misterio leap, but we end up getting a Seanton Bomb anyway…The Animals try to interfere, but Sanders maces Konnan…TPE and Reno rush the ring and beat down the Animals…Stevie, upon Tenay saying that Disco let Sanders infiltrate their crew: “Disco needs to be checked”…It’s so obvious to me that swapping Hudson and Stevie would be perfect for Nitro and wouldn’t harm Thunder too badly…Why hasn’t anyone backstage in WCW with the power to do so figured this out?... Gene Okerlund wants to ask hardcore champ Norm Smiley for advice, but Norm hears the words “hardcore champion” and winces…He’s still willing to give Okerlund some pointers, though…Gene wants to do a Frankensteiner… Tank Abbott is back to being a groupie…He’s not happy with the studio recording he and Three Count did…Three Count wants to know where their recording contract that Tank absconded with at New Blood Rising is…They also have a match tonight…Tank doesn’t give a single shit…He coerces them into going back to the studio with him… I’ve seen enough of the KISS Demon in midcard angles at this point…The Great Muta, his opponent, is too old for this shit…Stevie takes the heel position and says that Vampiro brought the Demon to greater prominence, so the Demon should appreciate it…I mean, maybe that’s true, but Vamp kidnapped his fiancé and generally abused him to do it, so that’s a cold take, my dude…I love Muta, but bored older Muta on cruise control isn’t lighting up the ring…Then again, I’d be bored and on cruise control if I were being booked like this…You could stick Muta in the main event and I’d believe it…At least you could do something decent like feud him with Sting again, geez… Vampiro (w/kendo stick) makes his presence known…He passes the stick to Muta, who hits the Demon in the gut with it behind Mickey Jay’s back…Then, Muta cancels that spot out by tossing the stick back to Vamp in full view of Jay, who has to sell it as though he’s not sure what he’s just seen…Muta gives zero fucks…If he were going to be here until the end, Muta Gives Zero Fucks would become a regular feature, but I can just see it percolating in the back of his brain that he’s working on an exit strategy ASAP…Muta mists his way out of a Shinonomake (Stevie calls it properly!) and hits a moonsault for three…Vamp hops in the ring and wears the Demon out with the stick after the match…Vamp, who is a REAL JUGGALO (his words), is going to wrestle Sting again at Fall Brawl…Fuck off, this feud sucks…Poor Sting deserves better… Rick Steiner is pissed off that someone is banging on his door…I assume Madden is out there to ask him for help, but Madden is being mean to Pamela Paulshock in a backstage interview…Madden has the teeth of a heel, I’ll say that much…He's out here looking like Jaws in Moonraker...Madden says that when Okerlund rubbed his jock in Madden’s face last week, it smelled like her perfume…I was hoping that Pam would punt him in the penis in response, but no dice…Anyway, we don't find out who was banging on Ricky's door yet... Here's Team Canada for their match against the M.I.A….Lance Storm hypes his team before the bout…We get a rendition of “O Canada” that is rudely interrupted by the M.I.A. theme…Our trios team for the American side is Rection, Cajun, and Loco…A-WALL and Gunns are nowhere to be seen…Doesn’t Gunns turn heel and join Team Canada?...Wait, doesn’t Hacksaw join Team Canada?...Wait once more…Mike Awesome is in Canadian-themed tights in the video that plays on the main WCW Thunder page in Peacock…I didn’t realize that Team Canada is a thing until the final days… The Canadian babyfaces/American heels come out on fire, though Loco stops PCO’s momentum…Storm helps PCO get it back with a distraction on the apron…PCO lands a sit-out chokeslam…Skipper tags in and gets two on a nice belly-to-belly as Stevie puts Loco over for being underrated…PREACH…Storm fucking DESTROYS Loco with a high dropkick…He lands right on top of Loco as he lands and goes right into a cover for two…Loco gets a hot tag, which is nonsense…Did anyone in the back figure out how to lay this thing out based on, you know, the fact that the Misfits are the heels tonight?... There are corner charges and dives, and Rection is left alone with Storm…Rection hits a back suplex and goes up for a No Laughing Matter…He hits it and gets a visual three count…*sigh*…Someone cheap shots Rection while Slick Johnson is distracted…Storm locks on a Canadian Maple Leaf for the win and then keeps it on after the match…The Cat runs to the ring with a chair and backs Storm away…No one understands how the hell to book Team Canada in Canada in contrast to how they are booked in the States…The Cat turns around and Storm jumps him to cheers…The other Misfits finally run Team Canada off… All the matches are a touch too short to really be good…There’s some awesome work within these matches, no doubt, but the finishes suck, and the match times mean that the matches are underdeveloped… The Cat wants to fight Lance Storm after the break…Storm says he’ll put his Canadian Championship up against the Cat’s commissionership…The Cat agrees as long as the rest of Team Canada bugs off…Huh, did Storm ever become commissioner?!...I can’t imagine that the Cat would ever win the U.S. Championship…Here’s another brief bout…The Cat hits a Feliner...Ref Jamie Tucker counts so slowly to give PCO time to run in and attack the commissioner that Stevie Ray is vocally baffled about it…Don’t point out how poorly timed the run-in was, Stevie!...The Cat gets a mic as Storm and PCO walk away and promises revenge on Nitro… Here's that Jeff Jarrett shoot interview…Jarrett is not pleased about WCW changing horses in mid-stream back in January…Wait, no, this is another snippet…We cut to Rick Steiner cutting a complete garbage dump of a promo with Pam Paulshock…Thankfully, someone tries to murder Rickyby knocking part of the set onto him, which ends the promo… Again, I’m not sure that we needed to play out the Mark Madden/Gene Okerlund feud with a singles match…Madden’s wearing a Levon Kirkland jersey…Madden trash talks Okerlund before the match…Tenay basically pulls a Scott Steiner and says about Mark Madden that HE’S FAT…Okerlund gets in the ring and tells Madden to BLOW IT OUT [HIS] ASS…The desk confirms that yes, Madden is extremely gassy…Tony S. hypes this “Match of the Millennium” and then swears that they’re making him promote it like this…He doesn’t actually believe it…Okerlund wants Madden take off his shirt for a posedown before they go at it…Madden is a large man…Russo thinks that fat people are inherently funny on account of their appearance… Madden chokes Okerlund, so Norman Smiley rushes out to help him, but Norm is quickly jumped by PCO…Vito makes the save and backs PCO off of Smiley…This segment has already been too long…One more month, Russo…I need to start counting him down like I did that dipshit Hulkster…Madden sets up Gene for a Vader Bomb, but Pam Paulshock runs out, rolls Okerlund away, and forearms Madden in the balls…Okerlund covers for three…Pamela pecks Okerlund on the cheek, and the desk marks out…I mean, this doesn’t offend me enough to get on a bad list, but we could have featured Kanyon in a match or something instead of this, y’know?... Vito is upset at these Canadians and their bullshit…He asks the Cat for a match against PCO…The Cat agrees… OK, finally, it’s this Jeff Jarrett interview…Tony S. runs down Jarrett’s family history in pro wrestling…He asks Jarrett about the state of DA BIZ today…Jarrett thinks the business changes every five or so years and that we’re on the cusp of another big change…You ain’t kidding, Jeff!...He’s apparently not a fan of the death of the territories, basically, because he thinks that they’re just going Power Plant à Nitro instead of getting their experience in before they get onto television… This is the least useful shoot-bang interview because it’s about the state of wrestling in general and doesn’t advance any angles or feuds…It’s just a vet saying the kids don’t respect DA BIZ enough…Tony S. asks if Jarrett’s happy that he came back to WCW when the WWF was really hot…Jarrett says he was, though of course, he doesn’t get into why…However, he’s not entirely sure that WCW is headed in the right direction based on how he pauses and tries to develop a decent answer…He isn’t happy, as stated earlier, with all the leadership changes that are getting in the way of company cohesiveness… Tony S. tries to get over Booker/Jarrett on the previous PPV as a great match…Jarrett disagrees…As do I…It was fine, which Jarrett also thinks about it…These main event matches are almost all overbooked, though…Jarrett again shares his displeasure over Russo leaving in January because of a lack of support for his booking decisions, but thinks that even with the lost time, WCW is headed in the right direction…Meh, this was the least essential of these interviews… Billy Kidman stops Vito backstage and says that he’s glad to back the former Mamaluke up…He asks Vito what the deal with he and Reno is, but Vito tells him not to worry about it… Alright, PCO and Vito are probably going to hit each other with stuff!...Commentary debates whether or not someone is terrorizing Rick Steiner in the back…I have decided that Chucky the Living Doll is the one doing it…That’s my headcanon and will stay as such unless WCW provides an alternate answer on screen…Vito and PCO start out having an actual wrestling match, which is neat…The match itself is fine…Vito eventually asserts himself after a slow start and lands a Savage Elbow for two…PCO slips in a floatover power slam of his own for two…PCO looks for a top rope splash and scores, but Vito kicks out at 2.8…Vito hits a burly back suplex and a second-rope headbutt for two…There’s a good twelve-minute match somewhere in these guys, but this particular bout between them doesn’t have enough time to develop…I think they have good chemistry, though…Vito reverses a whip and lands a Paisan Plunge for three and the clean victory…This wasn’t even a hardcore match, as an added bonus!... Reno attacks Vito after the match, but he’s not immediately successful…Vito and Reno go back and forth...Reno hits a Roll of the Dice and goes to look for a chair…Billy Kidman runs down the aisle and manages to dropkick the chair into Reno’s face…They go at it, and Kidman hops over Reno on a corner charge and lands a Kid Krusher….The rest of the Natural Born Thrillers run down one by one and are dispatched one-by-one as Kidman looks like a legit upper-midcard guy for the first time in months and months…Finally, the numbers game gets to Kidman… The Filthy Animals are the next men down to the ring…They attack the NBTs…The Animals, Vito, and Kidman clear the ring…The rest of Team Canada finally makes it down to back up PCO….Everyone brawls in the ring…Mike Awesome shows up a bit late and starts hunting Team Canada members…If only more than a couple of these people were over, this would be a hot segment!...I do appreciate the effort to ignite something here with the criss-crossing feud mashup… Chucky the Living Doll Goldberg finally catches up to Rick Steiner as Ricky holds a phone call with his brother Scotty…He beats down Ricky with a pipe, then grabs the phone and asks Scotty how Midajah is doing…After the break, Ricky does a stretcher job as Stevie tries to get answers from the medics on Rick’s status… Wait a minute, did we bait-and-switch another Nash vs. a Steiner Brother match?...Nash simply doesn’t want to wrestle anymore, huh?...Did he get in Russo’s ear and get a couple of nights off?...This is a guy who booked himself into retirement, after all… Speaking of this guy Nash, he exerts himself with a walk to the ring, stopping for a water break to hold up someone’s SIEGEL FEARS HALL sign…I bet Siegel’s niece Emily fears Hall considering that Hall physically attacked her during an argument…I digress…Nash gabs for our main event once again…I am not looking forward to him getting the belt from Booker T. in a few weeks…Speaking of, here’s Booker to contest Nash’s boasting that he’ll soon be the new world champion…TNA NUMBER ONE COMMENTARY TEAM CHET LEMON AND BLACK SNOW PRE-EXPLODE…You won’t believe this, but Booker disagrees that Nash is going to win at Fall Brawl…They put each other over…They shake hands…Nash lines up Booker and hits him with a clothesline, then falls over while landing a big boot…The crowd is kinda like, We like you Nash, but this heel-style cheapshot is okay, I guess, but not the thing we were hoping for…Nash lands a Jackknife as the crowd is like, OK, it's fine, we still like you, Nash…Why book Nash to heel on Booker like this?...I don’t get it… This was not a good Thunder…Again, as with Nitro, I didn’t hate watching it, but it had all the same problems that Nitro did…I genuinely enjoyed the Hancock/Dopey Dave/M.I.A. segment the most tonight by a fairly significant margin, which probably is a bad sign for the overall success of this television show...OWW…

We've had this conversation before. Still not the implication, haha! Here's how I (mis)remember the world title going from here: Booker > Nash > Booker > Russo > Booker > Scott Steiner > Booker. But I also remember Jeff Jarrett getting another title shot in which boxes were opened and a picture of Scott Hall got a massive pop, so yeah, I'm ahead of myself here. Except for when it does matter, somehow, illogically! Elix Skipper is one of those guys who isn't a good worker, necessarily, but is certainly a fun one. He was perfect as half of a flashy tag team in TNA. I'm a pretty big fan of Skipper and Low-Ki as a team. His Play of the Day/Overdrive looks terrible, however. Even he can't get that one quite right, but then again, who can? He tries to be funny, but he simply isn't. It's apparent when he's trying to banter with Madden that he's basically creatively defenseless. WCW needs to pluck Dusty Rhodes out of ECW and get him back on commentary. I don't give a damn how Southern he sounds. He could actually hold his own against Madden. It's too bad that Penzer didn't get KABONG'd by Jarrett on this show instead of the Thunder previous. The lying bastard. Yeah, I was as baffled as you were. Was that supposed to be a babyface turn? And if so, why did he kidnap Midajah, call her a bitch, and then Jackhammer her through a table? That's not the sort of kid-friendly move that gets over with the Make-a-Wish crowd! I am bummed that I didn't look closer for two young kids, one of whom did the RVD point, if I recall you correctly. I'm going to need to go back and skim that Nitro at some point. I don't get why they'd bait and switch a Nash/Steiner match there. It annoyed me from 25 years in the future. I'm only a few minutes into the Kamloops Thunder, but I should have that done later today. Were you or any family members on camera at the Thunder taping? I mean, Heyman also didn't subvert the logic of the shoot-bang stuff within the same show or segment, either. ECW and the WWF have always been much better at presenting the shoot-bang stuff as a plausible work, so that if you're not online, you can still understand their worked-shoot angles as pure works, and if you are online, you get that extra layer of shoot stuff to enhance things. I will note that you've uncharitably compared Russo to Coach TK regarding shoot-bang angle booking, by the way. I'm in the minority in DVDVR, but I don't think TK is ever beating those "Vince Russo, but with more money and an actual taste for long wrestling matches" charges with me.

I liked the first book. The second one was okay. I wish Richard Osman a lot of success, though. I'm a huge House of Games fan. And a fellow Fulham supporter, for that matter.

Show #253– 14 August 2000 "The one that shows WCW is a subtraction of Vince Russo away from being consistently solid" I can do one more month of bad Vince Russo-booked television. It’s cool. There really is a light at the end of the tunnel! And this time, it’s not the Bischoff/Sullivan-in-early-2000/Russo train’s lights coming at me! It’s actual daylight! But first, let’s get through this month of horseshit television. For some reason, we cold open with Vince Russo standing in the ring with Tank Abbott as his backup. What the hell? Is Russo just going to ruin even the small midcard things that I like? Tank as Three Count’s groupie was funny! I liked it! Anyway, Russo cusses a lot as he yells that he made an excuse out of Hulk Hogan (without saying Hogan’s name), and GOLDBERG’S NEXT. He complains that Brad Siegel wouldn’t let him fire Goldberg because Goldberg’s popular with the fans, so as he hates both Goldberg and the fans, he’ll just have Tank Abbott beat Goldberg up. Even though we saw Abbott lose to Goldberg two months ago, mind you. Does anyone in this crowd even know who Brad Siegel is, by the way? Russo fucking sucks. BLAH BLAH SHIT, BLAH BLAH ASSHOLES, BLAH BLAH ASSWIPES: Look how edgy he is! Now he’s out here talking about how Goldberg thinks that wrestling is “real” and that he could win every fight, but wrestling is not real, so former UFC fighter Tank Abbott will beat him up. Speaking of Brad Siegel again, this is malpractice and someone should have fired him for driving down the value of this company with his dumbshit decisions and then selling it for no money to Vince McMahon. Is Siegel just a horribly incompetent moron or was he really in league with Stu Snyder, do you think? After a break, we cut back to commentary, where Russo grabs a headset and cusses at production to show Tank fighting Goldberg in the aisle. Goldberg beats Tank up with wrestling moves like Irish whips even though this particular brawl has been established as a real fight, so an Irish whip shouldn’t work. This should be worked like an actual fight, not a fake fight. Russo is so dumb. He genuinely doesn’t understand a single fucking thing about professional wrestling. Goldberg threatens Russo and scatters the other folks at the commentary desk before going back to beating up Tank, and we cut to another break. Dirt. Heckin’. Worst. We’re getting Scott Steiner vs. Kevin Nash again tonight [Editor's note: NOPE]. Scott Hudson is like GOLDBERG IGNORED THE SHOW FORMATTING LAST NIGHT. Yuck. This Kelowna crowd is hot, but not because this show is any good. It’s just an underserved market. Shane Douglas (w/Torrie Wilson) steps onto the stage as I think, hey, Shane Douglas is also just about done in big time wrestling. No more Shane; no more Buff. Well, I guess WCW didn’t die for nothing. Douglas heels it up huge by promising to continue this endless feud with Billy Kidman. It takes forever, or at least it feels this way, but Douglas finally introduces Reno, who comes to the ring. Kidman’s TurnerTron video has him dropkicking Lord Steven William Regal in the head. I miss the hell out of that guy. Kidman walks out and waves his backup, Big Vito, onto the ramp. This is a tag match, I suppose. It starts out with a brawl and feels very much like a tornado tag. Why didn’t Russo just make all tag matches tornado tags? This might have been the one way he could have made WCW more XTREEM that I might have actually got some joy out of. Torrie and Kidman are still beefing, to the point that Kidman is too busy jawing at her to help his buddy Vito out. Anyway, the match settles down into a typical tag match for a second, until Kidman bails Vito out of trouble with a diving crossbody that hits Douglas and Reno. Reno ends up hitting a Roll of the Dice in there, but then Vito is meant to break it up with an elbow. Reno moves, so Vito elbows Kidman, but it’s not supposed to be a miscommunication spot. Anyway, a Sky High/Frog Splash combo from Kidman and Vito wins the match. Post-match, Douglas hits Vito with a pair of handcuffs; he prepares to handcuff Kidman in the corner, but takes his sweet time about it and allows Vito to jump him from behind and handcuff Douglas in the corner instead. The babyfaces throw punches at Douglas, then beat up Reno until the Natural Born Thrillers hit the ring and stomp them out. Disco tries to give the Cat a tape of his appearance on VH1’s The List – holy shit, am I that old? – so that the Cat can play it on air, and the Cat bats it out of his hands petulantly and grumbles, “I’ll do anything to get rid of you.” HAHAHA. The Animals want to get more concessions out of the Cat, so they bring in Ms. Jones, who is has straightened her hair and ditched the new Nitro Girls. She is hot as hell, goddam. OK, before I settle back down again, the ladies of WCW always came off to me as hotter on a visceral level than the ladies of the WWF at the same time. It’s poor form to bust out detailed, ranked lists of human beings, specifically in the context of building that list based on their looks, but let’s just suffice it to say that I still have a list in my head, and I’m putting like five or six ladies of WCW on that list before I get to my first lady of the WWF. ECW, on the other hand, could hang with WCW a little bit in that department. Don’t worry, I’m not going to screen cap a panty shot and post it in this review or anything like that. I have some control over myself, dammit! David Flair, still wearing his muddy clothes from New Blood Rising, mumbles wearily to himself. Major Gunns rushes up and asks him if Ms. Hancock is okay, but he just continues mumbling and walks away. After the break, Dopey Dave mopes his way into the ring and starts talking about Hancock’s tum-tum issues. We cut to the back, where the men of the M.I.A. don’t care about any of this bullshit, but Gunns is watching it on a monitor and sobbing. They ignore her as she resolves to go talk to Dave in the ring. Gunns and Dopey Dave do some regrettable acting in which as part of her remarks, Gunns shares that she feels like it’s her fault that Stacy got hurt and Dave gets caught on the admitting of fault part of her comment and threatens Gunns. Stacy – is she Stacy now? Everyone’s calling her Stacy now – rushes out here with a mic and tells David to back off. So are Stacy Keibler Hancock and Major Gunns cool with one another now after a month of heated battles? Stacy finally gets him to back off by yelling DAVID, I’M PREGNANT. Dopey Dave saves this segment from going on the bad list by immediately turning around, excitedly smooching Stacy, and then celebrating that HIS BOYS CAN SWIM by bouncing off the ropes, stomping, and doing a bad Fargo Strut in an imitation of his pops. That was genuinely hilarious. Just a reminder: Dopey Dave is a nutcase because Kimberly Page and the Filthy Animals's combined efforts flummoxed his dirty old dad and eventually dump the elder Flair in the desert. Remember when all that happened? And yet, this lunatic is apparently able to convince Stacy Keibler to have sex with him in kayfabe. Nonsense. As Lance Storm carries his gold to the ring, Mark Madden promises to extend his feud with Gene Okerlund. It worked out okay on Thunder, but I’m not sure we need to do much more with that pairing in the ring. Hudson thinks he’s cute by calling Kelowna COLONIC, but he’s an idiot. Also, Kelowna is a lovely small city on the river, dammit! Storm cuts a patriotic promo in which he shits on the United States. In a flashback to when I watched 1997 WWF, I find myself unconsciously nodding along with his message. Storm: “They can wave the red-white-and-blue if they want, but I keep makin’ ‘em tap out to the Maple Leaf.” Huh, that was a cold line. Then, we get a rendition of “O Canada.” Madden, who is not my favorite color guy in the world, but who is infinitely better, more clever, and a quicker thinker on color than Scott Hudson’s dumb ass, makes me laugh by telling Hudson, “You’re just another thick, selfish, dumb, arrogant, know-it-all American…and you got no hair, either.” The Cat dances out here at the end of the anthem, and I think to myself that of all the WWF angles that Vince Russo tried to reproduce during his time in WCW, Lance Storm being a heel in the U.S. and a babyface in Canada is probably the most artistically successful one. I mean, he didn’t get why booking Storm as a weaselly heel at New Blood Rising was dumb – did he even attend IYH: Canadian Stampede, or did he just not understand why the Hart Foundation was booked in the way that they were at that show? – but still, this is the most fun reproduction of any past WWF angle by a significant amount. As I mentioned, the Cat is here. He’s a heel tonight in Canada, so he hits his MAY I PLEASE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION (x2), SHUT THE HELL UP line. The crowd just enjoys reacting to heels and getting any chance they can to chant ASSHOLE. The Cat cusses a lot in response, but he’s funny, so he’s allowed to. The thing of it is that he’s just so mean, and it riles this crowd up: YOU SAID YOUR PIECE, NOW LET ME SAY MY PIECE: KISS MY AMERICAN BLACK ASS. YOU KNOW, I SEE A BUNCH OF BIG FAT ASS WOMEN IN THIS COUNTRY, I SEE A BUNCH OF UGLY ASS CANADIAN KIDS—SIT YOUR FAT ASS DOWN, BOY. IF YOU CAN GET YOUR LITTLE FAT CANADIAN ASS OVER THAT [RAIL], COME AND GET SOME *cuts to portly Canadian heatedly hanging over the guardrail, holding a beer and yelling FUCK YOU at the Cat*. I mean, it’s crude, but I enjoyed how mad everybody got. Anyway, the Cat books a rematch between Storm and Mike Awesome, calls Storm a POWER RANGER like fifty-eleven times – which Madden notices and shits on – and then says that there will be no Canadian rulebooks used in tonight's match, but there will be a guest referee. Then, he takes off his jacket and reveals that he’ll be the guest referee. Storm is overwhelmed early, but scores two superkicks; he covers Awesome, but the Cat is extremely slow to count. On the other hand, the Cat hits the mat immediately to count a quick two on an Awesome splash and cover. It’s obligabrawl time after that; Awesome wins it, but loses control of the bout back in the ring. Storm lands a dropkick, a couple of corner lariats, and a nice Northern Lights with a bridge; the Cat moseys on down to the mat to count, gets to one, and Awesome kicks out. Storm gets in the Cat’s face, and Awesome takes the opportunity to get control again and land an Awesome Bomb on Storm. Before the Cat can count, Jacques Rougeau runs out in his ref shirt and dispatches of him. Awesome threatens Rougeau with an Awesome Bomb, but is jumped by PCO – the Amazing French Canadiens are back together again here in WCW! Wow, 2000 WCW has so many random pop-ins and brief returns. We get an assisted cannonball on Awesome; Storm follows up with a Canadian Maple Leaf, but the Cat recovers and lands kicks on the AFCs. Elix Skipper slides into the ring and signals that he wants to team up with the Cat on a double attack to Storm, but the dastardly Skipper has defected! He kicks the Cat and gives Rougeau the chance to signal the submission in favor of Storm. Was Rougeau even a WCW-approved referee for this bou—no, never mind, this is one of the least shaky logic issues with this program right now. I'll let it go. After the break, Pam Paulshock asks Lance Storm about Storm’s newly-assembled Canadian army, and Storm formally introduces Team Canada. In a move reminiscent of someone from *Mallory Archer voice* THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CANADA, Storm divides his spoils amongst his friends so that everyone on his team can aspire to better things. Wait, are we sure Storm’s the heel? Anyway, PCO is the new S.H.I.T. holder, and Elix Skipper is the new Cruiserweight Champion, so I guess giving away titles is something that you can do now. Logically, was the scandal that Ted DiBiase bought the WWF Championship? What if Andre “gave it away” to him, but then was repaid through some shell corporation that DiBiase founded in Delaware or the Caymans without Jack Tunney ever finding out? Would that have stood? Probably not because I think Tunney's issue with the exchange was not that it was done for money, but that the WWF Board of Directors held supreme power over matchmaking for the title and how it would be exchanged. Whatever, this is late-stage WCW, and there are no rules. The executive committee is toothless. Brad Siegel is practically a drooling zombie. WCW World Cruiserweight Championship title change count: 10 (Madusa > Oklahoma > VACANT > TAFKAPI > VACANT > Candido > Daffney and Crowbar > Daffney > Chavo Guerrero Jr. > Lance Storm > Elix Skipper)… The WCW Cruiserweight Championship is now second in the amount of switches in the year 2000, the big gold belt being first (of course) by a significant number. Oh yeah, this interview isn’t over yet! The Cat walks up with a baseball bat and says that he’s booking the two new champs in title defenses tonight before swinging the bat around a bit. Jeff Jarrett comes out to the ring as Mark Madden gins up some Canadian bonafides for Elix Skipper, claiming that Elix played in the CFL. The thing that cracks me up is when he says this: “There are seven or eight teams name the Rough Riders/Roughriders; he played for one of them.” There’s only one team with that nickname now! The other one went out of business and came back as the Redblacks. As an aside, I do enjoy the CFL even though it’s hard to catch now that they moved away from having all their games on ESPN+ to having them buried on some CBS sports-focused cable channel that no one gets and their CFL+ service doesn’t allow me to watch replays after the game is done. Go BC Lions! But I do hope that, as nice as it is that Canada is currently a very cheap quick getaway for me, their dollar recovers enough that the Atlantic Schooners can finally become a real thing. Also so that people have the buying power to eat or secure a home, too, of course. I digress. Jarrett walks out here to wrestle Booker T. for the world title yet again. I feel like that feud is done, y’know? Still, I suppose that we’re waiting on Nash to officially once again become the number one contender to the world title after his rematch tonight, so one more blow-off match is fine. Commentary is very clear that this is Jarrett’s final shot at the big gold belt, and I think that might be legitimately true; doesn’t he exit the title scene going forward and float around the upper-midcard for the rest of his WCW run? Booker and Jarrett have a series of speedy exchanges to start; Book wins a dropkick, then a clothesline, and finally a sleeper that Jarrett escapes by swinging his leg backward into Booker’s balls. They’re speeding through the shine and the heel control segment, it feels like. Booker is already making these short comebacks that keep getting cut off. It’s not bad, but it’s too rushed to be good. They obligabrawl, and Jarrett wins that. We get back in the ring, and Jarrett goes right into a chinlock. Welp, Booker makes it out of this chinlock after a couple of false starts. Jarrett goes for the guitar, but gets hooked for a Book End; Jarrett fights out, but gets a Houston Side Kick to the face. Book grabs the guitar and tries to KABONG Jarrett, but Jarrett moves and Book KABONGs ref Mickey Jay. Book tries a spinebuster with a jackknife pin, and Charles Robinson slides into the ring and counts two. Axe kick, Spinaroonie, whiffed Houston Side Kick that Book sells as a knee hyperextension. Jarrett hooks Booker and lands a Stroke, but Goldberg runs out and yanks him off the pinfall at two. Well, logically, Goldberg is attacking Russo’s CHOSEN ONE, but functionally, Booker T. looks like a weak champ yet again. Goldberg grabs a mic and threatens Russo to a babyface pop. So, he’s a babyface again, basically? Did we make him one again with Russo’s return? Scott Steiner cranks up the creep factor on this show by jamming his finger into Pam Paulshock’s mouth as she tries to interview him. What the fuck? Anyway, Steiner yells at and about Goldberg and Kevin Nash. PCO defends the hardcore belt against a perpetually confused Norman Smiley. Smiley’s bummed about having to wrestle yet another hardcore match. I think I’m with him; use Smiley better, please. Hey, when are we getting that sadly aborted angle where Glacier is Smiley’s terribly ineffective guru? I want to see if I enjoy it as much as I did 25 (!!!) years ago. Anyway, some garbage nonsense happens in this match, but PCO also does some sweet dives because he rules, so this is broadly better than your typical WCW-style hardcore match. There are some weapon shots, a Big Wiggle, and more decent wrestling moves than you’d think! PCO sets up a table and hits a sit-out uranage – though not on the table – before signaling that he plans to use said table for nefarious purposes. PCO lays Norm out on the table and goes up; Smiley uses the ref’s shirt to yank himself up and into a sitting position. PCO crashes and burns, and Smiley falls back onto PCO and gets three. Charles Robinson tries to award Smiley the title, and Smiley freaks out about having to defend this fucking thing again. The Cat and Ms. Jones are pleased about Smiley getting the hardcore title off PCO and consider who might be able to do the same to Elix Skipper. Then, we pan over to Kwee Wee and Papaya, so I assume the fashionista is the guy who will get the shot. Pam Paulshock interviews Kevin Nash; Nash complains about having to wrestle once again for his number one contendership, but if this is all booked in advance – as Nash has made clear the last few weeks’ worth of promos – why would he care? He’s probably booked to win the rematch, after all. Nash gripes that Scott Hall hasn’t gotten a second chance (more like a seventeenth chance, Kev), so Russo wanting to give Scott Steiner a second chance at number one contendership is a no-go. He says that he’s only wrestling the champ, so if Booker T. wants to hook it up tonight, great! If not, he’s good with all this "having a wrestling match" nonsense. The Filthy Animals are in the ring; Konnan’s chant-along energy has almost died out. After he coaxes a weak call-and-response from the crowd, he's like LOL KRONIK LIKES WEIGHTLIFTING, SLOBBING KNOBS, AND BUTT STUFF, and you know what, Konnan? It’s never going to be 1998 again, and the Wolfpac is dead. You can go home until we need you to cut promos for LAX or be a character on Lucha Underground. KroniK responds by joining commentary; I listened to a Between the Sheets covering the time right before New Blood Rising (on which our very own odessasteps was a guest), and in the WCW section, Wade or Dave noted that Brian Adams had been legit aggy about Konnan running KroniK down during his most recent stints on commentary. Let’s see if Adams is bright enough to get back at Konnan in an effective way. The bar is extremely low w/r/t my expectations for him. Adams spends a lot of time focused on the Harris Bros., actually, as the Disciples of Apocalypse EXPLODE. While Clark and Adams talk more than they should, Vampiro and Muta make their way to the ring. Clark and Adams do indeed fail to clear my extremely low bar for them – I mean, it’s so low that one of Satan’s faces is using it as a toothpick to get all the chewed up Judas Iscariot out of his teeth in the Ninth Circle – by calling Konnan “ugly.” Adams: “He looks like Urkel, or, uh, a turd with glasses.” FOR THE LOVE OF IT ALL. Look, give up, fellas. Konnan will probably be back on guest color in the next couple of television shows, and he’s going to roll you idiots. KroniK is put out of their “bad at commentary” misery, which is good news. The bad news is that it’s because the Harris Bros. attack them before the tag match in the ring even starts, so now they’ve been plunged into “have to feud with the Harris Bros.” misery. Commentary scatters, of course, except for Konnan, who AIN’T NEVER SCARED. I think that Bonecrusher song came out a couple years after WCW died or Konnan would definitely have been quoting it in his pre-match sing-alongs. Konnan actually puts Muta over before saying that as good as he is, his opponents are just too tough. Meanwhile, this match is alright to start. I am struck by how much bigger Muta is than Rey! I mean, that is an even better visual marker than Muta standing next to Adams for just how large Muta is. Back to Rey, though: He gets his ass whipped. The problem with this match is that neither team is babyface, so Rey gets killed, but doesn’t engender any sympathy from the crowd. He gets a hot tag eventually, but again, gets little reaction. Juvi gets misted almost immediately anyway; Muta and Vamp are in control. That’s when Sting shows up and destroys the Dark Carnival members with a baseball bat while shrouded in half-darkness. Slick Johnson basically hid in the corner as soon as the lights started flickering, so he saw nothing except for Rey rolling over and covering Muta for three. Remember when Rey Misterio Jr. and Billy Kidman were an incredibly exciting, very over babyface team holding the tag gold? I miss those days for both of them. The Dark Carnival invades Commissioner Cat’s office and (via the KISS Demon’s snarled demands) requests a Four Corners Match with Sting in the fourth corner. The Cat agrees, then cracks me up by yelling HEY FREAKS, YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO SAY “TRICK OR TREAT” as the Carnival leaves; he then chuckles and, in an aside, to Ms. Jones, notes that “they got their asses kicked” in the previous segment. The Cat’s jibes don’t all land – stop trying to make calling Lance Storm a Power Ranger a thing, buddy; it’s never going to be a thing – but he’s consistently funny enough that it carries me through some of these suboptimal shows. The Cruiserweight Championship defense is up next; Elix Skipper faces Kwee Wee (w/Papaya). I vaguely remember this Kwee Wee character, but I don’t remember almost anything about the gimmick other than “glitter, sparkles, and goofy hairstyle.” This bout opens solidly, with nice pace and some good counters. After Kwee Wee leaps behind Elix and fires off a back suplex, he lands a lovely spot where he vertically suplexes Skipper straight back into the corner buckles. That move, and a few follow-up punches, garners a two count for Kwee Wee; Kwee Wee tosses Elix outside dismissively. Skipper re-enters the match by trying a rope-assisted headscissors, and though Kwee Wee tosses him away, Skipper dodges when Kwee Wee tries a follow-up spear and misses; Kwee Wee crashes to the floor. Skipper follows with a twisting corkscrew, then tosses Kwee Wee back inside the ring and covers for a two count of his own. Kwee Wee tries to come back with a cross body, but Skipper hits the Matrix to dodge it and in that instant fully gets the crowd behind him. Huh, this match is achieving at least one goal of making Skipper look legit. The fellas at commentary are besotted with Papaya, by the way. Hudson plays KroniK to Madden’s Konnan while Skipper and Kwee Wee have a fun fucking match in there and get over via enjoyable MOVEZ, which is the whole point of the cruiserweight division as it was originally conceived. Skipper escapes a stalling vertical suplex by leveraging his way into a counter DDT; then, he loads his knuckle with a Grey Cup ring. Smart, forward-thinking move, Skipper! Kwee Wee makes a comeback and scores a couple of two counts, but a loaded punch with the ring scores three for Elix. I liked this! After the match, Kwee Wee attacks ref Jamie Tucker while Papaya tries to conceive of the concept of “emoting” in the background. Alright, let’s knock out this Four Corners Match farce. Madden challenges Okerlund to a singles match on Thunder as the match begins. I should be annoyed, but Madden is funny enough to make me laugh (“I’ll rip the one remaining working organ out of his body and force feed it to him”). So, while Vamp and Muta abuse the Demon and then attack Sting, let me type something that I’m shocked to be typing: Madden has grown on me enough to the point that I actually don’t mind him on color, but Hudson is maybe one of the worst guys I’ve heard at the desk ever. I think the issue is that Hudson is even less suited for color than Tenay is for PBP, and I wonder if a Hudson/Tenay PBP/color pairing would make me think better of Hudson. The thing about Hudson is that he has the voice for PBP, but he’s sort of a dullard if he’s forced to think of interesting things to say about a match on color. Madden, meanwhile, has a ton of misses, but zendragon was right that Madden’s updated Heenan act is appropriate for its time. Further, I think it was BobbyWhioux or maybe Spaceman Spiff who said that they actually liked Madden’s act, and yeah, I get it. It’s sometimes a pretty good act. Muta and Vamp beat up the Demon, then Sting. Keeping the Demon down is one thing, though; keeping Sting down is entirely another. Sting makes a comeback and decides, What the hell, let’s pretend it’s 1989 and wraps Muta in a Scorpion Deathlock. Vampiro gets a kendo stick, but the Demon asks Vamp if he can have it so that he can prove himself by hitting Sting. Vamp relinquishes possession and the Demon, of course, hits Vampiro as Muta submits to the Scorpion. The Demon and Sting eye one another warily after the match; the Demon makes to leave, but Vampiro attacks first the Demon and then Sting with the kendo stick. This Vampiro/Sting feud needs to fucking END forever. I don’t want to see these two anywhere near one another ever again. Vampiro drags Sting away from the ring as we go to our final commercial break. Back from break, Vamp and Muta have knocked out a trainer and are preparing to stick a dagger in Sting’s chest when the Demon makes the save with a baseball bat. So, yep, that happened. Kevin Nash saunters to the ring while holding a thin cardboard box. Nash gabbing doesn’t seem very main event-like! Nash complains that Scott Hall isn’t on WCW television, and the Kelowna crowd, who wants Scott Hall to be the world champion forever and ever like every other WCW crowd, agrees with Nash’s complaints. Nash takes a Scott Hall cutout from his box, stands it up, and commences to interview it as Madden correctly notes that said cutout is more over than most of the actual real-life guys in professional wrestling. Nash mentions to the cutout that “the nWo died for the third time” before conducting a survey anyway to see whether or not Scott Hall is popular with the crowd and should come back. Madden intoning, “I don’t think they expected him to say that” is bad Madden, but you know what? I blame Russo. Nash demands Booker’s presence, and Booker walks out in jeans rather than his gear. He doesn’t make it to the ring before Scott Steiner attacks first him and then Nash with a lead pipe. Goldberg pops up on the TurnerTron, and this babyface icon has snatched Midajah. He intones ANY BITCH WHO’S BEEN WITH YOU AIN’T NO DAMN LADY and then hoists her up for a Jackknife through a table. We don’t see it because TNT’s probably like Hey, that’s a bit too far for us, but Steiner races to the back and finds her laying in the wreckage of a broken table, Goldberg nowhere to be seen. He yells GOLDBERG, YOU SONUVABITCH as the show ends. WCW in mid-late 2000 has just enough acts which I enjoy even in the midst of Russo being a complete fuck-up (with weird ideas about women) that this show will be one of the lowest scoring, if not the lowest scoring, that I actually didn’t hate watching. -1 out of 5 Stinger Splashes.

Both of these things are, indeed, fucking bananas.

Here's some stuff that I read in quick hits: Truman Capote, A Duke in his Domain: Capote spends a late night with Marlon Brando in his hotel room. Once you get past Capote's weird observations about Japanese women, it's a pretty compelling picture of how big-time acting really screws with the ability to define oneself and the shattering of one's identity when you're spending so much time inhabiting others. It also makes Brando look like a completely unserious person, which I sense that he kind of was despite his acting prowess. Susan Sonntag, On Camp: This is a series of two essays that attempt to define the concept of camp. It's just dense enough that I want to read through it again to make sure that I understand completely her specific definitional boundaries for calling something camp, though her overarching ideas about camp mostly make sense to me. Ralph Ellison, The Black Ball: So, after Ellison died having only published Invisible Man in his lifetime, his wife passed along a half-finished book (Juneteenth) and a bunch of short stories to his editor. Black Ball is a Penguin collection of four of those short stories. The first one in the collection, "Boy on a Train," gave me a good ol' "this child character's observations on life destroyed me" moment. You know how as a kid, you sometimes partially grasp some very adult-world truth and can speak about it poignantly even if you don't quite have the vocabulary or life experience to fully understand it? This story did that. Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: The day after reading "Boy on a Train," I read "Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets." The main character's child in that did the same thing to me as the young protagonist in "Boy on a Train." These fictional kids going all Phoebe Caulfield on me is a lot right now, man. James Baldwin, Dark Days: This is a NO POLITICS zone, but basically Baldwin is the best political and social commentator of modern American times, and maybe of American times in general. I'll leave it at that. Betty Friedan, The Problem that Has No Name: NO POLITICS, but Friedan does an engaging job of laying out what should be the obvious fact that women, too, are subject to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Chinua Achebe, Africa's Tarnished Name: NO POLITICS. I'd never read Achebe's non-fiction writing, only his fictional stuff. Reading the non-fictional commentary in this collection made me wish that I'd taken a class with him when he was teaching on the East Coast. Some people take to a professorial approach in their writing or speaking with aplomb, and he is one of them. Weirdly, I haven't read Arrow of God, which I think comes between the other two books in the trilogy, right? I need to get on that. Wendell Berry, Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer: Dang it, I have opinions about a lot of what I read that would trigger the NO POLITICS warning, now that I'm writing all this out. Anyway, this work is a collection of two different pieces. One is an op-ed from Berry, an evangelical environmentalist (they do exist - see the green theorists who center their theory in Biblical belief w/r/t humans being appointed by God to be the stewards of the earth). It explains why he won't be buying a computer, and it is a fascinating argument that, uh, I'll say is thoughtful in some spots and problematic in others. It was published in a popular U.S. publication, and this work publishes the op-ed responses from readers and then a follow-up article from Berry that responds to those responses. All I can say is that this is one of the most fun polemical pieces I've read in a while, and I'd encourage other people to read it just for the novelty of getting an underrepresented combined perspective on ecological concerns, the nature of work, and marriage and love all at once. George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism: NO POLITICS. It's a timely work to return to, though. Andy Warhol, Fame: I'm never sure how seriously to take Warhol, you know? A work like this makes me think that I shouldn't, but then I saw a piece of his art in which he reproduced a tacky American ad for a light-up Jesus and I thought it distilled a major part of the American essence down into one visual more concisely than almost anyone else could, so I'm on the fence about him. The right answer is probably that we contain multitudes, and it's okay to be unserious or a little flippant sometimes. Not all the time, though. Looking at you, Brando. Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon (Eds.), Critical Hits: Writers on Gaming and the Alternate Worlds We Inhabit: I've been looking for a video game-focused critical theory collection for a while now for various reasons. This is a strong selection of essays - lots of queer representation, too, which I enjoyed because the authors said some interesting things about using video games to explore their queerness that I never would have thought about for a second. If you enjoy the nexus of video games and 300-level critical theory classes, you'd like this (I adore both of those things, so it was perfect for me).

Right, because they were not presented as mystical characters under the WWF's narrative framework for mystical characters. Wrong because I would also accept it from Kane, or even probably Papa Shango. The WWF had established a particularly cartoonish nature throughout the '80s, so when by the early '90s, they decided to add a character like the Undertaker to it, it was easy to accept. You can draw a line from the Ultimate Warrior asking the gods for the power to go on in his match against Randy Savage directly to stuff like the Undertaker. No, I didn't. WCW decided that for me by never establishing a consistently cartoony narrative approach. It's why people make fun of WCW for Robocop showing up or the Chamber of Horrors Match, whereas I bet the WWF could have done both of those things and it would have been much more accepted. Incorrect because, again, I am guided by the style and narrative tropes that the promotion establishes in these cases. Well, since Bret Hart specifically worked a gimmick meant to specifically contrast with the guys like Hogan and Warrior who do things like fire up after taking lots of punishment in an overtly theatrical way, probably not! This theoretical makes no sense because it would never happen, and it wouldn't happen because Bret himself decided to present his character in a more "real" way than the world of cartoon wrestling that he was inhabiting, a philosophy so important to him that he made it the subtitle of his autobiography. I just don't think we'll see eye to eye on this one, but I would say that as much as I enjoyed your hot take, I think it discounts far too much what the actual creative heads are doing to prime a fan for suspending their disbelief.

Not even a top-three theme on Slam Jam, IMO. To aspire to greatness, you need at least that ranking for an early '90s WCW theme. Ron Simmons, Rick Rude, and Sting (the clear top three on Slam Jam) definitely have multiple great themes, so I think that's my cut-off.

No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that teleportation is my type of bullshit in one company, but it isn't my type of bullshit in another company because of the narrative tropes that those companies themselves have established. This is what you don't seem to be getting in my point here. The idea that "this thing is bullshit" doesn't come out of nothing or of only personal dislike. It comes from something not fitting the established narrative tropes of the company or cultural style. EDIT: Actually, I was too absolute. My dislike of AEW's house style, for one example, or of the style of AAA trios tags for another, is certainly only out of personal dislike; it includes a bunch of narrative tropes that I simply don't enjoy, but those tropes are clearly established by AEW or AAA itself. So you're right that it can be simple dislike sometimes, but certainly not all the time.

This is true, but the People's Elbow is not the best example, IMO. He started out doing it to indifference and silence in front of live crowds, and it got over as he got more over. The most complaining about it that I remember from the too-online fans at the time was when he'd use it as a finisher, to which a chorus of responses would point out Hogan using a legdrop as a finish and no one batting an eye. I don't think there was ever sustained pushback against the People's Elbow in the first place. But I do agree that today's baffling move can be tomorrow's perfectly accepted wrestling trope. Pro wrestling evolves as everything else does. I think it's not the idea that the business is being exposed as fake - well, except for maybe actual pro wrestlers or old timers that still think kayfabe as it was in the 1970s is a viable thing anymore. It's that there are established narrative tropes for pro wrestling, and when you puncture those tropes, you risk causing a viewer to stop suspending his disbelief. I believe that this is what most fans mean when they talk about "exposing the business." Again, something being fantastical is fine, but it has to be part of the established tropes for the company. There is a reason that the Undertaker teleporting from ring to stage and back is fine with me, but Sting or Vampiro doing it in WCW makes me roll my eyes. The former fits the exaggeratedly-fantastic way in which WWF gimmicks often work, while WCW is traditionally more grounded in how it presents its gimmicks and therefore being too fantastic breaks immersion in that company. IN THE ARRRRRRRMS OFFFFFFFF AN ANGEL

I like this sort of spicy take! I disagree entirely, though. In the years of wrestling that I watched, Irish whips were a commonly used move that, in the context and within the fabric of American pro wrestling, was widely accepted as a legitimate move. The structure of U.S. pro wrestling was that no matter the house style or company, Irish whips were a thing. When you're consuming WWF and WCW and even AWA on ESPN as a kid and those shows tell you, consistently, The narrative structure of our matches includes Irish whips, so just accept it and don't think too much about the mechanics, you accept it as part of your suspension of disbelief quite easily. If a wrestler is doing a move that is not within that fabric of widely-established narrative quirks about pro wrestling, then no, it's a problem with the wrestler or move. Of course, things change and cultures are different, so something that I find "business exposing," other fans through consistently experiencing them as part of the narrative will accept them. For example, I suspect my dislike of lucha trios tags is because I didn't grow up with lucha and therefore will never accept the "everyone dives on everyone else one-by-one spot," but if I grew up in Nuevo Laredo or Guadalajara watching lucha as a kid, I absolutely would. That, I think, is where it's accurately a problem with me and not with the move. But if it's not some established cultural or narrative norm in pro wrestling? Yeah, a wrestler or a booker had better think clearly about whether or not it works. I'm watching Vince Russo try to do shoot-bang shit where one match on the card is worked and the commentators are talking about who booked the match and who is supposed to go over and not go over while treating the rest of the card as a legit competition. That is goofy booking that breaks the immersion, and it's absolutely not me that is the problem here.

Look, I don't know how Silver City does its magic, but everything they brew is glorious, so I don't question it. It's like the Sega Genesis using "blast processing." Marketing lingo? Maybe, but Sonic 2 was fucking flames, so ultimately they can say whatever they want about their techniques.

I'm seeing "September 18th, 2000" as the answer for when he's out of booking power and "sometime in October 2000" for his last WCW appearance whatsoever, so that means while he's going to spoil Fall Brawl, we should have a few people with creative talent back in charge for Halloween Havoc. Thank goodness, too, as Havoc is one of my favorite WCW PPVs.