SirSmUgly

Fall Brawl ’99 notes: Sting! Hogan! The first post-Bischoff WCW PPV! Exciting times in WCW! As the desk hypes this show, I think that I’ve maybe underrated how badly the United States Championship has been booked for the past year. It’s not been booked quite as badly as the Tag Team Championships, but it’s not that far off! It’s not just the ill-advised David Flair reign; it’s the fact that they insisted on sticking it on an injured Bret Hart, it’s the mediocre tournament for the title after they put it on Roddy Piper and then immediately transferred it to Scott Hall for about three weeks in which he never defended it, it’s the determination to have Sid “replicate” Goldberg’s streak by taking it off a poorly-booked Chris Benoit, who actually could use a successful and lengthy U.S. Championship reign to pick up some momentum. Hype video: The Dead Pool (minus Raven) is still beefing with the Filthy Animals. OK, we get a snippet of a Dead Pool promo in which Violent J says: EVERYBODY OUT THERE WATCHING THIS RIGHT NOW, I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I HATE YOU. That got a guffaw out of me, honestly. All of a sudden, rappers can’t wrestle, at least according to Eddy. Your on-again, off-again buddy Rey disagrees! WCW production cobbled together some fun snippets from Backstage Blast promos to make this package, and I genuinely enjoyed it. Yet again, the Dead Pool faces Eddy Guerrero, Rey Misterio Jr., and Billy Kidman in a trios tag opener. Wow, these fellas are in quite the holding pattern. The babyfaces already won cleanly, and I don’t have much hype for a rematch. There’s lots of stalling to start. But you know, the actual match is perfectly acceptable as an opener. You have hot cruiserweights elevating three opponents who are fun enough to watch if they’re in there with the right opponent. Rey and Kidman combine on a springboard legdrop, and Eddy follows with a tope con hilo, and it’s enjoyable. You have someone like Rey who will bump around for anyone and still come off like a credible threat, and it’s almost like you’d have to try to make this a bad match. Rey lands an early Bronco Buster on Vampiro, and pretty much, the Dead Pool looks outmatched. Violent J eats a bunch of punches from Kidman and hides behind ref Billy Silverman, then uses that distraction to hit a chop on Kidman and take over. The crowd liked the “heel hides behind the ref” spot and a more experienced wrestler would have recognized that and milked it a bit more. J rushed through the spot a bit, I think. Kidman’s the FIP for a while. The thing about this FIP segment, and I think it fits with the story they’ve been telling on B-shows and Backstage Blast about ICP being rappers first and wrestlers last, is that Kidman never feels like he’s really in much trouble. He doesn’t take too much damage and only has to kick out at two once before getting a hot tag to Rey, who rolls J. Rey gets caught in no man’s land, though, and is clotheslined to the floor and attacked by the illegal Dead Pool members. Rey is our second FIP of the match, but again, there’s never really a sense that they’re going to beat him without some sort of chicanery. Vampiro ends up in no man’s land himself, where Rey tags Eddy in and Eddy laces Vampiro with chops that have some venom in them. My goodness. Vampiro isn’t athletic enough to land on his feet out of a monkey flip, but he tries it anyway and then hits a weak kick to gain control of the match. Eddy takes a bit of offense, including a guillotine legdrop that Shaggy 2 Dope doesn’t really land properly. Eddy doesn’t even need a hot tag to make comeback and fights off all three guys for awhile before Vamp lands a clothesline while Eddy is facing someone else. Shaggy and Vampiro combine on a completely mis-timed Tower Diamond Cutter, yuck, and a series of events leads to Vampiro hitting Kidman with a top-rope gut wrench suplex, but turning around into a Guerrero missile dropkick. Kidman recovers quickly and, since Shaggy is missing top-rope moves, figures that he might as well do it too and barely lands an SSP on Vamp for three. Rey might have blown out his knee again, legit; the faces help a trainer carry him out after the match and don’t spend time celebrating in the ring. Rey being off TV again is gonna suck if he’s hurt for a longer period of time. The Revolution does a bad WCW.com spot backstage. Saturn guarantees a Revolution sweep tonight. Huh, I’ll be keeping your boast in mind, Saturn. Recap: Lenny Lane is the Cruiserweight Champ, and I don’t see that changing tonight. Kaz Hayashi gets a shot at Lenny Lane’s (w/Lodi) title. You know how this match goes: Bad “cartoonish gay stereotype” shtick to start, decent wrestling in the middle, and a finish with lots of nonsense and ga-ga. Lane works a Gorgeous George Wagner skipping spot worse than George did forty years after George originally did it. Kaz can stick the hell out of a dive, though. Lane is an improved worker from a year ago, but he just doesn’t have the things that you’d want from a complete wrestler. I find myself not caring about anything he’s doing. He can’t even tell the crowd to talk to the hand in as entertaining a way as Chris Benoit told Mongo McMichael to do it on Nitro a few years ago (Show #67, in fact). Kaz, on the other hand, just needs the right presentation. He’s a fun worker and when they put him with Jimmy Yang and Jamie Noble, that’s going to be some enjoyable television. Lane does a lot of slow control in between dives, getting occasional help from Lodi, before Kaz comes back. Kaz gets two on a rana, but is reversed on a corner whip and has to kick out of a rebound bulldog at two. Kaz counters a grab with a back suplex, then counters a corner charge with a springboard bulldog. He looks to kill Lane off with a top rope move and ends up fighting with the champ over it; Kaz sunset flips into powerbomb position and hits a running powerbomb a la Jushin Liger; the cover gets only two because Lodi reaches in the ring from his spot at ringside puts Lane’s boot on the ropes. See, one thing you can give Lenny Lane is that he’s had some fun finishing runs in his matches since becoming champ. Kaz goes up and is surreptitiously tripped by Lodi; he falls into a seated position. Lane runs in, gets booted backward, and eats a Frankensteiner for two. Kaz gets close again after whipping Lane toward Lodi and dropkicking them into one another, but his victory roll only gets two. Kaz goes up one more time and dives at an apron-bound Lodi while Lenny distracts the ref, but Lodi snaps Kaz’s neck across the top rope; Kaz stumbles back into a rollup, but kicks out at around 2.7. Kaz comes at Lane again, but Lenny grabs him, twists him into full nelson position, and as a former mimic of Chris Jericho, hits a Breakdown even though Jericho wasn’t even using that move yet; maybe Jericho ended up stealing it as revenge for never getting his Loverboy tape back. Anyway, this gets three. Decent match, but Lenny’s no Goldust and is really bringing me down with his crappy “comedy” spots. Why are we doing an in-ring Sting interview with Gene Okerlund on a fucking PPV? Come on, now. Sting says that Luger is about to throw away their friendship with all his nonsense, and that maybe it’d be a good idea if Luger kept to himself during his title match later tonight. He reiterates being copacetic with Hogan, at least until they fight tonight, and opines on possibly becoming a nine-time world champion. Recap: The Revolution has been beefing with a lot of folks, including the First Family, and doing a poor job of it for the most part. Shane Douglas and Dean Malenko don’t have singles matches tonight, so they tag up against Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobbs, who are low-key one of the least enjoyable tag teams that have ever existed. They brawl to start, and though Morrus disposes of Douglas outside the ring, he and Knobbs can’t find a way to effectively double up on Malenko back in the ring, and the Revolution clear the ring. For some reason, Jimmy Hart and his charges stand with their backs to the ring and raise their arms. They eat baseball slides, but what a dumb spot that is. Why would any experienced manager have his wrestlers do that when they’re all aware that their opponents are up and had just won a tangle against them? I could see if they plausibly thought that they had Malenko and Douglas down and prematurely celebrated, but there was no way they didn’t know they were setting themselves up to get clobbered. The match is no disqualification, so it degenerates into a garbage brawl with a bunch of weapon shots. Shane FRAUD WATCH Douglas throws some shitty punches at Morrus in the corner of the ring, but he gets jumped by Knobbs and eats sniffs a Pit Stop. The stench wakes him up, and he hits clotheslines on everyone. This is no DQ. Why has it turned into an ordered match with tags? You know what, I’m done expecting WCW to figure this match type out. I think this match stinks worse than Knobbs's unwashed pits. It seems to go on forever. Of course, the inability to properly work the match stips is a huge problem, but these guys all kinda suck to varying degrees, so you know, that’s another huge problem. There’s no flow to this thing. I guess Douglas is FIP, but he controls for a lot of the time he’s in there before getting a hot tag, so it’s not like the hot tag feels especially earned. Malenko cleanly jobs to a No Laughing Matter after his hot tag runs out of steam and he’s tripped on a rope run by Knobbs, and you know, I think the Revolution is dead, folks. What a woefully ineffective faction. They’re the Wolfpac with no popularity. Recap: Rick Steiner and Saturn are beefing over the TV title. Do I want to watch Saturn sell a lot for crappy, dull Rick Steiner offense? Not particularly. Alas, here we are. While Steiner controls early, Tony S. lets us know that Buff Bagwell isn’t here for his match against Berlyn. Uh oh. First of all, Buff Bagwell is running wild backstage. First, he gets the booking of the Ernest Miller match at Road Wild changed. Then, he refuses to job to Berlyn. Buff Bagwell isn’t remotely good enough to refuse to do jobs. I get it, he went from beating Roddy Piper to being booked to job to Miller and Berlyn in the span of three PPVs, but the Bagwell who looked most like a star in the Piper match was Judy, so he needed to get over himself. Babyface Buff Bagwell is genuinely one of the worst performers I’ve ever seen in my life. Anyway, this match is fucking BORING. My goodness. The typical Thunder is a lot more fun than tonight’s show has been. And Steiner drops a DDT on concrete! This is the most boring match that includes a DDT-on-concrete spot ever, I know it. I don’t need to actually do the research to make sure. I had a history teacher in high school, brilliant guy, who would respond to students claiming that a reading was boring by saying, “The reading is not boring; you are bored by it.” I generally agree with his point, but I would challenge him if he were here today and say that this match objectively exists as a boring thing outside of subjective experience. After a long, slow Steiner beatdown with bursts of Saturn offense that quickly get snuffed out, Saturn actually lands a DVD…that Steiner kicks out of at two. Saturn tries another one; it doesn’t work, and Steiner hits an Oklahoma Stampede and a diving bulldog for three. Tony S. takes pains to point out that the Revolution is oh-for-two tonight. Hulk Hogan talks with Gene Okerlund backstage. The Hulkster’s mad that the other wrestlers in the back don’t trust him. Is this kayfabe or shoot, brother? Also, is this 1999 or 2019, brother? Well, I get why they brought Jim Duggan out here to wrestle Berlyn from a storyline and thematic standpoint, but did no one recognize that Hacksaw thinks he’s Scott Norton or, dare I say, Goldberg in his own delusional mind? Berlyn should have run through this guy in about two minutes, but nope. Duggan no-sells a series of moves and HOOOOOOOs up from a couple of European uppercuts. There was a small window of time that Duggan was a useful pro wrestler, and that was in Mid-South in 1984/1985. He was never any good and has always sucked real bad in the ring, but he was actually useful for that one place and time only. But it’s 1999, and Berlyn needed a better matchup than this. Then again, I’m not sure that crybaby fuckboi Buff would have been much more amenable to getting Berlyn over anyway. After a match that goes way the hell too long, Duggan can barely figure out how to position himself for a reverse neckbreaker, finally does it, and eats it for three. YUCK. Berlyn casually puts on his shades after the match, and that’s a pretty dope post-match spot, though. We cut to the back where Buff Bagwell has some luggage and gets in an argument with Mike Graham about moving his match to later in the night. Buff runs out and hugs Duggan, but Duggan is like WHERE WERE YOU, I JUST GOT MY ASS KICKED. Buff Bagwell sucks. That Billy Jack bitch. Recap: Harlem Heat want to become nine-time champs just like Sting does! Harlem Heat try to get the WCW World Tag Team Championships back from the Windham Brothers (w/Curt Hennig). Where’s Curly Bill?! Ah, never mind, it’s okay if he’s not here. I don’t want the joke to get run into the ground too quickly. Booker and Kendall start off; Kendall uses his wheels to create space, but Booker overwhelms him and then his bro before tagging Stevie and landing a team vertical suplex on Barry. Stevie keeps control until Barry pokes him in the eye and brings him over to the champs' corner. Kendall tags in and Stevie no-sells his chops, but Kendall gets a boot up on a corner charge to keep control. Stevie is FIP, which actually cements the overarching storyline point about him being jealous that Booker didn’t need him, but that he needs Booker. Stevie does work his way out of trouble and get a tag to Booker, though, who easily handles Kendall. Curt Hennig senses trouble and tries to get involved, but Booker elbows him off the apron. Kendall is able to dump a distracted Booker out of the ring on the heel side, though, and Book takes a beating outside the ring. Back in the ring, though, Kendall Windham is still only Kendall Windham, so Booker works out of trouble and hits an axe kick and a Spinaroonie before Barry jumps in and clocks Booker with a lariat, then dumps him back on the heel side of the ring. After another beating at ringside, Barry hits a superplex, but only gets two when Stevie makes the save. He tags Kendall back in, which is an obvious strategic mistake, come on, Barry, and Booker kicks out of a Kendall diving lariat at two. Would you believe it? Booker floats over on a Kendall corner charge and gets two on a roll-up before Barry breaks up the pinfall. Billy Silverman is the kayfabe worst ref ever and misses an obvious Booker tag to Stevie; Barry comes in and locks Book in a sleeper. Booker gets to the ropes, and let’s get to the hot tag. The Windham Brothers aren’t exactly the most exciting in control. Booker finally gets a hot tag and the match breaks down. Hennig conks Stevie Ray with a cowbell, but Silverman’s busy watching Booker clear out Hennig and Barry on the outside, then hop on the apron, go up top, and hit a bewildered Kendall in the mush with a missile dropkick for three and the gold. One good thing I can say about this match is that there was a clear hierarchy of workers established within the layout. A second good thing I can say about this match is that it’s over. Recap: Are they really going to have Sid win the U.S. Championship to mimic Goldberg’s run in 1998? Really? Sid wins the U.S. Championship from Chris Benoit, who plays Raven to Sid’s Goldberg. We haven’t talked about the Revolution’s dubbed theme, but it is a sad substitution for what I think is was originally a “Beautiful People” knockoff. Anyway, Sid and Benoit have decent chemistry, but this match starts out a bit slowly. Benoit finally goes at Sid’s knee and tries to chop the big man down. He locks on a standing Figure Four in a neat little spot. Sid makes his way back to standing and hits a lot of kicks, so I guess that knee work sucked in kayfabe. They end up outside, where Benoit kicks the steel steps into Sid’s leg. Sid just shakes it off and catches a Benoit crossbody back in the ring, but Benoit wriggles away and lands a German suplex. Still, Sid has no problem planting that leg! He catches a Benoit crucifix attempt and hits a reverse slam. He does limp a bit when he gets up, though. I give him that. He tests out the knee before going at Benoit again. Benoit lands Van Hammer’s finisher for only two; maybe he should ask the master how to properly apply it. Benoit tries to sunset flip out of trouble, but Sid drops down and gets two before Benoit slithers out. This match isn’t very good, unfortunately. I think they have much better in them, and in fact, I think they do have a very good match right before Benoit heads to New York. Anyway, Benoit manages to wrap a Crippler Crossface on, and there’s a minor “did he tap out or just hit the mat in pain” spot that is, I suppose, slightly enhanced by Charles Robinson being the ref. Look, that WCW execs in kayfabe would let Charles Robinson referee Sid matches is fucking dumb. Sid gets to the ropes; Benoit tries a diving headbutt, but whiffs. That’s all she wrote: Sid lands a powerbomb to get three and win the title. LOL, the Revolution. El-oh-el. I don’t want to hear a damned thing in a promo about deserving top spots after this performance. Seriously. This sort of group choke job is going to earn them kayfabe heel status in my house if they come out there on Nitro and whine some more. On the other hand, this show found a hell of a way to book some midcard talent into oblivion. Recap: DDP thinks he might just have the secret sauce to beat Goldberg this time. Probably not, but hmm, when does Goldberg lose his second match? I’m curious. Also, don’t spoil it for me if you know the answer. The transcriber misunderstands DDP demanding KILL IT, MONKEY BOY to the production truck about his theme as SHOW US, FUNKY BOY. I like the transcribed version better. Goldberg comes out, and I’d expect a really good match between these two, but Fall Brawl has been a snoozefest so far. If Page has a good match with Goldberg tonight, though, I think he is safely Goldberg’s best opponent with no room for further discussion on it, at least in my view. Page immediately tries to load his fist, but Mickey Jay is no Billy Silverman and makes him give up the roll of quarters that he’s packed into his knuckles. Page then immediately loses a punch-up. He wanders around outside, barks at the audience, takes off his vest, then gets back in the ring and fails to be particularly effective on offense. Page tries a shoulderblock and ends up tumbling through the ropes and to the floor. Page wisely takes another walk, grabs a mic, and then yells at the crowd for chanting GOLDBERG. He threatens to leave if they don’t stop it, so of course, they get louder; Page decides to leave through the crowd, and Goldberg goes out there and brings him back to the ring the hard way. Page tries everything he can; he jumps Goldberg as Goldberg re-enters the ring. It doesn’t work. He tries a Diamond Cutter; it gets blocked and he gets slammed. He jabs Mickey Jay in the eye while kicking Goldberg in the balls, then loads his fist with a second object in his tights and lands a punch. This last move gives him a bit of sustained control. Goldberg tries to come back, so Page plays rope-a-dope with the ref and loads his fist whenever possible. Page hits a Scumbag Elbow, which is what I’m going to call his version of the People’s/Corporate Elbow, and gets two. Page does his best to club Goldberg to the mat and keep him in holds, but Goldberg gets sick of all that nonsense and makes a comeback out of almost nothing before Page is able to sneak a leaping DDT for two. Page tries to follow up and gets suplexed out of a front chancery for two. This is when Bam Bam Bigelow and Kanyon run out; Bam Bam distracts Jay while Kanyon bashes Goldberg in the back of the head with an object; Page's cover only gets two. Page gets in Jay’s face while Bam Bam and Kanyon try to attack Goldberg, but Goldberg dispatches of Page’s lackeys with a double clothesline, then spears and Jackhammers Page for three. This was by far the least of their trilogy, but I did like the idea that Page had like eight or nine different strategies for cheating his way to victory as a framework for the match. I just think it would have been more effective to have Goldberg fight through each one in clearly segmented parts of the match, and for each DDP cheating attempt to escalate in seriousness and violence. I also don’t love DDP making to abandon the match unless his attempt to leave was explicitly tied to a covert attempt at knocking Goldberg out and then rushing back to the ring to get a cheap count-out victory or something like that. Mmmm, the execution didn’t live up to the concept. Recap: White Hummers and Photoshopped Pictures and Lights Out Dressing Room Attacks, Oh My! Alright, let’s get into this main event. I have to assume that this ill-considered Sting heel turn finally happens tonight. After Hulk Hogan comes to the ring, Bret Hart follows for some reason. Hey, I like Bret’s shirt: On the front, it has THE BEST written in gold lettering above the skull that’s on his Hart Foundation jacket, and on the back, it says IS | WAS | EVER WILL BE in a vertical line. That shirt rules. Between that and the Chavo-as-Jack-Torrance t-shirt, people need to start re-printing more obscure WCW-era t-shirts so that I can purchase them. Anyway, Bret shakes hands with both guys before the match and wishes them luck. These fellas jaw at one another a bit. Hogan gets an early roll-up, but he takes Sting right into the ropes. That’s not his game, really. They trade arm wringers, and boy, I really don’t think Hogan should be wrestling more than five or six times a year at this point. He needs to be on that Roddy Piper deal. Hogan does a creaky drop toehold because his back is probably already trying to give up on the concept of helping the rest of his body move. Whatever, man, this is dull stuff. Hogan jaws at some fans in the front row, but Winston-Salem is mostly silent. Hogan hits a running clothesline, and the crowd barely reacts other than some faint boos. Hogan hits some more mediocre offense, lands a vertical suplex, and is surprised to find that Sting has Stung Up and even does the Hogan finger wag to mock the guy. Unlike Bogdan Bogdanovich mocking a courtside-seated Carmelo Anthony with Anthony’s own hand sign after hitting a shot in the U.S./Serbia Olympic men’s basketball semifinals, though, Sting doesn’t choke victory away like a chump. Instead, he…uh…gets beaten up at ringside and looks like he might choke victory away like a chump. This obligatory ringside brawl, done in slow motion and with low impact, does nothing for me. It strikes me that this show is what happens when you’ve destroyed your midcard and particularly when you’ve booked your cruiserweight division and TV title scene into the ground. Those two things provided a ton of good undercard material on PPV from 1996 through 1998, but neglect means that the undercard is as much of a drowsy jaunt as the main event stuff is. Does it hurt that once again, Ric Flair isn’t on this card? Sure. Winston-Salem in particular would go nuts for him after he ate a cage door shot and then didn't show up at all on the last two Fall Brawl PPVs. Does it hurt that Scott Steiner and Randy Savage aren’t here to multiply the crazification factor? Absolutely. But WCW has entirely too much talent to miss those three guys like they have tonight. The reason that I have time to opine on this is because Hogan is in control for so much of this match, and he’s all back rakes and shitty punches. Hogan is human melatonin at this point. Just get to the end. That’s all that matters, anyway. We know there’s going to be fuckery because the angle has revolved around it and because WCW rarely does clean main event matches. Sting gets some control, tries two Stinger Splashes, hits them, and then tries a third. He misses; Hogan hits the big boot and legdrop, but DDP runs in, knocks down the ref, and hits Hogan with a Diamond Cutter. Page drags Hogan onto Sting, and the ref counts, but Hogan kicks out at two. Page dispatches of the ref with a Diamond Cutter; Hogan gets up and faces off with Page, but Bret runs in and attacks DDP, taking him out of the ring and bashing him around at ringside. Then, oh my goodness, Sid runs in and is easily dispatched of. Good to know the new U.S. Champion who is supposed to be a threat to Goldberg is so easily turned aside. Lex Luger next runs in holding a baseball bat and drops it as Hogan takes care of him. Sting grabs the bat and uses it on Hogan to, oops, a babyface pop! Sting wraps Hogan in a Scorpion Deathlock and Charles Robinson, the backup ref, awards the match to Sting and, oops, another huge babyface pop! Sting and Luger hug while the crowd cheers. HAHAHAHA, why did the booking committee think that, after years of Hogan fucking mainstay babyface Sting over with cheap shot bullshit tactics, longtime WCW fans would feel bad about Sting doing the same right back? I feel triumphant right now. Heenan laughs about Hogan being the one to get double-crossed by Sting for once. Yeah, that’s pretty much how a whole lot of WCW fans are going to feel about that one, and it’s your ostensibly heel commentator making the point. BWAHAHA In spite of getting a nice bit of glee out of Sting doing what he did to the Hulkster, this is a show that I’m going to forget existed by next week. Even Winston-Salem, an excellent bunch of WCW fans if there ever were any, was mostly bored by the proceedings.

He looked frail on the Who Killed WCW mini-series, which combined with the news that he'd been ill makes this news unsurprising. Sullivan was always good for a weird and nutty segment or twenty. Instead of posting the obvious ones from WCW (specifically the story about Buzz Sawyer's mom basically pooping him out in a desert somewhere, but also IT'S NOT HOT), I'll post Sullivan somehow convincing me that Bob Roop is a Satanic cult follower. It's a little more relaxed than typical insane Sullivan stuff, but it's still pretty good! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjYlnSV4FsA

Terry Funk vs. Atsushi Onita A long time ago, back in college and when I was still learning to be a functional adult, I used the tail end of the Limewire/BearShare/etc. period to watch wrestling from everywhere. This dove-tailed right into the YouTube era, especially once you could post videos ten minutes or longer. I digress. Anyway, I’ve seen this match before back in those days, at least when I had time to sit down and seek out older stuff, including this match, which I’m pretty sure I watched with some friends when we just wanted to drink cheap alcohol and see some nonsense. We went from WWF ladder matches to Japanese deathmatches at some point in these random watches. At the time, I thought stuff like this was enjoyable in the sense that I found entertainment in it as a spectacle of senseless violence. Whatever happened during the process of learning to be a functional adult changed me once I got to the point that I actually was able to (mostly) fulfill the duties of being one, and I found this sort of violence a little bit gross. It’s bad enough that wrestlers give themselves concussions all the time and the mere act of bumping has long-term consequences; I can hide that at the back of my mind for the most part and enjoy some pro wrestling. But the Nick Gage/Necro Butcher/CZW/light tubes and glass shards stuff maybe was too late in my personal development for me to enjoy. I say this as a prologue to talking about how I feel about this match now that I’m an older dude. What I think works about this match that is missing from the little deathmatch stuff that I’ve seen since then is that, at its barest level, these guys are clearly trying to win a wrestling match, and it feels like that is the ultimate goal of the proceedings. They struggle over the first contact with the barbed wire and explosives, and Funk makes early covers for two counts. I think deathmatch stuff that’s more modern loses the ability to suspend my disbelief and to make me feel like I’m watching an athletic contest in which the ultimate goal is to win a match. Rather, these matches (and I think increasingly modern pro wrestling in the States, generally) care more about sheer spectacle than anything else. Too many matches offer up amazing spots where guys bleed and do Tsukaharas onto a bunch of guys at ringside and risk their health, but you could take any of the spots out of context of the rest of the match and not miss anything because the bleeding and the diving is the major point. It’s not just the major point, in a lot of cases: It’s the only point. Funk/Onita is nice enough to remind you that it’s still a wrestling match and that you should enjoy the spectacle of the blood and the spots with explosions, but there are spots that matter that don’t depend on those things, as when Onita and Funk fight and fight and fight over Funk trying to toss Onita forward into the explosive wire, and Onita hits a simple back suplex to barely escape the predicament. There is connective tissue here in between all the stuff for the freaks who want to see these fellas lose a bunch of plasma. Now, do I think the connective tissue is good enough to make this a match that I actually like in spite of the fact that I don’t much enjoy watching dudes bleed all over one another and slash themselves up? No, I don’t. I’ve come much closer to the belief that wrestling should only look like it hurts more than it should actually hurt, and other than the rare blade job, I just don’t get the value of having guys actually slice themselves to ribbons and risk even greater injury than a worked pro wrestling match typically asks wrestlers to risk – and your typical match makes quite a lot of asks in this regard! But I do think this is a thoughtfully worked match. I think that Onita taking the first two wire/explosion spots, then fighting desperately to avoid the third and escaping with a back suplex before winning another struggle and sending Funk into the wire and the explosion was pretty great. The rule of threes is a trustworthy trope in almost any form of art. I also loved that when the timer hit five minutes on the exploding ring, Funk and Onita panicked, as one does when a claxon hits and danger is imminent, and started throwing wild fists at one another trying to get out of dodge before the ring goes up in smoke. Funk going to the spinning toe hold as his death move so that he can get outta there with a win, but being kicked back into the wire, which leads directly to him stumbling back into a DDT for the loss, is a nice initial finish to the match. It’d even be easy to let down your guard a bit and think, Well, Onita’s safe. Good for him, he got the win in time. Funk being a petulant loser who would rather stick around and take an explosion along with Onita rather than simply take the L and save his own health is a nice escalation to things. Even then, Onita’s able to fight Funk off when Funk is diverted by attacking the ref, but it’s as if he also loses himself in the bloodlust and really goes to town on Funk, and it’s as if that last gasp has taken it all out of him and, as the timer hits a minute and the klaxon is joined by the irritating whine of a siren, Onita is basically Samus at the end of Metroid. He makes it out of the ring, but then he realizes that he has to go save the last Metroid and bring it back into captivity so the Galactic Federation can make a vaccine with it get Funk out of there before it’s too late, and he sacrifices himself to go back and try and save Funk. He doesn’t drag Funk away in time, but he covers Funk, the ring explodes, and this is truly a modern WWE-style way to conclude this match. Heavy on spectacle in both its spots and its soap operatics (I’ve decided that this is now a new term that I've created), playing up the respect these warriors ultimately have for one another even as they have their own internal issues springing from the story that AxB laid out, meant to very overtly make you feel the emotion that the wrestlers are begging you to feel. This was more WWE than CZW, ultimately, and in some ways it mixed the things I like least about both of them together – wrestlers injuring one another for real on purpose + FEEL THE EMOTION-style spots and facial expressions to try and enhance the match story. This means that while I didn’t like it much, I did respect what it was trying to do, and it certainly did those things very well. Twenty years ago, I would have loved the spectacle, but now, I prefer my tightly-woven stories with less spectacle, both in terms of the spots and bumps as well as in the presentation of the overarching narrative.

Thunder Interlude – show number seventy-nine – 9 September 1999 "The WCW Gang heads into the post-Bischoff unknown" An “In Memory of Mark Curtis” screen displays before the Thunder opening…Mike Tenay memorializes him as we first view the arena…Let’s all remember in his honor that time he shot on some dipshit trying to rush the ring…That ruled… Jimmy Hart leads the Barbarian down to the ring to face Buff Bagwell…There’s stalling and posing to start…Buff hits a dropkick and a clothesline after a bit of Barbarian control, then dances…Hart calms Barb down, then yanks Buff’s leg to divert Bagwell and allow Barb to hit a weak clothesline…Barb is washed and singles Buff sucks ass…The best thing about this match is that it’s not long enough to warrant a commercial break…The second best is Jimmy Hart, who cheats successfully once, twice, but not the third time…He tosses a weapon to Barb, but Buff intercepts it and hits Barbarian with it…Buff covers for three…See, the rule of threes is almost always an effective trope… Recap: Berlyn is a significantly better promo in English than his interpreter…Maybe cast a better actor for the interpreter, WCW?...Oh yeah, Berlyn’s planning to beat Buff down at Fall Brawl… Promo video: Sting and Luger have had a long frenemy-ship… Van Hammer faces off with Blitzkrieg in a classic WCW-ass WCW matchup…Hammer overpowers Blitz early and feels good about himself…THIS IS GONNA BE A LITTLE EASAY…Naturally, Blitz comes back and scores a few strikes with his agility…Blitz tries a backslide, but in a neat spot, Hammer blocks it and then airplanes Blitz around, then unhooks his arm and lariats his smaller opponent…Huh…Hammer lands a top-rope beal toss to wild cheers, even though the whole hard cam is sitting there looking half-asleep…Ah, taped Thunder, I love you…Blitz gets out of a press slam attempt and manages to yank Hammer over in a roll-up…He tries to follow up with kicks, but Hammer catches Blitz’s leg and suplexes him…Hammer gets two on an elbowdrop, then front suplexes Blitzkrieg across the top rope…Hammer goes up for a second-rope senton (!!!), but whiffs…Blitz tries his senton/moonsault combo, but Hammer rolls under it…Hammer hits a beal from his position on the ground, then tries again…Blitz flips out of it and gets two off a dropkick…Hammer presses out of the pinfall attempt and sends Blitzkrieg to the floor, then knocks him around ringside for a bit…Hammer whips Blitz toward the apron, but Blitz leaps onto the apron and hits an Asai moonsault…Hammer is back in the ring first, and he’s able to catch a Blitz springboard and dump him…One Cobra Clutch Slam later, Hammer is the winner…That went from “Charming Uniquity” to legitimately fun and good with all the counters and interesting spots… Recap: WCW thinks the White Hummer angle is still interesting…I beg to differ… We get six-man tag action between the Royalists (Steven Regal, David Taylor, and Chris Adams) and the Revolution (Chris Benoit, Perry Saturn, and Shane Douglas)…We just talked about Douglas in last month's main thread, but I’m beginning to think that maybe he sucks…Raven came into WCW without being able to swear or get super-edgy and got over anyway…Hak and Chastity got reasonably over as a midcard act without the former needing to crush beers and smoke cigs before they left the company…But Shane Douglas seems like he ain’t shit without dropping a lot of F-Bombs or hanging out with Francine…Maybe he’ll prove me wrong as this watch moves into 2000, but he’s on FRAUD WATCH with me right now… Saturn hits a springboard forearm, and boy, this crowd sweetening is so bad…It’s obvious that the shrieks of excitement on that move are not coming from anyone in this somnambulant crowd…Eventually, Douglas ends up as FIP…He takes a series of flagpole shots from Taylor…Adams is the one to lose control of the match when he tries a dive and is countered into an inverted atomic drop…The match breaks down immediately after the hot tag…Regal bumps himself over the top rope without even letting Douglas pretend that he’s the one tossing Regal…Benoit lands a diving headbutt on Adams, then locks him in the Crippler Crossface for the tap out… Lodi follows Lenny Lane to the ring…Lodi’s ARE WE AMBIGUOUS ENUFF NOW? sign feels like it’s maybe targeted at Turner S&P, or maybe at any LGBT+ interest groups that might have complained to Turner…Kaz Hayashi is Lodi’s opponent in a rematch from an earlier Thunder in which Kaz ended up pinning Lane on a switcheroo…That has earned Kaz a Cruiserweight Championship shot at Fall Brawl…WCW didn’t push enough of its cruisers outside of Rey, Eddy, and Kidman for the past year, and now they’re trying to push new guys in that division from almost nothing…Whoops…I truly believe that taking the belt right back off Psicosis for no reason was a bad mistake…They had a chance to re-center the division around heel Psicosis fending off babyface challengers that they'd have had some time to build… Kaz dives onto Lenny after Lenny slaps him, then steps out of the way of Lodi’s dive…Lodi crashes into Lenny…Lodi turns things around and whips Kaz into the guardrails…He rolls Kaz into the ring and covers, but only gets two…Lodi bashes Kaz’s head into the buckles, but eats boots on a couple of corner charges…Kaz tries to follow up, but Lodi lands a lariat…Lodi sits Kaz up top and gets about 2.7 on a diving bulldog… Lodi tries to get Lenny’s help to block a counter sunset flip, but loses his grip and rolls backward for two…Guess what?...He hits a lariat as soon as he gets up…Kaz works out of a Lodi sleeper then gets two on a roll-up when Lodi gets dropkicked into Lane on the apron…Kaz lands a brainbuster for two…Lenny Lane gets o the apron and tries to hit on Kaz…Lodi jumps Kaz and gets a roll-up for two…Lane gets back on the apron as Lodi shoves Kaz toward Lane…Kaz ducks, then rolls up Lodi for three after Lane hits his sign-carrying buddy…Lane tries to attack Kaz after the match, but Kaz escapes…This was perfectly acceptable televised pro wrestling… Recap: Hulk Hogan swears he’s a good guy, gets side-eyed by Luger and me… The Power Plant is getting its guys some TV time tonight…Adrian Byrd and Bobby Blaze, the latter of whom somehow got put into the WCW Mayhem game, come to the ring to get killed off by Sid…Byrd must have been watching Regal bump himself over the top rope with barely any help from Shane Douglas earlier, because Sid lightly shoves him away and he comically stumbles across the ring and out through the ropes as though propelled out of a spinning centrifuge…Each man eats a diet of chokeslams and powerbombs for pinfalls…I am still baffled why Charles Robinson, who turned heel because he was specifically a huge fan of Ric Flair, is now boosting Sid… The Revolution come to the ring…Dean Malenko took Rick Steiner’s TV title when Steiner brought it to the ring on a previous run-in during a previous show…Why Steiner brought it out during a run-in just to dump it at ringside, I don’t know…Anyway, Malenko confiscated that shit and used it to attack Steiner…Malenko bores me to death on the mic…Basically, he challenges Rick Steiner to come get his TV title back in a match…He tries to warn off Sid by saying that the rest of the Revolution are backing him up…Oh, so they won’t just be standing at a monitor and watching Malenko fight a handicap match?...Good for them…I keep waiting for someone in this group to paraphrase Gil Scott-Heron for one of their catchphrases…I continue to be disappointed…Douglas talks…Let’s put it this way: His mic work isn’t nearly good enough to get him off FRAUD WATCH… The Windham Brothers and Curt Hennig come to the ring…So does Harlem Heat…This’ll be a singles match, however…Booker T. faces Barry Windham…Booker controls the match early…Barry struggles to get much going…He runs into boot on a corner charge, then ducks a lariat and turns right back around into a flying forearm…Barry even bails, but to the wrong side of the ring…Stevie pops him one, then tosses him back into the ring…Hennig has to grab Book’s leg as Booker tries an axe kick for Barry to get any sort of sustained control… Back in the ring, Barry scores a DDT and fends off Booker right hands with an eye poke…Barry decides that he needs more help, so he dumps Booker at ringside for Kendall and Hennig to club…Book is dumped back in the ring…Booker always seems like he’s one move away from re-taking control, though…He dodges an elbowdrop, then ducks a lariat and hits a Houston Side Kick…Book manages to land an axe kick…Back suplex, Spinaroonie, and missile dropk—nope, Kendall jumps Booker as Book goes up top and we get a DQ win for Booker and a three-on-two fight that Harlem Heat loses… Recap: Lex Luger doesn’t like the look of that Hulk Hogan, tries to convince Sting of his concerns…Huh, there were definitely beatdown sounds when the lights went out in Hogan’s dressing room…Maybe the audio was borked on the Network version of that Nitro…Or I could have just missed it somehow… Rick Steiner faces off with Dean Malenko for the WCW World Television Championship…Rick Steiner + pre-match mic work = DDP-level nonsense…I actually don’t see the Revolution out here with Malenko…Are they too busy trying to find a monitor to cluster around backstage?...There’s almost immediately a commercial break in this thing…Steiner’s in control when we leave and when we come back, but Malenko lands a leg lariat and tries a Texas Cloverleaf…Steiner gets out of it with an eye rake…So, get this…Sid comes to the ring to root Steiner on…Where are those bums from the Revolution?...You may be surprised to find out that Sid ends up chokeslamming Malenko for a DQ and then beating up an onrushing Shane Douglas…Did the Revolution get tips on running as a group from the original Wolfpac?...Egregious…They look like bums…Even Larry Z. points out that running in one at a time was a dumb idea, which they do (and get clobbered one at a time)…Wow, this booking is nonsense…Steiner got his belt back, but you know, the way these fellas have all been booked, they might as well send Saturn in there at Fall Brawl and have him lose in thirty seconds…Is it any wonder that three of these four Revolution members bolted for the WWF at the first chance they could get?...This is not quite bad enough to get on the Dirt Worst list, but the way they book and present the Revolution as a whole might end up making it at some point son… Remember when Bam Bam Bigelow was presented as a threat to Goldberg for a few months at the end of 1998 and beginning of 1999?...Now Bammer’s out here to get crushed by Goldberg like he should have been by the middle of January 1999 at the latest…Goldberg does some cool power spots, including catching Bam Bam on a crossbody attempt (!!) and hitting a front slam…Goldberg locks on an arm bar, but Bigelow barely makes the ropes…Bigelow wildly swings at Golberg, and you’ll be surprised to know that there’s a ref bump in the main event of a WCW show…Goldberg continues to dominate, but Nick Patrick is half-dead, so DDP runs in…Page doesn’t do much to help Bammer, who gets speared and Jackhammered while Page escapes to safety…Patrick counts three, but Page is in immediately with a steel chair attack on Goldberg…Goldberg slowly gets to his feet, so Bam Bam and Page decide that discretion is the better part of valor… Just another solid Thunder, folks…We’ve got at least another month or two of them before Vince Russo decides to shake things up…I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts…WOOO…

Yeah, so the week before on Nitro, they had a bunch of plants with signs cheering for Lodi while security kept them from entering the building, so they're doing something with die hard Lodi fans using plants that won't come to fruition because of all the booking changes. What a strange run it was for this guy. I was decidedly not a fan at any point, but injured -> OD is just a terrible way to end things. "Uta"s accent is pure Midwestern American, so I just picked a common name for an American woman and a random city in the Midwest to illustrate my point. Happy accidents! (Seriously, WCW, she doesn't need to actually be German to be Berlyn's translator. If you're going to tell this Germany > United States story, it might even be more effective if she's just Megan Walters from Dubuque and has been convinced of her belief in German superiority after meeting Berlyn. Berlyn can bestow her German name upon her in one of these segments. All I ask is that you make it make sense, WCW!) I know Terry Funk comes in. I remember reading something about the Old Age Outlaws years and years ago and rolling my eyes, and I think Funk was part of that. But I really don't remember Terry Funk vs. a horse, and I'm extremely excited about this. Does Pepe have a secret son? Tell me he wrestles Pepe Jr. in mid-2000 or something like that.

Show #205 – 6 September 1999 “The last one before Eric Bischoff is ejected from his executive position and sent back to Wyoming and is best summed up as three hours of pure Krustywhatthehellwasthat.jpg that I think may have brainwashed me somehow after viewing it” Bischoff’s reign of creative terror is almost over! YESSSSSSS Russo’s reign of creative terror is about to begin! NOOOOOOO Bischoff is four days out from getting sent back to Wyoming to terrorize river trout instead of wrestling fans. It’s wild that they fired him two days BEFORE a PPV, though. Fucking WCW. Schiller and Co. are also idiots, not just Bischoff. Boy, do I hate Nitro’s newest theme. It’s been months of shows, and I’ve decided that if a TV show’s theme can somehow be described as “edgelord,” this show’s theme can. We have more weird audio overlap to start the show. I checked my phone initially, as I have women’s Olympic basketball on mute at the same time that I watch this show, but no, it was good ol’ WCW production. Fuckin’ Craig Leathers. (I joke a lot about Craig Leathers and blame him for everything production-wise, but I’m not serious about it. I’m aware that Leathers is just doing the best he can for this goofy-ass company.) The Hitman! Bret Hart comes down in street clothes. That is the first time that Bret’s “Hart Attack” knockoff caused my brain to flood with dopamine when I heard the opening riff. That might be the only time it happens, honestly. I’m not even going to snark on poor Tony’s show formatting sheet being wrong and making the guy sound like a doofus as he kicks it to the ring. Bret’s been hitting the weights lately because that dude’s shoulders and arms look bigger than I’ve seen them. Or maybe it’s just the t-shirt he's wearing. I wish Bret had just retired at the Georgia Dome because he’s got three more months before Goldberg throws a wild kick and puts him out of wrestling anyway, but at a physical cost in addition to the emotional cost of wrestling that he's already paid. The Hitman wants to wrestle Hulk Hogan already, dammit. Bret says that he’s got to do this before he decides whether to come back full time or just hang 'em up after that; notably, when he says that Hogan has a claim to being the greatest of all-time, there is a small HO-GAN chant and also a smattering of boos. I thought Bret was going to ask for a match against Chris Benoit, actually. Anyway, Bret leaves the ring after asking for that match. Riki Rachtman is still in this company?! I hadn’t seen this dude in awhile. He’s going to be hosting this Nitro Girls competition. Let’s hope WCW drops this thing like it does everything else because I’m already irritated about it. And I say this as the Nitro Girls come out to join Rachtman on the ramp! Kimberly helps out with the talking and helps Rachtman introduce this thing. Then, we get some videos of prospective Nitro Girls. Meh, no offense to these ladies, but I don’t care. Put on a wrestling match. It doesn’t help that Rachtman is annoying as FUCK. Kimberly is charming as hell, though. Why do we need Rachtman at all for this? At least half the Nitro Girls are enjoyable talkers and could share these hosting duties amongst themselves. Alright, a match! It’s a match with Lenny Lane and Lodi doing their annoying fucking act, but still, a match! Lodi holds a sign that says STOP THE HATE, and I agree, so I guess he’s the babyface somehow? He’s also got a sign that says WEST HOLLYWOOD BLONDES, which is the first time that this nomenclature has been used for these fellas on screen, at least as far as the shows that I’ve seen. Evan Karagias comes out as Lodi’s opponent. Some plant holding a LODI RULES sign does a pratfall over the guardrail and gets carted out. There’s just too much going on, man. Finally, we focus on the match, as Karagias hits a Sky High for two, then throws some terrible punches in the corner. Karagias knocks Lane off the apron and continues to land offense on Lodi. After a neckbreaker, he gets mixed up as to which side he should be headed toward before switching directions and springboarding onto Lane at ringside. The Dead Pool comes out at the same time and get on the apron after Karagias is back in the ring; they distract Karagias by just starting at him, and Lodi jumps Karagias from behind, lands a top-rope bulldog, and hits a DDT for three. That was a very, very, very busy match. Gene Okerlund interviews Hulk Hogan in the ring. There are only six days until Fall Brawl, so we should get some angle progression, right? He denies knowing that Randy Savage was in his locker room last week [Editor's note: Savage doesn't even show up later in this episode] and accuses Lex Luger of causing all these problems for him. Hogan shows how detached from the everyday financial lives of his Hulkamaniacs he truly is by saying that his East Coast Hummer is all-black and his West Coast Hummer is all-white - I’ll leave the obvious jokes that might be made about this proclamation to the side – but the Hummer that hit Nash’s limo was white with a black top, and he doesn’t own a Hummer like that. I guess what Hogan’s saying is that he’s anti-miscegenation. OK, sorry, I couldn’t help myself but make an obvious joke, for which I dearly apologize. Hogan says that Luger is “on the take,” which means that actually Tatanka is the one on the take somehow. He also says “kick some ass,” because that’s how you make the yellow-and-red have some ‘90s ‘tude. There’ll be a tag match in a cage for the main event tonight, and Hogan will be in it. I love that the final major act overseen by Eric Bischoff during his initial creative oversight of the show will be to set in motion a face turn for Hogan and a heel turn for Sting in 1999 WCW. Beautiful, practically the booking equivalent a melodic song, don't change a note, Eric, you doofus. Barry Horowitz comes out in a glittery tux-styled vest and calls himself THE BADDEST WRESTLER ALIVE TODAY into the camera. I like the confidence! He’s facing Al Green, so I’m just going to chill until Sid makes it out here. In the meantime, Tony S. spends some time selling a million-dollar giveaway that Bischoff will (semi-famously?) chew him out over not selling enough. Tony S. claims to have then shilled it like some sort of lunatic the next time around and had Bischoff praise him, unless he’s previously shilled it before and got yelled at. I don't know, the timeline's a little tight because Bischoff is sent home on the Friday after this show. Uh, some piano music plays, which also happened on the Nitro previous to this one. At the same time that the music starts, Sid runs down. We miss a bit of Sid’s beatdown because THE MAESTRO is sitting on stage and playing piano while Sid kills the jobbers in the ring. What is happening right now? Do I need meds? Am I having a fever dream? What in the absolute hell?! Sid talks about facing Chris Benoit for the U.S. Championship at Fall Brawl and does his whole Millennium Man deal on the mic. There is another hour-and-a-half of this show to go, and I can’t imagine it getting weirder than that first half-hour. The WTRs sit in the back and complain about Harlem Heat putting Bobby Duncum out with injuries; is this the last we've seen of Duncum on WCW television? He accidentally OD's and passes away in early 2000. So, as the WTRs talk about getting revenge on the Heat at Fall Brawl, someone kicks the door in, bathed by a bright light. Is that Kendall who quotes Blazing Saddles while looking up in surprise? Someone, I think him, exclaims, “What in the Wide, Wide World of Sports?!” and I laughed. I laughed even harder when Hennig confusedly asked VINCENT?! But he's not Vincent, nor Virgil! He’s Curly Bill! Holy shit, then as Curly Bill calls himself “the biggest redneck in the world,” the WTRs quote that series of early ‘90s Pace Picante commercials (“[Curly Bill’s from] the south side of what? NEW YORK CITY?!”) These fucking dads and their dad references. The WTRs agree to give Curly Bill an opportunity to join them later tonight. What the fuck, man, this segment was also bananas, but it was so dumb, and I laughed more than enough for it to be quite enjoyable. Harlem Heat joins Gene Okerlund in the ring for a little talky-talk time. It’s boilerplate stuff; Booker decides to play Colloquialism Roulette and then accidentally knocks Okerlund’s mic out of his hands. Boy, this Nitro is fucking strange. I don’t believe in omens, but this feels like a Nitro that is desperately trying to signal that something shocking like Bischoff getting sent home is about to happen. Stevie drops a NINE-TIME, NINE-TIME, and wow, he is way better at dropping that line than DDP. Oh, this is the famous segment that provides the well-used GIF where Stevie mean mugs the camera for so long that he finds it too hilarious to keep a straight face any longer. That genuinely got me to laugh, too. This Nitro is something, man. Sting and Lex Luger bust in on Bret Hart and Hulk Hogan having a conversation in Hogan's locker room. Sting wants five minutes of Hogan’s time, and Hogan, upset, says that Sting will get those five minutes and storms away from him. That’s it. We don’t see them actually take five minutes of one another’s time before we cut away. Wait, we come back to Hogan yelling YOU SET ME UP at Luger while Bret tries to help a downed Sting up from the floor. What the fuck? What was the sequence of events that would have led to this? So, hold on. When we left, before the break, Hogan was talking to Sting. He got up from his chair and stormed off camera, saying he’d give Sting five minutes of his time. We came back to Sting down and Bret, Luger, and Hogan standing over him. So, what mystery is there? Either Bret or Luger knocked him out right then and there. It’s not like Sting followed Hogan off screen, after all. OK, I see. What I thought was a commercial break with a cut from one segment to the next was actually just the same uninterrupted segment in which the lights (randomly?!) cut out. So, someone knocked Sting out in the five seconds that the lights were out, soundlessly because I didn’t hear anything. This probably came across better live because on the Network, they don’t always stick a commercial break in other shows that have a “cut to black, show commercials, then come back immediately with the next segment” format. This mimicked that sort of format, but as it turns out, it wasn't actually a pair of segments around a break; it was a full segment with a spot where the lights went out. Whoa, this was weird, too, and doubly weird watching it on the Network. There’s going to be a 12-man battle royal for a world title shot up next. OK, what the fuck? This is insane. Get these rules: The first four men thrown over the top rope are eliminated from a chance to get the shot. The next six men eliminated from the battle royal are going to face each other in a series of singles matches later tonight based on their order of elimination. What they are fighting for, I have no idea. The final two men remaining will fight later tonight for the world title shot, given to them on next week's Nitro. All these rules, if not contradict, confuse what it said on the screen right before the rules screen came up, which is that the last man standing (which one would assume is traditionally the winner of the battle royal) gets a world title shot next week. What in sweet fuck is happening?!?! So, those are the battle royale rules. The First Family, Revolution, and WTRs are the participants. I don’t know, folks, let me just run down some eliminations: The first four out who are eliminated from the world title shot competition for good, unless WCW decides otherwise and doesn’t tell me until Curly Bill is randomly getting a world title shot on some Thunder next month: Brian Knobbs, Curly Bill, Barbarian, and Curt Hennig. The next six out who are now prepared to wrestle one another in singles matches for some reason or prize; I don’t know what they get or why they are now wrestling singles matches against one another: Kendall Windham, Shane Douglas, Barry Windham, Jerry Flynn, Hugh Morrus, and Perry Saturn. The final two men remaining who will wrestle for a world title shot: Chris Benoit and Dean Malenko. So, that means that Kendall Windham will face Shane Douglas, Barry Windham will face Jerry Flynn, and Hugh Morrus will face Perry Saturn later tonight. Again, for no particular reason, which Tony S. reinforces on commentary. Miami typically has awful Nitro crowds in my opinion, but even considering their very low baseline for vocal enjoyment of a WCW show, they anti-popped for this whole segment and didn’t care about either Benoit or Malenko. They’ve been bad all night, per usual, but this match seems to have drained them to a point that they’re an even shittier crowd than they normally are. Johnny Swinger is out here now. Sure, why not? I’ll keep a DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! counter for you fine folks who end up reading this [Editor's note: Zero on the counter, wow!]. Prince Iaukea is his opponent. I immediately am looking for Sid. So is the crowd, which lands a weak SID chant for ten seconds before the bell. I’ll tell you if and when Sid shows up. The crowd gets restless three minutes in and starts a longer, more sustained WE WANT SID chant. There’s a weird audio issue yet again and Tony S. sounds like he’s commentating in a tunnel. The Dead Pool comes to the ring instead of Sid. Shaggy occupies the ref and Vampiro nails Swinger with a Nail in the Coffin; Iaukea covers for three and is immediately cornered by the Dead Pool, who expect Iaukea to pay them back. Why was any of this on Nitro? Thunder, I could understand. But Nitro? We are just hitting an hour into this show. There’s still more, somehow! I feel like this Nitro has been three Nitros long, but I’m also oddly sort of enjoying this in a “what nonsensical shit will Bischoff/Nash/Sullivan throw out here next” sort of way. Earlier today, Buff Bagwell autographed shirts at a merch stand for his fans; Berlyn showed up and said something in German, and these snot-nosed teens standing around went OHHHHHH even though none of them understand a word of German. Bagwell/Berlyn is on for Fall Brawl. I was under the assumption that Duggan/Berlyn was Berlyn's first match, and oh no, does Buff get hurt and get subbed for by Duggan? Lord Steven Regal (w/Dave Taylor) faces Buff Bagwell next. Supposed babyface Buff Bagwell engages the crowd by starting a U-S-A chant, which is the most engaged these fans have been all night. In my opinion, Miami is what you get if you take Atlanta, add beaches, and lose all the things that make Atlanta charming and fun. This match exists and is perfectly fine, but it would have been more fine if Regal got more of an extended heel control segment. As it ends up, Bagwell gets a ton of offense in (as it should be from a booking standpoint if not an artistic one) and Regal never really gets on track. He tries to connect with Taylor on a flagpole bonking, but Buff moves and Taylor bonks Regal, the latter of whom stumbles into position for a Blockbuster that gets three. Buff gets a mic after the match and verbally fucks the flag for a bit before threatening Berlyn. Buff: “When you step on my toes, you’re steppin’ on Miami’s toes. You’re steppin’ on toes that you don’t want to be steppin’ on…You’re not just fightin’ Buff, daddy, you’re fightin’ THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” This was so bad that it defies belief. Buff Bagwell could be the worst babyface of all time. Marcus Bagwell was fine at being a plucky young rookie; Buff Bagwell is the least likeable wrestler in the company other than the Hulkster. Juventud Guerrera is dressed like Billy Kidman – white tank and blue jorts – and joins Psicosis and Blitzkrieg (the last of whom is already in the ring for some reason) to oppose Billy Kidman, Chavo Guerrero Jr., and Eddy Guerrero. They all brawl to start, and Juvi hits a spinebuster on Eddy. For a second, I wondered why Kidman was hitting Eddy with a spinebuster. Fucking Juventud. I assume he’s dressed like this for some spot later in the match, especially after Tony S. explicitly points it out on commentary. If not, who the hell let him go out there like that? The wrestlers eschew tags some of the time, and they make tags some of the time. Chavo and Kidman are friends again – no, wait, they’re not. After teaming up on a double dropkick on Blitzkrieg, they both go for a pinfall attempt and Chavo gets irritated that Kidman nudges him out of the way. Now, Juvi and Kidman go at it. Juvi misses a splash and gets punched a lot by Kidman; Kidman throws punches at one point while mounted on a kneeling Juvi, and Juvi stands up and lifts Kidman for a Psicosis missile dropkick. Juvi covers for two, but Chavo makes the save. Juvi eventually loses his shirt, which makes it easier for me to tell you that Juvi’s the one hit by a Sky High. The Dead Pool comes out and observes the proceedings. The match has broken down again and it occurs to me that this feud with the Dead Pool is a heck of a waste of Eddy and Rey both. Blitz decides not to help Psicosis out of a jam and instead tries to hit a dive onto Chavo; he misses and hits Juvi. Chavo follows with his own dive, and back in the ring, Kidman reverses a powerbomb into a face crusher; Eddy follows up with a Frog Splash for three. Strange little match! Post-match, Chavo and Kidman make up over the confusion on the pinfall attempt, so I guess Chavo’s a babyface again. While the Nitro Girls do a dance routine, Tony S. drops a ONE MILLLLION DOLLARS to promote the money give-away thing and also to show that he’s seen Austin Powers. It’s Kendall Windham versus Shane Douglas. I guess what they get is a second opportunity to go to the PAY WINDAH or something. It really bothers me that they’re wrestling for no reason other than they went out of the battle royal one after the other, but not before four other men went out previous to them. Shane Douglas on the mic: MIAMI, ARE YOU READY FOR A REVOLUTION?! Miami crowd: *crickets*. Bobby Heenan on commentary: THEY’RE READY! God, this Nitro episode is so fucking stupid. What an experience. Anyway, what follows is an okay match with an obligatory ringside brawl. Douglas takes the brunt of the offense in that ringside brawl, but makes a comeback when it gets back into the ring. Curt Hennig runs down and clocks Douglas after Windham diverts the ref. We see the Revolution watching the match in the back, and they see Harlem Heat run down and attack Hennig while Douglas recovers enough to hit Windham with a Pittsburgh Plunge for three. On the replay, we see that Stevie hit Kendall with a slapjack while Booker talked to the ref, which the production truck missed on first viewing. Stevie mugs the camera and cracks me up again. Tony S. promotes a new video called WCW Mayhem, with the Mayhem logo, that covers the first four years of Nitro. That won’t be confusing when WCW Mayhem, the November PPV, also hits video stores! Not in the least! Barry Windham (w/Curly Bill) faces Jerry Flynn (w/Jimmy Hart) in the next match. I really get a kick out of this Curly Bill thing. Virgil is such a leech. He gloms onto any damn group out there that’ll take him. Flynn and Windham are extremely boring. I didn’t expect Kendall to have a more engaging match than Barry tonight, but here we are. Hart grabs Windham’s ankle on a rope run, and Bill runs over and chokes Hart out. Then, after Flynn lands a running wheel kick that sends him out of the ring, Bill hammers Flynn with one of the tag belts and rolls him back inside for a Windham DDT that ends the match. Berlyn and his entourage come onto the ramp; Okerlund’s there to get frisked before interviewing both Berlyn and Uta Ludendorff, who you and I both know is probably just Megan Walters from Dubuque, Iowa. Berlyn talks and Uta translates; Berlyn’s like, Buff didn’t challenge me first, I challenged him first at that merch stand, stupid. Okerlund’s like, What, I didn’t understand that, and I actually don’t need Uta to translate that Berlyn is like Learn to speak German, you American fucking idiot, and that goes for the lot of you. That two years of German in college is paying off! The crowd boos because being multilingual is UN-AMERICAN, DAMMIT. Monolingualism for everyone! U-S-A! U-S-A! Berlyn thinks that German culture is the best. I don’t know. I like Remarque, but I don’t like Realpolitik as a long-term strategy for keeping world peace. It’s like any other culture with its ups and downs. Okerlund: “This German thing, folks, has gone far enough!” Hey, that’s the exact same thing Jewish Czechs said in 1938. What? You can’t expect me not to riff on that Okerlund comment. I apologize for any and all questionable taste in that riff. Jimmy Hart’s right back out here with Hugh Morrus, who if you’ll recall is facing Perry Saturn as the last two guys to get eliminated from the earlier battle royal. Tony S. shouts out Brian Hildebrand, who passed away only two days after this show aired. Speaking of questionable taste, Heenan, you don’t have to stay in character to give your love to Hildebrand (“He’s the only referee I’ve ever liked”). It’s okay to say something nice without considering kayfabe in this case. While Saturn tries to get something solid out of Hugh Morrus, I wonder to myself how long this version of the First Family even lasts. Barbarian is cooked, I assume that Flynn’s run is on borrowed time, and the Misfits in Action don’t last through the end of the company, so they must be coming up pretty soon if they are around for awhile, but not by the time Nitro is cancelled. I would guess that as soon as Russo is in the company, the First Family gets picked apart and re-packaged. Saturn gains leverage in the match early and tries to hit a move on Morrus as Morrus is seated on the top rope, but Hart holds Morrus’s boot down, and Morrus tosses Saturn to the mat. Morrus is trying to get a two-elbowdrops-and-a-legdrop spot over, but he’s stupid and his spot looks stupid. Morrus drops a Savage Elbow from the top, but he’s no Randy Savage, so it only gets two. Saturn fights back, but Morrus regains control and gets two on a vertical suplex. Saturn shows some more fightback, but gets mowed down by a diving lariat. Morrus sits in a chinlock that Saturn works out of, but Morrus turns a back suplex attempt and falls on top of Saturn for a pin attempt. I don’t know, fellas, this match in a vacuum, while not good, is watchable. Morrus is trying hard even though he’s simply not very good. But is this the match that Saturn needs going into a PPV match against Rick Steiner for the TV title? Saturn spends most of this match bumping, selling, and looking not even remotely like a threat to Steiner. Morrus hits a press slam, then misses a top-rope splash. Saturn finally makes a sustained comeback and, after a flurry of offense, signals for a DVD. Hart jumps on the apron and distracts Saturn, which allows Morrus to jump him. Morrus plows into Saturn, then goes up and attempts a No Laughing Matter that misses. Saturn hits a judo toss and locks on the Rings of Saturn for the submission. Who laid this match out, exactly? They did a poor job of it. Dean Malenko is back out to the ring to face Chris Benoit. There are only twenty minutes left in the show, and we’ve got this match and a tag cage match left. They do some swiftly-paced counter wrestling to start. I think they need to get Benoit away from the Revolution because they’re dragging him down. I think when Benoit a) doesn’t talk too much and b) wrestles anywhere between 40/60 and 60/40 with upper midcarders and spot main eventers, people believe in him. I love Saturn, but having him pal around with Saturn, Malenko, and Douglas just makes Benoit look like a midcard piker. The men have a punch-up and generally strike one another a lot. This match isn’t doing anything for me; I blame Malenko. The crowd does wake up for both men reversing one another in the Tombstone position…no, wait, they wake up because Sid makes his way out and attacks both men after Benoit misses a diving headbutt. Sid is able to powerbomb Malenko, but Benoit manages to dump Sid to the floor. Sid looks bewildered that the little guy was able to duck his blows and backs away from the ring. This match just seems to peter out, I guess, since ref Charles Robinson never bothered to call for the bell. Ummmmmmmmmm, okay? This Nitro continues to be confounding. The main event pits Rick Steiner, DDP, and Sid Vicious against Goldberg, Sting, and Hulk Hogan in a cell match. The heels take forever to get down there. Hogan comes down first, then Goldberg; Goldberg doesn't quite make it to the ring, as Kanyon and Bam Bam Bigelow jump him in the aisle; the heels already in the ring jump Hogan. Kanyon and Bam Bam dump Goldberg in the ring with five minutes to go, and Goldberg fights off the three heels in the ring for quite a while, actually, before the numbers game gets to him. Of course, by that point, Hogan is up against and clears out the heels for a little bit. The heels finally assert some extended control, which is when Sting heads to the ring for a save, no thanks to the remonstrations of Lex Luger. Sting fights past Bam Bam and Kanyon and then gets in the ring and helps the babyfaces turn the tide. I continue to stay impressed that WCW hypes main events that are a) short and b) extended angles moreso than matches, half the time. Sting slings Page into a Hogan big boot, and Hogan follows with a legdrop that the ref counts two on, but I guess he decides, what the hell, it’s three. I, um. What? OK, sure, why not. Hogan looks overjoyed that Sting helped him out, but Luger charges into the ring and yells at Sting for helping Hogan. Luger is heated and even does the same thing that Morgan Freeman does to the crack-smoking crying kid in Lean On Me by grabbing Sting’s chin and yelling at him. Except he yells LOOK AT ME WHEN I’M TALKIN’ TO YOU instead of YOU SMOKE CRACK, SON, DON’T CHA? DON’T CHA?!?! Sting and Luger are so entertaining together whenever they’re having friendship problems. It was true in 1995, and it’s true now. Luger tries to make the point about why Sting should trust him with simple math: WE’VE BEEN FRIENDS FOR THIRTEEN YEARS! *holds up all ten fingers* TEN *holds up three fingers* THREE, THIRTEEN! Sting takes it for a bit before getting sick of it and causing Luger to back away expeditiously by yelling at him: GET OFF MY CASE, LEX, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, ANYWAYS? Luger backs off, but he’s so frustrated and emotionally heated that he forgets to use his words and punches Sting. Not with any venom, just lightly in the chest. Sting looks shocked, exclaims WHAT WAS THAT FOR, LEX? and then fires back with a couple punches of his own as we fade to black. That was unironically enjoyable because I am totally invested in any storyline where Sting and Lex Luger have friendship troubles. Those two having their problems is always compelling as far as this viewer is concerned. After this nutball Nitro, I think I’ve been lulled into something akin to a sense of out-of-body contentment. My soul might be floating above my body as I type this sentence. I feel like Winston finally being brainwashed by the Party. I love WCW now! WCW has always looked out for my interests as a wrestling fan. WCW is my only true friend. 1 out of 5 Stinger Splashes Infinity Multiplied by Infinity out of 5 Stinger Splashes.

Thunder Interlude – show number seventy-eight – 2 September 1999 "The WCW Gang works around some crappy angle and mic work stuff to do good wrestling, as is Thunder's way for most of the Bischoff Era (because no one pays too much attention to Thunder in the Bischoff Era)" I didn’t get to Thunder yesterday, so let’s go ahead and do it now… Hogan + White Hummer angle = Let’s not have this all over my still semi-consistently nice little wrestling show, please… The White Hummer angle, an angle that I can’t believe that people still ask Eric Bischoff about (that's his claim, at least), gets a short recap…Sure, whatever, just keep it brief… Larry Z.: “We’re in the state of Michigan, but Sting must be in a state of confusion”…This guy… Bumper: Lex Luger promises to shock the world with his proof that Hulk Hogan sucks back on Nitro… I shouldn’t have even bothered to request not getting this dumb angle all over my still semi-consistently nice little wrestling show, huh?... Diamond Dallas Page is in the ring to do his thing…”His thing” is bad mic work followed by good wrestling, as you well know…He hypes his upcoming match against Goldberg at Fall Brawl…I’m here for it…Page is easily Goldberg’s best opponent…Goldberg might be Page’s…But Sting is probably Page’s best opponent…DDP kills off Al Green without much trouble…He does some “your mama” shit toward Green before the match, and the crowd has the temerity to go HOW FAT IS SHE when DDP starts his joke…Fuck off, Saginaw, you're oh-for-one…Page hits a floatover Diamond Cutter and takes his sweet time to cover, but of course gets three anyway… Dave Taylor (w/Lord Steven Regal) matches up against Shane Douglas (w/Dean Malenko)…Taylor tries to jump on Douglas, but runs into a front suplex and then gets his neck snapped…Taylor bails and resets…He controls and locks on a kneebar while the crowd chants U-S-A…You’re oh-for-two, Saginaw…Regal tries to help out, but conks into Taylor not once, but twice…The first time only nets two on a roll-up for Douglas, but the second time allows Douglas to hit Taylor with a Pittsburgh Plunge while Malenko handles Regal outside…That gets three, but then we have a series of post-match run-ins…First, Chris Adams runs down and hits Douglas with a flagpole…Benoit is down soon after to take care of him…The whole First Family rushes down, but the Revolution finally looks strong and takes care of the whole lot…Douglas again does a bit of somewhat crappy mic work after the match…He challenges the First Family to an eight-man, no-DQ tag at Fall Brawl…So, an eight-man tornado tag?...If it’s no DQ, but people are tagging in and out and the ref is enforcing tags, I’m going to complain incessantly about it… Larry Z. gives us a history lesson in which he ties the fall of the wall to a new generation of aggressive athletes from the former Soviet block, including Berlyn…Um, Alex Wright is from Nuremburg…That’s in West Germany…Eh, Larry Z. is underestimating the ability of the typical wrestling fan to look at an atlas, I get it, but as an atlas-owning future and current DVDVR poster, I am offended (especially since I won that atlas in a geography bee!)… Kaz Hayashi is wrestling El Dandy, and if Sid brings his lovable, yet currently annoying-as-fuck ass down here…Kaz and Dandy have a pacey match…Cool spot alert: Dandy hangs backward by his toes over the apron…Instead of setting up to do a springboard legdrop, Kaz just casually kicks Dandy’s feet away from the ropes so that Dandy splats on the mats below…I love Psicosis, but he would have taken thirty seconds setting up for a legdrop while Dandy just hung there…Kaz’s idea was better…There’s a nice little chop-off that leads into some Dandy control…Unfortunately for Dandy, he whiffs on a second-rope Vader splash… Kaz gets back into the match…He rips off a slingshot DDT that should get three, but only gets two…Kaz’s suplex attempt is blocked…Dandy sits him on the top rope and tries a superplex, but Kaz lands a super front suplex and follows up with a senton splash for three…That was short, but it was fun as hell…What a nice little three-minute sprint…Aw, fuck, Sid came out here after the match…Kaz tries to attack and, oh look, even though he just pinned the Cruiserweight Champ in the past week, he means nothing, really…Eat a sack of rotting Rocky Mountain Oysters, WCW…Sid blathers on after he finishes destroying these nothing little cruiserweights…Other than the Goldberg threats, Sid says that Chris Benoit is the only guy in the Revolution worth a damn, basically (that probably ends up being true, but I think Saturn has use as an upper-midcard gatekeeper in WCW, even if not in the WWF)…Sid says that it’s a shame the Revolution is sending Benoit out to get his ass kicked by him at Fall Brawl… Lenny Lane (w/Lodi) defends the Cruiserweight Championship…Ol’ Lenny put a bow on his title to pretty it up…But, um, it’s the sort of bow that you put on a Christmas present…I don’t think that’s the type of decorative bow that one might put on a title…Billy Kidman is Lane’s opponent…These fellas do some mat wrestling to start so that Lane can ride Kidman’s arm on an arm bar...*sigh*…Lenny skips around the ring after hitting a leapover...Look at this broke-ass Lanny Poffo…This stinks…The crowd briefly starts chanting a slur at Lane…Oh-for-THREE, Saginaw…I pretty much hate this match and all the shitty shtick…If you’re going to do an objectionable “feminine male wrestler” gimmick, at least be as good as the Genius…I’m not even asking for gimmick work at the quality of Adrian Street or Goldust, as I know that is entirely beyond a guy like Lane… There’s a break in this match as Lane hits a sit-out front slam out of a wheelbarrow for two…We come back to Kidman firing up into a comeback, but missing a corner splash and eating a bulldog for two…Lane is actually okay when he’s in there with someone better than him and is toning down on the shtick…But he has all this hacky material that he’s also awful at delivering, which he’s obliged to do…They work a straight series of near falls that’s both hot and good and that raises this whole match to at least watchable…Of course, there’s soon a ref bump…Hey, why is Charles Robinson allowed to ref and also second Sid out to run in on matches?...Someone get a kayfabe WCW President who is finally going to handle these rogue refs…While the ref is down, Lodi sticks Kidman with a DDT after Kidman gets a visual three count…Robinson recovers and counts Lodi’s cover, but Kidman kicks out at two… Kidman knocks Lodi off the apron and reverses a powerbomb into a face crusher for two…He goes up for the SSP…Lodi immediately jumps up and knocks Kidman off the ropes, drawing a DQ…Lodi tries to attack Kidman, but Rey comes down and helps Kidman take Lodi out…Misterio drops a Bronco Buster Rough Rider on Lodi besides…Hey, even Rey and the WCW announcers can’t decide what to call it…There was a good competitive match in between the opening garbage shtick and the ending ref bump nonsense… Chris Benoit comes to the ring with the Revolution and responds to Sid…His promo is just fine…He downplays the fact that he probably does have slightly higher potential than everyone else in the group…Saturn grabs the mic and is also fine…He’s facing Sid later tonight and says that the Revolution is hunting Sid like Sid is hunting cruiserweights and also Goldberg… Promo: Coach Buzz Stern doing a mediocre impression of Power Plant trainer Buddy Lee Parker is not the wave…All the “comedy” in these sketches has sucked real bad…They explicitly name one of the trainees specifically, so maybe that guy’ll be on TV too…We’ll see… WCW choosing to destroy its tag team division really benefitted Disorderly Conduct…They get to be on Nitro and Thunder way more often…They’ll be looking up at the lights tonight once again, this time due to Harlem Heat…Tuff Tom tries to get the jump on Booker, but he gets tossed to the floor…the Heat drop Mean Mike with a stalling double vertical suplex…The Heat basically coast from there…They land a Big Apple Blast for three…The Windham Brothers run in and attack the Heat after the match…It goes poorly for them…Duncum tried to get in the ring and didn’t even get past the apron… Scotty Riggs admires himself in the mirror…He faces Prince Iaukea…You know, it’s funny…Iaukea got the TV title too early in his progression as an in-ring worker as a mirror of Rocky Maivia…Then, Iaukea actually became a solid worker and they immediately stopped giving him any type of a push…I don’t even think he needs an actual push, really…Just having him be a win some/lose some midcarder would have made more sense than having him lose to everyone all the time…Anyway, Iaukea jumps Riggs while Riggs looks at his reflection…Riggs comes back and lands a nice-looking dropkick…This is a decent little TV bout…Riggs and Iaukea end up brawling on the floor…Iaukea follows Riggs back into the ring, but whiffs on a dive…Riggs quickly lands a Rocker Dropper for three… Goldberg crushes the Cat (w/Sonny Onoo)…What is this, December of 1998?...No, you’re telling me that it’s ten months later…Yeah, the timing on this bout is about right for WCW…Miller promises to “shake up the world,” but he’s no Ali and Goldberg is no Sonny Liston…Miller wants to beat Goldberg and then Hulk Hogan afterwards in the same night…He sends Sonny Onoo to the back so that everyone can see him do this all on his own…Miller: “[Goldberg,] I’m gon’ put this mic up your ass so far that tonight [the fans] will hear me kicking your ass”…OK, after all that shit talking, this match should take no more than thirty seconds…The Cat kicks Goldberg in the throat with his ruby slipper on…Goldberg coughs a bit, clears his throat, and hits a spear and a Jackhammer, as it should be… Perry Saturn comes back to the ring to face Sid in the Thunder main event…Sid backs Saturn into the corner on a lockup…He misses a boot, then a fist, and then rushes toward Saturn against the ropes...As it turns out, Saturn just yanks the top rope down, and Sid falls to the floor…However, when Sid gets back on the apron, he easily out-strikes Saturn and takes over…That was a very neat series of spots that immediately illustrated the “speed versus power” story of this matchup…Saturn again uses his quickness to duck a Sid attack, land a side kick, and clothesline Sid to the floor…He tries to follow up with a slingshot splash, but Sid catches him and drapes him across the guardrail… Give me Sid wrestling a smaller, agile wrestler ALL DAY…Sid’s best matches are all with guys 6’1 or under who are quick and at least reasonably athletic…I am not surprised that this is a fun match…Sid gets Saturn back in the ring and stomps at him, but runs into a boot on a corner charge and eats a missile dropkick…Saturn tries to follow up with a sunset flip, but Sid easily blocks it, goozles Saturn, and hits a chokeslam…Sid is slow to follow up because he thinks he’s safe…He stomps Saturn, then tears at his lips, puts on a rope-assisted chinlock, and lands some forearms…Saturn fights up out of a regular old chinlock, ducks a clothesline, but leaps into a front slam that gets two…Saturn really needs to stop leaping at Sid like that… Sid also needs to stop trying corner charges, as he misses his second of the match…Saturn lands an inverted atomic drop and a springboard forearm…Sid scrambles to the corner, but Saturn follows and lands punches…Aw FUCK, Rick Steiner walks in and attacks Saturn, drawing a DQ…This match was GOOD…I want more Sid/Saturn now…Dean Malenko runs in for the save…He picks up the TV title that Steiner brought out and dropped for some reason, then hits Steiner with it…That match was so fun that even with the non-ending, I really enjoyed it…It’s not Sid or Saturn’s fault that Rick Steiner and WCW’s booking committee ruin everything…But yeah, I loved that they laid out the strategic story of the match early and then reinforced it with two spots where Saturn tried leaping at Sid and having Sid's strength win out, but also two spots where Sid tried running at Saturn and having Saturn's speed and agility win out...Sid is never a mere passenger in these fun or good matches against smaller guys that people love and remember, but that's the false narrative that I guess a lot of internet fans have settled on... Hey, WCW didn’t run the return of the white Hummer angle into the ground…They got that out of the way in the first five minutes…Then, they proceeded to put on a pretty good wrestling show outside of Lenny Lane doing awful shtick…I really do like you, Thunder…You have an unfair reputation that you probably got because of Vince Russo paying more attention to you…I give this one a WOOOOO…

The final punchline of this comic is tremendous. Great find.

A joke told by a guy who I know must have told the "I am the vindow viper" joke to at least twenty people across his lifetime. I sure hope you have sons, daughters, nieces, or nephews to terrorize with jokes like these, whether those sons, etc. are yours or somebody else's. Make him annotate them, too! And cite 'em in APA. None of that MLA stuff. And if you cite them in Chicago, that should be an insta-Cashing!

One of a possible many. To the bolded part of your post, I respond: That is BADA BING, BADA BOOM, BADA BANGGGGGG on. When he was cigar-and-jewels Page, it worked because that was how he was portrayed. He just never changed it up as his character progressed. I haven't seen those A&E Biography shows on past wrestlers, and I feel like I was turned off by hearing that Hulk Hogan was a talking head on the Randy Savage episode and spent his time tossing dirt on Savage's grave. Bischoff's undying love for the Hulkster makes sense, though. Bisch made a lot of money post-WCW being Hogan's manager, essentially, in both TNA and working on stuff like Hogan's celebrity wrestling show. Not only was your tablet's spellchecker right about Hogan, but many a Calgary Flames fan would say that it was right about the Edmonton Toilets. Flynn's not bad, but he just doesn't have it to be pushed beyond "jobber on WCWSN." I didn't realize that he was around and got this level of push into 1999, either. I thought he'd go the way of Roadblock and Rick Fuller and other semi-memorable underneath guys, but he stuck it out and even got featured in feuds. I think at the point he was randomly tagging with Fit Finlay on Starrcade '98, it dawned on me that the guys running WCW just really liked the dude. You know, Enos/Karagias sounds wonky, but it was okay to watch, actually. This got way fewer minus Stinger Splashes than most shows because the wrestling was generally watchable, and the Rey/Eddy tag match was genuinely fun and good. It was kind of an extended Thunder in that way, and what really dragged the show down is a) almost every angle and b) the terrible layout and booking decisions in almost every match. It's just that Nitro will often have a) and b) and then only book six or seven matches besides, at least in my view.

I've seen Onita/Funk, but not in twenty years or so! I remember thinking COOOOOOL back then because I was way more open to deathmatch wrestling than I am now. And you could TOTALLY give me CZW shit or have me watch Nick Gage or Necro Butcher slice people up with shards of glass if you wanted. Or you could just give me a lucha tag and spare me.

Show #204 – 30 August 1999 “The one where we all debate whether or not Hulk Hogan could ever turn out to be a piece of shit even though we all know the answer already in kayfabe” Let’s Nitro over a couple of sessions because the USA women are about to play a basketball game, and I have a lot to do today, but I also want to do this because I believe in the importance of establishing a writing practice. This show practically starts in media res, with Steven Regal and Dave Taylor just locking up with Disorderly Conduct in a tag match. I think we all know where this is going. The crowd pops for this fucking run-in spot from Sid, but the best thing I can say about it is that comes very early in this thing, and I wasn’t dumb enough to get invested in anything happening in the ring anyway. The word millennium is misspelled on Charles Robinson’s sign. Lodi and Lenny argue with security about getting backstage while some plants pretend to be their fans. Here’s where they stick the review of last week’s show, including Bischoff denying to comment on who the new WCW President would be. It strikes me that we’re two Nitros away from Bischoff being SHOOT dumped in the bushes. Our long national nightmare is almost over. There’s the title card with the Nitro Girls, then a dance in the ring from the Nitro Girls. Someone in the crowd has a FIRST ZEUS, THEN HERCULES, NOW GOLDBERG sign that I think is an apt explanation of at least some of the appeal of American pro wrestling specifically. Truly, many of these wrestlers act out the trials of heroes past in the ring. Unless that sign dude was talking about Tiny Lister and one-half of Power and Glory rather than the Greek mythological figures, in which case I disagree with his sign entirely. Lex Luger comes to the ring to talk to Gene Okerlund about why he’s suspicious of Hulk Hogan. Memory is a strange thing because I never saw any of these shows; I just read about them on the internet. Yet, out of nowhere when I was pondering how the Hogan/Sting match might end and out of the deepest recesses of my mind, I remembered merely following this angle via internet reports and recalled for the first time in twenty-five years what was likely going to happen. Luger claims to have evidence that Hogan is secretly heeling. Man, Hogan is openly heeling at all times; he’s just wearing red and yellow now, so the ham ‘n eggers are easily duped. Hey, that was a decent Bobby Heenan impression I just did. Berlyn pops out of a limo with the back; he’s with a translator named Uta and some security dudes. Tony S. says that while Berlyn speaks English (yes, we know), he refuses to do so (yes, we’ve seen him do that very thing and piss off that xenophobe Okerlund in the bargain). Seriously, though, it’s a nice touch to pull that character trait forward and center it for this new angle. Lash LeRoux is out here. He’s in a huge fight to even finish a match before Sid comes out here against Scotty Riggs. The crowd is chanting WE WANT SID immediately during this match. It’s a show in the state of New York, if you were wondering. New Yorkers love the FUCK out of Sid powerbombing dudes. I do too, but not in the middle of matches multiple times each show! The crowd quiets down for a bit, then gives another reaction. That reaction is another WE WANT SID chant. They don’t get SID. They get Vampiro and the ICP instead. Vampiro yaps at Riggs, which distracts the guy; LeRoux, who had been getting trashed, hits a run of offense. Vampiro yells something about Riggs owing him and then enters the ring to watch Riggs pin LeRoux for three with a Rocker Dropper. Vampiro tries to put his arm around Riggs’s shoulder, but Riggs is resistant. Vampiro insists that Riggs owes him; Riggs is confused about this whole deal. The Revolution is in the ring with snazzy new t-shirts; Douglas tries to get his guys over as budding main event talent; Saturn requests a TV title shot from Rick Steiner for Fall Brawl. Chris Benoit basically offers up an open challenge. Benoit-bot gets stuck on the word experience and nearly explodes; so much for being a decent promo with any consistency. Malenko said some boilerplate stuff. This group very badly needs a talker, which is wild to say since Shane Douglas is part of it. Kaz Hayashi has a beard of evil, maybe? No, wait, he slaps hands with members of the crowd. Lenny Lane and Lodi come to the ring to do their whole deal. I guess they got into the building somehow. Lodi is going to wrestle tonight. Somebody throws a drink at them. Lodi stops, looks in the direction that the cup came from, and yells THEY LOVE US because he sometimes finds little pockets of humor in the dreariness. Tony S. shills WCW Mayhem (the video game), which is the first N64 WCW game not developed by AKI and the first N64 WCW game to have the new ugly logo on the cartridge. It’s all downhill, as if you didn’t know. Kaz leaps over the top rope from the apron and DDT’s Lodi, but Lane puts Lodi’s boot on the ropes. Kaz attacks that cheating Lane with a twisting Tsukahara, but Lodi dives onto both Kaz and Lane and takes over. Some dude has been insistently holding up an I MISS RALPHUS sign on the hard cam side. Yeah. Yeah. Lodi gets two on a powerslam and sits Kaz up top for a move, but Kaz counters with a rana that gets two. He counters a Lodi suplex attempt and drills a brainbuster, then goes up top before Lane trips him right in front of the ref. No DQ. It’s kayfabe worst WCW ref ever Billy Silverman, so it tracks. Lodi goes up and hits a super bulldog while Kaz is sitting on the top rope, but Kaz kicks out at 2.5 or so. Then, there’s a ref bump on a leapover spot in the corner because of course there is. Lodi and Lenny do a switcheroo, but when Lane tries a body slam, Kaz counters it into a small package and gets three because Lodi and Lenny look vaguely similar. The brothers (Tony S. is insistent that they’re totally related bros) attack Kaz after the match. Hulk Hogan and Sting will be rematching at Fall Brawl for the big gold belt; Gene Okerlund introduces Hogan as a man who has always been there for the fans before an interview. Did Hogan get one of those Men in Black mindwipe devices and use it on everyone but Luger, Sting, and Heenan? Anyway, I’m excited for this latest Hulkster reign of terror to be ending in the next couple of weeks of television. Hogan denies being a bad guy and claims not to know anything about Luger having hard evidence of him being a terrible dude. I’m assuming Luger hid a camera in Hogan’s bedroom and got him in a relaxed post-coital mood. This year’s two new WCW Superstar Series videos: Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair. They stand the VHS sleeves up, and Heenan surreptitiously knocks the Hogan one down. Heh. La Parka and Blitzkrieg are a random tag team tonight. Should I even get hyped for this? Is this going to be another Sid special? They’re facing Eddy Guerrero and Rey Misterio Jr. La Parka dances, so Rey slaps him. RUDE. Parka hits a lariat in response, and when Eddy yells at him, Parka spits at Eddy. Parka gets into with Eddy on the apron, and Parka slips to the floor when trying to shove Eddy; Eddy shoots Rey into a baseball slide DDT on Parka standing on the floor(!). Blitz just jumps in there and attacks with no tag, but Rey controls him and hits an Asai moonsault, then dodges a charging La Parka. Parka finally catches Rey on a crossbody and is able to shake off a corner whip and comes out with a body slam. Blitz and Parka combine on a kick to score two as the camera cuts to the remnants of the Dead Pool standing at the top of the ramp and watching the match. In the ring, dudes just do moves and eschew that whole “tagging your partner” thing. It’s basically a video game in here. Blitz and Eddy end up together in the ring, but Blitz misses a cartwheel elbow, bumps himself damned near over the corner post, and gets top-rope rana’d. Eddy boosts Rey into a splash that drills La Parka outside the ring, then lands a Frog Splash on Blitzkrieg for three. Fun and fast moves exhibition, that was. Blipmo: One more time, it’s that Berlyn promo. Gene Okerlund is in the ring to harass Berlyn regarding his willingness to speak English. I think Berlyn has a cool look, what with dressing in all black, the entourage in all black, and the cane. Dope facial hair, too. Berlyn’s security insists on patting down Okerlund before Berlyn will enter. See, this has potential. Why did they send Berlyn in there with Duggan, of all people? You have all these cruiserweights who you don’t value; send one of them in there to get squashed. The translator’s name is Uta Ludendorff, but she has a clean, Midwestern American accent, so that’s a slight miss. They couldn’t find a woman with a light German accent to fill this role? Anyway, here’s a summary of Berlyn’s promo using a very ‘90s analog: Envision Peter Stormare in a VW commercial showing off the superiority of a Volkswagen and then intoning GERMAN ENGINEERING, but instead it’s Alex Wright wearing a Mohawk and standing in a wrestling ring talking about how great he is instead of how great a Jetta is. Also, he challenges Buff Bagwell. Uta is terrible in her role and forgets the word “option” for a second or two. She’s the only bad part of this whole presentation. This even works with the Network-dubbed theme, even though the “O Fortuna” knockoff in the original presentation is pretty great. Lex Luger ambushes Gene Okerlund on the ramp. His hair is all akimbo, and he claims that it got that way because Hogan attacked him in his locker room and ran through his bags. Then, he storms off. Did Robbie Rage explode his whole body? Is he still able to walk, much less wrestle? Did he fail to chiggedy-check himself and now has unfortunately wrecked himself? Whither art thou, Robbie Rage? Kenny Kaos comes out to tag not with Rage, but with Prince Iaukea. Iaukea is irritated at Kaos’s enthusiasm. They face off with the Windham Brothers (w/Curt Hennig), who come out to Jeff Jarrett’s first WCW theme, except with lyrics over top of the track. This is a strange match; Kendall and Iaukea start it, and about two-and-a-half minutes later, they end it without ever tagging out. Kendall, uh, drops a knee? and that gets three. The Windham Brothers think this was a bit easy, and they also think Harlem Heat is easy to beat, too. Harlem Heat jog to the ring to respond; there’s a short brawl that the Heat win and, uh, Booker pins Kendall after a side kick, but I guess they don’t win the belts, and the WTR beat them down in a four-on-two attack, and that was a strange fucking segment. Lex Luger is back in the ring with Gene Okerlund to show the world, and of course his buddy Sting, what a scumbag that Hulk Hogan still is. Luger’s got a picture that he says is the smoking gun. It’s just Hogan photoshopped next to a white Hummer. Should have gotten some audio with that picture, bud, you would have nailed him to the wall. Luger is very sorry that he had to expose Hogan like this, which makes him a nicer guy than Bubba the Love Sponge. DDP runs in and randomly knocks Hogan over, then runs away. Sting and Hogan just go back to arguing. What is going on? Who laid out these segments? Van Hammer’s tiny little push is over; I don’t think he’s beating Buff Bagwell. Berlyn’s entourage walks onto the ramp to scout Buff. He dances like an idiot and does the Blockbuster. There. There’s your scouting report. Hammer lazily dominates in the early going, but Buff wins a hip toss, a dropkick, and a clothesline. Buff tries a monkey flip, but Hammer rakes his eyes as he goes up, sits him on the top rope, and beals him. Hammer goes back on top, but he’s very casual about hitting offense or covering. He locks Buff in a sloppy Camel Clutch-ish chinlock, and htakes a few seconds to pose Buff in Bagwell’s common poses. Buff uses the chance to swing a leg into Hammer’s balls, then makes a short comeback that ends with a Blockbuster for three. Recap: Back on Show #192, someone driving a white Hummer plowed into the side of Kevin Nash’s limo with Nash still in it. Was it Hulk Hogan, as Luger claims? No, it was Sid, we already established that in these reviews. Mike Enos faces Evan Karagias in singles action. They quickly tumble outside, where Karagias hits a low dropkick before going back into the ring, trying to springboard onto Enos, and getting caught. Enos hoists him over his shoulder, walks up the stairs, and hucks Karagias into the ring. That was both impressive and anticlimactic. There’s a COUNTDOWN TO WCW MAYHEM (the game) clock that takes up a chunk of the screen while Enos hits offense and the crowd chants for SID, I think; it’s hard to hear. This match has already gone on longer than it needs to, so I’m thinking that maybe Sid is gonna make his way down here. But again, we don’t get Sid; we get the Dead Pool. The ICP surrounds the ring and draws the ref; Vampiro lands a diving back kick on Enos, hits a Nail in the Coffin, and jets so that Karagias can get a win. Vampiro gets in the ring and says that Karagias now owes him. This is like the Raven’s Flock deal, but way worse. Raven successfully got Riggs to join him unlike Vampiro, for one. Some music hits and the KISS DEMON steps out of a coffin. It’s still Crush at this point; I can tell because he talks. He yells at Vampiro. This is truly some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen in my life. Jimmy Hart leads Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobbs to the ring. Heenan opines on how tall the KISS Demon must be. It’s Crush! You know it is! He got into a limo with a KISS license plate on the back in a cut segment that we didn’t see on the Network, but that you saw live just a week or two before this show! You have seen Crush many, many times before and surely know his height! Anyway, Dean Malenko and Shane Douglas are their opponents. Knobbs insists on doing some pre-match mic work because he hates me. They have a dull, but somewhat energetic four-man brawl that the First Family members dominate. Eventually, Morrus and Douglas end up as the legal men. On a related note, I wonder how long before Nitro goes back to two hours? I can’t freakin’ WAIT. Eventually, Jimmy Hart tries to stop a Malenko Texas Cloverleaf on Knobbs; he does, at a cost. Morrus helps Knobbs get Malenko at ringside for an obligatory ringside brawl. Meanwhile, back in the ring, Morrus goes for a No Laughing Matter on Shane Douglas and gets only mat. Douglas ends up doing a shitty dive onto all three of the First Family dudes at ringside. This match is one of the more energetic matches that absolutely sucks that I’ve seen in awhile. Anyway, everyone does a crappy brawl in the aisle to a double-count-out. Oh man, Okerlund’s in the ring again to talk to Hulk Hogan again. Again, again, again. These bookers drive some of these storylines into the ground. They’ve shifted from driving Sid’s antics into the ground to driving Hogan/Sting/Luger into the ground. Hogan says he didn’t do the Hummer attack, really, he didn’t, and he has proof, but he’ll, um, show us on Nitro next week. Don’t worry about it. “Fidelity” is Hulk Hogan’s middle name, but he’s thinking about making it his first. F. Hulk Hogan. Yeah, that just looks right. Hogan wants to fight DDP tonight after Page randomly showed up for ten seconds earlier on, so he wants to ask Goldberg if it’s cool if he takes the match against Page instead of a guy who is the top babyface and should probably be the world champ again; it’s been nine months. Hogan: “Diamond Dallas Page has crawled so far up inside of me that I can’t think.” Luger, get out here with a recorder! If you can record this sex tape, I think Hogan’s about to spill his guts! Goldberg proposes a handicap match instead: Hogan and Goldberg vs. the Jersey Triad. Hogan likes that idea; DDP comes onto the ramp with the Triad and does some awful mic work as a way to accept the challenge. Disco Inferno (w/faux-fur vest, psychedelic cowboy hat) is on his way to the ring. Someone tosses an nWo Wolfpac t-shirt at him mid-stride, and he takes it from around his head, looks at the logo, and disdainfully dumps the shirt. Disco does some pre-match self-love. Verbally! He does it verbally. He quotes two ‘90s songs. Hey, that’s not Disco! Disco says that Rick Steiner wants to be him and has his TV title, so get on down here for a tushy-kicking. Rick Steiner comes down and probably is going to bore me to death, but maybe he’ll actually try? That’d be nice. Nope. Disco tells Rick Steiner to crown him figuratively. Steiner crowns him literally, with his forearm. Then, it’s prototypical Steiner face gouges and chokes. He does deign to hit a couple of suplexes before landing a diving bulldog for three. Disco got zero offense in that match, which is fine if it’s Disco, but not fine if it’s Rick Steiner that he’s being fed to. Steiner tosses the ref out of the ring and locks on his shitty armbar after the match until Saturn runs down and basically gets out-punched by Steiner even though Saturn jumped him from behind. Saturn at least lands a superkick, but Steiner just lands outside the ring and strolls away. Man, Rick Steiner sucks so bad. Jimmy Hart matches back out here with Jerry Flynn; Chris Benoit is Flynn’s opponent. Flynn gets resident dumbass Billy Silverman to check Benoit’s boot for some reason so that Flynn can land a cheap shot. Benoit dragon whips his way out of a kick soon after, though, and then he goes to work. He hangs Flynn up on the ropes and absolutely chops the fuck out of the poor bastard. Jimmy Hart tries to intervene and is able to run a pursuing Benoit into a Flynn strike. Flynn controls in the ring for far too long because he’s Jerry Flynn and Chris Benoit is the U.S. Champ, and I don’t care that Flynn had to finagle his way into control both times. Benoit sells way the fuck too much until he dodges a Flynn kick, makes a final comeback, and drills a diving headbutt while Jimmy Hart calls for the troops. They get there before Benoit can get a three count, and the rest of the Revolution runs down and clears the ring. Way to keep your U.S. Champion looking strong! The First Family is a shitty stable, man. Get Ric Flair and some older dudes back here to feud with the Revolution instead as soon as possible. Benoit then calls out Sid even though he struggled to defeat Jerry Flynn and OH NO, is Sid going to win the U.S. Championship to “copy” Goldberg’s undefeated streak? Oh, please no. I like Sid, and I don’t even like Benoit that much, but no. It’s main event time with Michael Buffer! Goldberg and Hulk Hogan are about to go over the whole Jersey Triad. Fucking DDP, with his fucking mic work. Fuck. I have complex feelings about Page. But man, this new attempt at establishing a bunch of bad catchphrases (except for the catchphrase that Booker T. successfully developed) is nearly unwatchable. Bam Bam beats up Hulk Hogan and immediately tries to drop a flying headbutt, but Hogan moves and then all the heels feed for his punches. Red-and-yellow Hogan adjusting to 1999 by saying “ass,” but then doing everything else he’s done for nearly two decades, is some nonsense. Goldberg tags in and overhead suplexes Kanyon; Kanyon does like four flips before landing. He’s no Simone Biles, but I’m impressed. Goldberg is able to ward off Bam Bam and Kanyon trying to hit him, but doesn’t see DDP diving from the top rope and eats a flying clothesline. The Triad does some pretty good triple-teaming, and Page loads his fist and lands a strike to keep Goldberg in trouble as the FIP. The heels do some good quick-tag, double-team stuff. See, I’m conflicted about Page. He’s fun in ring. I do note that he also tries out an elbowdrop with some gaga attached to it. Man, did people borrow liberally from the Rock. Anyway, Goldberg double-clotheslines his way out of trouble and then tags Hogan, who big boots Page (the legal man) out of the ring. Kanyon and Bam Bam attack, but Goldberg spears Kanyon and prepares to Jackhammer him. Page hits Goldberg with a chair while Hogan drops a leg on Bam Bam (not the legal man) and pins him. Page lands a Diamond Cutter on Goldberg as the ref counts, but then Goldberg pretty much gets up and no-sells it anyway. For some reason, Sting doesn’t know that the main event is going on at that moment and tries to get into Hogan’s locker room. He barges in and, uh, Randy Savage is sitting there with Gorgeous George. That’s not really the hook the bookers think it is. Mostly that’s because Sid was obviously driving the Hummer—oh, nevermind. Bad show! -0.5 out of 5 Stinger Splashes.

This is a reasonable explanation for that catchphrase, so I'm going to take this and run with it. Shane coming in and going at the old guard certainly does fit with who he is as a character. I just think his execution of this works far better as a shit-talking heel or tweener than it does as a fiery babyface. OBLIGATORY RINGSIDE BRAWL OBLIGATORY RINGSIDE BRAWL OBLIGATORY RINGSIDE BRAWL RING BRAWLLLLLLL (William Hung trails off, house band suddenly stops playing) I wish I had come up with a knockoff set of lyrics for "It Ain't Easy Bein' White/Wight" when the Giant was still in the company.

Well, I've got a couple matches that are not-WCW matches that I plan to place here, but I think I'll hold onto those for now and instead go to my trusty list of WCW Nitro-era matches that I like. I'll just go ahead and shoot you a match that gets forgotten, I think, and is even better than the PPV match they had that doesn't ever get forgotten: DDP vs. Goldberg on 4/19/99. I was delighted when I saw this match a few weeks ago, and it's shorter than the even better DDP/Sting match on the following Nitro while still being pretty fun. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdmmjh Skip to about five minutes in for the entrances.

Since I can't tag anyone, this'll have to do. You can give me an idea of something you'd like or not like, or you can just say "hit me with something you saw while doing your semi-focused watching over the past few months," and I am glad to do either. My optional request is borne out of a small discussion in the WWE Network Conversation thread: I'd like you to hit me with something from a match type or company that I typically don't like. Give me one of the best examples that you can think of from the list if you can: Scaffold matches Triple threat or four corners tag matches that are NOT tornado-style Death matches (oof, I'm admittedly unsure about watching these, but it's for science) Comedy matches built upon spots in which the common tropes of professional wrestling are skewered as a part of the comedy (think the style of comedy that CHIKARA started/is at fault for popularizing among indy workers who do that shit on television now) Multiman ladder matches PWG matches AEW matches Lucha tag matches from AAA or CMLL Tag matches that don't follow the broader shine -> FIP -> hot tag structure so common in American tag matches It's an optional request, so if you would rather give me something that you saw and were interested in sharing outside of these, I'm glad to watch that too!

Thunder Interlude – show number seventy-seven – 26 August 1999 "The WCW Gang faces new competition from the WWF, manages to drag even its weakest members to solid television performances" Fall Brawl doesn’t quite feel like it’s taking shape yet, other than maybe Goldberg/Sid and possibly a Sting/Hogan rematch if they don’t hotshot a title switch on Nitro…I’m not sure Thunder is going to do much to push things along… This is the date of the first WWF Smackdown!, just as a note... The Public Enemy open tonight’s show against Sid Vicious in a handicap match…Sid destroys these fellas…They put up no resistance…Sid finishes the former WCW tag champs with a double chokeslam…He talks to the camera after the match… Promo: This Coach Buzz Stern thing plays again…I knew of this gimmick, but wow, do I remember nothing about it or how long it lasts…Stern has “three ‘S’s”…“sweat + sacrifice = success”…Well, it’s not Kurt Angle’s “three ‘I’s’,” but it’s not bad… The *hurk* tag champion *hack* WTRs *blurgh* come to the ring, but oddly enough without their belts…Passing strange, isn’t it?...Anyway, let’s continue watching this ostensibly live Thunder as they ("they" being the Windham Bros. and Bobby Duncum Jr.) face Rey Misterio Jr., Eddy Guerrero, and Billy Kidman in a trios tag…Hennig must be injured right now, and even as mediocre-to-bad as he is in the ring at this point, swapping him out for Kendall or Duncum is typically a noticeable downgrade… Misterio pulls a Booker T. and makes Kendall look like he might not suck in the opening by having a fun sequence with him…Kendall hits a clothesline and tags out to Barry, but Rey scrambles away from danger and tags Kidman, who has a pretty good fiery sequence against Barry that ends when Barry sends him to the floor on his team’s side of the ring…Bary leverages his power when Kidman is dumped back into the ring…Kidman is FIP…He backflips out of a back suplex and hits a springboard bulldog as we hit the break… We come back to Eddy Guerrero seemingly in control against Barry Windham, but Barry snaps his neck across the ropes as he pursues, and Eddy’s going to be in peril for the second notably lengthy FIP segment of the match…Barry Windham has looked good tonight, and as not good as Duncum and Kendall are, they’ve worked well leveraging their size advantage against the smaller babyfaces (and taking some nice bumps for their offense)…Eddy takes a beating and has to kick out of pinfall attempts a couple of times, but he scores a DDT on Barry and then a rana after Windham pretty clearly sets up for it by using a knuckle lock, which I never see him do at all… Rey gets a hot tag, and he and Kidman combine on leveraging Bobby Duncum over on a sunset flip/crossbody combo…The resulting two count causes the match to break down…Misterio tries a Bronco Buster on Duncum, and Hennig rings up Rey with the bell as he flies in from the seated position…Duncum covers, but Eddy makes the save…Hennig pulls Rey to the floor…Kidman follows and hits him with a baseball slide…Kendall comes out and attacks Kidman…Meanwhile, Duncum and Barry combine on a flying forearm…They try again, but Eddy busts out of it…He dropkicks Duncum into a seated position on the top rope…Rey goes up and hits a top-rope rana for three… The WTRs stomp out the babyfaces until Harlem Heat charge out and run them off…I can’t believe it…That was an excellent match, and it involved the WTRs!...Eddy and Rey are miracle workers, but Kidman and Barry were also excellent in this thing, and all four of those guys helped Duncum and Kendall elevate their games…Even the break, which cut out the second run of babyface offense before the second FIP, didn’t hurt this too badly (even if I would have liked to see it)… No…NO…NOOOOOO…Sid Vicious and Rick Steiner are out here to interview with Gene Okerlund…Please, make it stop…Sid calls himself and Rick the “pioneers of WCW,” which is kinda true from a certain perspective, and then mocks the REVOLUTION chant, and that's funny, especially because the REVOLUTION stuff is corny…Well, I wasn’t excited to see the WTRs, and they had a good match…I was rapidly getting sick of Sid, but he entertained me in this promo…Maybe, contrary to my preconceived notions, Rick Steiner will be a pleasant surprise on the mic?...Hmmm…Nope, he cuts a garbage dump of a promo…Oh well, two out of three ain’t bad!... Blipmo: Run a different Berlyn promo already! Ernest Miller (w/Sonny Onoo, cowboy hat, sheriff’s badge) is in the ring next…He does a hilarious two-step…He incites these Texans in the crowd by saying, “There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s big, bad, and black” before stomping the cowboy hat as a show of what he thinks of the whole sorry state of Texas…I mean, he stomps the shit out of this hat…Onoo tries to hold him back from the hat, but he pulls away and stomps it some more in a rage…The Cat kills me… So, Onoo grabs the mic and tries to calm the Cat down by saying that Prince is here, then singing a few bars of “Purple Rain.” But no, it’s not Prince Rogers who comes out here…It’s Prince Iaukea…Did Russo see this segment and get ideas in his head?...Anyway, the Cat kills me…He grabs the mic and calls his opponent “Prince Guacamole,” a worthy heel mispronunciation on the level of "Prince Nakamaki," then says that he’ll win the match in fewer than three minutes, or he’ll never return to Lubbock…I mean, he should deliberately win in more than three minutes…Lubbock is a dump… Iaukea bonks Miller's head off the ring steps, so the Cat makes to leave…Onoo rushes up to him and reminds him of his promise to beat Iaukea in three minutes or fewer, so he waits for his chance and rushes Iaukea, who has his back turned and is talking to the ref…He slides in the ring and misjudged how far he had to go…Iaukea turns around, sees the Cat on his stomach in front of him, and stomps him…I loved that spot from when he first busted it out against Saturn…It’s a clever spot that some cowardly heel who is trying to get over on national television should steal… Iaukea charges Miller after a whip to the corner, but gets kicked in the jaw…Miller lands a kick, a slam, and a Moonwalk Elbow…He tries another one, but misses…Iaukea comes back with strikes and a dropkick…He lands a body slam, then a reverse slam…He covers after that last one, but Onoo puts the Cat’s foot on the ropes…The Cat goes after Onoo, so the Cat puts on the red slipper and lands a Feliner for three…We don’t get the timekeeper’s call about how long that took…I enjoy the Cat’s antics an awful lot… Harlem Heat is already in the ring when we come back, as are their opponents Hugh Morrus and Brian Knobbs…They’re following through on the First Family challenge from the previous Thunder, but unfortunately for Knobbs and Morrus, the Heat don’t have the tag belts anymore…Booker easily controls Knobbs to start…He tags Stevie in and that big lunk loses control of the match almost immediately…To his credit, he fights his way out of trouble and lands a jumping front kick to Morrus…Booker tags in and gets two off a flying forearm… Watching Booker land offense is fun, but he’s only one man…Still, this match is perfectly watchable considering who’s involved…Stevie is FIP off a distraction…Booker T. tosses Jerry Flynn, at ringside, into the guardrail when Flynn tries to get involved…The FIP segment has pretty much no Booker in it, so it’s not too great…Stevie kicks his way out of more trouble eventually and gets a hot tag…Booker hits explosive offense, which is his best trait…Booker getting to be a babyface hot tag is maybe what he was made for actually…the match breaks down…Flynn pulls down the rope on a rope run and Booker tumbles to the floor as Stevie tosses Knobbs out on another side of the ring…Flynn hops in the ring while Jimmy Hart distracts the ref, but he mistimes his kick and hammers Hugh Morrus in the face…Booker scrambles up from the floor, goes to the top, and hits Morrus with a missile dropkick…Stevie covers for three…That was decent stuff, but Booker is so far above these other dudes…It’s eleven months until he gets a proper singles push at the level that I believe he should be at…That’s a lot of WCW television for me to watch until then… Promo: It’s a different Buzz Stern promo…He yells at some Power Plant trainees while they lift…Aw, there is a vintage Clash of the Champions banner and an old-school WCW Nitro banner hanging in the workout room…I miss the hell out of those aesthetics… Disorderly Conduct tag up against Shane Douglas and Dean Malenko…This match is okay…Douglas and Malenko hit a series of double-team moves to clear the ring early…The Revolution members have little issue working over DC…No one cares about Shane Douglas…They need to get Ric Flair’s injured back some ice and get him on TV again to heat things up a bit…Maybe Ric can form a version of the Four Horsemen with Terry Funk and a couple of other older dudes to feud with the Revolution or something…Douglas is FIP for a bit…He catches a Tuff Tom dive and turns it into an inverted atomic drop, then lands a belly-to-belly and gets the hot tag…The match breaks down pretty soon after…Malenko rings Tom up with a leg lariat and locks on a Texas Cloverleaf to win it… Diamond Dallas Page cuts an interview with Gene Okerlund…It’s bad, but you already know my issues with page on the mic…He can’t adapt his baseline style from when he was a corny dude with too many cubic zirconia rings and a cigar in his mouth…Page lays out Sting, Goldberg, and the Hulkster as his next targets…He plans to finish Goldberg off on the next Nitro…Then he wants to be the world champ again…Well, that filled some time… Chavo Guerrero Jr.?!...PUSH THIS MAN, YOU IDIOTS…He is figuratively criminally underutilized…And if I were Supreme Leader at the time, I would have made it a literal crime to do Chavo like this…Speaking off, Page is facing Chavo tonight…Oh great, Page is going to play the dozens before this match…Chavo grabs a mic and plays them right back…He cuts a dumb iterative your mama joke that plays off Page’s…I chuckled, I admit it…Page fake laughs, then jumps Chavo… Page might be absolute garbage from a mic work perspective, and he might be wildly vacillating between “psychotic about his lady akin to a heavily-tattooed version of Randy Savage” and “cornball Jersey boy,” but his in-ring work is still top-notch for the most part…These fellas had an excellent match at Fall Brawl in 1996…They have a match that isn’t anywhere near as good as that tonight, and there’s a break in the middle of it besides…Mostly, Page hits impact moves on Chavo…It’s aesthetically pleasing, and it makes sense…Page is several levels about Chavo in the pecking order…I just don’t like it because a more competitive match would be significantly more enjoyable…I also don’t like it because Chavo should be the Cruiserweight Champ and a threat to heavyweights everywhere like Kidman, Rey, or Eddy are…But it’s an easy watch…Chavo gets close on a couple of flash pinfall attempts, but Page generally has no trouble…He drills a TKO-style Diamond Cutter for three… It's main event time…Sid and Rick Steiner face Saturn and Chris Benoit…Benoit starts out hot, but goes at Rick Steiner on the apron and gets caught from behind by Sid…Sid whiffs on a clothesline and gets caught in a Crippler Crossface, so Rick Steiner breaks it up…That draws Saturn, which allows Steiner to switch with Sid, no tag needed…They’re heels, so Mickey Jay lets it happen instead of forcing Steiner to the apron like he would if they were babyfaces…I hate that fucking spot because it’s inconsistently applied…I get why on the level of “we want the crowd to feel a visceral sense of unfairness”…But it drives me batty and takes me out of the match a bit… Sid stands in the ring and yaps at the crowd, which is chanting SID SUCKS…Jay is drawn over to shoo Sid onto the apron, and the Revolution members stomp out Steiner in their corner…This is a fairly back-and-forth match, actually…Benoit is in trouble in the heel corner as we go to break…Steiner liberally cheats outside the ring while Sid wanders around and yaps at Saturn…Steiner gets a crutch from somewhere and chokes Benoit with it…Benoit blocks Sid’s punches and gets a rollup for two, but Sid’s up first and locks on a sort of Camel Clutch… So, I can’t believe that I’m saying this, but Rick Steiner does something cool that I’ve not seen before…He walks over and shoves his boots against Benoit’s, which theoretically jams Benoit up into the chinlock that Sid’s got him in even more…Huh, that’s a cool little leverage spot…Some tag team should definitely do a Camel Clutch spot where the illegal tag partner shoves his body weight against the opponent’s feet to leverage the hold…Benoit ends up outside the ring, where Sid hangs him on the guardrail throat-first…Benoit fights up out of a Sid chinlock a couple minutes later, but whiffs on a diving headbutt… Both men make tags…Saturn goes wild, and of course, the match breaks down…They try stereo corner punches, but Steiner tosses Benoit over his head and outside the ring…In a contrived finish, Steiner attacks Saturn from behind, and Sid powerbombs Saturn while Benoit creeps from behind and locks Steiner in a Crippler Crossface…Steiner wheels around and kicks Mickey Jay in the head while giving up…Charles Robinson runs down and counts three on the Sid pinfall attempt while ignoring Steiner submitting…Sid and Steiner attack Benoit after the match and are run off by the other two Revolution members…Well, that wasn’t bad!...And not entirely because of Benoit and Saturn, either… I’m glad to see Thunder getting back to being consistent, even with (again) way too much Sid on the show…Sid is traditionally better when you run him out there in small doses…Nash et al. choosing to do the opposite is the type of decision that makes Turner brass decide that Vince Russo would be a better choice to head up creative…Still, good wrestling show that featured the WTRs being useful somehow!...WOOOO…

Huh, I went back and looked up Hart and Soul and ended up in a Wikipedia rabbit hole. It's because WWF wanted to have Canadian Stampede during the week of the actual Calgary Stampede, which is in early July, so they shifted the PPVs around that show accordingly. I would guess that something similar happened this year, but I have no idea what WWE's PLE schedule is now outside of the big three.

Show #203 – 23 August 1999 “The one where WCW tries to kill their fanbase in Las Vegas, in Nevada, in the United States, on Earth, in the Milky Way, etc., etc.” OK, this SummerSlam ad played again, and I caught the date. It’s tomorrow. That’s a little early in August for that show, ain’t it? Anyway, let’s Nitro! We get the a more traditional open to the show: Recap of last week/WCW logo/title sequence, all in that order. No title sequence fifty-five minutes in this week! Mikey Whipwreck is still in the company. It seems that he outlasted Hak and Chastity even though the latter were actually over as a midcard act. His opponent: Chase Tatum, who is no longer a No Limit Soldier. He’s about to leave the company, too. This is his last TV match or close to it. Tatum visually reminds me of the stripper who told Dee Reynolds that she was his “rock bottom” on Always Sunny. Tatum isn’t any good, but Whipwreck at least gets something watchable out of him by fighting up from underneath. There must be audio issues because I don’t hear any commentary for a chunk of the match; that (sadly) improved things. Sid comes down and kills these dudes. Charles Robinson is out to help count his “wins.” Sid talks about Goldberg. Fin. Billy Kidman and Kimberly awkwardly talk over one another backstage. Kidman apologizes for what he said last week and intimates that he’s got his eye on one of the other ladies, heh heh heh, Kim’s cool with it and says that she’s going to try and cool Page down. Figuratively, not literally. No, wait, I guess literally, since body heat does rise with extreme anger. Goldberg comes across DDP and the Jersey Triad backstage and they get into it because why the hell not? In fact, Goldberg and DDP should have some unfinished business from back in April that it might be interesting for them to go ahead and finish. Tony S. gets his wires crossed and says that Page was attacking Kidman backstage as the Jersey Triad comes to the ring. They do some mediocre-verging-on-bad mic work. Mostly, that’s because DDP is right behind Rick Steiner in trying to establish catchphrases that don’t work for him. I can’t say “don’t work at all” because Booker T. got one of Page’s catchphrases over. Page threatens both Kidman and Goldberg and challenges the latter to a match later tonight. Sting hits the ring to talk. We’re sixteen minutes in and have had one match that was a Sid Special. Sting starts by saying, and I swear to fuck I’m not lying, this: STIZZING IN THA HIZZOUSE. OK, I’m out. While I daydream about other things, Sting acts like a dork and tries to get BACK IN BLACK over. Wait, hold on, I’m back; here comes Lex Luger. I see my hunch was correct! Lex and Sting hug while I am annoyed that I can hear production cues underneath the primary audio. Fucking WCW. Luger gets a mic and reiterates his long, close friendship with Sting through thick and thin. He’s here to support Sting, but he’s also here to warn Sting that maybe Hulk Hogan is on some secret heel bullshit. In general, he is correct. Luger tells Sting not to trust Hulk, but Sting is reluctant to mistrust Hulk. At least publicly at this moment. Luger wishes Sting luck and shakes his hand, but you know, I think Luger put an inkling of doubt into Sting’s mind, which we all are about to appreciate him for. Mike Tenay ambushes Eric Bischoff as Bisch arrives at the show and asks if he’s going to be the new (on-screen) WCW President. Bisch blows him off, but I have an answer from the future: HAHAHAHA NOPE! The Cat’s music hits as Tenay is still talking to Bischoff outside, so I scramble to mute the audio. Ah, there we go, the correct theme. Ernest Miller is down here with Sonny Onoo, fresh off of punching Buff Bagwell in the face for going to Kevin Nash and getting the finish of their Road Wild match changed. He in fact says that he beat the hell out of Buff at Road Wild, but Buff’s still delusional about it, so he’s challenging Buff to another fight tonight. Babyface Buff Bagwell is nearly unwatchable; the guy is complete ass. His mom is pretty entertaining, though. They have a straight wrestling match instead of Miller doing a bunch of entertaining (to me, at least) shtick to trigger a bunch of cornball bikers. Buff wins a dropkick off a rope run and the Cat bails. Miller jaws at the crowd until Buff goes out and dumps him back in the ring, but the Cat hits a kick soon afterward and takes over. He lands a Moonwalk Elbow, which I think is where he ends up on the whole “signature elbowdrop” deal. He tries another one and misses, which sparks a Bagwell comeback. A Buff neckbreaker and splash scores a two count; Buff tries to press the offense and Miller forearms him in the junk, then tosses him outside so that Sonny Onoo can stomp him. Lex Luger comes back out to back Onoo off, which distracts the Cat and allows Buff to land a quick Blockbuster for three. Totally Buff does the opposite of pre-exploding! Promo: Berlyn arrives in a week, and we’re all just going to pretend that we’ve never seen the guy before. I love the ‘90s font style and graphics they use in this video to spell Berlyn’s name. Kanyon seconds Diamond Dallas Page to the ring for that impromptu match against Goldberg. Page is Goldberg’s best opponent in my opinion, so I have expectations for this match which probably aren’t fair, actually. Page does some pre-match mic work for some fucking reason. Goldberg comes down to his WWE theme because I guess someone got all fidgety about “Crush ‘Em.” The Network is inconsistent about themes in a few places. Bam Bam Bigelow runs up from behind and clocks Goldberg with something, but Goldberg chooses to attack Page and Kanyon rather than Bam Bam. This is a handicap match, I guess. Goldberg spears Kanyon, who takes a wild bump and folds himself in half like an accordion, then spears a charging Bam Bam before DDP runs away. Goldberg tells the camera that he plans on fucking up Page’s world on the next Nitro. He eventually enters the ring, gets a mic, and lets the crowd know what he said to the audience at home into the camera. It was pretty badass, if you wanted to know, but ultimately, we didn't get the match that we were teased. The WTR have a music video set to their Jimmy Hart-penned theme. MUTE. Some weird kid stands around with some plants-slash-regular ham ‘n eggers who chant for Lodi in a tent. They have a Lodi party and then a masked guy shows up and there’s a food fight. What is happening right now? Guess who finds it safer to hop off the stage rather than walk down the ramp? That’s right: Juventud Guerrera. That fucking ramp. Juvi’s getting a shot at Lenny Lane (w/Lodi) and the Cruiserweight Championship. Juvi shakes his ass. Lenny applauds it. Juvi is enraged. Welp. Look, here we go, here’s the match: It’s shitty “comedy” spots interspersed with some decent fast-paced wrestling. Honestly, I stopped caring like two seconds in. I will say that Lane hits a wild somersault splash that he sorta overshoots on Juvi and Lodi at ringside. Lane’s definitely upped his game to a level I didn’t know he had since that first Rey Misterio Jr. match last Nitro. Lane rips off two shoulderblocks and a powerslam; that’s a neat spot for a larger base against the cruiserweights to use. Maybe there’s something there, talent-wise, but WCW was a mess, and he apparently never unlocked it entirely. Juvi eats a lot of offense from Lane and a bit of offense from Lodi, including a nice sit-out powerbomb for two. Lane misses a corner charge and takes a Psicosis bump, maybe distracted by the homophobic chants of the crowd in kayfabe. Juvi gets two on an awkward sunset flip bomb and then, MOTHER FUCKER, it’s FUCKING SID. FUCK OFF, WCW. This match got decent when it became a straight-up wrestling match. Anyway, WCW is trying to make me despise Sid, but I despise Kevin Nash’s shitty booking instead. Nothing like Sid destroying your Cruiserweight Champ and his former Cruiserweight Champ opponent to make that Cruiserweight division feel oh so special! Sid yammers on as we go to break. This mother fucker is STILL talking when we get back from break. Why is Charles Robinson stanning Sid instead of Ric Flair now? Oh, who cares. This angle fucking SUCKS. I actually think the idea is pretty good, but the execution is complete garbage. Sid’s an underrated talker, but he is doing WAY the fuck too much talking lately. No need for him to cut a promo every time he ruins a match. Instead of whatever dub the Network sometimes uses for Sid’s theme, they should have used his Sycho Sid theme for dubbing. HOLY SHIT, now there’s a live performance of the fucking WTR song. FUCK YOU, WCW. I don’t need any luck to get through Russo-led WCW. I feel confident that Bischoff-and-Nash WCW has prepped me for Russo WCW. It’s going to get dumb and bad and shitty, I know, but this past year-plus has been dumb and bad and shitty, mostly. Brian Knobbs, Hugh Morrus, and Barbarian work a trios tag against Shane Douglas, Perry Saturn, and Dean Malenko. No offense to these guys, but I like Saturn a whole lot and I like Barb quite a bit, even though his work sort of slid off a cliff after 1997. After that, I could leave all these fellas to the side. That includes Dean Malenko, who secretly became total shit after the Chris Jericho feud. Barb does a nice chop and everybody moves with pace except for Brian Knobbs, so there’s that. Malenko is FIP, but gets a boot up on Knobbs’s second-rope splash, which he uses as a finisher. Saturn hits the hot tag and cleans house; the match breaks down shortly after. Saturn handles Knobbs, but Rick Steiner runs down and hits a diving bulldog while Saturn signals for the DVD. The ref turns around to see Knobbs splash a prone Saturn for three. Chris Benoit runs down and challenges Steiner to a U.S. Championship match right now. That Revolution catchphrase is fucking STUPID, by the way. What in the fuck is OUT WITH EVOLUTION, IN WITH REVOLUTION supposed to mean? Idiotic. I don’t like the Revolution as a concept or a going concern. Hype video: It’s this same Berlyn video. Let’s hurry up and have Duggan kill him off so we can get the Boogie Knights back together. The Insane Clown Posse (w/Vampiro) comes to the ring. Whither art thou, Raven? Aw, so long, buddy; your 1997/98 up through Fall Brawl was fantastic. The Raven/Saturn tag team in 1999 ruled, too. Rey Misterio Jr. and Billy Kidman are their opponents. I love Shaggy’s whiffed lariat. It looks terrible, but in such a hilarious way that I can’t be mad. Then he goes and takes a nice running flip bump into the guardrail. Rey and Kidman dominate Shaggy, who manages a clothesline and gets a tag before Rey and Kidman beat up Violent J instead. J lands a clothesline of his own and Kidman is FIP for a little bit. Wait, no, not even that long. Shaggy tags back in and almost immediately eats a rebound clothesline and a springboard dropkick. Rey hits a Bronco Buster on Shaggy, so J jumps him and then hits a nice press slam onto Shaggy’s outstretched knee. Shaggy lands a guillotine legdrop, but only gets two, and then J is a bit out of place for a Rey dive, and as the ref checks on them, Vampiro gets in, stops a Kidman SSP, but then hits Shaggy with a lariat instead. Kidman covers, barely gets three as Shaggy kicks out right at the third slap of the mat, and then gets stomped by the heels for a bit before Eddy Guerrero runs them off. Gene Okerlund is in the ring to interview Hulk Hogan. Fine, let’s get this done and dusted. I don’t know, Hulk says his son saw Luger out here and called his dipshit dad to see if he was going to turn heel again, but he’s definitely not and Sting is totes his friend. Totes. Let’s see if Chris Benoit can get something good out of this absolute fucking bum Rick Steiner. The answer is that he gets something solid, but it’s ninety, ninety-five percent him. Great selling, good intensity, vicious strikes as always. He chops the shit out of Steiner after hopping onto the apron, in particular. Steiner’s trying to incorporate something cool like that Oklahoma Stampede, but it’s not a great Oklahoma Stampede. He also takes entirely too much of this match. Benoit explodes into a comeback with German suplexes, then goes up and tries a diving headbutt. Steiner yanks Charles Robinson on top of him; Lil’ Naitch takes the brunt of the blow. Steiner grabs the U.S. title and plans to use it, but Saturn runs in the ring and jumps him. Sid comes down to jump Saturn. Saturn gets powerbombed, and the heels leave before Benoit gets back up and comes after them. Benoit cuts a more typical-for-him crappy promo in which he reiterates the challenge he made on the previous Thunder. Please stop chanting REVOLUTION, Benoit. Please. If we were playing EWR, a certain someone would have triggered a notification that he was used too much on this show. Speaking of “used too much on this show,” here come the WTR's, also known as the West Texas (Let’s See What’s On) RAW’s. They (Barry and Kendall) are facing Harlem Heat, and if we’re getting a stupid-ass tag title switch for no good reason, let’s just do it. I’m irate about Booker T.’s booking in 1999. Fucking terrible. I thought he was friends with Kevin Nash? Booker actually helps make Kendall Windham look like he has a little talent in the opening sequence, but even though Harlem Heat looks like they’re going to roll, they run into trouble. Stevie is FIP, but for a very short period. The match breaks down after the hot tag, and Booker lands an axe kick and a missile dropkick on Kendall for a visual three, but the ref is distracted. Hennig hits Booker in the back of the head with the cowbell and Kendall covers for three. Truly some WCW-ass nonsense. They’ve ramped up the Berlyn promo stuff just for it to get blown up by that worthless sack of crap Jim Duggan. At least get me a new promo package if you're going to run Berlyn promos multiple times in the show. Vampiro comes to the ring to face Eddy Guerrero while Tony S. announces a new Nitro Girl search. Let’s see if that actually comes off or not. Vampiro attacks Eddy with strikes and a pretty sick belly-to-belly that launches the hell out of the guy, actually. Vamp misses a corner charge and Eddy hits some sick strikes of his own. He sticks Vamp with a back elbow for two and follows up with a snap suplex and some punches. Las Vegas is bored or tired or something, and Eddy tries to fire them up. They are barely responsive. WCW is trying to kill Las Vegas as a town, and they might be doing a decent job at it. They wander around outside the ring for a bit; Eddy puts Vampiro back in the ring, then has a slightly awkward series of counters that end with Vampiro putting a boot into Eddy’s chest. These guys feel slightly off sometimes, but for the most part, this is a perfectly decent match. Vamp goes up, gets caught, and gets taken to them at with a superplex. Eddy goes up for a Frog Splash, and ICP walks down to ringside, so Eddy splashes them instead. Yikes, he and Shaggy clashed shins. I know that shit hurt. Vampiro takes over when Eddy makes it back to the ring. Where are Rey and Kidman? It’s dumb that the heels always show up at ringside, but the babyfaces are just chilling in the back until it’s too late. Oh yeah, it’s too late: By the time Rey and Kidman show up, Eddy has already lost the match after clashing heads with Shaggy. Holy cow, this show has had a bunch of garbage finishes and shitty match layouts. It’s incredible. Again, this feels like a Russo show even before Russo even showed up. You know, if Sting actually does turn heel here, it’s going to be pretty incredible that the guy who is an unshakeable number two babyface in the crowd’s pecking order behind Goldberg will be making an ill-advised heel turn when Hulk Hogan suddenly turns babyface. Michael Buffer makes a boatload of cash to introduce Sting and the Hulkster. They can’t resolve a collar-and-elbow and get heated. Hogan gets a hammerlock; Sting gets the ropes. Just get to the twisty-turny stuff already. Hogan is cooked and also takes too much of these matches. They deadlock on a couple of shoulderblocks, so Hogan ties up and slips in a roll-up for two. There’s a Greco-Roman knuckle lock. Hogan wins it and tries to transition into an arm wringer, but Sting gets a sloppy small package for two. Hogan controls the next lockup and hits knees and a running lariat for two. He lands an AXE BOMBAH~ and a back suplex for two more. He looks for another lariat, but Sting ducks it and hits one of his own. Sting lands a few punches in the corner and then a back rake, which is a heel Hogan move. Then again, it’s a babyface Hogan move because Hogan is an inherently bad kayfabe character. Sting tries an elbow drop, but Hogan fires up. Hogan hits a very weak boot to Sting’s midsection before tossing him to the floor so we can have a lukewarm obligatory ringside brawl. We finally make it back to the ring, where Hogan drops an elbow for two. He ducks down after shooting Sting into the ropes and gets kicked. Sting follows up and lands a second-rope splash, Vader-style, for two before going to a chinlock. It’s a long chinlock spot. Hogan eventually fires up again, hits a face crusher, and punches Sting a ton before hitting a big boot. He goes for the legdrop, but Sting moves and then lands a Stinger Splash when Hogan gets in the corner. He tries a second one, jumps into a boot, and tries a third one and misses entirely. Hogan does his stupid wind-up punch, and that’s when *sigh* Sid Vicious and Rick Steiner run in. These two guys are just being driven into unwatchability, at least Sid; Rick Steiner was pretty much already at that point. I’m baffled why Rick's being pushed this much and getting this much airtime. Goldberg and Luger run in for the save. Hogan promises Sting another title shot. Even though I'm glad that the Network excised the KISS performance, ultimately, there's no other conclusion to come to: This episode was some bullshit. -25 out of 5 Stinger Splashes.

I think all the backtracking and re-spawning enemies work well in 2D, but the gameplay is awful in 3D. It's a minority opinion, but I think Prime stinks. Literally every 2D Metroid game is better. I'd rather play Prime than Other M, Echoes, or Corruption, but that's about it.

Authorities are good if they have credentials. Unless the teacher running the class only has two semesters of junior college and no degree.

Good morning, class! Today's lesson about argumentative fallacies will start with an example of whataboutism.

Thunder Interlude – show number seventy-six – 19 August 1999 "The WCW Gang puts a Rey Misterio Jr. match on my Dirt Worst list...Ah, WCW in 1999" Trying to squeeze in a Thunder on another busy day… Tenay at least says that he’s not bothering to look at the actual record because Sid is too volatile to challenge on his claimed record…That’s a much better way to approach things for commentary…Silver King is wrestling Psicosis…Please do not send Sid out here…I’m sure it’s going to happen…Actually, I find that expecting Sid to come out has already sort of ruined this match because I’m not getting invested in the opening…I love Psicosis, but sometimes he insists on hitting immersion breaking spots…If your opponent hangs themselves on the ropes and could easily wriggle away, but has to wait a good fifteen seconds, just looking at you, while you climb up top to drop a leg on them, maybe the spot isn’t very good after all… Silver King catches Psicosis coming through the ropes and controls the bout…He gets two on a tilt-a-whirl backbreaker and physically threatens ref Billy Silverman…In a favored spot for the heels in the back, Psicosis sneaks two on a sunset flip, and King gets up and mows him down with a lariat…King tries a double springboard on a moonsault, but whiffs…Here’s Sid…I’ve stopped paying attention…Just imagine what comes next; you can probably figure it out yourselves… When does Goldberg fuck up Sid’s car?...That’s the only thing I want to see when it comes to this Sid/Goldberg feud… It’s Al Green…I wonder if he’s so tired of bein’ a jabrone…Dean Malenko’s music hits, but it’s Shane Douglas who comes to the ring…Over the past three months, both Chris Benoit and Shane Douglas have used Dean Malenko’s theme…I know Turner didn’t slash Bischoff’s budget that damn much…Douglas came into the company doing lukewarm worked-shoot promos and has been absolutely mediocre in the ring so far…This match is what it is…Douglas hits a pretty nasty-looking neck snap…He lands a stalling vertical…Decent offense from the Franchise for the first time in this WCW run…He tries to post Green with an atomic drop, but Green refuses to let his crotch anywhere near the post, so it looks awful…This was longer than it needed to be…Green got more offense than was necessary…Douglas reverses a suplex into a gutbuster, then lands a Pittsburgh Plunge for three… Gene Okerlund cuts an interview with, ugh, Rick Steiner…Steiner attempts to make complete sentences…It goes poorly…Okerlund claims that the Revolution has been challenging Steiner…When did that happen?...Steiner keeps calling himself THE DFG…He’s tossing catchphrases and nicknames out every week, and they all stink…Steiner opens his jacket and has a t-shirt on that says BITE ME…It’s a shirt from some burger joint promoting its food…This guy is a fucking tool…There’s a standing challenge out from him to any Revolution member for his TV title… Promo: Glacier has been repackaged as Coach Buzz Stern…This little sketch introducing his character has me already wanting him to go back to being comedic Glacier and failing to back up Norman Smiley… Bobby Blaze, Adrian Byrd, and Dave Burkhead are some Power Plant guys…They face the trio of Lord Steven Regal, Dave Taylor, and Chris Adams…What if, instead of having cruiserweights wrestle matches to nowhere against one another, you put a few of them into trios that can tag up sometimes?...Tenay talks about a Nitro segment where Crush got in a limo with a KISS license plate…We saw nothing of the sort on the Network edit of the episode… The British vets steamroll the Power Plant pukes…Regal makes the most of a Bobby Blaze sunset flip…He grabs his partners for leverage and frantically scratches for safety after Charles Robinson kicks his leverage away…His attempt to avoid being sunset flipped was akin to Wile E. Coyote trying to scramble back onto the ledge after realizing that he’s run into thin air…There’s always something enjoyable about a Regal match…This squash is entirely too long, but it was probably worth it for that spot…Unless, like, Sid ends up coming out and destroying six guys…And I am not kidding, here comes Sid and Rick Steiner…Oh man, this “fake win streak” angle SUCKS…It’s now reached the point where it’s the wrestler run-in version of Bischoff re-telling Tonight Show jokes… The Revolution comes to the ring…I just don’t think this shooty-bang stuff works when Shane Douglas is trying to meld it with a classic babyface promo style…I'm not sure that Shane Douglas, the guy who should be the primary talker for this group, is even the best talker in it…Saturn accepts Rick Steiner’s challenge… Blipmos: They keep hyping a world premiere for a WTR music video on Nitro…*vomits*… Lenny Lane and Lodi come to the ring…Wait, I guess Lenny lost his last name here on the chyron…And Billy Kidman still hasn’t been given his on the chyron…Lodi’s signs are all comedic misses…Lane’s getting another shot at Rey Misterio Jr. and the Cruiserweight Championship…I love Rey, but that belt might as well not exist…It hasn’t been centered in Rey’s feuds since the early part of the year…Lenny grabs a mic and starts to talk, but Rey takes the mic away and says, essentially: You and Lodi should go buttfuck each other like the GAYS do, you weird gay dudes…Now, that’s not a babyface thing to say!...1999 was, in many ways, a mess of a year… Lodi gets sent to the back before the match by the ref...They do some gay panic spots to start…I think I’ve checked out…Lenny uses his power advantage to score a couple of two counts…Mostly, this match sucks…Rey scores a sunset flip for two…Quick, guess what Lane does next!...Maybe vary up that spot somehow, heel workers in WCW?...The thing is, there’s a good match lost in the middle of Lane’s shitty Goldust impression with some of these spots…If those spots had been excised from this match, I think I would have enjoyed it…If you’re going to do shtick, it had better be clever or funny…Ernest Miller knows how to do shtick…Lenny Lane decidedly does not... Rey eats a ton of offense from a guy who has been booked as a non-threat for the past couple of months…Lane rubs his ass on Johnny Boone’s junk, so Boone is too busy, uh, wiping his dick off through his pants to keep paying attention?...That allows Lodi to run out, but his interference misfires…Then they do that shitty “hang there on the ropes, obviously on purpose, so the babyface can land a legdrop” spot…Also, Rey does a Bronco Buster in there…He also drop toeholds Lodi into Lane’s crotch *sigh*… Lane actually wins the Cruiserweight belt when Rey rolls Lane up, but Lane powers out and knocks Rey into Lodi on the apron…Lane scores his own rollup for three…This is fucking staggering…You put the belt on a guy who you have telegraphed no one should take seriously after sticking it on Rey for five months and ignoring it for feud purposes…Awful pre-match mic work, bad match full of dumb comedy spots, baffling booking, truly the dirt worst… Horace Hogan and Scott Norton are getting a two-on-two shot at Harlem Heat’s tag titles this show…Now, I was listening to the 83 Weeks about Road Wild ’99 the other day, and Conrad spoiled that Harlem Heat is going to do a back-and-forth set of title switches with the WTR…*vomits*…As bad as this on-again, off-again Stevie/Booker feud will get later on, I do think that there’s something good about the overall character work in the storyline…Stevie was definitely jealous of Booker’s singles success, something that Stevie could never duplicate…But at the same time, he genuinely also missed tagging with his brother…Harlem Heat was both an entity that he relied on for personal success and also one he genuinely valued…He was hurt by Booker seeming not to feel the same way about it…That was kinda complex stuff, emotion-wise…Brothers, man… Booker and Norton start off…Booker lands a roundhouse kick, gets slammed, and slams Norton twice in turn after Norton misses a corner charge…Stevie hits a clothesline, slams Horace, and is in control until Norton can gouge his eye…We get an early break…Back from break, and Booker is the one in trouble in the ring rather than Stevie…Blergh… Back from break, Booker escapes a Horace whip, but after hitting an axe kick and a Spinaroonie, Norton jumps in and levels him…Norton lands elbows and a double thrust to the throat on Booker in the ring…Horace tags in and switches things up by hitting a back elbow on Booker after Booker gets two on a sunset flip…I’ve highlighted it this show, but WCW wrestlers love the hell out of that spot as a hope spot leading into a cut-off…WCW has a definite house style, including double-FIP segments with each babyface tag partner in tag matches, flash pinfall hope spots that get cut off at least once or twice, etc…. Booker gets two on a crossbody to Horace, but can’t capitalize…Norton tags in and gets rolled up for two, but Booker again can’t capitalize…Book is able to duck a double-clothesline from the B-Teamers and hit one of his own…A disoriented Booker is able to find Stevie for the hot tag…The match breaks down…Booker controls Norton outside the ring…Horace gets the best of Stevie, but Booker disposes of Norton by tossing him into the guardrail, then catches Horace with a missile dropkick back in the ring after Stevie drops down on a rope run…That was a pretty good match, but man, that commercial break being placed where it was bums me out… Gene Okerlund interviews the First Family in the ring…Jimmy Hart has been underutilized on television lately, so I’m glad to see him getting a bit of time…Though after he’s done talking, it goes way the fuck downhill…Eurgh…Anyway, the First Family wants to take the tag titles from Harlem Heat…Brian Knobbs and Hugh Morrus challenge the Heat to a tag title match on the next Thunder…They’re also not fans of the Revolution… Rick Steiner defends the TV title against Perry Saturn in the main event…They keep letting this bum talk…He can barely say, “It looks like it’s gonna be a massacre” before the match…Rick is awful, man…At least Stevie Ray is funny and has entertaining facial expressions…Rick Steiner is the lesser tag team member of his former team, but he can’t even fucking talk or emote, either…I’m higher on Saturn than I guess the DVDVR/PWO set usually is, so it means something when I say that this match isn’t all that great…And it ain’t because of Saturn… Saturn hits a short burst of offense after Steiner’s opening boring work…Steiner does one cool thing…He sits Saturn up top as if readying for a back suplex, but goes back to back with him and lifts him over his shoulder, then hits an Oklahoma Stampede…It would have been way better if it were Dr. Death doing it, as Dr. Death actually knows how to run with a guy hanging over his shoulder, but it was still a neat setup for the move… There’s a break after Steiner tosses Saturn around at ringside…We come back to punches and eye gouges…Saturn tries to come back, but gets kicked in the gut and DDT’d for two…Steiner is a former shoot wrestler, but he somehow works the weakest-looking wrestling holds in the company…Saturn hits a neckbreaker to escape one…He ducks a clothesline and nails a superkick, then hits a nice release overhead suplex for two…Saturn seems to be coasting to victory, so here comes Sid to shove Saturn off the top rope and into a Steiner belly-to-belly… Chris Benoit hits the ring and whips his U.S. title belt at the escaping heels…I can’t believe it, but Benoit is currently the best talker in the Revolution…He cuts a solid little promo, and the long and short of it is that he and Saturn challenge Rick Steiner and Sid to a tag match on the next Thunder…Sid responds by basically doing the “too small” hand signal that a power forward does after easily scoring in the post, but in verbal form, and agrees…The heels rush the ring and have no luck, so they back off again…That’s the show… This show was very bad!...Harlem Heat/B-Teamers was the only good thing about this show…And my goodness, Rey/Lenny Lane was an abomination…OWWWWWWWWW…

As a side note, even though it didn't happen on TV, Sid ate a clean pinfall to Sting at a house show on 2 July 1999 and a clean pinfall to Booker T. (!!) at a house show on 4 August 1999. It works that Sid, as an egotistical deluded heel, ignores all that, or any DQ losses, no contests, etc., but commentary should not be bleeding credibility by co-signing that.

Sorry for the double post, but the women's rugby sevens at the Olympics might have made me a rugby fan. That whole event went hard.

You should have told him that when society collapses, forget gold because potable water will be the only true currency. Then you should have told him to send you his bank account info because you have a lead on a well deep in the Appalachians that would make you both rich after the end of society happens.