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Any fans of Starrcade 89?


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I got absolutely flamed and melted down on by a YouTube psycho recently, even by YouTube standards by saying that this was a good show that was just overshadowed by the several possibly better ones and just overall good year for WCW/NWA. 

The main event was a solid Flair match where for 15 minutes they wrestled in 5th gear and not for 45 minutes a gear or 2 lower. That’s not to say I didn’t love of the historical Clash match but it wasn’t exactly something that had never been done before (Flair vs youngun that ends in a draw). The Starrcade 89 match was with a driven storyline that wasn’t just Flair vs youngun. It wasn’t the match where some youngun was going to wrestle Flair, it was the match where STING was going to BEAT Flair. Obviously the nontitle match win wasn’t a new thing either but this one had some nice twists. There was the tournament and the insane heat by the time we got to the match based on that night alone let alone their history. 

Burying Muta has been a minor gripe about this show but I thought they did well enough. Losing to Flair and Luger the way he did didn’t lose any heat and he had to lose to Sting. That ended that feud and started the Flair feud. Muta was gone soon after anyway.

Doom being buried is another, but they were basically put together to get fed to the Steiners anyway since the Road Warriors couldn’t possibly work full time for a national wrestling promotion and lose a match. That was my complaint...the Road Warriors/Steiners finish. I could have lived with it had Patrick executed it a little better. He should have hesitated or done something to sell the fact that he was doing something that rarely happens. He just counted to 3 and said the Steiners won as if they won a squash match on TV. That’s still a darkhorse pick on greatest WCW match lists. With a better finish it might have been number 1. It wasn’t an hour classic or anything but the Steiners were perfectly crisp that match and the Road Warriors apparently only minded losing to the Steiners, not working with them. It was a dream match at the time and heat was as high as Sting/Flair.

Next is the Samoans. I thought they did good here going with them. The Midnight Express wrestling the 3 other muscle tag teams would have just buried them and looked backwards in general. And we wouldn’t have gotten Jim Cornette in commentary. Norman the Lunatic’s cameo was well done. A real fun show that is overshadowed by a few others, and drug down by the blunder that was Sting’s knee injury making the main storyline that hit a new plateau that night pointless.

Edited by BloodyChamp
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Muta not winning a damn match sucked and made this show irredeemable. Also, this may be leftover spite from the fact that seven-year-old me found out the results of this show on WCW SN and was outraged. I'm still outraged. FUCK.

But what REALLY made me hate this show was that DOOM also got ZERO. FUCKING. POINTS. FUUUUCK.

So I hated the booking of this so much as a kid that it just carries over almost thirty years later because literally Muta and DOOM were my two favorite things in WCW at this point in my fandom. 

Edited by Smelly McUgly
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It suuuuuuucks.

This was the first WCW PPV I ever bought on tape as a kid so I guess I have nostalgia bias but I couldn't believe how low rent and dingy the production was compared to what I'd experienced with WWF.

I at least thought the matches would help me get over that but nope, none of them hit the mark at all.

The one saving grace from this show was it was my first experience of the Great Muta and I'd go out of my way to find anything with him on it.

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Not sure it was that great in theory, actually. If it had been a series of TV main events over the course of a month, that would have worked. If they had just done one round robin tournament on the night, that would have worked. If it had been a modern Wrestlemania-length show, that would have worked. But 12 matches in 3 hours? Bad idea.

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13 hours ago, Niners Fan in CT said:

Fan of the concept but the show itself for all the interesting match ups most of them were too short and didn't live up to the hype.  Also,  Muta at 0 points is no bueno. 

Yep, put me in with the "really cool concept, bad execution" crowd.  As a Clash or a series of TV matches, as @AxB suggested, it would have been more palatable.  But to do A) a gimmick show and b) with that kind of booking, at Starrcade?  Oof.

As a 15 year old, I did love the concept and it made  the round robin tournament a staple of my wrestling gaming, like CotG, TNM, etc, from then on.

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I like it, but I'm a sucker for such things. Wrestlemania 4 is still one of my favourite shows.

Re-watched it a year or so ago for the first time since like tape days and was surprised by how much I enjoyed the matches. Short, yes, but all were pretty fun. That said, I would have probably felt ripped off if I had ordered it on PPV. But 30 years later, it's a neat little oddball of a show.

Doom getting jobbed out doesn't bother me, as it was one of the events that led them from being Doom to DOOM. And the SST looked great.

Edited by elizium
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On 4/20/2019 at 4:12 AM, MORELOCK said:

Not defending this bad show or anything, but why the hell would they put Muta over anyone when he was leaving the company a month later?

Logical, but as a kid, I had no clue about this, nor did I care. Wrestling fandom is - and this is maybe a bit of an understatement - anything but logical. 

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Even if it is largely hindsight, just for storytelling purposes it is an important show. On the tag side, the Roadies win the war but the Steiners win the head-to-head battle elevating them to the top rank of tag-teams and like elizium said, it is step one in transforming Doom into DOOM!. On the other side it is the beginning of the end of the Flair babyface run that began with the Funk attack and anointed Sting as the #1 challenger. Flair being the first one in WCW to pin Muta and drawing with arch-rival Luger kept him strong for what was supposed to be Sting's upcoming coronation. But most importantly, I believe it was the first meeting of former partners Sting and Luger and was an early stanza in the the greatest WCW story ever told, The Ballad of Stinger and Lex.

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