Technico Support

Or referring to Birmingham, England as just "England," if not outright calling it "London," because of born southerner Vince's self-loathing and Birmingham reminded him too much of Alabama.

Finishing up Survivor Series 1988 with a real mixed bag of a main event, as it's The Mega Powers, Hillbilly Jim, Koko, & Herc vs DiBiase, Akeem, Bossman, Rooster, & King Haku. Y'all like bullet points? I do! When I wrote about SummerSlam, I commented on Hogan's amazing restraint -- he actually entered with Savage to Savage's music! Well that's out the window as he is the only co-captain to get his own separate entrance and music. AND Savage is wearing his Mega Powers tights while Hogan isn't, as Hulk little brothers the fuck out of Macho here. What a dick. I get the feeling switching his merch from a Hulkamania shirt that says HULK RULES was also some "keep me on top" gamesmanship. Crowd is HOT for all this The tiny iron-on "WWF" letters on Koko's gear are blurred out LOOOOOOL Herc responded to his face turn by adding 20 more pounds of surely all natural muscle. Extra chicken, extra broccoli just like your favorite action stars tell you about when advertising their latest movie in Men's Health. Was Red Rooster supposed to be a diss on Ric Flair? Squint and Terry looks like him, right down to the kneepads on the shins. If not, I don't understand this gimmick. Heenan promoted him as a loser that he'd still be able to lead to success and I understand that the whole point is for him to turn on Heenan, but still...The Red Rooster? You can do the same storyline without naming him after a barnyard animal. Cocaine is a hell of a drug. Speaking of cocaine, OMG has "gone back to his roots" and is now Akeem. Sweet Jesus. I always took "The African Dream," a fat white guy shucking and jiving, speaking in stereotypical ebonics, as a parody of The American Dream, who was a fat white guy shucking and jiving, speaking in stereotypical ebonics. OR it's just another gimmick from Vince's dumb sense of humor, where the absolute height of wit is to dress a fat guy like an Easter egg and have him "act black." My god I've written too much about this already. The 80s wrestling wars were crazy, part 2: between 1-2 years ago, four out of the five guys on the heel team were ALL working in Mid-South/UWF. Bubba and OMG even traded the UWF title. Koko's flying dropkick is a thing of beauty. Watching all these shows in order, it's wild to see guys go up and down the card. DiBiase is eliminated second on his team as he's moving on from main eventing as part of the Megabucks act since January to feuding with Herc, who he tried to buy as his slave. The world has moved on. This was really a tale of two matches, as everybody is game and up for working hard (maybe they didn't want to be upstaged by the semi-main!) for the first half of the match. As soon as Herc is eliminated by DiBiase, all the work takes a backseat to angle advancement. It sucks because the heels are up 4-2 and I'm like, "cool, let's see some babyface fire in the face of adversity!" But then Savage pins DiBiase immediately. Okay then. And then it's all gimmicks as Hogan is handcuffed, BOTH Twin Towers are eliminated by bullshit (Bossman is counted out, Akeem is DQ'd) to, I guess, keep them strong, and then big brother Hogan makes the save to keep Randy in his place and wins the match for his hapless team. Post-match lust-filled shenanigans This show was decent enough, I guess. It was fun from an almost "greatest hits" perspective, as you get to see a LOT of guys doing their thing in bite sized pieces. For work, the semi-main is the match of the night. I need to look up how many more years they stick with elimination matches before abandoning the format. Rumble '89 is next, then I might watch The Main Event just to see the whole big angle play out. Thanks for reading!

Exactly. Word is there will just be a "HBO" tab on the Discovery Plus app. It sucks, to be sure, but that's modern corporate branding and synergy bullshit for ya. What amazes me, in general, is how all these content creators/studios who own the rights to movies are pulling all their stuff from other services so they can have it for their own service because, I guess, they feel like subscription fees are worth more than rights fees. I just re-upped Paramaount Plus over the weekend and saw, for example, that the Beverly Hills Cop series is on that now where it used to be on HBO. Same as we saw with Disney slowly pulling all Marvel content from Netflix, etc. We're hitting a point where the only time content will be licensed is when the creator is getting a crazy overpriced deal for it (WWE!), far more than any money they could have made on their own. I think we've already passed the point where the number of streaming services is unsustainable and I'm curious as to what the future holds.

Oh shit I never saw that, either. I guess he took "get on the gas" literally as well as figuratively.

Same! Dean, I love you, but please use paragraph breaks once in a while. I actually switched to bullet points on my 80s/90s WWF thread. I love me some bullet points.

Thanks!!

Yep, same meaning! Some days I like one, some days I like the other

The Breaking Bad episode this crosses over with was called "Better Call Saul." This episode was called "Breaking Bad." Niiiiiice.

Skinny Walter looks like an angry Hank Azaria here.

We've gone from talking about AEW's entire catalog showing up on HBO Max to speculating about HBO Max shutting down and possible other homes for AEW. 2022 has been insane and it's not over yet.

What about the dreaded Father Nelson? (apologies for the poor video quality)

If you smell shit everywhere you go, check your own shoes

I really like how AEW isn't afraid to just beat somebody instead of playing the "how do we get out of this match we booked?" game. LOOOOOL Best Friends bringing back the GIANT TRENCH COAT from 2014. It's insane that we're watching Christian vs Matt Hardy almost a QUARTER CENTURY after both guys came to prominence. Props to the fan with the sign "I played this match on No Mercy" Why did Brody King look like Captain Spaulding in that promo shot? Women's tag was amazing! Fuck yeah give Hayter a win. Ethan Page continues to do nothing for me as he takes TV time to shoot~! on the boss for not giving him TV time. I rewound the Acclaimed rap multiple times, laughing my ass off. Hangman! Bucks! FRIENDSHIP MANCE WARNER! I did not expect that. AEW is crazy.

Rolling on with the next match on the show... Andre, Rude, Bravo, Perfect, Rude, & Race vs Jake, Duggan, Scott Casey, Patera, & Tito: I'm going to bullet point this and see how that works because IRL I'm a middle manager and we love bullet points. Scott Casey is filling in for Brian Blair, who was to fill in for JYD. If they got any further down the depth chart, James Dudley would have been in there Jake's music is awesome. Was that written by someone on staff or was it stock music? I do remember it being used on SNME for a Hogan workout montage. Curt is in there as prototype Mr. Perfect -- short tights, no singlet Lots of amazing big hair in this match as well. Between all this and Beefcake's insane 'do in the earlier match, even Bonnie Tyler would be like "guys, ease up on the Aqua Net." Tito is in his Strikeforce gear but Martel is not around. I swore they broke up later so I had to look it up -- turns out Martel had a kayfabe injury from Mania 4 and Ax hitting him with the cane (his wife was ill and he was given time off for that) and the storyline was Tito had initially brought in PoP to go after Demolition. I remember none of that. The is the first match where I really noticed the work. Foregone conclusion because Hennig, Race, Rude, Tito, & Jake are in there, sure, but even Duggan and Bravo had their working boots on and these guys were going for it in the earlier portion of the bout. Maybe they had that semi-main chip on their shoulders. Harley Race, part 1: Fuuuuuuuck that hernia operation scar is massive. No wonder he wore a singlet when he went to JCP/Crockett Harley Race, part 2: he's still in his King gear despite being deposed by Haku. Quality Control should have caught that Harley Race, part 3: I looked it up and Harley is 43 here. FORTY THREE. Race is one of those guys born looking 40 and just got older looking from there. He looks like he could definitely get the senior citizen's discount without an ID. Harley Race, part 4: HE'S AWESOME. Even at his advanced decrepitude (yes that is a Blade Runner reference), he whips out some sweet suplexes and even a nice dropkick I mentioned in the SummerSlam writeup that it was fun to watch how they would strategize how to hide Andre. Here, he doesn't even get in until we're 13 minutes and 3 eliminations in. Then he only has two spots in the match. I watched part of this match right before bedtime and was dozing off, but it really felt like Jake and Rude were trying to be even more boring than their Mania 4 match during their segment late in the show. Ending makes sense as Andre's team is up 3-1 on Jake, so Andre just chokes the fuck out of him, gets DQ'd, and Hennig pins him immediately. So smart. Like braining a guy with a chair in an iron man match, getting DQ'd, then pinning your unconscious opponent 10 times. Obvious strategy like this kind of ruins elimination matches if you think too hard about it. Main event is next, then Royal Rumble 89 as we start to wrap up the me decade!

I loved the episode. Also lollin’ at how they did nothing to try to make Aaron Paul look younger.

Bolsheviks and Stallions, but you’re right about the vagueness of their placement on the depth chart and that both are technically JTTS teams. I guess I’m speaking relatively compared to the other seven teams. Like, the Bolsheviks job to the Harts 10 times out of 10, ditto Stallions/Rougeaus, for example.

IT'S UNREALISTIC! AUBREY ISN'T OVERREACTING TO ROSA'S OFFENSE IN THE FIRST PIC!

NICE. My only memories were of being really far from the stage and Catherine Wheel doing Black Metallic; something about the tempo of the song and how hot it was just made the song feel like it was going on FOREVER. Much like an AEW thread last month turned into a rumination on cheesesteaks, only on DVDVR can a thread about Ric Flair's last match become a discussion of late 80s/early 90s pre-grunge alternative. I have an Apple Music playlist that I made solely by Googling WHFS playlists from that era and it's beautiful. @JLowementioned George Clinton...I remember seeing P-Funk at HAMMERJACK'S in Baltimore (the old one, which was razed to build the Ravens' stadium) in maybe 95. It was a hilarious show because it was so long and nobody felt any obligation to stay and the vibe was go ahead and check out when your P-Funk meter was filled. My friends and I were there for maybe 2-3 hours and dipped out like, "yep, we've had our fill of George & the All Stars, we're good, thanks everybody byeeeeee."

My top two memories of this: The kid at ringside who loses his shit when Ron wins, We should all have at least one moment of such unmitigated joy in our lives. A friend called me around noon or 1 to go to that show but I was really really hung over and couldn't make it.

LOOOOOOOOOL Bret gonna Bret.

Same, but substitute 1992, "HFStival," "Upper Marlboro," and "The Soup Dragons." Holy shit, this is the most stereotypical pre-grunge, alternative lineup ever: The Soup Dragons, The Charlatans UK, The Ocean Blue, They Might Be Giants, Graham Parker, Catherine Wheel, Too Much Joy, The Wolfgang Press, Manifesto

Are they disciplining or getting rid of whatever writer(s) screamed at them and called them spoiled or whatever? I feel like Jericho is hitting his stride balancing his character work with actual decent color commentary. Between all the screaming and gimmickry, he covered for/reigned in JR a few times and did decent job explaining why certain things were happening in the context of the match.

Quick thoughts on the tiny bit I watched yesterday: I actually left off on the finish of the tag match, so I missed the aftermath when I watched a few days ago. Demolition running in, beating up the PoP, and running them off was ridiculous. I mean from a standpoint of "we need to cement these guys as faces," I guess they felt they had to do it. But from a standpoint of building up a tough new challenger and "oh shit their longtime manager is now behind a dangerous team who will make a serious run at the belts," it was a mess. PoP promo later to try to save this. I don't recall ever hearing Barbarian speak. Nothing but promo packages as I'm guessing there was a short intermission in the arena. They're moving Andre down the card now -- he's not in the main as I'd assumed he was. He's feuding with Jake because Vince loves "big guy afraid of snakes" angles. SCOTT CASEY (with a WWF record of 0 - 3,973) is on Jake's team because JYD quit and then B. Brian Blair left as well. Sweet Jesus. Next year, they move to 4 on 4 and with better defined, mixed teams (singles and tag teams together). It's a good choice, as the amount of JTTS and outright job guys needed to fill out teams on this show is pretty crazy. So I'm thinking 89 will be smaller teams, less filler. I'm fully ready for the joke to be on me and we get job guys in every other match. I had absolutely zero recollection of the fact that there was a brief time where Harley Race apparently came back and rejoined the Heenan Family alongside his replacement, King Haku. Wild. I know it doesn't last long as he wrestles Haku for the King title at the Rumble and then is out shortly after. Anyway, that's the good thing about re-watching this stuff I haven't seen in probably over 30 years...I only remember the generalities so it's fun to watch back (almost) fresh. Thanks for reading! Two matches to go!

Many, many thanks, buddy! I'll do my best.

Isn't he essentially Kin Korn Karn?