Vgmastr

So apparently Virgil had been kayfabing his age even through his death. He had told everyone over the years he was born in 1962, but he was actually born in 1951. Most reports list him dying at 61, but he was actually 72, thus making him one of the oldest guys on the WWF roster in the 80s and 90s, older than Hogan, Piper, Jake, Dibiase, Savage and only two years younger than Flair. He was 40 when he won the Million Dollar Title at Summerslam 91, which is absolutely crazy.

Not sure if you recognized them, but the doormen for this show were a very young Matt and Jeff Hardy.

Playing Devil's advocate, what if the plan is still Cody and Roman and this is just a way to build some groundswell support behind Cody a la the Yes Movement? Not saying I believe that, but I think we see a lot of "We want Cody!" chants in the coming weeks.

Not sure, they didn't tell us anything other than that it's a new show.

As someone who was there, this did a really good job at getting the crowd hot for the live show. Local start time was 6:45, only 15 minutes before Smackdown went on the air. They managed to fit in two matches with entrances in that 15 minute window. With the matches being so short they were non-stop action, no stalling or rest holds. The second match ended only a minute or so before 7, they went right into the Smackdown intro and the crowd was on fire.

It would actually be a perfect Elimination Chamber match. Start the match with Sami and Jimmy, bring Solo in third to double team. KO fourth to even the odds, Roman fifth for a 3 on 2 advantage, then Jey last where you don't know who he is going to side with.

This reminds of the time I went grocery shopping with my mom and spent the entire time in the magazine section reading various wrestling and video game magazines and one magazine, I can't remember which, said that if you beat the game with all eight wrestlers you unlocked Adam Bomb. So I spent an entire Saturday afternoon doing just that to be rewarded with nothing. I was PISSED.

I absolutely love old school Survivor Series where there were nothing but elimination matches, and 1989 is one of my favorites. It's, IMO, the best show for the Monsoon/Ventura team, their back and forth during both Hogan's and Warrior's matches is fantastic. That's probably part of it, I wonder if it had been decided yet that Warrior was getting the World Title run at Mania. There are a couple of other reasons though too, it allowed them to run a small post-match angle to help build up the No Holds Barred PPV, and it allowed them to talk about dissension in the Heenan Family throughout the show to explain Tully's absence.

The Hogan/Beefcake vs Savage/Zeus cage match was on the Supertape Volume 1 Coliseum Video, which is on Peacock: https://www.peacocktv.com/watch/asset/sports/wwe/wwe-supertape-volume-1/40653eb4-56bd-333b-b12f-259676db96aa

I never really understood the story behind Dibiase buying 30. They show him draw his number, he's horrified when he sees it, and then he approaches Slick and it's implied he buys it from him. The thing is Bossman and Akeem enter at 22 and 23, so what was Dibiase's original number? His reaction when drawing doesn't match getting 22 or 23. It would have made way more sense if he had bought it from Heenan with Andre entering at 3, especially with the history Dibiase and Andre had. I'm sure I put way more thought into than Vince did though, it was probably just "Fuck it! Just tell them he bought 30, no one's going to think about it!"

Bob Uecker is in both the baseball and WWE HOFs.

It's actually the seventh Recharged game.

She could just stream on Twitch and easily make six figures if she wanted to.

This game is what caused Ventura to leave the company in 1990. Vince wouldn't allow him to do it because it wasn't a WWF licensed game, so Ventura left but the game never actually came out.

Wrestlemania Challenge on NES was decent, but the other three WWF games on the console were pretty trash. The three WWF games on SNES were okay to good, each one improved on the previous. RAW is best one, though Royal Rumble has such a great roster with Bret, Shawn, Flair, Perfect, Savage and Dibiase. That said, the best wrestling game on that console is Saturday Night Slam Masters, can you imagine what a classic game it would have been if Capcom had the WWF license?

With 2018 being the exception where they actually gave the fans Rumble winners they wanted in Nakamura and Asuka and then fucking up Wrestlemania by having them both lose.

The one guy I think the WWF could have built up as a monster heel for Warrior was the Barbarian. The Powers of Pain had just split up and neither guy really did anything for the rest of their time in the company. Of the two, Barbarian was by far the better worker, had the better makeover with the skulls and antlers and had Heenan as a mouthpiece. I think he could have pulled a good match out of Warrior and seeing the Barbarian just squashing dudes in the buildup would have been great.

They uploaded some more Superstars a month or so ago. There's a Knuckleball match on the 10/1/94 episode. There's actually quite a few baseball spots that he adds to the match. Jumping jacks, baseball slide, arguing with the ref and pretending to kick dirt on his feet, sliding between his opponent's legs and yelling "Safe!", doing a windup when throwing a punch and yelling "He's out!" after getting the pin. Vince and Lawler are also pretending that he's an actual MLB player having to turn to wrestling during the strike and speculate on who he really is.

The best line of the night came from Jesse Ventura on commentary when he told Tony "things could be worse, you could be indicted or something." This event took place days after Vince was indicted.

It seems like the match of survival was a big missed opportunity. You could have had Slaughter go over in his match and Bret go over Dibiase in his, then in the finale you have Hogan/Warrior/Bret vs. Slaughter and the Visionaries. After a heel or two is eliminated, have some kind of schmoz where Hogan, Warrior and Slaughter are all DQed. Now Bret is down 2 vs 1 or 3 vs 1 but gets the underdog babyface push and becomes the ultimate survivor. This way you setup your next two PPV main events and give a big push to a guy who's poised to get a big singles IC run in a few months. Instead it was just another way to have Hogan and Warrior go over the entire roster.

The problem with the Raw vs Smackdown is it's the same thing every year. Heels and faces teaming together so there's always infighting. If they insist on doing the Raw vs Smackdown stuff, they should do two matches for the men and two for the women. Do Raw heels vs Smackdown faces and Raw faces vs Smackdown heels. Then you can have the two teams from the same show competing for bragging rights against each other.

So first she takes Nia Jax off TV and now Eva Marie? Shayna's going to be the biggest babyface on the roster. Of course, WWE thinks that her taking out the two most useless people on the roster make her a heel, since they piped in canned boos to try and drown out the "One more time!" chants as the crowd is literally asking Shayna to break her other arm.

The Brewers are doing a WWE Night in September and are giving a special Bob Uecker bobblehead with him in a ring in his tux and a title belt on his shoulder. The fact that it's not the scene from Wrestlemania IV with Andre choking him out back and forth is the biggest missed opportunity for a bobblehead ever.

WCW didn't have their own production crew, they always used crews from Turner Sports. They ran into a problem in the summer of '96, the Summer Olympics were in Atlanta, Turner's backyard, so all of Turner production was loaned out to broadcasters for the Olympics. Faced with having to run a month of shows with no production crew, WCW went back to Disney, who had their own house production. However, instead of going back to the stale soundstage, they built a makeshift outdoor arena in the park. What helped was the timing of the shows, they ran Nitros here for five weeks, every Nitro in between Bash at the Beach and Road Wild. That means the first Nitro here was the night after Hogan's heel turn joining the nWo. There was a sense of uneasiness throughout these shows as you were wondering when the nWo would attack next, and being outdoors in a makeshift arena helped add to that atmosphere as it would be easier for the nWo to attack here instead of a real arena. WCW even played into that with Tony announcing all the main eventers who weren't at one of the shows because they were on a Japan tour. Seems like an odd way to market the show, "Look at all the guys who you won't see tonight!" but it worked in making WCW seem even more vulnerable. Then the big attack happened, one of the most memorable angles in WCW history, with the nWo laying out a bunch of guys backstage. They made it seem so real and not scripted. The show stopped to a halt as the wounded were attended to and ambulances were called. Guys who had just been fighting in the middle of the ring were now working together, Heenan walked off the set out of fear for his safety. We were told since all of the attacked guys were scheduled to wrestle that night, the entire show had to be rebooked on the fly with who was available backstage. That led to some funky match-ups, including a main event of the Giant defended the World Title against Greg Valentine. That entire episode of Nitro was a master class in wrestling angles, and the set helped add to that.

One of the big problems of the 95 Rumble is that all the star power were in other matches, Diesel, Bret, Undertaker, Razor, Bigelow. It left the Royal Rumble guys like Mantaur, Well Dunn, Aldo Montoya and Kwang. The only other guys in the match besides Shawn and Bulldog that were near the top of the card were Luger, Backlund and Owen, and Backlund and Owen were only in the match for a few seconds each.