WWE Network Conversation

[Cobra Commander]

John Nord wrestling the Barbarian in Nord's first Nitro match feels like a bit of an Easter egg reference for a certain group of fans. There's also a Barbarian/Berzerker matchup that aired on Prime Time Wrestling in 1991.

Of course this being John Nord, he shows up for a few months, and then retires. Didn't even have the in-ring injury before leaving like Rick Martel did.

[porksweats]

1 hour ago, Cobra Commander said:

John Nord wrestling the Barbarian in Nord's first Nitro match feels like a bit of an Easter egg reference for a certain group of fans. There's also a Barbarian/Berzerker matchup that aired on Prime Time Wrestling in 1991.

Of course this being John Nord, he shows up for a few months, and then retires. Didn't even have the in-ring injury before leaving like Rick Martel did.

If I remember correctly, that's Nord's ONLY Nitro match.

[Cobra Commander]

1998 WCW’s roster was a deep assortment of dudes.

Meanwhile…

 

[SirSmUgly]

22 minutes ago, porksweats said:

If I remember correctly, that's Nord's ONLY Nitro match.

You are correct. A quick CTRL + F in the ol' Nitro thread before I go out for the evening shows that the Battle of the Barbarians was on 1/5/98's Nitro, and then his name doesn't ever ping again in my reviews. He actually is only around for a couple weeks before he leaves and then comes back for a random dark match a few months later. 

I popped over to Cagematch and saw that they had him and Darsow work two matches, one on WCWSN, as a tag team. That would have been a perfectly fine underneath tag team. The Darsow and Nord vs. High Voltage matches on Worldwide would have been fun. 

[porksweats]

4 minutes ago, SirSmUgly said:

You are correct. A quick CTRL + F in the ol' Nitro thread before I go out for the evening shows that the Battle of the Barbarians was on 1/5/98's Nitro, and then his name doesn't ever ping again in my reviews. He actually is only around for a couple weeks before he leaves and then comes back for a random dark match a few months later. 

I popped over to Cagematch and saw that they had him and Darsow work two matches, one on WCWSN, as a tag team. That would have been a perfectly fine underneath tag team. The Darsow and Nord vs. High Voltage matches on Worldwide would have been fun. 

I tracked down most of his C Show matches, he's surprisingly fun. There's even a match against Road Block.

[odessasteps]

Was just coming to post about the Vladimir thing on the network. 

[hammerva]

So if it is only on the Network then only people outside the US can see it?  I know it isn't on Peacock 

[odessasteps]

I bet it will show up on YT or Daily motion soon enough.

[Stefanie Sparkleface]

12 hours ago, hammerva said:

So if it is only on the Network then only people outside the US can see it?  I know it isn't on Peacock 

It's on Peacock. Search for Superfan and it comes up.

[hammerva]

Just finished watching the Vladimir Superfan special on Peacock and god this was incredible.  In a world full of marks like us (yeah me too), he is a legit wrestling fan who lives for this stuff.   At the end of it when he said "If it wasn't for wrestling I would have no life" will feel like sad and pathetic to some but to me and other it felt wholesome and pure.    LIsten to him talk about how awful 2020 was for him losing his mother to COVID and then not being able to go to shows is just heartbreaking.  I mean I had no idea about his suicide attempts because of the depression.   Showing him in December 2020 just praying to his mom in heaven to bring back live wrestling made me cry throughout most of the special.  Even when he was able to go to WM in Tampa and was so happy.  

If this doesn't get to you in some way, your wrestling fandom is definitely dead. 

 

[Cobra Commander]

Just watched the Vladimir docu and it's nice that it escaped whatever purgatory it was in for like 2 years or so. Vladimir being Haitian and not Russian is one of those "a-ha" sort of things which does make sense with the variety of footage of him where he really clearly looks more Haitian than Russian (his surname might have taken a bit of a journey to reach Haiti). But I guess there was a period of time before people found out how many non-Russians ended up named Ivan or Vladimir (like notable baseball players).

But yeah I suspect a certain amount of the first half-ish was pre-2020, and then yeah, Covid/2020 really swung things. There were several wrestlers at WM37 who have departed the WWE since then. But seeing Scott Hall there was also interesting since I had read about how 2020 had caused him to relapse and messed up his health. So yeah the whole thing really hit some people hard.

A few extra things

1) Frank the Clown catching a random stray

2) Jeff Jarrett is pretty prominent and that's a guy who wasn't just raised in the business but in a territory with weekly shows in the same towns, so there's probably several fans he would encounter every week for years around there and having someone like that in WWF was probably pretty fun too

3) The phrase "sports entertainment fan" was a bit cringey but that phrase didn't appear after the first little bit. Vladimir was most assuredly saying wrestling over and over no matter what.

4) I'm gonna pretend that it took 2 years to release because they were working to blur the WWF logo in his Wrestlemania X shirt that he was wearing in some scenes

5) I've mentioned the whole "fans on the hard cam who seem like they're being held hostage" aesthetic i've seen on some shows, which is a promotion problem not a fan problem. But the fans who care are always fun and we need more of them compared to snarky smarks.

I had half-season tickets for the Royals for 7 years in the last decade with a gap between end of 2019 and opening day 2021 where for obvious reasons I didn't attend live baseball games and being able to go see that, even for 40ish games a year, was a lot more fun than not doing much of anything for a year. And that's from someone who has made nowhere near as much of a commitment as he has, so it's cool that this whole thing had an upbeat sort of ending with how bad the middle portion had been for him.

[Gorman]

Vladimir's interactions with Jarrett and HHH showed that he's the perfect fan. He pays money, shows up, cheers the faces, boos the heels, and inspires everyone sitting near him to do the same.

We never did find out how he always managed to get such great seats and how he could afford to attend 1000 shows and 35 WrestleManias.

[Stefanie Sparkleface]

22 minutes ago, Gorman said:

Vladimir's interactions with Jarrett and HHH showed that he's the perfect fan. He pays money, shows up, cheers the faces, boos the heels, and inspires everyone sitting near him to do the same.

We never did find out how he always managed to get such great seats and how he could afford to attend 1000 shows and 35 WrestleManias.

I was actually fine with not knowing that. It looks like he lives very frugally and spends all his non-essential income on wrestling, and that is enough of an answer for me.

[odessasteps]

The Vladimir doc is very touching and such a “non WWE” for them to make. And you get the feeling most everyone was being honest except maybe the usual suspects (I’m looking at you, billion dollar princess.)

[Cobra Commander]

Two other things

1) it wouldn’t shock me if one of Vladimir and Charlie Adorno has bought tickets for the other at least once. Maybe in a situation where the guy buying both tickets gets paid by the other guy to make up for it. Also it being NYC, maybe Vladimir’s apartment is under some rent control with a 1960 rate and he does the NYC equivalent to my grandparents getting two meals out of an Arby’s sandwich.

2) Also kinda surprised that they used alternate names for Faith No More guy, but I guess FNM was a little more prominent in 1995 than 2021

[odessasteps]

I'd be curious to hear about his trying to be a wrestler. 

[Cobra Commander]

Would this been before or after Johnny Rodz opened a school (if I had to guess, his eyesight in the ways before LASIK was might have been more of a problem than his size)

[odessasteps]

It's not like you don't have famously near sighted guys who were big stars (Hansen, Monsoon).

[Cobra Commander]

The other very real possibility is the Rob Naylor realization (Vlad is probably a bit larger than Rob but) that taking bumps in the ring kinda hurts.

The Cornette podcast was going through Piper/Snuka/Tonga Kid promos from 1984 and the one thing they didn’t mention about Snuka’s promo quality is that there were probably no shortage of people from the northeast who either didn’t speak English as a first language or knew someone who didn’t and Snuka’s verbiage was a little more familiar to them. Just something that comes to mind after watching the Vladimir documentary with how he speaks having been born in Haiti and living in NY for decades.

[Hamhock]

In the Vlad doc, do they show the clip of him in the audience at the Flair/Sting title change at the Meadowlands in 1991?

[odessasteps]

I don’t think so. Don’t think they show him at any non WWF show.

[Cobra Commander]

not sure how many WWE things have all the commercials up-front like the Vlad doc had, but going through 35-ish minutes without breaks was a nice experience too

(the Peacock commercial placement robots are a little weird on some shows, they'll stop putting commercials in after a point so that you end up getting like 30 minutes in a row of commercial free World Championship Wrestling because they had 5 breaks in the first half of the show)

[zendragon]

On 10/29/2023 at 6:02 AM, Gorman said:

Vladimir's interactions with Jarrett and HHH showed that he's the perfect fan. He pays money, shows up, cheers the faces, boos the heels, and inspires everyone sitting near him to do the same.

We never did find out how he always managed to get such great seats and how he could afford to attend 1000 shows and 35 WrestleManias.

I heard once the Red Hat Sign Guy gets comped 

[odessasteps]

Mike Johnson said there will be a Vladimir action figure done in Hasbro style.

[Cobra Commander]

Halloween is approaching, so let's go to a promotion where Halloween is approaching (kinda)...

World Championship Wrestling (10/24/1987)

We open with a clip of the Mighty Wilbur turning face on Paul Jones from a different show.

Tony and David insist that big announcements are coming about Starrcade. Also WarGames will be at the Nassau Coliseum.

Match 1: Jimmy Valiant and Bugsy McGraw vs Eric Long and Tommy Angel. It's like when the two coolest kids at different high schools meet up in College, only with babyface comedy gimmicks. The faces booking in some work with multiple tags. No word on if this is like Who Framed Roger Rabbit where the Donald and Daffy have a deal on how to split their time. Babyfaces win with a Bugsy splash after a few minutes. 
Valiant and Bugsy join Tony at the table post-match and say things, some of them coherent.

Match 2: Barry Windham vs John Savage. Which western state is John Savage from. Barry is facing Dr. Death at Starrcade. Barry wins with a flying lariat that causes John Savage to almost land directly on his head.
Barry Windham joins David, along with Mike Rotunda. Hey do these guys know each other. Mike Rotunda thinks it's good for him that some wrestlers aren't paying attention to their wrestling.

Let's go the Starrcade Control Center with Tony, Jim Crockett Jr, and JJ Dillon. I kinda love how hilariously drab this command center looks. How about matches: Jimmy Garvin, Nichael Hayes and Sting vs Eddie Gilbert, Rick Steiner, and Larry Zbyszko. Also Windham/Williams. And Terry Taylor/Nikita Koloff. Also Dusty Rhodes and Lex Luger. But let's look at Hiro Matsuda putting out Tommy Young and Johnny Weaver first. Let's hear from Dusty Rhodes in what is probably an office in his house. Dusty will be facing Lex Luger in a cage. Dusty mentions the Magnum TA car accident as influencing his approach to things. Dusty's in front of a photo of Dusty playing softball. The contract is signed and Dusty is putting his career on the line. He closes by telling Lex Luger "to be the legend, you have to beat the legend". We go to the control center where JJ Dillon is disputing the wording of the control and apparently "putting his career on the line" means "not wrestling for 90 days", instead of "not wrestling for 30 days" and it should be worldwide and not just in the US. Well, okay.

Match 3: Mighty Wilbur vs David Isley. The graphic says Wilbur is "with Paul Jones" but he isn't and they'll be talking to Paul Jones later. Wilbur wins quickly with a splash.
David talks to the Mighty Wilbur postmatch. We see footage of Wilbur turning face on Paul Jones from Pro. Wilbur is from Hayward, California (south of Oakland on the East Bay) picking fruits. Red Bastien saw him one day and got him into wrestling. He doesn't like the way that Paul Jones treats people. Wilbur has the mic skills of a dude who drives a truck for a living.

Match 4: The New Breed vs Gladiator #1 and Bob Riddle. Chris Champion returned from 2002 last week on the Sunday Edition of World Championship Wrestling. Chris Champion is working with a cast that has designs on it. A bit of a depth perception challenge on Sean Royal's dropkick to the Gladiator. Chris Champion jumps off the top turnbuckle to hit the Riddle with an axehandle to the floor. Chris Champion beats Riddle with a flying crotch attack (Royal lifting Riddle up and Champion coming off the ropes)

Here's our lame duck champion Ron Garvin with Tony. Ron wants to be the people's champion unlike Ric Flair who used the belt for selfish pursuits. Ron closes by saying he's a little bit younger than Flair (nope!), a little bit stronger, a little bit faster and he's coming after Flair.

Match 5: Warlord and Ivan Koloff vs Rick Ryder and Rex King. Paul Jones joins the table to rant about how dumb Mighty Wilbur is. Paul Jones now believes that Red Bastien has a long-standing grudge against him. Paul talks about how much Wilbur must have sucked at picking grapes. Heels win after a double team move (Warlord holding Rick Ryder in a backbreaker and Ivan dropping a forearm on Ryder's chest).
Paul Jones have more words for Mighty Wilbur postmatch. Mighty Wilbur is dead meat.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL SCOREBOARD WITH CRAIG SAGER IS NEXT

The results from October 24th, 1987: #6 Auburn beats Mississippi State, #3 Miami beats Cincinnati, #2 Nebraska crushes K-State, #10 Notre Dame beats USC, #1 Oklahoma beats Colorado, #9 Syracuse beats Colgate, and #8 UCLA beats Cal. Meanwhile on TBS, Georgia beats Kentucky. Slow week of College Football.

Ric Flair is at the table with Tony. He has words for Ron Garvin. He says Dusty is a millionaire. Ric Flair says he'll be at his best at Starrcade because the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks will be in the front row.

Match 6: Michael Hayes and Jimmy Garvin vs Thunderfoot #1 and Robbie Idol. Big week for masked jobbers with #1 in their name. Hayes pins Idol with the running bulldog.
Garvin and Hayes join Tony postmatch. Maybe they should have gave Jimmy Garvin a 2 month title reign instead of Ron Garvin. Michael Hayes refers to Rick Steiner as his real name (Rob Rechsteiner) while talking about the six man tag.

Match 7: Kevin Sullivan vs Terry Jones. We get a Ticketmaster phone number for Nassau Coliseum tickets. Sullivan wins with a double stomp.
Kevin Sullivan joins Tony and he has Chitown Fever. Not to be confused with Jimmy Garvin talking about Starrcade Fever in the last promo segment of this show. Kevin Sullivan cuts a promo about the Starrcade card because he's not actually doing anything for Starrcade anyways. Kevin Sullivan things that Dusty might be walking into a trap by doing WarGames so close to Starrcade.

We return to the Starrcade Control Center. Dusty has agreed to every demand. It'll be title vs career (for 90 days). Jim Cornette has joined the control center because The Midnight Express will face the Rock'n'Roll Express in a Scaffold Match. Jim Cornette's really mad about this season (on-screen and probably off-screen too). Jim Cornette threatens to sue over this Scaffold Match. Putting the Midnight Express in matches that actually won't be any good, it's a Starrcade Tradition!

Match 8: Tully and Arn vs Keith Steinborn and Alan Martin. Tully and Arn haven't signed for Starrcade. Keith Steinborn eats a Spinebuster and Arn beats him with the Gourdbuster.

No interview, just Tony plugging tickets for Nassau County Coliseum. Which is a month away.

March 9: Mike Rotundo vs Alan Martin. Hey waitaminute. (HistoryOfWWE says that Ricky Nelson was in the match against Tully and Arn, not Alan Martin). The graphic says Rotundo, David says Rotunda. Rotunda's intensity is noted and he wins with an airplane spin. The smirk on his face is noted. Somebody's turning heel soon!

The New Breed join Tony at the table. Chris Champion has words for the Midnight Express and Jim Cornette. Sean Royal is also talking some trash and he thinks that the the MX is lucky to not be facing the New Breed in a scaffold match (well, for more than one reason, i'm sure). These two are kinda on the same astral plane as the Ultimate Warrior for coherent promos.

Match 10: The Rock'n'Roll Express vs Larry Stephens and Tony Suber. Ricky's still taped up. We hear some more about the scaffold match. Robert pins Suber with a double team move (Gibson running bodypress with Morton behind Suber to trip him)
Rock'n'Roll join Tony to talk about the Scaffold Match. Starrcade 86 didn't finish the job on Cornette's knee cartilage, so we gotta try it again at Starrcade 87.

Match 11: Midnight Express vs Italian Stallion and George South. Wow, they're bringing out the really good jobbers for this one. Jim Cornette joins the table to do his thing. MX really enjoying double-term moves with one team member jumping onto George South as he's perched on the ropes. Bobby gets the pin with the Rocket Launcher.

JJ Dillon and Lex Luger join Tony. Lex has words for Dusty Rhodes and yeah, I think he's a good heel promo here.

Eddie Gilbert joins Tony with both TV title belts. Eddie is trying his best to push a NWA vs UWF thing that literally nobody else around here actually wants to do.

Match 12: Ricky Santana vs Thunderfoot #2. Just when you thought there'd be no more enhancement matches because this show is almost over. Ricky Santana wins quick with a Thesz Press off the top rope.
Ricky Santana joins David for some words. He hypes Starrcade and then starts speaking Spanish.

And that's the show! Only 4 more of these episodes until Starrcade 87. We're all-in on the hype train for Starrcade (and Nassau Coliseum). Presumably the next 4 weeks will have something happen at lease once or twice.