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Effing pandas!
Get ready for two solid hours of wrestling commentary!
The first half of our show is all about the golden era of the World Wrestling Federation. This is the place that gave us grown men who refer to themselves as bulldogs, junkyard dogs, snakes, cats, birds, dragons, gorillas, and weasels! This ain’t no wildlife fund. This is the real WWF!
The second half is our look at the Monday Night Wars between WWF and WCW. Two juggernauts square off in one of the most brutal ratings wars in television history. In the end, the rivalry is almost literally thrown away as WCW goes out of its way to fail again and again. And if that wasn’t enough, WWE pisses on the corpes of its former rival by first buying the company and then destroying everything that anyone ever loved about it.
The ultimate showdown of two giants that ended in a whimper.
Topics covered:
Verne Gagna’s ego
Hulk Hogan’s even bigger ego
DOOKY!
ARM BAR!
The Big Gold Belt
The Dirty Pair and the WWWA
We got pyrotechnics!
The evil twin referee
Black Saturday
Bobby Heenan
Scary Sherri
Dusty and Virgil
Terra Rizin
The KISS Demon
The Finger Poke of DOOM
The West Texas Rednecks
WCW snatches fail from the jaws of success
JT fails at trivia
This was actually fun to listen to.
I agree. More enjoyable than I imagined it would be. I watched the WWF “cartoon era” religiously as a kid. It was a big deal when I was in grade school. I remember WrestleMania III being HUGE! Kids were talking about it at school for days.
Just as you guys bring back the memories by talking about some of my favorite animated shows as a child, you definitely took me back talking about the wrestlers, matches and story lines. It was so much fun listening to the show. I’m surprised how much of this I remembered. Macho Man was always my favorite. The commentators were so much fun to listen to as well. I’m glad you covered that aspect of wrestling because it really was one of the reasons wrestling was so much fun.
You know, Ben kept using that term “the cartoon era,” but I prefer calling it the Golden Era of WWF. I described it to him once as being like a huge cartoon, but that’s not really what I was going for as an overall theme. Wrestling during this era was very much a product of the 80s. Bigger than life and balls to the walls.
There’s a reason why guys like Hogan, Flair, Warrior, Savage, and DiBiase still hold onto our imaginations after all these years, and I think a lot of this has to do with how clearly defined from one another. They were real life characters. They were so distinct, that you could imitate their voices, and anyone around you would immediately know who they were.
I don’t get that from today’s WWE. There’s really nobody today that’s anywhere near as fun as the classic guys.
I’ll have to admit that I did enjoy this episode. The only group that I wanted to hear discussed was Degeneration X. That was the mega-group that the WWF featured for some years. Plus, a part of its first incarnation, Rick Rude, was the very person who supplied Russo and Bischoff with the Monday Night Raw script when he jumped over to WCW. Apparently Rude (who was working on a pay-per-appearance basis) was pissed over the Montreal Screwjob, signed with WCW, and became the first person to appear on both Nitro and Raw on the same night.
Of course, I then went on to become a fan of the second version of DX, especially the tag team The New Age Outlaws. I mostly watched wrestling during the soap-opera and attitude eras. I do not watch any wrestling nowadays, mainly due to my only have basic cable.
You know, I actually had a bunch of trivia questions, and one of them was about Rick Rude appearing on both shows on the same night. He is, in fact, the ONLY wrestler to appear on both shows. (I’m not counting Shane and Vince on the last Nitro, because that was a simulcast.) Rick Rude was legitimately on both shows, in both rings, on the same night. No one else ever did that.
The best part about that not only was Raw pre-recorded, but it actually went to air a full hour after Nitro started. So Rude took advantage of this by shaving his beard off between appearances. Nitro went on air at 8 EST with a clean-shaven Rick Rude in the ring with the nWo. An hour later, he’s on Raw with beard, introducing DX.
Another trivia question I had was about the Cruiserweight division, specifically something that happened on WCW that not many people know about. There was only one wrestler who held a WCW title and a WWF title simultaneously during the height of the Monday Night Wars. That man was the Ultimo Dragon.
When Ultimo Dragon signed a deal with WCW, he was holding an eight-belt unified championship, known as the J-Crow. One of those belts was the WWF Cruiserweight Championship, which had existed exclusively in Japan for years. WCW very quickly arranged for Ultimo Dragon to win the WCW Cruiserweight Championship, thus enabling him to hold a WWF and WCW title at the same time.
Of course, days later, Dragon dropped the J-Crown to Jushin Thunder Lyger, and WWF quickly moved their Light Heavyweight title to North America, preventing that from ever happening again. Still, it was kind of cool.
Then again, any discussions about the WCW cruiserweights (and Lucha Libre ) is not complete without mentioning my favorite: La Parka, “the chairman” of WCW. The Mexican lucha libre wrestlers were fun to watch in their heyday, but La Parka was in a class all his own.