Pre-show notes:
– Click here to watch this week’s episode on WWE Network. If you’d like to read about previous episodes, check out the WCW Monday Nitro tag page.
– In case you missed it, the retro Best and Worst of WWF Monday Night Raw column has jumped ahead to 1996. We missed last week’s episode because of the passing of Dusty Rhodes, so this Friday we’ll double up.
– With Spandex is on Twitter, so follow it. Follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. You can also follow me on Twitter.
– Share the column! The shows are 19 years old and there’s not a real Internet hankering for jokes about Ice Train, so if you’d like to see them continue, share them around.
And now, the vintage Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro for June 2, 1996.
Best: The Shark Is Not A Fish And He Will Kill You Over Some Hair
On last week’s episode, in-fighting amongst the Dungeon Of Doom — now basically useless without a cartoonish goober Hulk Hogan to rage against — led to Jimmy Hart and Big Bubba Rogers jumping The Shark (cough), beating him up and shaving off half his hair. This week, a humiliated Shark drops a bombshell: he’s not actually named “The Shark” at all! Please, ladies, stop clutching your pearls. His name is “John Tenta,” and he’s refusing to even out the insulting haircut because of fishish rage.
Bubba has been carrying around Shark’s hair in a big clump for like a week now, which is weird, and Tenta beats him up and sends him fleeing. That’s basically the opening match. The highlight is easily Bubba’s Confederate Railroad shirt, which he either got from Jesus or Mama. He should’ve dumped Jimmy Hart and gotten a valet in a cocktail dress and a Dolly Parton wig. Joking aside, it’s remarkable how long pro wrestling held on to Confederate iconography, even indirectly. Can you imagine a guy with Confederate flags on his trunks showing up in WWE today? Imagine Finn Bálor crawling out at NXT TakeOver dressed like a monstered-out Robert E. Lee.
Worst: Danger, Danger! High Voltage!
Meet HIGH VOLTAGE, an ELECTRIFYING team in discarded neon Steiner starter onesies. High Voltage is “KAOS” and “RUCKUS,” although they’d eventually run into a fifth grader with better ideas for names and become “Kenny Kaos” and “Robbie Rage.” Say what you will about WWE’s developmental system before Full Sail NXT and how generic everyone who came out of it looked and sounded, but man, the WCW Power Plant is responsible for 30 percent of the world’s blandest, most forgettable hunks. Hunks of what I haven’t decided yet.
(It took me two seasons of watching Game of Thrones before I realized who Ramsay Bolton reminds me of. Kenny Kaos. Look at him. You see it, right?)
Best: Babyfaces Of Fear
High Voltage goes up against Meng and the Barbarian, who are not supposed to be babyfaces. They’re supposed to be EVIL ISLAND TYPES, and they’ve got skull-and-crossbones on their tights for anyone who missed it. Dude does a finisher called “The Mafia Kick.” They’re five seconds away from having the RUDE TO GRANDMAS SUPLEX. Still, when they’re up against the incompetent pansexuality of High Voltage, they are beloved. The crowd cheers for everything they do, so much so that The Barbarian starts pausing between moves to raise his arms and get pops. It’s … kinda great.
It makes me want to go back and find a way to book the Faces as faces all the time, because nobody’s brave enough to make it work. Every face team of color has to be jokey and happy, like the Usos. If you’re a Pacific Islander tag team, you have to high five each other and smile a bunch and have funny catchphrases. WHEN WE SAY UCE, Y’ALL SAY OH! How about when I say “Meng and the Barbarian,” you say “it’s okay to cheer for them because they’re awesome and could kill you in real life?” I think the wrestling world could stand to be a little less safe, and a little more into gawking at the world’s weirdest, toughest people. Andre the Giant didn’t become a legend because of his sassy t-shirts, you know? Nobody liked Hulk Hogan because he was friendly, they liked him because he was a living M.U.S.C.L.E. character and iconic as shit.
Best: PHRASING
LEX LUGER! WE’RE GONNA GET HUNGRY AND LEAVE NO MAN UNTESTED!
Best: Disco Inferno’s Priorities
The next match is Sgt. Craig Pittman vs. the Disco Inferno, and it’s what you’d expect. I love the finish, though, which is Disco wildly tapping out when he’s about to get put into an armbar. Not when he’s in it, but when he realizes he’s about to be. Pittman just kinda grabs his wrist and yells OOOOOOH and Disco taps out. His excuse? “I wouldn’t be able to do this anymore [does disco face wave] or this [does disco point] or this [touches hair].” Disco Inferno seriously believes that if he wrestles too much, he will not be able to comb his hair. He makes Tyler Breeze seem like Dean Malenko.
Speaking of the disco face wave …
Best: This Lady
Nailed it.
Worst: WWE Raw 2015 Presents This Jim Duggan/Steven Regal Match
The trials and tribulations of cheatin’-ass Hacksaw Jim Duggan continue.
He faces Lord Steven Regal, who is in the middle with an issue with Sting. Regal wants a shot at Sting and he wants him at his best, so that when he beats him on pay-per-view, the WCW fans will notice and appreciate him. Jim Duggan’s story is, “I’m barely literate and if I put Scotch tape on my hands it turns them into sledgehammers.” He’s a total bastard. It takes three Bluebloods showing up to curb the Duggan cheating. Three of them.
Duggan goes for the 2×4 and tries to literally attack Regal with a plank of wood. Earl Robert Eaton and Jeeves distract the referee so Squire Dave Taylor can sneak around the other side and steal it away, because Duggan is basically Sloth from The Goonies and you have to just order him around. With his weapon taken away, Duggan of course starts taping up his fists and punching everyone in sight, including Eaton. That allows Regal to roll Duggan up from behind off the distraction WITH A HANDFUL OF TIGHTS and get a desperation win. RAW ROLLS ON WHEN WE COME BACK.
I’m sitting here trying to figure out why Duggan was so protected. Regal’s on a roll and he’s being built for a pay-per-view match against STING for Christ’s sakes. Can’t Regal just go over Jim f*cking Duggan? Why does he need interference in triplicate, two foreign objects AND the tights? It’s JIM DUGGAN. You could hand Duggan a math book and poke him in the open eye and pin him.
Best: Garrett From Community Loves Jim Duggan
(I’m gonna cheer for England.)
Best: These Taskmaster/Chris Benoit Matches Are About To Be The Best
“The best” of course meaning “objectively, and mostly in my memory, and only if you ignore all the other stuff.”
The issues between the Dungeon of Doom and the younger, mouthier Four Horsemen have come to a head and The Taskmaster’s got a match against Benoit at the Great American Bash. To prep (and show he’s not a weird, helpless midget who exists to not beat Hulk Hogan), Sullivan TROUNCES another terrible Power Plant graduate, Prince Iaukea. If you don’t remember Prince Iaukea, imagine if Superfly Jimmy Snuka and Carlito were the same dude. WCW shoved Iaukea into matches from here until the company folded, and he never had a good one. The highlight of his entire run was getting called “Prince Naki-maki” by Chris Jericho and having his entrance skirt stolen.
The best part of the match is the post-match interview, in which Sullivan tries to address what’s happening in WCW and accidentally figures out the nWo before it happens. He says there are two major issues affecting WCW: the “war,” which he knows nothing about, and the impending return of Hulk Hogan. He scares Jimmy Hart by saying Hogan will be back soon to destroy his enemies and cause havoc for everyone, and he’s right … he just assumes it’s babyface havoc, and doesn’t connect the dots. A supplemental Best goes to Jimmy Hart for his “take off my glasses to show worry or surprise” move, which always makes me laugh.
Best: Whoa Wait What
The best match on a show full of not-very-good matches is a 20 minute (!!) tag match pairing Ric Flair and Arn Anderson against The Rock n’ Roll Express, making their Nitro debut and return to WCW something like 10 years past their prime. The thing about the Rock n’ Rolls, though, is that prime is a flat circle. Internet Police Officer Scott Keith once described their matches with the Midnight Express as being “like pizza” … even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good. Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson were so instrumental in creating and perfecting the southern tag style — what most wrestling fans consider a “good tag team match,” where a face in peril takes the heat leading to a hot tag and then they switch and do it again — that at age 60 they could sleepwalk through a match and still make it worth watching. They don’t really do anything, but they know when to do it.
Flair and Arn adjust to the style like riding a bike, and we get 20 minutes of something I wouldn’t call a great match, but at least half of a pizza. Being around Morton and Gibson and the increasingly Ghoulish Flair makes Arn look like a spry 20-year-old. The finish is your standard ’96 WCW thing, with the referee wandering off to check on something and Woman raking Robert Gibson’s eyes, allowing Arn to DDT him and the Horsemen to steal the pin.
As a totally unnecessary aside, the Rock n’ Rolls were my very favorite wrestlers when I was little bitty. Here’s me taking mark photos with them when I was six, because I have always been me:
Yes, Robert Gibson has always been that wall-eyed. I still don’t totally understand what made them heartthrobs. Maybe it was that Reba McEntire thing, where she was the undisputed hottest woman in country music for years and then whoops, Faith Hill and Shania Twain showed up and Reba was instantly a grandma. The NWA was pretty uniformly ugly, if you think about it. Aside from like, Magnum T.A., everybody was rough looking. Dusty and Flair were both horrifying caricatures of humanity, but they were the best f*cking ever at their jobs, so you didn’t care. Wrestling wasn’t about how great everybody looked back then. You didn’t have the Internet condescending on Kevin Owens for wrestling in a shirt or whatever because the 1983 version of the Internet was getting drunk as shit and screaming at people over a railing in Greensboro.
So yeah, maybe the RNRs were just great at their jobs. They weren’t necessarily teen heartthrobs or Dynamite Kid-level athletes, but they played the roles of those things well, and their timing and enthusiasm were perfect. I spent more than one Halloween wrapping bandanas around my legs.
Best: Bobby Heenan, All-Madden Team Member
After Flair and Arn cheat to win, they gather around Flair’s weird hallway dinner table and discuss the possibility of Bobby ‘The Brain’ Heenan managing them against Kevin Greene and Mongo McMichael at The Great American Bash. Flair mostly sings old-timey songs about how much he wants to f*ck the women and makes the worst faces you’ve ever seen.
Heenan eventually wanders over with a trophy he received for being named a coach on the All-Madden Team — a position that required no actual coaching, I might add — and says that he won’t manage Flair and Arn at The Bash, he’ll coach them. The best part (and maybe the best part of the show) is that when he says he won’t manage them, Flair’s response is WHAT ABOUT THE GIRLS, WHAT ABOUT THE GIRLS?? Ric Flair is super into MILFs being f*cked right now.
What are Mongo and Mean Kevin Green doing right now, you probably aren’t asking?
Best: GAME PLAN
They’re in the back holding footballs like characters from The Room, drawing stick figures on a dry erase board. Greene comes up with the idea of Mongo using a chop block as move and Mongo likes that, but Greene won’t stop screaming about how much they need to “penetrate.” WE GOTTA PENETRATE THE LINE OF SCRIMMAGE AND THEN PENETRATE THE OTHER HALF OF THE RING AND THEN PENETRATE OUR OPPONENTS! Mongo explains that in tag team wrestling you gotta stay out of your opponent’s corner, baby, and Greene is so concerned about the penetration he starts eating a not-phallic-at-all Slim Jim. They aren’t getting anywhere. Greene just has to get that penetration, you guys.
Mongo realizes that they need a coach, and because Slim Jims are around, they announce out-loud in front of cameras with nothing confirmed that they’re gonna go get him in their corner. Heenan’s response is to offer them his All-Madden trophy if they keep Savage away. I think he’s probably more worried about the penetration, but can’t say it.
Worst: Fire & Ice Get Buried
The next two matches are garbage and kinda go together, so I’m lumping them into one thing.
The first is Giant vs. Ice Train, which should be this incredible forgotten classic where two guys who are extremely athletic for their size throw bombs for a few minutes until one of them drops. Instead, Ice Train gets tripped up by Jimmy Hart while stretching against the ropes in the first seconds of the match, gets distracted and gets chokeslammed. That’s the entire match. Big E could’ve done better than Ice Train and he was 10 when this match aired. Train’s partner Scott Norton runs out to help and gets chokeslammed too, because two massive, super strong guys who could beat the shit out of the Steiner Brothers can’t handle this one, really tall green dude.
The second match is Scott Norton vs. Hugh Morrus. The story is that Norton is hurt from Giant’s attack, so Humorous is showing up to pick the bones. Okay, scroll up a little and look at the picture. That’s the finish. It’s supposed to be Hugh Morrus going up for a moonsault thinking he’s got an easy win, flipping backwards into Norton, Norton catching him in mid-air and powerslamming him. On paper, that’s an amazing spot. In practice, Hugh Morrus is f*cking terrible, undershoots the moonsault, only gets half caught and they both kinda fall over. Norton punches him in the face three times, and that’s the finish. There’s an overwhelming feeling of, “welp, never trying THAT again.”
If you were worried this wasn’t enough content about how the Giant is great, stay tuned for our main event!
Worst: ALL GIANT EVERYTHING
The Steiner Brothers and Sting and Lex Luger have an issue. Sting and Scotty Steiner wrestled last week, and when Scott tried to suplex Sting on the floor, Luger ran over and booted him in the stomach to stop it. That caused a fist fight between Luger and Rick Steiner, and a backstage interview in which Scotty said he was gonna jack Luger in the ring and get hot. You remember that part. Anyway, there’s some heat between the teams and it appears to be building to something, so we have Luger and Sting against The Steiners in the main event.
If you were wondering what it was building to, it’s the Giant wandering back out and nothing mattering.
For absolutely no reason whatsoever, Giant shows up and gives Rick Steiner history’s worst chokeslam on the arena floor. It’s like, up about a foot, a gentle landing on flat feet and then both of them tumbling over. It’s the Hugh Morrus moonsault onto Scott Norton of chokeslams. Giant starts beating up everyone and the ref calls for the bell, so Sting, Luger and Scott Steiner put aside their differences and create a united front. Giant leaves roaring, and that’s six guys he’s attacked in the last half hour of Nitro. I’m surprised the Scott Hall stuff at the end didn’t feature The Giant knocking them all onto the announcer table and tipping it over like a cow.
Best: YEAH HE IS
Look, Smithers! GARBO is coming!
Best/Worst: YOU WHANNA WORE?
The final segment of the show is the return of Canadian Tuxedo Scott Hall, who reiterates that should WCW want a war, they’ve got one. Bobby Heenan flees and Bischoff acts upset, so Sting shows up as the first guy to confront what would eventually be revealed as the New World Order. This becomes important later. Sting goes full Axl Rose on Hall (“You know where you are? YOU’RE IN THE JUNGLE, BABY.”) and slaps him in the face. This is the last time Hall would show up alone.
What’s funny about watching the interview now is Bischoff himself. Watch his face when Scott Hall’s talking. He’s mouthing along with him, reading his dialogue.
There’s no way they did it on purpose, but it’s our first clue that Eric isn’t on our side. He’s the one orchestrating this invasion, so he knows what Hall’s supposed to say. Otherwise he’s just a bad actor who isn’t paying attention to what he’s doing on TV because he thinks we’re all looking at Hall, but you know, the explanation is better.
Next week, we look at the adjective.
