Previously on the vintage Best and Worst of WWF Monday Night Raw: Fake Diesel and Fake Razor Ramon continue their fake invasion of the fake fighting show. Also, Sid is invincible, The Undertaker and Mankind are spending weeks digging graves they won’t actually get to use in their upcoming in-arena Buried Alive match, and Jeff Jarrett — a pro wrestler who also wants to be a country singer — has been outed as a “fraud.” He didn’t really sing the song he said he sang! Let’s harp on that on the show where people aren’t actually punching and kicking each other!
Click here to watch this week’s episode on WWE Network, then scroll through for the Best and Worst of WWF Monday Night Raw for October 14, 1996. Stay strong, we’re almost to the good stuff.
Worst: Vader Is Hurt And Nobody’s Here
And now, one of the lowest rated Raws in The History Of Our Sport.
As you know, this is from the era of Raw where they’d tape a ton of episodes at once. What that means is that by the time you get to the final episode, the arena’s half empty, the people who stayed are burned the hell out from hours and hours of terrible 1996 Raws and the wrestlers are either injured or about to be. The previous set of tapings had Ahmed Johnson competing in a battle royal with an exploded kidney, and this set has poor Vader stumbling around a 5-minutes-to-midnight match against Phineas Godwinn at 10% speed because he’s hurt and tired.
This week’s show is all about Sid, because he’s next in line for the WWF Championship and needs to look like the world’s wettest, most unsinkable battleship. He shows up to cause a distraction in the opening match, but it goes nowhere because even 10% Vader can annihilate Phineas f*cking Godwinn. The second (and only other) talking point of the episode is that Jim Ross is being “replaced” by Vince McMahon next week per the orders of “executive producer Kevin Dunn,” namedropped on TV for (I believe) the first time. If you aren’t “smart” enough to have a built-in hatred for Dunn, imagine him as the Emperor Palpatine behind Vince’s Darth Vader. The Dick Cheney behind Vince’s George W. Bush. He’s the guy you should actually hate for all the stuff that pisses you off when you’re a decent person and make an investment in the product.
Worst: Giving Away The Punchline
Speaking of stuff that pisses us off, this week’s show features the closest thing we get to a payoff for the “Jerry Lawler won’t stop making jokes about Jake Roberts’ shoot alcoholism” angle. If you haven’t been following along with the weekly recaps, here’s the quick version: Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts used to be an alcoholic and a drug addict, but he found Jesus and beat it. Lawler is a jerk and purports that Jake has fallen off the wagon and is lying to everybody. The idea’s supposed to be that Lawler’s full of sh*t and Jake’s a good dude, but Jake had actually fallen off the wagon in real life and was lying to everybody, so the whole thing became a shoot.
Lawler starts in with the Jake jokes again, and it’s so tired that the announce team just talks over it. Jake stumbles out for a match with a liquor bottle in hand, and Lawler is like HA I TOLD YOU. The joke is supposed to be that Roberts is only pretending to be drunk to get the jump on Lawler. We know this because they f*cking tell us, and the pre-match is Gorilla Monsoon showing up and Jake openly going “I’m totally fine, I’m pretending to be drunk so I can beat up Lawler, just play along.” And the announce team is even like “IN CASE YOU MISSED IT BEFORE THE COMMERCIAL BREAK, JAKE ROBERTS IS ACTUALLY FINE AND NOT DRUNK AND HE’S GONNA SURPRISE LAWLER.” It’s such a neutered-ass way to pull this off. Remember when Dean Malenko entered the Cruiserweight Battle Royal as Ciclope at Slamboree ’98 and unmasked to one of the biggest and best crowd reactions ever? Imagine how much worse it would’ve been if the announce team had spent the whole battle royal going, “I can’t wait to see Dean Malenko unmask and beat up Chris Jericho!”
So yeah, Roberts fakes drunk to catch Lawler with an instant DDT and pin him. After the match, he pours whiskey on Lawler’s face and tries to choke him to death with a boa constrictor. Constrict him to death? I don’t know.
The World Wrestling Federation, folks, where the only thing worse than bad breath is “a snake touched me without my consent.”
Worst: The Road Dogg Is Great At Country Music And Might Duet With A Major Country Star AND ALSO HE WAS IN WAR AND ALMOST DIED
We’re still balls-deep in the shiz-nit that is the “Real Double J” story, with country singing pro wrestler Jeff Jarrett being outed as a fraud and replaced by country singing pro wrestler Jesse James. The only difference is that Jarrett wrestled, and James has spent every Raw since the reveal sitting in a studio singing 10 seconds of his one song.
This week, we join James and “his producer Jim Johnston” — composer of pretty much every WWE entrance theme you’ve ever liked — as they announce the RE-RELEASE of ‘With My Baby Tonight.’ This obsessive dedication to beating one song to death would eventually be passed on to The Real Double J’s protege K-Kwik, who would ask, “What’s up?” and keep asking it for a decade.
The best part is that they spend like five minutes interviewing The Roadie about how much he cares about the integrity of country music, and end it with “next week we’ll talk to him about how he WENT TO WAR.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t even a 1996 crowd care more about a war veteran than a blushy-faced guy cosplaying Tracy Lawrence and complaining about how the dude he used to help cheat at wrestling made country music promises he couldn’t keep?
Worst: Jim Ross Can’t Stop Burying Sunny
Sunny udrya, Sunny machka!
Sunny shows up to sit in on commentary and announces it via one of those giant exploding unveiling banners WWE uses for video game box covers and Russian flags. Jim Ross CANNOT HANDLE THIS, and spends every second she’s not talking throwing her under the bus. “She makes Pamela Anderson look like a HARVARD GRADUATE!” Keep in mind that Sunny’s never once acted “dumb” and that’s not part of her character. Also keep in mind that Jim Ross is LASER-FOCUSED on making her feel bad about herself, calling her a “jezebel” for even existing in his line of sight. He starts getting furious about how this is all a “waste of time” because it “has nothing to do with athleticism.” Jim Ross just stat through a Road Dogg interview about country music, Jake Roberts pouring booze on somebody’s face to set them up for a snake necklace and a Godwinns match. But no, this super hot blonde is the problem.
Best: Sunny And Kevin Kelly As A Metaphor For Life
Sunny and Kevin Kelly have great chemistry, because Sunny is an A+ chemistry set by herself and Kevin Kelly’s one of those homemade scarecrows you stuff with clothes and put on your porch at Halloween when there’s no hay available. She snuggles up to him and asks him how much money he makes, and when he says he “does okay,” she rebuffs him. When Kevin Kelly dies, this moment should be looped on his tombstone.
The match they call is Faarooq vs. Alex “The Pug” Porteau, which is less interesting than anything I’ve just written about. Faarooq murks him, and the commentary’s all about how he and Sunny have made an “amicable split” after she kinda-sorta got him hit in the face with a brick and cost him the Intercontinental Championship. She assures us that they’re still very good friends, and that she might still be around to help him from time to time. For those keeping score at home, this is the end of Sunny as a manager until she shows up with the Legion of Doom at WrestleMania 14. She spends about a year and a half wandering from show to show as WWE’s best approximation of Jenny McCarthy. It’s fine. As a kid who was in the throes of puberty when this happened, I was just kinda happy to see her standing onscreen somewhere. I didn’t care if there was a Smoking Gunns match happening in the background.
Best: That Jacket
See what I mean?
Anyway, we get an extended clip from Livewire where Faarooq calls in to sh*t-talk Ahmed Johnson, and Ahmed is wearing one of the greatest jackets I’ve ever seen. Holy SH*T, look at that thing. He looks like he rode to the show on Kaneda’s motorcycle.
The segment itself is fun, too, with Ahmed and Faarooq skipping the pleasantries and going straight for, “hey, I respect you and you’re tough, but the next time I see you I’m putting my foot in your ass.” Ahmed even does the “take off my earrings before a fight” thing with his mic. They start talking about racism, and Sunny and Todd Pettengill just kinda have to keep quiet in the background or be revealed as the country’s whitest man and woman. It rules. This is easily the best part of the episode, and it didn’t even happen on Raw.
Best/Worst: This Mr. Perfect Thing
So, semi-retired former Intercontinental Champion Mr. Perfect keeps showing up during Hunter Hearst Helmsley matches and stealing Helmsley’s “girls,” who are either groupies or escorts, I’m not sure. I don’t know how romance works in Connecticut. Triple H pretended to drug his wife and marry her against her will in a drive-thru wedding chapel as part of a plan to piss off her dad and eventually win a wrestling match, so maybe he doesn’t either.
But yeah, Perfect keeps showing up and stealing these ladies, so Helmsley develops a plan: he’s going to HANDCUFF A WOMAN TO THE RING POST so nobody can steal her. To her credit, she seems down for it and spends the entire match happily clapping in bondage. Again, no idea how uptight WASPy Connecticut love works. I imagine it’s a lot like Eyes Wide Shut, but all the dudes are dressed like Mozart.
Helmsley wrestles Freddie Joe Floyd with this poor lady shackled to the ring, and Mr. Perfect shows up on cue with the handcuff key. He’s perfect, remember? He steals her, Helmsley tries to stop him, and Perfect lays him out with a punch. These women might be sentient mannequins, as they don’t react positively or negatively to anything happening around them. They’re just here to stand near things and look nice! It’s a Barker’s Beauties situation, I think? So … okay, the payoff is supposed to be the in-ring return of Mr. Perfect on next week’s Raw, and a Perfect vs. Helmsley match. It doesn’t happen, but I’ll cover that when we get there. Suffice to say, this will all make sense in the end, and by “make sense” I mean “when does H start pointing at his dick so we can escape this mess.”
Best: Shawn Michaels Vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin, Or
Worst: Everything Else Is More Important Than Shawn Michaels Vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin
If you want the most vivid illustration of why the mid-1996 vision of Raw didn’t work, check out this week’s main event.
It’s Shawn Michaels vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin. Yes, the WrestleMania 14 main event that would usher in the Stone Cold Era and formally kick off one of the most successful periods in company history. This version has the upside of both a healthy Michaels and a pre-neck injury Stone Cold, who still has enough Stunning Steve in him to be considered a f*cking super-worker. We get the feeling-out process of a much longer match, and it’s fantastic, and then boooop, Vader runs out and causes a DQ. Imagine that Mankind vs. Michaels match from Mind Games if Vader had run it at minute 7 instead of minute 27.
To make things worse, the match features TWO (2) split-screen cutaways, where we talk at length to Vader and Sid about their upcoming match at Buried Alive. Austin and Michaels get to wrestle in a tiny screen to the right with the referee standing between them and the hard cam.
This is the state we were in. I don’t think WWF had a single moment as egregious as WCW’s Doomsday Cage at Uncensored ’96 to make them finally turn the ship around — fake Diesel and Razor Ramon were close — but the apathy and brutal adherence to the status quo made everything good feel like an accident.
The Good News
The good news is that Raw is live next week, and enough cool/important stuff happens that it at least APPEARS like they’re tired of Nitro pulling athletic tape out of its shorts and knocking them out every week. Bret returns to officially start the feud that would make Steve Austin, the Intercontinental Championship gets a main-event story and Jimmy Snuka gets a Hall of Fame induction.
Okay, not everything’s great. But we’re getting there.
