Previously on the Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro: Halloween Havoc ’96 happened, and everything changed. Rowdy Roddy Piper showed up and put the fear of God in Hogan, and the following Nitro showed the segment again in its entirety. You know, in case you missed it. Also, Sting is now full-blown Crow Sting, and he’s sorta drifting in and out of frame to make WCW’s heroes feel weird about themselves.
Click here to watch this week’s episode on WWE Network. You can catch up with all the previous episodes on the Best and Worst of Nitro tag page, and you totally should. Programming note: We’re doubling up on vintage Nitro reports this week, so check back here tomorrow (Thursday) for the next edition.
As for now, please scroll through for the vintage Best and Worst of WCW Monday Nitro for November 4, 1996.
Best: Rebuff Bagwell
At some point — read: 1997 — WCW stopped caring about why characters were face or heel, and started having them turn by changing their shirts. That was it. They’d be normal, but then they’d put on an nWo shirt, and that’d make them evil. You can see it in the way characters interact with one another already. If you’re in WCW, your only real reason for not wanting to join the nWo is “WCW.” “I’m WCW!” It doesn’t really mean anything. You just are or aren’t wearing a shirt.
This week’s show pre-dates that phenomenon with the beginning of two great character alignment changes; one from good to bad, the other from bad to good.
The first is Marcus Alexander Bagwell, who as you may know has spent his entire WCW career as, for lack of better phrasing, a rookie with ruthless aggression. He always came across as a gentle, handsome southerner who at his best was a more serviceable Jim Powers. He has a million dollar smile and the personality of a block of wood, so they put him in an endless string of tag teams with similar character types. Scotty Riggs, The Patriot, Lex Luger, and so on. He’s been a dirt-boring babyface forever, and this episode really kickstarts the heel turn they’d been foreshadowing.
He opens the show against Brad Armstrong in a match elevated by the fact that the crowd is crazy into everything. Bagwell gets frustrated in the middle of the match and slaps Armstrong in the face, and you’d think Goldberg just Jackhammered Hulk Hogan. He tries to go heel with it and do sarcastic American Males claps, but the crowd’s like YEAH NO LET’S DO WHAT THE WRESTLE MAN IS DOING, CLAP CLAP NYAH HA HEE HEE. Bags ends up getting the win by getting the higher percentage of a crossbody attempt head-on collision.
Later in the show, Scotty Riggs challenges Dean Malenko for the Cruiserweight Championship. If you’re wondering, most of the match is the announcers being all, “Scotty Riggs must have lost some weight because dude is barely a Cruiserweight, this is bullsh*t.” It’s just a means to an end, though, as the finish is part 2 in the night’s epic Bagwell turn. Riggs goes to the top rope to hit a 225+ pound splash or whatever, and Malenko shoves him off to the outside. Riggs takes a nasty bump off the apron and hits the floor, so a frustrated Bagwell just picks him up by his hair and tights and rolls him back in. Riggs immediately gets pinned.
What’s great about this is that they’re actively giving us reasons why Bagwell would turn, and want to throw in with the nWo. He’s a good wrestler, but his career’s on a bit of a downward slide, and he’s struggling to beat guys like Brad Armstrong. That’s Hugh Morrus bad. He’s taking those frustrations out in places that don’t warrant it, like in Riggs’ singles matches or in tags where he could probably win if he’d pull his head out of his ass and stop sabotaging himself. Remember that moment on a previous episode where Bagwell could’ve broken up a pin, but he hesitated and they awkwardly lost a match? That’s the rub.
As a reason for being seduced by the dark side, it beats the hell out of “some jerks I know gave me a free shirt.”
Best: There Are Great Face Turns, Too
The second is Diamond Dallas Page. On last week’s episode, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash showed up in the crowd to cheer him on, causing the announce team to immediately insist that they were recruiting him, and that he’d sold his soul or whatever. Pay no attention to that legendary company man you made go goth and hang out in rafters because you constantly doubted him and called him a traitorous liar.
Anyway, Page wrestles Ice Train, which is quickly becoming a 2015 WWE feud. They wrestle all the damn time. Late in the match, Page gets knocked to the outside and Nick Patrick suspiciously follows him out. That leaves the ring open for a surprise attack from Hall and Nash, who whomp the sh*t out of Train with their Tag Team Championships. Patrick is (spoiler alert) (not really) the nWo referee, so he purposely checks on Page for like two straight minutes and misses the entire thing. Ice Train seems totally fine no-selling repeated belt shots from two of the biggest stars in wrestling and sorta shouts at them from the ring until Page recovers, hits a Diamond Cutter and gets the win.
What’s great about this is that Nick Patrick missed the action on purpose, but Page didn’t. In fact, Patrick sorta inadvertently prevented Page from seeing Hall and Nash interfere on his behalf at all, so when he got back in the ring, he just took advantage of Train’s lack of focus and won the match. The announce team hell confirms that this means DDP is nWo fuh-fuh-fuh-for life, but they’re missing a key part of the story. More on that next week.
Worst: Jeff Jarrett Is A Dork
So, uh, that’s all the good stuff on the show. Sorry!
You know what makes me feel like I’m in the Impact Zone? Watching Mike Tenay interview Jeff Jarrett. It’s like those pictures of Keanu Reeves that claim he’s an immortal vampire.
Jarrett starts cutting a promo about how he’s assumed leadership of the Four Horsemen, by-proxy leadership of WCW as a whole, will single-handedly (or four-handedly, I guess) destroy the New World Order and also kick Sting’s ass — Sting, who is up in the rafters listening to him right now — for dropping the ball. WCW Jeff Jarrett is maybe the most spectacularly tone-deaf babyface ever. It’s so bad that Chris Benoit and Steve McMichael are like, “hey, nobody said Jeff Jarrett was the leader of anything, he’s an idiot, nobody approved this.” They take over the interview, set the record straight, and leave. When they’re walking away, Jarrett gets back on the mic and continues his promo.
If the point of this was “make everyone listening want to set Jeff Jarrett on fire,” mission accomplished.
Worst: Ix-Nay On The Ife-Way
Speaking of Benoit, he has a fun match against Hector Guerrero built around the idea that Hector is lucha libre as f*ck, and Benoit has to deal with it. It’s great watching Benoit try to keep pace with this guy as he throws weird arm drags, rolls away slash into everything and does awkwardly backwards planchas to the outside. To put it in a modern context, imagine if Kevin Owens went to Lucha Underground and got wackily headscissored every time he tried to throw a punch. Also great: Hector looks like Eddie Guerrero from the future, especially when he walks to the ring wearing a silver cape.
I’m giving it a Worst, though, because it continues the most weirdly uncomfortable angle ever, aka “Kevin Sullivan books his own divorce.” It’s furthered by these unsettling picture-in-picture promos where Sullivan says the vaguest, most threatening things he can. The announce team will be like, “Sullivan and Benoit had some great matches, let’s hear from Kevin Sullivan,” and Sullivan is like, “she’s whispering sweet nothings in your ear, but she used to whisper those same sweet nothings in mine, and now I’m going to for real kill you both, you’re f*cking dead.” I’m paraphrasing. If I was looking back on this without all the real-world stuff that happened with it, I might have a different perspective. As it stands, my response is “nervous whistling,” followed by me scrolling down to write jokes about literally anything else.
Best/Worst: This WCW Women’s Championship Tournament Is Already Crazy
Remember when Madusa threw the WWF Women’s Championship in the garbage and declared that WCW was where the Big Girls played? Well, in the 11 months since that happened — Jesus Christ — we’ve seen a match to decide whether a racist plantation owner will stay with his wife or his mistress and a racist match about motorcycles, and that’s pretty much it.
On this week’s show, however, Tony Schiavone debuts the new WCW Women’s Championship and announces a tournament to crown the first champ. That starts tonight, with Madusa (naturally) going one-on-one with “Reina Jubuki.” What’s weird about that, you might ask? Well, Reina Jubuki is Akira Hokuto’s CMLL gimmick. Akira Hokuto is also in the tournament, and according to commentary, Jubuki and Hokuto have the same international accomplishments. Also, it’s very clearly Akira Hokuto. Like, imagine if they had a Cruiserweight title tournament and Malenko wrestled Mr. JL in round one and Jerry Lynn in the finals. Also, imagine that in the 1990s, WCW could find so few female wrestlers that they made the ones they could find work double duty.
So yeah, Madusa runs through the same woman she eventually faces in the finals — I’d say spoiler alert, but even WCW didn’t care about the WCW Women’s Championship — and gets stared down by ZERO, the alter ego of legendary joshi star Chigusa Nagayo. She’s managed by Sonny Onoo, because in the 1990s WCW’s mission statement was, “make sure everyone knows Japanese people are evil.” Just all of them. WCW booking sheets were written on the backs of 1940s propaganda posters.
Amazingly, this is one of two WCW Women’s Championships launched via an international tournament in the span of five months.
Worst: Nick Patrick Still Doesn’t Need A Mouthpiece
If you’ve seen any of the other “Nick Patrick has pretended to be injured for months and WCW losers try to call him on it” segments, especially the ones with Patrick’s wholly unnecessary lawyer present, you’ve seen this one. I have no idea why they let Patrick be one of the best and funniest talkers in the company for a month and then yanked away the microphone, unless somebody was threatened by Patrick’s natural, proto-Kenny Powers charisma.
Here, the highlight is Teddy Long calling Patrick a “playa hater.” Don’t say things you can’t take back, Ted. Patrick’s lawyer throws shade at Jericho for being the son of a “goon” — no, not that one — and reminds Teddy that the most crooked referee in the history of WCW is Teddy Long. I mean, Tommy Young was in the pocket of the Four Horsemen, but he never tried to steal a mentally challenged man’s teddy bear.
Worst: The Curse Of Harlem Heat Continues
As regular readers know, the words “Harlem” and “Heat” in the same sentence must be followed by the phrase, “sh*tty finish.” That goes for their singles matches, too.
On last week’s episode, Lex Luger sorta wandered away from a match with Booker T because Sting showed up in the crowd. Sting had been in the crowd the entire episode, but Luger sorta sensed him and meandered out into the crowd to wrangle him. This is the rematch, and Colonel Parker is here to make sure it ends as stupidly as possible. Booker’s about to win, in that way Booker did for years before anybody actually let him win, and Parker gets too excited. He pops up on the apron and starts dancing around, so Booker grabs him by the jacket. Luger rolls him up from behind and gets three, and once again Colonel Parker’s existence has caused a Rube Goldbergian chain of events to unfold that make Booker’s life a living hell.
The good news is that this has actually become a story now and goes somewhere, instead of being an annoying thing I have to point out every week. The bad news is “Lex Luger’s wrestling.”
Worst: The Main Event Is Eric Bischoff Being Bad At Negotiations, And A Halloween Havoc Replay (Again)
Seriously, the main event of this week’s show is two things:
1. Eric Bischoff taking one of those Lee Marshall 1-800-COLLECT road trips out to Oregon to try to sign Rowdy Roddy Piper. He wants Piper vs. Hogan, assures his that the fans want Piper vs. Hogan, and says he’s pretty sure Piper wants Piper vs. Hogan kinda sorta maybe. There’s like five minutes of Bischoff saying “I’m talking to Piper’s management and I hope something happens” in as many ways as he can.
2. A replay of Piper’s return at Halloween Havoc. If you’ll remember, this is what ended last week’s show, too. Hogan shows up in the arena after we’re done reliving two weeks of rambling madness and says that he was just pretending to be intimidated by Roddy, and that Piper’s just a sissy in a skirt. He drops the skirt line a few times, eventually upgrading it to “mini-skirt.” Can we go back to the Eric Bischoff graphic?
Next Week: The show ends with video of Roddy Piper, and Hulk Hogan talking. I’m not kidding.
