Previously on the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Is War: It was the night after WrestleMania XIV and Raw was absolutely PACKED, from the return of Syxx and the reformation of D-Generation X, to the debuts of Dan Severn and Kai En Tai, previews for Val Venis, and tons, tons more. Meanwhile WCW’s like, “uh, here’s Roddy Piper again?”
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And now, the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Is War for April 6, 1998.
Best: We Want The OLLLLLLD STONE COLD
If you didn’t think the Stone Cold Steve Austin and Vince McMahon segments could get better after last week’s master class, wait until you see Austin “go corporate” by putting on a suit and taking mark photos with Vince. The idea here is that Austin has decided to do things the “easy way” and go along with Vince following his arrest, and Vince has a personal victory in the palm of his hand and can’t let it be. It’s just not good enough.
It’s an extended version of what happened with Austin and Sgt. Slaughter, which makes it work. Austin doesn’t want to do what anybody says, but I think he knows there are some uncomfortable realities that come with being the WWF Champion and is prepared to live with them. Slaughter is like, “you have to wrestle tonight PER THE ORDERS OF VINCE MCMAHON.” Austin’s like, “all right, fine.” Then Slaughter keeps at it, adding, “AND IF YOU DON’T YOU’RE IN TROUBLE MISTER.” That is a bridge too far for Stone Cold. It’s the Alexander Hamilton “he looked at me like I was stupid/I’m not stupid” line. He SAID he’d do it, but now that you’ve insisted upon it, he’s going to kick your ass about it.
Vince does that here, to a much greater degree. He’s gotten Austin to show up in a suit, but gets mad at him for wearing a baseball cap with it. Instead of just asking Austin to take it off, he gets handsy, removes it himself, and tosses it into the crowd. Austin’s like, “that was a damn good hat,” and you can already see him getting ready to kick a man in the stomach, but Vince is a worse winner than he is a loser and keeps going. He’s mad that Austin wore his wrestling boots with the suit instead of the nice shoes he was provided, even though Austin explained they weren’t comfortable. Vince is like, YOU HAVE TO BREAK THEM IN. It’s so good. He keeps on and keeps on until Austin internally says “nuts to this” — as he was probably thinking all along — and does a cheesy publicity photo just to nutslap him and take a disposable camera shot of him standing there pigeon-toed with his hands on his balls.
It’s really great because you can assume that Austin was just going along with this to catch Vince unawares and embarrass him again, but you can also justify that yeah, he was actually trying to do some basic shit to be a better employee and wasn’t appreciated for his effort. All Stone Cold ever needed was a friend, and everyone who ever took an interest in him either manipulated him with it or developed an inferiority complex that caused them to turn on him.
Example:
Best: Jack Specific
Last week’s show ended with D-Generation X storming the old blue bar cage and beating the shit out of Cactus Jack and Chainsaw Charlie. Instead of cheering for Funk and Foley, the crowd chanted, “AUS-TIN! AUS-TIN! AUS-TIN!” That bothers Foley so much that he comes to the ring in full-on ECW promo mode, delivers a blistering speech about how disrespectful WWF crowds can be, and promises that we aren’t going to see Cactus Jack again for, “a long time.”
“… when Cactus Jack was laying, and I was conscious — and I could move, but it was very hard to move and I was not very far from being unconscious — and when I looked at Terry Funk, well, I heard something in my, in my ears that, I gotta tell you the truth, it kinda made me sick! That’s … there was an announcement being made, thanking the fans for coming to the WWF event, and they said something about Stone Cold Steve Austin people started chanting his name…
And it’s funny, because… when I came here two years ago and I was Mankind, there were always people saying, ‘Why don’t you just be Cactus Jack?’ Then when I came out in tie-dye and white boots they said, ‘You know, why don’t you just be Cactus Jack?’ Well, I gave you Cactus Jack… I GAVE YOU EVERY GODDAMN PIECE OF ENERGY I HAD … and when I was laying there, helpless, you chanted someone else’s name.”
The entire thing is chilling, real, and honest. One of Foley’s most underrated promos ever, and it sets up an unbelievable month of television to confirm that this was the Austin era. Because Michaels is gone, D-X is full of goobers now, and Austin needs someone to step up and validate him as champion. A hero is only as good as his villains, right?
Best: Ugh D-X Is The Worst
First of all, I know you want to say the bazooka is your cock, but you don’t “cock” a bazooka. It’s like when Karl Anderson was known as “Machine Gun,” and would do a pump-action pantomime before shooting his imaginary machine gun. IF YOU ARE THE GUN PLEASE KNOW HOW A GUN WORKS. Val Venis is about to show up and nuke Triple H in the “my dick is like a thing” pun game.
Second of all, the new D-Generation X is impossibly obnoxious, by design. The previous incarnation of D-X was “juvenile” or whatever, but they had some legit street cred. Rick Rude was there, and he’s one of the most legit pro wrestlers ever. Shawn Michaels was the leader, and while I don’t agree with them repeatedly calling him the “greatest WWF Champion of all time” to sell WrestleMania, I know he’s Shawn Michaels, and one of the best in-ring performers the company’s ever had. The weak link in the group was Triple H, who as we know ends up spending 20 years explaining how he’s the strongest link in every chain ever made. New D-X is Triple H on top — doing well, but still a ways from being “The Game” — backed up by the 1-2-3 Kid, his girlfriend bodyguard who’s at least twice as tough as him right now, and the all-star tag team of Jeff Jarrett’s old henchman and one-half of the Smoking Gunns. If they’re going to stay relevant, they need to drop their game from “we run this place,” to, “we’re going to walk around backstage and push people around because we’ve been downgraded from first class to coach.”
This week, their big plan to control the World Wrestling Federation with an iron fist is to push around a random NPC backstage and spray-paint “D-X” on him — original! — and to have a literal pissing contest on the Disciples of Apocalypse’s motorcycles. Jim Ross is hilarious here (“too bad these are Titan bikes, and not an electric fence!”) but Michael Cole ruins the entire bit with maybe the worst call he’s ever made. Which is saying something, because this is MICHAEL COLE we’re talking about.
“You know what the old adage is, it’s better to be whizzed off than ah, whizzed on!”
Having to listen to Michael Cole on commentary really whizzes me off.
The DOA are also pretty whizzed, so this sets up the unbelievably terrible main event of Triple H vs. CHAINZ. And like you probably already guessed if you’ve read anything about WWF’s tag team division in these vintage reports, it ends with D-Generation X beating up the DOA until the L.O.D. 2000 run in to make the save, giving us our weekly does of Everybody Fights. A match involving WWF tag teams ending with a bunch of tag teams in the ring brawling is WWF’s version of every match with an nWo guy in it ending in a disqualification with an nWo beatdown.
The good news, I guess, is that the Disciples of Apocalypse have been around and dragging ass so long they’ve stopped getting the “woo, we love WHITE GUYS” pops from crowds. In retrospect it probably wasn’t a good idea to have the new D-Generation X announce in a promo that they’re the hungry young new stars of wrestling and hate WCW because it’s main-evented by a bunch of past-their-prime dinosaurs and then have their first feud be against the Legion of Doom, but we’ll cover that at length pretty soon.
Worst: Jim Cornette Is The Only Person Who Can Say ‘Severn’
Dan “Severn” Severrin’ makes his official in-ring debut in a match against Flash Funk, and it’s about as exciting as any of his UFC fights. Part of what made the early days of UFC such a difficult thing to get into is part of what makes pro wrestling such a popular industry: real fights are either over in a few exciting seconds, or end after 20-30 minutes of lying around until one of you gets too tired to defend yourself. Severn had some knockouts in his day, but he was mostly all about the latter, so his pro wrestling style is to “ground and pound” you and then do an armbar. Meanwhile you had a guy like Ken Shamrock, who was excelling at adding MMA-flavored things into a pro wrestling repertoire, providing an example of what WWF fans might want to see from a mixed martial-artist guy. It’s about two minutes of Severn mounting Funk, leading to a suplex that only happens so he can get Superior Position for an armbar.
The highlight is seeing the old Ultimate Fighting Championship title belts next to the NWA Heavyweight Championship spread out on a Raw announce table. Those kinds of things feel commonplace today, but were a real mind-fuck back in the day. Also, the “Ultimate Ultimate” is still the funniest name for a thing. Oh, and nobody but Cornette can say “Severn.” Here is a handy guide. Dan Severrin’ should team up with Nie-omi and Jag-wire Yokota.
Best: Jeff Jarrett Improves On The Briefcase Attack
Hey, here’s a fun note: people have been getting hit over the head with guitars for as long as there have been singing characters in wrestling — Honky Donkey Man, I’m looking at you — but the most famous guitar-shotter ever has to be Jeff Jarrett, right? It’s all he did in WCW and TNA for the 20 years between this column and literally today.
But what was the beginning of that trend? Him showing up on this episode after a Steve Blackman vs. Brian Christopher match to El Kabong Blackman with a guitar. I also love that Jarrett started doing this on the same episode where Steve Austin pioneered slapnuts.
Worst: Owen Hart Is Still Getting The Short End Of The Stick
One of the saddest ongoing stories (that ends up getting way, way sadder) is the halfhearted push of Owen Hart, who has been portrayed as a loner bad-ass since the Montreal Screwjob back in November, but a loner bad-ass who can’t win any fights or see any attacks coming. D-Generation X already treated him like he was Tom Brandi, and now that they’ve traded a star player for a bunch of benchwarmers in a “rebuilding phase,” it’s even worse.
Owen has an Intercontinental Championship match against The Rock, which is a good pairing both for the talent involves, and for the fact that Owen actually beat The Rock for the Intercontinental Championship on Raw a year earlier … only now this is THE ROCK in capital letters and not young Prince Iaukea-ass upstart chump Rocky Maivia. Owen still gets the better of him, but only ends up winning by disqualification because Chyna shows up with a baseball bat — called a “ball bat!” by the adorably southern Jim Ross — and clobbers him with it. So once again Owen “wins,” but he doesn’t actually win the match or a championship, and gets his ass kicked by D-X. I’d say he was doing even worse than Bret at this point, but at least he’s on television. WCW gave Bret Hart a gold house and a rocket car to show up four times a year and badly punch Mr. Perfect. I don’t think any of them are doing well.
Best: Thee Are The Nation
Rock shows back up again a little later to prematurely end a Ken Shamrock vs. Marc Mero match with a full-on brain-damaging beatdown on Ken Shamrock, for what happened at WrestleMania. The key here is that it’s maybe the first time ever that the Nation of Domination has looked tough and good, as they actually play to their strengths for once, let Mark Henry throw people around, and cap it off with D’Lo Brown’s extremely dope, forever-underrated Frog Splash. It might’ve not had as much impact as Eddie Guerrero’s, but it’s got way more FROG to it. Full on “arms up legs down, ARMS DOWN LEGS UP” action. I love it with my entire heart.
It’s also a good segment because man, The Rock needed that. Even in the mutiny against Faarooq he kinda looked like he was in over his head, and while the Shamrock stuff at WrestleMania was hilarious, it didn’t exactly make him look like a bad-ass. The feud with Mankind coming up at the end of the year will fix that forever (for both good and very very bad reasons), but for now, it’s nice to see the guy in charge of a faction actually get the job done sometimes. Outside of D-X, WWF’s full of teams that talk the talk but never walk the walk. See also: Disciples of Apocalypse, Los Boricuas, The Truth Commission, and so on.
Best: Val Venis Is Extremely Subtle
Val Venis, seen here in a bedroom set decorated exclusively with tigers, is still Coming™. In this vignette, he talks to his makeup lady about whether or not she saw the Oscars last night, and jokes about how he’s a better actor than Jack Nicholson. He’s set to prove it in his latest film, As Hard As It Gets. I think my favorite thing about the Val Venis character is that he thinks all of his sex puns are hilarious and stops to HEH HEH laugh at them, like he’s the first person in the history of pornography to take a thing that isn’t porn and make it porno. He’s probably the only person in the world that laughed at Kevin Smith turning Star Wars into Star Whores in Zack and Miri Make A Porno. Or any other part of that movie.
Worst: Luna Vachon, Trailblazer
Hey, another first! Luna Vachon “wins” the first-ever intergender match in Raw history by defeating “Matt Gold,” a guy who is such a jobber the only thing you can find when you google “Matt Gold WWF” is recaps of his few appearances on Raw. Despite him being about Luna’s size and having clearly never worked out or tried to wrestle in his life, Luna doesn’t just get to beat him in a match, she has Goldust beat him up BEFORE the match, rendering the entire thing useless. C’mon, Luna could throw me into the sun if she wanted, she can take out Matt Gold on her own.
Best: Fire Sale
Finally we get an in-ring interview of the Undertaker by living Raw teddy bear Kevin Kelly, who gestures wildly while imagining what Paul Bearer could possibly mean about a match where the ring is surrounded by fire. Before Undertaker can say too many things about souls and “hail” and the fires of damnation or whatever, Kane and Paw Bear show up live via satellite from THE UNDERTAKER’S PARENTS’ GRAVES to taunt him. This sets up an event they seriously had planned for WEEK TWO of a month-long cycle: Kane smashing his own parents’ gravestones with a sledgehammer, then setting their graves on fire.
Yes folks, D-X is building a feud by pissing on somebody’s motorcycles and Stone Cold Steve Austin’s company-leading narrative is about how he shouldn’t wear boots with a suit, and the Undertaker’s like, “hey SMASH MY MOM AND DAD’S GRAVES UP AND BURN THEM WITH FIRE, we can totally keep topping that.” That’s my favorite thing about Undertaker’s contribution to the Attitude Era. They’re like, “everybody’s using their real names now and this is a shoot, but also here’s this giant wizard who is trying to literally kill people by embalming them on television.”
Next Week:
*yore
- The Undertaker beats up Scott Taylor to show how mad he is about his parents’ graves being desecrated, as you do
- Faarooq forms a NEW NATION
- Sabledust gets stripped to her BRA and PANTIES~
- Vince McMahon challenges Stone Cold Steve Austin for the WWF Championship (!)
- Road Warrior Animal ruins crotch-chops for everyone
