Previously on the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Is War: We recapped the most important Raw of the 1990s — and arguably ever — featuring Triple H joining what will eventually become D-Generation X, and Rocky Maivia turning heel, becoming “The Rock” and joining the Nation of Domination. It’s also the first time we see that Kane can control fire, but we don’t know that yet. If The Rock squashes a 20-year old John Cena this week, I wouldn’t be surprised.
If you haven’t seen this episode, you can watch it on WWE Network here. Check out all the episodes you may have missed at the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Is War and Best and Worst of WWF Monday Night Raw tag pages. Follow along with the competition here.
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And now, the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Is War for August 18, 1997.
Worst: Vince McMahon Doesn’t Get Rick Rude
Last week, Rick Rude returned to the WWF as Shawn Michaels’ “insurance policy.” This week, Rude is forced to participate in some weird game show NXT challenge in which Vince McMahon “interviews” him and makes him cut the same promo like seven times in a row. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. If not, I’ll paraphrase.
Vince: Rick Rude, last week you were the insurance policy. Are you an insurance policy this week?
Rude: Whether it’s long term, short term, life or disability, I am a type of insurance!
Vince: that may be, but would you say you are an insurance policy here tonight
Rude: To get the premium, you’ve gotta PAY the premium! It pays to be Rude!
Vince: quite frankly would you say you are an insurance policy
Rude: …
Rude: like a good neighbor, Rick Rude is there! Like insurance!
Vince: quite frankly Rick Rude that may be the case but are you an insurance policy right here tonight
Rude: …
Rude: ….
Rude: get it through your thick skull McMahon, you’re in good hands with Rick Rude! Because I am literally insurance
Vince: some quite frankly have said you’re insurance, how do you respond
Rude: bro do you have WCW’s phone number
Vince should’ve been like, “to prove you’re insurance, chug this 64 oz. soda and run an obstacle course.”
Worst: As The Hallibucket Turns
The World Wrestling Federation’s in a weird place here where they’ve just finished SummerSlam, run into the terrible disaster of Stone Cold Steve Austin getting paralyzed and almost breaking his neck, and the next two pay-per-views are In Your Houses. So most of the angles they build on this show are followed by, “hey, if you wanna see how this ends, go to the house show in Chicago this weekend! That’s where the Legion of Doom and the Godwinns will settle their bucket-related issues. And if you can’t make it there, uh, we have a show coming up in Madison Square Garden! That’s pretty cool, right?”
The announced match for the Tag Team Championship at Ground Zero is a fatal four-way: Dude Love and Stone Cold Steve Austin defending against the Legion of Doom, the Godwinns, and the British Bulldog and Owen Hart. Austin is injured, though, so the champs end up having to vacate the championship and drop out of the match. The Head Bangers get subbed in. On Raw, the Legion of Doom wrestles British Bulldog and Owen Hart until the Godwinns interfere, and all three teams brawl. Can you guess who wins the Tag Team Championship at Ground Zero?
Yep, the goddamn Head Bangers. The team who weren’t originally announced for the match, aren’t a part of the build at all and don’t have beef with any of these teams. Because there’s nothing, nothing WWE loves more than making an injury substitution win the championship with no rhyme or reason. They’re still doing it to this day.
Worst: The One Light Heavyweight Match They Do
The WWF had a really good thing going in the mid-90s when Alundra Blayze was the Women’s Champion, and they brought in some of the biggest joshi stars of all time to face her. You had Bull Nakano and Aja Kong on WWF shows, threatening to cause a “women’s revolution” 20 years before that became a marketing slogan. When Blayze bailed and dropped the Women’s Championship in the garbage on Nitro, they gave up completely, and it didn’t recover for a long, long time. Most weeks it still doesn’t seem like they’ve recovered.
Similarly, the WWF had a really good thing going when they signed The Great Sasuke, and decided to counter WCW’s influx of lucha libre talent by bringing in the crew from Michinoku Pro. When Sasuke got fired for bragging that he’d only defend the title in Japan, WWF gave up completely. The light heavyweight roster becomes “any small white guy we can find in Memphis,” Taka becomes the wrestling equivalent of “me put pee-pee in your Coke” and Sunny announcing them is more important than anything happening in the matches. They didn’t recover for a long, long time. Most weeks it still doesn’t seem like they’ve recovered.
Here, Flash Funk defeats Brian Christopher. WWF cares so much about this they have Christopher enter to Flash Funk’s music. The highlight is the pre-recorded comments from Funk, where it sounds like he calls Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler “Jerking Lawler.” Who wins in a fight, Jerking Lawler or Paw Bear?
KIM SHAMROCK NO GOOD JABRONI
With the Hart Foundation on fire, the WWF was like, “BRING IN EVERYBODY WE CAN FIND WHO HATES AMERICA!” So now we’ve got The Truth Commission hanging around and Brakus “coming soon,” so guys like the Sultan, who hated America before hating America was cool, get relegated to jobber status. Here, he loses to Ken Shamrock in about three minutes. For emphasis, the Iron Sheik gets suplexed. Worse than Michael Jordan! Michael Chackson!
Best/Worst: Van Vader Vs. Invaders
The Patriot defeats Vader, which isn’t a sentence I should’ve ever had to type, but here we are. Patriot has a big match with Bret Hart coming up and Vader can’t even go to the video store without getting pinned, so Patriot gets the knees up on a Vader Bomb and Uncle Slams him for the win.
The “Best” half of this match comes during the post-match, in which Vader’s beating down the Patriot and trying to Vader Bomb him again, but the Hart Foundation interfere. They try to drape the Canadian flag over the American Flag Man’s body again, so Vader hops down off the ropes, breaks the Canadian flag over his knee and fights them. That’s a face turn for Vader, which sticks for more or less for the next year, comma the remainder of his WWF run. He even ends up on Team USA at Survivor Series, where he would’ve teamed with The Patriot, had dude not torn his triceps and become a complete afterthought less than six months after his debut.
Worst: The Brian Pillman Story Gets Worse
If you’ve been following along, you know that Brian Pillman lost a match to Goldust at SummerSlam and, per the pre-match stipulation, had to wear a dress on Raw. Then, for no reason, new commissioner Sgt. Slaughter decided that Pillman had to wear a dress in EVERY match until he won, and does not seem to mind Goldust showing up and clearly making him lose every week to keep it going. I have never and will never understand why the response to “evil authority figures manipulate the faces and it’s the worst” is “good guy authority figures manipulate the heels and it’s great somehow.” It’s such a moral and ethical blind spot for wrestling fans.
Anyway, this week’s match features Jesse Jammes licking his fingers and rubbing Pillman’s nipples.
He also pulls up Pillman’s dress to reveal boxer briefs, which embarrasses Pillman for some reason despite the fact that every time we saw him in WCW for like half a decade he was naked except boots and some tiger-striped underpants. The finish of the match, which is surprisingly not Road Dogg graphically making out with Pillman, is Goldust showing up and dropping a measured elbow on Jammes to get Pillman disqualified.
After the match, Pillman tries to get Goldust to agree to a match where if Pillman wins, he gets Marlena as his “personal assistant,” 24/7, for 30 days. The actual match stipulation is basically, “if I can be better than you at our job once, I get to rape your wife all I want for a month.” Attitude! Goldust is rightfully like, “the fuck, dude, no,” so Pillman tries to enrage him by saying Dakota Runnels is his love child. Goldust attacks him, and Marlena agrees to the stipulation to make them stop fighting.
We’ll get to the rest of the angle when it actually happens, but hoo boy, are you in for whatever the opposite of a treat is.
Worst: Stone Cold Keeps Telling Us He’ll Be Back, But It’s Gonna Take Longer Than He Thinks
At SummerSlam, Steve Austin almost had his neck broken and was temporarily paralyzed. He still managed to perform the world’s reasonably saddest schoolboy roll-up to pin Owen Hart and win the Intercontinental Championship, because if he hadn’t, Owen would’ve had a paralyzed guy kissing his ass. Austin showed up on Raw the next night holding a neck brace, and WWF immediately started booking matches featuring him.
They’re like, “Owen, you will have to face Austin again,” and “Austin will defend the Tag Team Championship at Ground Zero,” and “Austin is in a triple threat match with the Undertaker and Bret Hart at Madison Square Garden,” and reality is like, Steve Austin almost got paralyzed, you guys, chill.
Austin sticks around and stunners people but doesn’t actually return as an in-ring competitor until three months from this, and even then it’s “against doctors’ orders.” Wonder why nobody remembers that match? Because the match after it was the Montreal Screwjob.
Best Ever: Heel Rocky Heel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hhs3r2Axb8
This is a lackluster Raw, especially after the gravitas of last week, but it does have one shining moment: The Rock’s first live heel promo. It’s the moment when you stop thinking of him as a pineapple-headed Saba Simba-looking-ass “blue chipper” and start thinking of him as the kind of guy who could be a World Champion. Ten times, maybe.
The promo is quick and simple, but great. He talks about how he gave the fans his blood, sweat and tears, and they hit him with, “die, Rocky, die.” He mentions being the youngest Intercontinental Champion in WWF history and getting “Rocky sucks” for his effort. “Rocky Maivia’s a lot of things, but ‘sucks’ isn’t one of them.” He wasn’t given respect, so now he’s going to take it by any means necessary. He also rightfully shades the Disciples of Apocalypse for “epitomizing racism,” which if you’ve been reading you know is 100% true. They’re the white guys WWF sends out to be cool and beat up the angry minority groups.
And, of course, the DOA does the same thing here. They show up on the TitanTron to say they aren’t racist, they’re just here to “kick ass,” and I guess all the asses they kick just happen to be brown? That leads to a Nation/DOA parking lot brawl, which ends with the very not racist event of the Puerto Rican guys stealing the DOA’s motorcycles.
The good news here is that within a month, The Rock is the hottest heel in the company. And within a few years, he’s WWF Champion, and the rest of these jokers are either enhancement talent or gone. If ya smell, etc.
Best/Worst: Generating X
The main event is pretty terrible considering the talent involved — Undertaker, Mankind, Shawn Michaels and Triple H — but it works as a tentpole to the overall plot, and continues piecing together the relationship that eventually becomes D-Generation X.
Throughout the show, Shawn Michaels and Hunter Hearst Helmsley make it clear that they aren’t partners and don’t care about each other, they were just in the same place at the same time last week with common enemies. This week, it’s the same story. Chyna’s at ringside for H, and “Definitely An Insurance Policy, We Swear” Rick Rude is at ringside for Shawn. Near the end of the match, Rude tries to sneak up on the Undertaker and blast him with a chair. Taker sees it coming, though, and chases Rude into the ring. Shawn ends up with the chair and obliterates Undertaker with it to cause the disqualification.
Now excuse me while I give one final Worst to …
Worst: The Undertaker’s Hilarious Blade Job
Look at that. He’s not even trying to hide it. Michaels brains him with the chair, and 13-year veteran The Undertaker is like, “oh no, I’m unconscious, let me wipe the sweat from my brow before I faint.”
Here it is in slowed-down GIF form.
It’s so good, Shawn put it in his pocket to use later.
And that’s the show.
Next week: Nothing! Raw gets preempted by the U.S. Open for two weeks in a row. See you at Ground Zero!
