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Previously on the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Is War: Stone Cold Steve Austin drove his truck into the arena for the first time, and the Artist Formerly Known As Prince Iaukea Goldust made my parents very uncomfortable by wearing a ball gag, metal tits and thong. Good times!
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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Up first, let’s talk about that time the World Wrestling Federation went inside your house.
Before We Begin
Here’s what you need to know about In Your House: D-Generation X. If you’ve never seen it, catch the encore presentation on pay-per-view tomorrow night!
Stone Cold Steve Austin Committed His First Vehicular Manslaughter
Austin drove his truck into the arena for the first time on last week’s Raw. Turns out that was act one, the truck was CHEKHOV’S STONE COLD STEVE AUSTIN TRUCK, and it was reintroduced at the end of Austin and Rock’s Intercontinental Championship match at In Your House: Act Three.
Stone Cold is still trying to figure out the best way to be a functioning wrestler after nearly getting his neck broken at SummerSlam, so the match is five minutes long and mostly him standing still while the Nation of Domination runs at him to get (1) Stone Cold Stunnered, (2) thrown into the truck somehow, or (3) both. It’s a lot of fun, and you haven’t seen a crowd go from 0 to 60 faster than Austin driving a truck to the ring and parking it at ringside in the middle of a December In Your House show.
Owen Hart Is Back
The only other thing you need to know about this otherwise awful, awful show — unless “Taka Michinoku won the Light Heavyweight Championship tournament” is huge news to you — is that Owen Hart is back and ready to deal with what happened to his brother by quietly doing his job until the company accidentally kills him. That ended up being a way sadder sentence than I intended.
Shawn Michaels escapes Ken Shamrock’s WWF Championship challenge via nWo-style interference from D-Generation X, which brings Owen out of the blue to attack him from behind and beat him down. You’d think this would set up a huge match for the Royal Rumble, but whoops, Shawn doesn’t want to work with Owen (because of the whole “Hart” thing) and Stone Cold Steve Austin SUPER doesn’t want to work with him (because of the whole “paralysis” thing), so poor infinitely talented Owen Hart gets sent back to the mid-card. Whomp whomp.
And now that you’ve read about a bunch of sadness, here’s the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Is War for December 8, 1997.
Worst: The Michael Cole Era Begins
Michael Cole’s made a few appearances as a backstage interviewer, but this is the first episode where he actually gets to call Raw. He’s “color” “commentary” for Jim Ross, and just jumps in to say the vague statements you know Vince is screaming for JR to say. Also sitting in is Kevin Kelly, so Ross is in a real Attack of the Clones scenario out here.
Don’t worry about Cole, though. It’s not like we have to worry about him soullessly calling the show for [checks notes] oh God.
Best: Jeff Jarrett’s Terrible, Amazing “NWA” Theme
At In Your House, Aztec Pride Jeff Jarrett “debuted” against the Undertaker. The match lasted about two minutes until Kane showed up, chokeslammed Jarrett and gave him a disqualification win. They follow up that stellar plan to get a new star over by booking Jeff Jarrett vs. Vader for Raw, having it go about two minutes, and end with Harajuku Goldust showing up in pig tails and a trench to “flash” Vader and give Jarrett a count-out win.
All that is miserable, but I wanted to give a special Best to Jarrett’s new entrance theme, which eventually becomes his “NWA” theme when the WWF decides to do a half-assed invasion angle with some public domain wrestling shit from 10 years ago. The actual theme part is shockingly good — like Goldust’s theme had a baby with Bret Hart’s — and features the GOAT catchphrase declaration info. I won’t spoil it for you if you don’t remember, but it’s the only quip bad enough to top both Hardcore Holly’s “HOW DO YA LIKE ME NOW” and Stevie Richards’ “I’LL SHOW YOU, YOU’LL SEE.”
https://youtu.be/hnlhliD8fsc
And then there’s, Maude!
Worst: The Lie Commission
One of the stranger developments from this week is that the Truth Commission has been downgraded again. They went from “South African military group led by South African commandant” to “South African military group led by a Canadian cult leader or something,” and now they’re down to “South African military tag team confused by the fact that the Canadian cult leader changed the tall guy’s gimmick and is now a separate thing.”
That’s this week’s story. The Jackal gets on commentary and explains that the idiots “in Stamford, Connecticut” gave Kurrgan a bad gimmick — “The Interrogator” — but now he’s getting REAL. Now he’s KURRGAN The Interrogator. He wears black pants and no shirt instead of a uniform! It’s a shoot, somehow!
The only other change in Kurrgan is that he now wears tape on his fingertips, which is supposed to make his iron claw finisher hurt more. He gets that same ill-advised finish they gave Lord Tensai, a claw chokeslam, which sounds great on paper but almost always results in the person doing the slamming losing their grip on their opponent’s forehead and having to reapply after they hit the ground. Because a forehead isn’t something that gives you a lot to hang onto, you know? Sniper and Recon are both shaken up by Kurrgan’s SHOOT BRUTALITY, and this all leads to me not pretending I remember where Truth Commission stories go.
Worst: Kane Attacks Hawk
Look at that elevation!
So at In Your House, the Legion of Doom failed to get back their Tag Team Championship from the Road Dogg and B.A. “Billy” Gunn thanks to interference from the Godwinns, because that Godwinns/LOD feud is still fucking happening. On Raw, they try to settle their farm-raised beef in a match, but it’s over in about two minutes — sensing a pattern developing here? — when Kane shows up and attacks them.
Normally that’s not a big deal, and I’d be thanking Kane for saving me from another one of these matches, but the way it happens is the worst. Kane shows up and piledrives Hawk, but he does like, a normal piledriver instead of a Tombstone so Hawk can do that gag where he no-sells it. Hawk does, but then walks into the world’s most underwhelming low-center-of-gravity chokeslam ever and then gets Tombstoned. He stays down for that one. It’s 1997, guys, just go straight to the Tombstone. Nobody’s buying Hawk as a threat, except maybe middle schoolers in the middle of a snap battle.
Best: No Road Warrior Animal Those Are My Cheesy Poofs, Beefcake!!!!
The LOD are officially christened the “OLD” by Road Dogg and Billy Gunn, who debut their classic airbrushed South Park shirts and become the New Age Outlaws you remember. All they need now is the name. They send the Legion of Doom away with a little Steam, and that leads directly into Mr. Ass vs. Dude Love.
Worst, But Then Best: Billy Gunn Still Can’t Hit A Decent Leg Drop
Remember back when Gunn tried to drop a leg on a Headbanger and missed him by like a foot, and the Headbanger still sold it? Billy tries to top that this week in a post-match attack on Dude Love.
Dude wins the match, so Road Dogg is like, “I should hit you so hard in the forehead with a steel chair that your brain falls out of your ass.” With Dude down, they put the tag title belts across his face and then drop a leg on it. Problem the 1: they do the same thing Ric Flair did to Curt Hennig at Halloween Havoc where they put the strap on the guy’s face plates up instead of down, where they might hurt. Problem the 2: Billy’s Gunn-shy (cough) about doing it for real, so he pulls his punch, so to speak, and “drops the leg” like this:
Bro! Come on!
The supplemental Best here is that the New Age Outlaws beating up Dude Love actually goes somewhere, and sets up a feud with Mick Foley and Terry Funk that ends up turning Dogg and Gunn into the stars they needed to be by the time D-X Version 2 rolled around.
Best: D-X Entertains The Crowd During The Show’s Worst Match And Shawn Michaels Tries To Kill Headbanger Mosh
D-Generation X responds to the Owen Hart attack from In Your House: Us by (1) calling Owen a “nugget of turd that just won’t go away,” which gets called back in the best moment of an otherwise culturally super-iffy Nation of Domination parody in ’98, and (2) announcing that they’re going to sit at ringside and play strip poker until Owen shows up like a man and fights them. This is all prefaced by a melodramatic DESTRUCTION OF THE HART FOUNDATION video package that recaps the last several months of the Harts and the Hart Adjacent looking like goobers.
The upside to this is that it provides a distraction during Skull and 8-Ball vs. Miguel Perez and Jorge Estrada. I’d rather watch a veterinarian spay and neuter a bunch of animals at ringside than sit through another goddamn Harris Brothers tag. Shawn gets progressively more naked while Savio Vega uses the Ahmed Johnson Memorial 2 X 4 to win the match for his team.
After the match they take the game into the ring, which interrupts the entrance of the Headbangers, who I guess are supposed to wrestle next. They don’t, however, because they flip D-X’s card table and Mosh gets a bottle of whiskey smashed over his head. Like you, I assumed that was a prop bottle, but shit, prop or not it really got him. Look at this:
Yikes. You can see another bottle in that shot, did Shawn accidentally grab the wrong one or something?
Owen finally runs out after this and jumps D-X before escaping into the crowd, but a guy getting Jack Daniels’d to death and bleeding from a lump in his skull is a tough act to follow.
Best: Speaking Of Sexy Times …
Jerry Lawler wins the Karate Fighters Holiday Tournament over Sunny, but wait, it turns out (via hidden camera … well, several hidden cameras, all in his face) that Lawler cheated multiple times to win at toys. He put gum under his guy to keep him from falling off and, amazingly, tried to seduce Sunny’s Karate Fighter with a hot lady doll. AND IT WORKED. Jerry Lawler used the POWER OF SEX to make an inanimate object throw a tournament final. The decision is reversed and Sunny is declared the winner, but for real, the King is on some Toy Story shit.
Worst: Being Insincere To Sincere
From way back in the Best and Worst of Raw for September 9, 1996:
The Salvatore Sincere character is a difficult one to describe. He was an Italian stereotype who was insincere. Actually, that was super easy.
He’s back this week to do the jab to Marvelous Marc Mero. Mero had a boxer vs. wrestler boxing match at In Your House, and it ended the only way boxer vs. wrestler boxing matches do: with the wrestler getting frustrated that he’s losing to the boxer AT BOXING and attacks him with wrestling. This time around, Mero made like a vegetarian and filled his stool with Butterbean.
Before their match, Mero SHOOTS ON SOME JABBERS by revealing that Sincere’s real name is “Tom Brandi,” and that the WWF game him a stupid gimmick and he just agreed to do it. Jim Ross gets in a sick burn by reminding us that Mero is a “baaaad man,” which I appreciate. The match doesn’t happen, and is just a promo for Mero to bring out Sable in a potato sack to reiterate that (1) she is his property, (2) she is possibly a food item, and (3) he does not want anyone to see him having a hot wife.
In response, Sable removes the potato sack to reveal a bikini and a body so oiled up she kinda looks like a newborn calf:
Mero’s so upset by this that Sal gets the count-out win, and is like, WHO’S THE JABBER NOW? This of course sets off the legendary Tom Brandi and Sable romance angle that I can’t even finish this joke about because Salvatore Sincere is a at best an asexual mannequin. Dude’s like if somebody sucked the testosterone out of the Z-Man and left him in the sun for a few days.
Worst: Unico And The Island Of Magic
“What’s Brian Christopher up to in this episode,” you’re definitely not asking. Turns out he’s dressing up Mexico’s “El Unico,” the next challenger to Taka Michinoku’s Light Heavyweight Championship. Because Taka and Brian Christopher are the only two people who are actually in the Light Heavyweight Division, so the next challenger has to be “also Brian Christopher.” I wonder why the Great Sasuke wasn’t SUPER PSYCHED to be Light Heavyweight Champion?
Anyway, Lawler dumps some racist burns on Taka until a fight almost breaks out, and then El Unico shockingly turns on Taka, unmasks as Christopher, and piledrives Taka a bunch. I think they piledrive him like, five times. It seemed like an attempt to recreate the infamous Ted Dibiase/Fabulous Freebirds angle, but Taka ain’t Ted DiBiase, and Brian Christopher sure as hell isn’t the Freebirds.
Best: Austin’s Shitty Limits
Finally this week we have Stone Cold Steve Austin deciding to forfeit the Intercontinental Championship to The Rock rather than wrestle him in the main event, because
- Kayfabe answer: He now has his sights set on the WWF Championship, so he doesn’t want the Intercontinental Championship anymore … and really he only wanted it back in the first place because Owen Hart ended up with it and he wanted revenge
- Actual answer: He’s still very injured and can’t do much in the ring, so he might as well do fun action-adventure stuff with The Rock (more on that next week) and save his workable body for the Royal Rumble and WrestleMania
Rocky Maivia’s still a gullible dork at this point — and, we should note, is officially calling himself “the people’s champion,” albeit sarcastically — so after accepting the forfeiture and becoming Intercontinental Champion for the second time (by doing nothing), he allows Austin to hold up his hand in celebration. You know where that goes.
Austin announces DTA for the first time (“don’t trust anybody”), takes back the Intercontinental Championship title belt without actually still being Intercontinental Champion, and declares that next week you should tune in to the “same Stone Cold time, same Stone Cold channel,” Batman-style, to see what he does with it. One of those catchphrases stuck, and one of them didn’t.
Next Week:
Mark Henry returns, The Rock’s Intercontinental Championship goes for a swim, and Vince McMahon officially announces the “Attitude Era.” It’s all happening!
