Previously on the Best and Worst of WWF Monday Night Raw: The marathon that is the Ahmed Johnson’s Kidney Memorial Intercontinental Championship Tournament continues, and all your favorite stories are here: “Diesel” and “Razor Ramon” are coming back, Jerry Lawler thinks Jake Roberts deserves constant humiliation for having substance abuse problems and nobody’s sure how to get Bret Hart back so the show will be good.
If you’d like to watch this week’s episode, you can do that here. Please enjoy the Best and Worst of an artistically depressing episode of WWF Monday Night Raw, originally aired on September 16, 1996.
Worst: Enter THE SULTAN
Before revisiting this episode, I had no idea that the Sultan had an origin story beyond, “Rikishi’s dressed up like the Cirque du Soleil version of The Iron Sheik.” As it turns out, the real story is so much worse.
According to Kevin Kelly, The Sultan is a superstar “so promising” that he united two sworn enemies, two former WWF Champions — Bob Backlund and The Iron Sheik — under the expectations of a future title. That uh, didn’t work out too well for them. According to Lawler, “legend has it” that due to the tensions in the Middle East and the conflict between the United States and Iraq, the Sultan had been taken captive and had his tongue cut out when he wouldn’t talk. Holy sh*t. The guy’s named “The Sultan,” too, so you’d assume he wasn’t fighting for the United States … meaning what, we cut out his tongue? Is that why he’s over here trying to take our beloved wrestling championships? Also maybe I’ve just never tortured a guy and don’t know how it works, but is cutting out a guy’s tongue conducive to getting him to talk? Maybe it’s a last resort as a kind of “f*ck you,” but why start there? Dude’s still got all his fingers and everything.
Anyway, this mysterious Arabic monster in Fatu’s boots (he didn’t even bother to change them!) takes on Jake The Snake, and yes, it’s an excuse for Jerry Lawler to say, “LOOK AT THIS ALCOHOLIC” for five minutes. Sultan gets the win with the camel clutch, because if you weren’t born in America, your fighting style is sitting on peoples’ backs.
Worst: The Point Of This Raw Is That Everybody’s A Liar
This week’s episode has two stories:
1. Jim Ross says Diesel and Razor Ramon will be here live, in the middle of the ring, next week. Gorilla Monsoon says he’s full of sh*t, because Kevin Nash and Scott Hall (mentioned by name, repeatedly) are under contract with another organization. Gorilla says he’s gonna investigate and punish the people spreading this rumor, so JR spends the ENTIRE EPISODE spreading the rumor.
2. Owen Hart and Brian Pillman say that Bret Hart is not only coming back, but that he’s reconciled with them and the Hart brothers are back together again. Everyone’s like, “bullsh*t, you’re lying,” and we get a video later in the show where Bret refutes it.
So that’s where we are. The two major stories boil down to, “our characters are saying something exciting you’d like to see happen is happening, but as a company we have to step in and let you know that it’s not true.” They’re straight up telling you that the show isn’t going to be worth watching. Note: this is Stone Cold Steve Austin’s only appearance for WEEKS, and all he does is just lean in and say, “I’m going to ALSO talk to Bret!” This is all so weird. Austin won the King of the Ring and cut a legendary promo, and he’s had about 5% the screen-time as the “Jake Roberts is a hypocrite for trying to get clean but failing” gag.
Best: Jim Cornette, Wrestling Master
Really, the only highlight for this week is Jim Cornette prepping for his Mind Games showdown with Jose Lothario by holding a “wrestling exhibition” against jobber Tony Williams, who we’ll pretend is a young A.J. Styles. Cornette says that Vader’s been coaching him and that he’s suddenly a wrestling master, disproven by him cowering and getting upset every time Williams reverses a hold or does anything besides passively take a move. Of course, the payoff is Cornette getting in trouble and Vader pulverizing the poor jobber.
It’s one of those things that would’ve played better on a studio wrestling show in 1983 or whatever, but it’s still good. Cornette is such an easy to punch human being, and him rocking a Vader shirt and blue sweatpants pulled up too high is pitch-perfect. Love it.
Worst: Chekhov’s Arena Soda
Cornette’s other contribution to the show is the 1996 version of 2015 Raw’s favorite trope, the distraction finish.
The Smoking Gunns (with Sunny, who is still the only thing that matters) take on the horrible wrestling dream team of Bob “Spark Plug” Holly and Alex “The Pug” Porteau. Camp Cornette wanders out to ringside to “scout” the Gunns, and Owen Hart has a paper cup full of soda with him that he never drinks. I hope that doesn’t come into play later!
The Gunns are about to win the match when (gasp) Owen gets on the apron with the soda. Billy Gunn runs over to him for almost no reason and slaps it out of his hand. I don’t know if he was supposed to slap it into his own face or if Owen was supposed to attack him with it a la R-Truth and things just got messed up, but nothing really happens. Cornette starts trying to splash water on Billy from the corner. Eventually Billy is SUDDENLY DISTRACTED and Spark Pug gets the upset victory, which is important because they’d never teamed before and never teamed again. Sure! This is the 65th hour of the Wheeling tapings, so you can imagine how wild the crowd is going for guys they don’t know beating tweener cowboys they aren’t paying attention to with a f*cking Pepsi.
One positive note: one of my favorite things about Sunny is how she understands how to work a crowd. She could just be pretty and let that be it — Sable, I’m looking in your direction — but she’s smart. When she reacts to something, she makes sure she does a full circle so everyone in the crowd can see it. Watch her. She’ll get upset, and she won’t move on to the next thing until she’s sure it registered. That’s awesome.
Worst: They Will Not Shut Up About Diesel And Razor Ramon
Marc Mero wrestles Owen Hart in the semi-finals of the Intercontinental Championship tournament, but you wouldn’t be able to tell by listening to commentary. Jim Ross spends the entire match screaming about DIESEL AND RAZOR RAMON and how he’s DAMN SURE they’ll be here live next week, NO MATTER WHAT THAT OLD JERK GORILLA MONSOON SAYS. Then Gorilla pops in via picture-in-picture to argue with him for the second time tonight. You can tell they know how terrible it’s gonna be and how much everyone’s gonna sh*t on it, and how they think addressing it means it’s okay and somehow not their fault. It’s like that anti-drug commercial where the diver jumps headfirst into an empty swimming pool.
Mero wins by hitting Owen with Owen’s own cast. Next week, Razor Ramon and Diesel will be live in the middle of the ring to tell us what they thought of the match finish and f*ck Gorilla Monsoon.
Worst: The Best Part Of This Episode Is That It’s Over
Hang on …
Sorry, had to get that out of my system.
If you needed confirmation that this week’s episode is spectacularly terrible, the main-event is Sid vs. Faarooq. Faarooq brings in a chair and whacks Sid with it while the ref is distracted, but it only gets two. Sid’s next move is to totally no-sell the chair shots, grab the chair himself and attack Faarooq in front of the ref for a DQ loss. That’s the main-event. It takes TEN MINUTES.
The grand lesson we need to take from these 1996 show reports is that wrestling cannot and will not change until it has reached an absolute rock bottom. We complain a lot about modern WWE TV, but modern WWE has a lot going for it. The roster has promise, there’s a shockingly wonderful developmental system, and while they’re stuck on a few standards and leaning a little hard on guys from the 90s who are about to have their hearts explode mid-ring, there’s a broad stroke of preparation for the future happening. As bad as it can be, it hasn’t gotten bad enough to change. In WCW, Hulk Hogan was happening and continuing uninterrupted despite being the most horrible sh*t you’ve ever seen until Uncensored ’96 and the Doomsday Cage. That was a special kind of unforgivably bad, and the character changed. In the WWF, they had to get worse and worse until they committed to moving forward and doing something better. We’re in the middle of that right now. This episode lost to Nitro in the ratings by 1.5 points, which is MASSIVE, and next week it’s even worse. Perhaps you’ve heard that DIESEL and RAZOR RAMON will be here?
Just hang on until Bret gets back.
Reminders:
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