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Previously on the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Is War: Mark Henry turned heel and joined the Nation of Domination, Owen Hart got his face lightly scratched by D-Generation X, and Sunny complicated a lot of fantasies by dressing up as a Penn State cheerleader.
If you haven’t seen this event, 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.
Hey, you! If you want us to keep doing retro reports, share them around! And be sure to drop down into our comments section to let us know what you thought of these shows. After this, we’re on the road to the unforgettable (?) No Way Out Of Texas: In Your House, the father of “No Way Out.” I wish every WWF pay-per-view had a longer, formal title. Like instead of just “Money in the Bank,” the full name was “Money in the Banks of the Mississippi.”
And now, the Best and Worst of WWF Royal Rumble for January 18, 1998.
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I’ve been reading the sheets leading up to this Mania recently and one through-line of the build is seemingly pretty much everybody who isn’t in Michaels’ camp thinks the back injury is another smile-losing con job trying to get out of taking the fall at Mania or at least spin an excuse. Even when he has an exploratory operation it’s reported in terms of “he’s gone to *these* lengths to make us think it’s legit?”
(The other interesting note – Tyson did get as much mainstream coverage as Rousey, but the major difference is some people wrote about Ronda’s involvement in a positive way. ESPN cut the feed to the press conference within seconds when they realized it was going to be all about wrestling, and more than one major newspaper claimed the convicted rapist, alleged wife beater and ear biter was “sinking to a new low”)
As these shows get better and better, I start feeling dumb for how long I stayed a “WCW guy”. I should’ve switched the channel a lot sooner.
Same, man…we had a group of us in fourth grade who all loved wrestling, and some of us would watch RAW while the rest watched Nitro. Then we’d come in Tuesday morning and update the other side on what’s going on.
RAW always sounded more fun. They’d be all “ZOMG DID YOU SEE WHAT AUSTIN DID?” and I’d be all “the nWo won AGAIN”
We never really had a divide of fans in my school. I can remember, like, two or three kids who were WCW guys, but the rest were WWF. It’s interesting to think back on, because even kids who you wouldn’t expect to care about wrestling were talking about Stone Cold. I don’t know if that’s just because I’ve always lived in the northeast – which had always historically been pro-WWF territory – or what the deal is. It might just be because the bloom was off the rose of the nWo by the time anyone in my school really talked about wrestling.
i had switched not to long before this PPV so i know how u feel
Living in Quebec, I had been watching the WWE’s A-shows in French on RDS since the early 90’s. This is around the time I finally got access to TSN and realized that the actual version of RAW was two hours long while RDS was just showing us a chopped version that was an hour long and missed most of the content.
Mind you, I didn’t really understand what the commentators were saying, but the extra hour was more than worth not knowing what Austin was saying.
Hey fellow quebecer, Salut :)
Owen made it to wrestlemania right?
This one and the next one. The May 1999 PPV is where he died.
He had to get anti-nugget for a while. Then the sadness came after.
This was the only PPV my father allowed me to order as a kid, and my favorite wrestler broke his back on a coffin. Serves me right for being such a HBK mark as a child I guess. I do remember thinking that The Rock worked his ass off the entire night and would always go back to that IC title match for the dope finish. Austin’s great as well and this VHS was like the culmination of my childhood for so many years.
Thank you so much for these posts. I’ve been reading them for months and always look forward to them.
Hey Brandon if you’re in LA for E3 you should try to do Giantbomb’s E3 after hours show
I live in LA now! Tell them to let me guest!
@brandon tweet Dan Ryckert or Alex Navarro no doubt they’d take you they had Samoa Joe and Xavier Woods(again) last year
Props to Jim Ross for inventing “thick” as a positive synonym for “fat” in describing Vader. the discourse c.2018 thanks you
“Mark Henry handling the big Johnson!” is one of JR’s funniest calls.
TBF, WWF was doing what WCW (and present day WWE) should have been doing: having the old, over the hill dudes putting over the young guys. If the LOD/NAO feud happened today the LOD would be burying the NAO underneath a bunch of airbrushed South Park shirts