Previously on WWF Raw Saturday Night: The Undertaker and Kane responded to Undertaker’s loss at SummerSlam and Vince McMahon’s insistence that they’re, “two putrid pussies,” by destroying the entire show. I’m talking the entire show.
Previously on Sunday Night Heat: That destruction more or less continued on Heat until Vince McMahon’s “master plan” was announced: Stone Cold Steve Austin will defend the WWF Championship against both Kane AND The Undertaker at Breakdown.
If you haven’t seen this episode, you can watch it on WWE Network here. Check out all the episodes of classic Raw 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. Head back to a time long forgotten when WWE TV was fun to watch, and things happened!
And now, the Best and Worst of WWF Raw Saturday Night from September 12, 1998.
The U.S. Open Is Still Keeping These Raws From Being Much Of Anything …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0rNaQtPKts
From last week’s column:
If you’re wondering why it’s “Raw Saturday Night” and doesn’t have the same date as the week’s corresponding WCW Monday Nitro, it’s because WWE wasn’t always a global television juggernaut and used to get preempted by dog shows and tennis tournaments.
So while Raw’s still going through the motions, it’s handcuffed by not being live on Monday nights, and is absolutely burdened with filler. For example, this week’s show features the Owen Hart vs. Ken Shamrock Lion’s Den match from SummerSlam (two weeks ago) in its entirety for no reason, and features highlight videos of Sable pinning Marc Mero from, again, two weeks ago. These clips aren’t exactly fresh out the kitchen, even in pre-YouTube 1998 terms.
The way the taping scheduled works out, this Raw doesn’t have an appearance from Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Undertaker, Kane, Mankind, Sable, or even Vince McMahon, and instead focuses on an Al Snow comedy bit and a D-Generation X jobber squash. Not the show’s best effort, especially not in the dog days of ’98.
… So Let’s See What They DO Give Us
The highlight of the episode, honestly, is a backstage promo featuring rare, actual WWE Network Insane Clown Posse footage. Their music and most of their appearances have been gutted from the Network due to a decades-old grudge about promotional promises, so it’s nice to see them get some mic time on a random Saturday night Raw. If you aren’t familiar with the wicked clowns, here’s the truth: while your enjoyment of their music and positivity clown cult may vary, these guys loved and got professional wrestling, and it should be no surprise that they’re good-to-great on the microphone.
Violent J’s bit here about the Disciples of Apocalypse where he admits to not knowing much about motorcycles, but used to own a Huffy and will ride it up and down their backs is pretty amazing, and head and shoulders above what any of the other Oddities were doing. Plus, the match that follows gives us two great moments.
The first is this wonderful image of Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler putting his crown on Golga’s stuffed Eric Cartman doll, which is such a 1998 WWF image you’d think I pulled it straight out of a fannypack. Jim Ross saying it looks like Brian Christopher when he was a baby is also pretty hilarious.
The second happens early on in the match, when Golga hits the ropes for a running Earthquake attempt and accidentally breaks everything.
Even God didn’t want to have to sit through an Oddities vs. Disciples of Apocalypse match. With the top rope completely broken and nobody sure of what to do next, someone calls an audible and sends ICP into the ring to get beaten down for the disqualification. Those guys are soldiers, I’m telling you. It’s also oddly appropriate for modern audiences to see a couple of motorcycle-riding white supremacists throw hands on a couple of wildly inclusive dorks in clown makeup for trying to help. It’s the 1998 pro wrestling equivalent of putting a flower in the barrel of a rifle.
Rock: Star
The closest thing the episode gets to any actual star power outside of the main event is this appearance from The Rock, who continues to climb the ladder of success in the World Wrestling Federation rung, by damn rung, by damn rung by calling out Kane and The Undertaker. They beat him up for trying to stick up for his spineless hench-person D’Lo Brown last week, and he wants to lay the smack down on them if you smell what he’s cooking. He’s full-on Rock here, and the next step in him becoming the Top Guy is calling out other Top Guys for fights.
The next few months are filled with starry-eyed fantasy booking of The Rock as the next Stone Cold Steve Austin, as the fans have finally figured out how great he is at this and are so ready to make him their next hero. To their credit, the WWF creative team of the time sees and understands this, and does everything they can to make that seem like an inevitability heading into Survivor Series Deadly Game. And oh, what a spectacular, garbage swerve that show still is. More on that when we get a little closer.
North Vs. South
As mentioned, there are a ton of perfectly fine but ultimately meaningless matches on this episode where the lower mid-card gets in some work in (hey, look at that) actual wrestling bouts. One of those is Bradshaw vs. Darren Drozdov, which is that serviceable kind of WWF action with no crowd response that reminds you pro wrestling still exists. Bradshaw cheats to win by getting his feet on the ropes, then hits a Clothesline From Hell on Droz afterward to make sure we know he could’ve won anyway. It’s fine.
Extreme North Vs. Extreme South
Similarly, a perfectly watchable Edge vs. Jeff Jarrett match ends with a distraction from workrate leaders Southern Justice and a guitar shot from Jarrett for the disqualification. Both men are in a transitional period, as we’re still a few weeks away from Jarrett realizing he doesn’t need a wacky southern manager or the mafioso Godwinns ruining all of his matches to get over as a villain, and Edge has yet to reveal the dark secret of his randomly flaring up vampirism.
Southern Justice returns later in the episode to get a quick win over Too Much with the Slop Drop, now known as the “Problem Solver,” assuming the “problem” is the nWo and you are Sting. I think SoJu (that’s what their friends call them) are getting a minor push so the New Age Outlaws actually have someone to wrestle besides the Nation of Domination, so they end up in these weird matches against other, even less threatening heel teams with neither side totally sure how they’re supposed to be acting.
Backdoor From Chyna
Speaking of the Nation of Domination, they win a match against The Headbangers when Chyna bumrushes the ring and attacks Mark Henry. This is the same finish they did the last time the Nation wrestled, because I guess someone backstage is getting dollar signs in their eyes thinking about Chyna vs. Mark Henry.
The weirdest part of the match is actually the pre-match interview with Mosh and Thrasher, where they don’t understand why Raw’s on Saturday and think they’re wrestling on Shotgun Saturday Night. Any humor you might find from that is immediately erased by Thrasher, who grins into the camera to explain his strategy for wrestling The Nation:
“Well, Mark Henry, we’re gonna keep him in the corner and just feed him a bush-load of bananas!”
Kaientai DX
D-Generation X sticks around after the Chyna interference to have their match with Kaientai, which is such an easy win for them Triple H doesn’t even remove his backwards leather Kangol. You know the main event is competitive when it turns The Cerebral Assassin into Super Calo.
As you can see in the GIF above, the major point of the match is to kill time, and to see if D-X can convince the cast of Gummo to moon them afterward. They can! They love to have fun.
Snow Me Gusta
There’s another random run-in from Al Snow that devolves into a comedy segment between him, Sgt. Slaughter, Pat Patterson, and Gerald Brisco that you can definitely skip. It’s interesting to see them try to do the same bits with Snow that they do with Mankind, and the dramatic difference in crowd response. That’s the difference between Al Snow and Mick Foley, I guess.
Plus, I’m not even sure Mick could get much of a reaction out of the crowd if his best jokes were, “Pat The Platypus Patterson,” “Geraldine Brisco,” and “Sarge Chinny McChin.” He jokes about giving them fur coats and Rice-a-Roni as “parting gifts.” It’s … not great. People sure do love screaming “HEAD,” though. You could go from jobber to Hall of Famer in the ’90s if you figured out a way for children to be able to scream about sex terminology but wink wink nudge nudge mean something else.
Speaking of that …
Val Venis randomly shows up to interrupt a Vader vs. Dustin Runnels match to counter Dustin’s “he is coming” sign with an “I HAVE COME” sign of his own. Dustin prays about it mid-match, and loses because of it. Honestly all this made me wish was that I had Val Venis nearby when I run into churchy types with megaphones outside of Comic-Con, or whatever. Just a sweaty-ass Canadian porn star in nothing but a towel and purple underpants to get horny about literally everything they’re saying, until they stop.
Next Week:
Stone Cold Steve Austin defends the WWF Championship against Ken Shamrock, a REAL MAN’S MAN appears, and Val Venis fails to learn an important lesson about what can happen to your pee-pee re: choppy-choppy when you sleep with another man’s wife. All this and WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, WWE edition, next week!
