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Post by Baker on Apr 5, 2023 21:49:21 GMT
WCW fans are so interesting how different they were, the people that were going to shows and were locked into it were really into it maybe on a deeper level than WWF fans. Have to dispute this. At the very least I'm an exception to the rule. No WCW fan was more committed to their promotion than I was to my beloved WWF.
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Post by Kilgore on Apr 5, 2023 23:18:45 GMT
It's always strange to think about the last year of WCW Monday Nitro, they were getting a 2-2.5 average rating (3.0 for their very last show), then those viewers mostly disappeared from ever watching wrestling again like the fucking rapture.
Raw had a high of 5.6 that year (mid-January), a 4.7 opposite the last Nitro (end of March), a 5.65 their first week as the only show in town, which was ALSO a post-WrestleMania 17 Raw to boot (basically the same rating as their high from two months prior), then they start a decline in ratings that has been pretty much uninterrupted to this very day.
A 3.0 rating amount of viewers, gone forever, in two weeks.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 6, 2023 1:46:23 GMT
^Such an interesting point.
I've made it to the September 23rd Nitro where the NWO takes it over pretty much. We get a pretty long match with The Outsiders beating the fuck out of High Voltage, pretty epic Jacknife. At the end of the show the NWO guys are all on commentary booth and Razor just outright asks The Giant, is Andre really your dad?! The Giant is like aw man, why did you have to go there haha.
Also the episode after Fall Brawl where Rey and Juvy go at it, absolutely fucking spectacular Nitro match one of the best of the year for sure. They just go all out, at one point Juvy hits a springboard 450 from the apron.
Also forgot to mention the whole JR shoot about Vince being the owner, then this leading to fake Razor and Fake Diesel. JR brought the goods on the mic but man it's a big what the fuck where they thinking with all this. Like the whole war with WCW pushed them to be just retarded. Baker has a different perspective of Fake Razor and Fake Diesel that I remember appreciating but I still think this was just bad. Then they also brought in Backlund and Sheik to set up The Sultan around the same time. I felt like I lost track of what year I was watching when these two were cutting a promo, had Peacock auto-loaded an episode of Superstars from 1994 while I wasn't paying attention?
Talk about two young superstars that really got cut down through the course of the year, The Giant, and Ahmed. Ahmed getting the kidney injury then everything they did with The Giant in the NWO after he lost the belt to Hogan at Road Wild, just killed him.
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Post by Baker on Apr 6, 2023 2:15:09 GMT
1. Baker has a different perspective of Fake Razor and Fake Diesel that I remember appreciating but I still think this was just bad. 2. Talk about two young superstars that really got cut down through the course of the year, The Giant, and Ahmed. Ahmed getting the kidney injury then everything they did with The Giant in the NWO after he lost the belt to Hogan at Road Wild, just killed him. 1. To reiterate for the noobs it's more nuanced than just "Fakes good!" The Fakes failed. Fans rejected them. Fake Razor was objectively awful. I can't argue with of this. But it didn't kill the company or anything and I still think it was a potentially genius idea that was worth trying. Think about it. All your favorite wrestling characters can live on forever if the Fakes work. Mark Callaway gets old? No biggie. Just make another tall man the new Undertaker. CM Punk being difficult? Bye, Philecia. WWE replaces him with another tattooed skinnyfat guy who can talk a little bit. Lucha does it all the time. As did Japan with Tiger Mask. "But it's different with masked wrestlers!" the naysayers nay. OK, fine. How about this? Mainstream movies and tv shows replace beloved characters with new actors all the time. Why not WWE? Fans just weren't ready for it yet. And, fine, ok, the casting of Razor wasn't great either. Still think it's one of the ballsiest, most outside the box ideas they ever came up with, and this is a hill I am willing to die on. 2. Agreed. I've mentioned many times before thinking Ahmed & The Giant were the futures of their respective companies.
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Post by Big Pete on Apr 6, 2023 20:48:46 GMT
Don't worry kids, we've got Diesel and Razor Ramon at home!
Diesel and Razor Ramon at home. ------------------------
Shin how could you be going on and on about luchadores when THE greatest debut of all-time took place on that September 16th 1996 edition of Nitro?!
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Post by Kilgore on Apr 6, 2023 21:31:18 GMT
Man, Glenn Jacobs sucks so fucking bad. Just seeing him again as Fake Diesel is such an annoying reminder how this reject needed to be a degraded VHS copy of Nash and Taker to make it back on television after his all time bad run as an evil dentist. And this dude was only passable for like the first 6 months of Kane and has been on television for almost 30 years.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 6, 2023 22:53:56 GMT
Love Baker's perspective on it and never looked at it that way but it's a good point. Took a few actors after Keaton before Bale nailed down a great Batman.
It does have to be one of the all time most shameless ratings grabs, like the cheapest, hyping up like they were coming back only to pull this shit. And then to think it wasn't just a one or two time deal like a shot fired but they actually kept the guys around wrestling for a while into 1997 if I remember correctly, such a huge embarrassment and one of those things you can point to if you need a reason why WCW was killing them in ratings for 83 weeks here.
Looking at the Bret return drawing near, holy shit did they need him back. It was like the WWF was just missing a major part of itself that whole stretch there without him in 1996.
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Post by Ness on Apr 6, 2023 23:25:43 GMT
I love how Kilgore is always dropping gems about how guys you may have liked for a while growing up... actually pretty much suck. LOL suddenly the reign of terror steamrolling him makes sense because it's KANE. It begs the question... is a 1 day reign better than entire careers that never got one? Never watched 96 wcw (or it in general) Nobi got me intrigued to wanna watch things. Sometimes from a WWE lens they feel undersold.
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Post by Baker on Apr 6, 2023 23:33:15 GMT
1. It begs the question... is a 1 day reign better than entire careers that never got one? 2. Never watched 96 wcw (or it in general) Nobi got me intrigued to wanna watch things. Sometimes from a WWE lens they feel undersold. 1. Obviously. Gets your name in the history books. 2. Check out Great American Bash 96 if you're serious about this. Strong show from top to bottom with something for every type of wrestling fan. ============ HHH beating Kane was absolutely the right call because Kane sucked by that point and there were other more marketable guys around. I was a Kane fan longer than Kilgore. I only think Kane sucked nonstop from around Wrestlemania 2000 on whereas Kilgore thinks he always sucked.
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Post by Kilgore on Apr 6, 2023 23:46:24 GMT
I love how Kilgore is always dropping gems about how guys you may have liked for a while growing up... actually pretty much suck. LOL suddenly the reign of terror steamrolling him makes sense because it's KANE. It begs the question... is a 1 day reign better than entire careers that never got one? Never watched 96 wcw (or it in general) Nobi got me intrigued to wanna watch things. Sometimes from a WWE lens they feel undersold. Kane is athletic for a big man, which kind of fools people into thinking he was better than he is. It fooled me for a bit, too. The reality is, he has nothing going for him whatsoever and needed to be a bad cover band version of Undertaker, arguably the greatest WWF/E creation of all time, for anyone to care about him. He got handed a proven working gimmick and moveset, TWICE, each time the WWF brass was like, "Just do exactly that, except shittier," and now 26 years later we have to pretend that he was ever good because it worked for a short period on the second attempt. Here's an interesting thought experiment: Think of the best Kane match of all time, then put that match up against Diesel vs. Bret (Survivor Series '95) and Diesel vs. Shawn (IYH) and watch it pale in comparison. And yet, everyone's first instinct is to say, Kane, the reject Diesel, is a better worker than Kevin Nash. This dude has 20+ years of WWF/E television matches and can't beat two Kevin Nash matches from 1995/1996 in quality. And while the argument can be made, "Well, it was against Bret and Shawn!" Well, I watched Isaac Yankem wrestle Bret that same exact year, and he was no Diesel, I can tell you that much. And I'm assuming Kane and Shawn locked up once or twice during Shawn's comeback run, and safe to assume, it was not In Your House: Good Friends, Better Enemies, because I've literally never heard anyone mention one of them. Kane fucking sucks. He's like the replacement lead singer of a famous band singing the hits, just making you wish the original singer was still there.
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Post by Strobe on Apr 7, 2023 10:28:36 GMT
1. To reiterate for the noobs it's more nuanced than just "Fakes good!" The Fakes failed. Fans rejected them. Fake Razor was objectively awful. I can't argue with of this. But it didn't kill the company or anything and I still think it was a potentially genius idea that was worth trying. Think about it. All your favorite wrestling characters can live on forever if the Fakes work. Mark Callaway gets old? No biggie. Just make another tall man the new Undertaker. CM Punk being difficult? Bye, Philecia. WWE replaces him with another tattooed skinnyfat guy who can talk a little bit. Lucha does it all the time. As did Japan with Tiger Mask. "But it's different with masked wrestlers!" the naysayers nay. OK, fine. How about this? Mainstream movies and tv shows replace beloved characters with new actors all the time. Why not WWE? Fans just weren't ready for it yet. And, fine, ok, the casting of Razor wasn't great either. Still think it's one of the ballsiest, most outside the box ideas they ever came up with, and this is a hill I am willing to die on. It is not really the same as replacing a character with another actor though, because of kayfabe. Wrestling is supposed to be a real sport that we are watching. Not a scripted TV show or film. There isn't an opening credits with "WWF RAW starring Michael Hickenbottom as Shawn Michaels, Mark Callaway as The Undertaker, Bret Hart as Bret Hart and Kevin Nash as Diesel" that one day just changed to "...and Glen Jacobs as Diesel". It isn't like they tried to not acknowledge it either and pretend like they were the same people. They were acknowledging it was a different guy from the start as part of the JR heel turn. When Maggie Gyllenhaal appears in The Dark Knight instead of Katie Holmes, there isn't some commentary saying "hey, that isn't the real Rachel Dawes". I don't really know what they hoped to achieve. If you wanted a similar wrestler, you could have someone copy the gimmick as such. That is a staple of pro wrestling history. Like how Hulk Hogan and Jesse Ventura were Billy Graham rip offs. Have Glen Jacobs be a laid-back cool biker guy (how bad would that be?) with his own moveset. If you really want him to use some of the same moves and mannerisms, then have him talk about Diesel being an inspiration or even a mentor. But having him cosplay as Diesel was never going to work in any way And it is different with masked wrestlers, as the mask is inherently an attempt to conceal your identity and is more like what I described above as a potential route for Jacobs as Diesel. Tiger Mask II was not supposed to be Sayama, it was known he was a new guy under the same cartoon persona. While he wrestled a high-flying style, he didn't use all the same moves and mannerisms. It is more like if the WWF leased the rights to the GI Joe character, had someone wrestle under that cartoon character's name with their own moves, then replaced him with someone else and called them GI Joe II, had them wear the same gear, but they used different moves except maybe using the same finisher as GI Joe I. Whereas what the WWF did was the same as having someone else be called Sgt. Slaughter (a real athlete in kayfabe and that was his chosen ring name, not taken from some existing IP) and start taking all of Sarge's signature bumps and using all of his moves. Maybe to move away from risk of a "fake soldier" and the stolen valour issues that can bring up, think of using He-Man or Lion-O from ThunderCats. Probably still works best with a wrestler that can wear a mask. Skeletor! It just screams of Vince throwing his toys out the pram after having put time and effort into those characters and someone else taking them from him with more money. Like he had done to others a decade earlier. And Kilgore is spot on as usual. Glen Jacobs fucking sucks.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 7, 2023 18:19:10 GMT
Was thinking about music in 1996 and always read and heard that it was a year of gloom and doom for heavy music. Supposedly a lot of bands got dropped from their label during this year, while radio and MTV collectively started ignoring it more and more while album sales dropped hard.
But also noticed a cluster of solid to great hard albums released all there within a few weeks apart, from April to early June 96 you had some good stuff drop from Evil Empire by Rage, Load by Metallica, Demonstrating My Style by Madball, the Slayer punk covers album, Through Silver In Blood by Neurosis, Great Southern Trendkill by Pantera, and the album Soundgarden put out that year all that all came out there in that little 6-8 weeks window there. Seems like an exciting time to have some cash for CD shopping. Roots by Sepultura came out in February. Wither Blister Burn Peel by Stabbing Westward in January.
Jester Race by In Flames is one I’ve only recently got into, what a spectacular album.
Another cluster of good stuff dropped in October ‘96, Korn, Manson, Tool. Seems like actually a pretty great year for heavy music, rap metal hadn’t quite taken it over yet and the flood of nu metal mallcore bands was still years away, heavy music had a free spirited kind of grunge/alternative/Lallapalooza element to it in 96, a certain artistic coolness, I feel that started to fade over the next couple years before it was kinda lost with the flood of Wal Mart cornball shit like Disturbed, Godsmack, and Linkin Park. Maybe for this style of music 1996 was the small window where it had really modernized and evolved into something cutting edge before the onset of the post-Telecommunications Act of 1996 Clear Channel radio metal.
Hanson dropped their absolute banger Mmbop in March 96. Did they bring on the premature death of the decade? I honestly believe so.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 9, 2023 14:54:48 GMT
Whoa, this episode where Bret makes his return is pretty big time. That promo has got to be up there, MSG is holy ground, he shits on HBK, his decision of WWF over WCW he's WWF forever, calls Austin the best wrestler in WWF(Austin's look at Pillman when Bret says he's going to wrestle him lol). Whole episode has a very big feel to it, definitely up there as the best one of the year, maybe one of the biggest episodes in the history of the show up to that point? This was the night after Buried Alive? Late October. Was this the start of a new WWF era?
Also was watching some Street Fighter The Animated Series on one of the free streaming apps, this was a 1 season animated show based on the Capcom game it aired in 1996 and that was it. In one of the last episodes I watched this morning with my boy they did a cross over where Ken and Ryu go into the Final Fight universe to save Mike Hagger's daughter from Mad Gear, and the guy who does the voice of Guy is the guy who played the Watcher in Highlander. It was like 1996ception.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 11, 2023 23:33:22 GMT
Is it just me or did all pro wrestling kind of really get good there in between Mind Games and Halloween Havoc? It's like both shows are really finding their groove finally after being mostly shitty through most of the year. I've finally reached the point where DDP's 5 year run as a huge dork begins to come to an end, here in October after Havoc at PEAK NWO overness you got Hall and Nash starting to come out during his matches to scout him, cheering for him when he wins. What a massive rub at this time and at his stage of his career.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 12, 2023 8:02:33 GMT
Watching his intro for the match against Mankind at Survivor Series 96 I feel like the Undertaker is the unsung hero for the WWF in 1996, with Bret out, HBK being this weird character with bad storylines and lackluster matches all year as Champ. This is really by far and away the baddest ass thing pro wrestling ever produced, and I feel like the whole Mankind storyline brought out the best in it all in 96. I stand by my longtime PW opinion that all of this was some of the most awesome shit ever, one of my favorite feuds/storylines.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 12, 2023 8:05:56 GMT
Also watching this it really gives me the feels for just how much deeper into WWF I was at this time in 96. Sid to me is at his most bad ass since 1992 Superstars squashing jobbers on stretchers, I feel like he could fairly easily beat up anybody on WCW TV. Bret is back and Austin is fucking solid gold anytime he gets near a mic. Over on WCW it's Hogan looking like a dork filming 3 Ninjas part 5, cringe shit with Savage and Liz, Piper is back, the whole WCW just feels like it's for dorks compared to WWF at this point in 96, way cooler, much more bad ass. Interesting that my opinion now and in real time back then is opposite of what the ratings were showing, WCW was killing WWF at this point? That's crazy. I think it was the little things like the fake razor/diesel, all the HBK bullshit, all the bs with Warrior actually drove viewers away there in August/September/early October, once Bret came back and shit actually got better the audience was gone to WCW for a couple years.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 12, 2023 9:04:02 GMT
Oh man the Austin montage and Bret's promo and all the walk outs for their match at MSG at Survivor Series 96, talking abouat Austin's attitude, the Highlander Adrian Paul vibes I get when Bret calls MSG holy ground, the fireworks for Bret's entrance, how truly fucking great was all this? Wow. Just in awe right now watching this for the first time in a long time. This was big. Watching through the 7 months of garbage WWF had going leading up to this makes you really appreciate the real context of just how big this really was. And then take into account where the promotion was going from here with Austin and what all happened with Bret over the next year, just wow. This is such a critical and awesome match on a scope that I am just now really appreciating, epic of the cinema.
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Post by Big Pete on Apr 12, 2023 12:44:14 GMT
One of the reasons Nitro was so successful around this time was every show was live. RAW was still being taped in bulk, which meant some episodes barely contained their biggest stars whereas Nitro always had the nWo, IV Horsemen, Lex, Sting and a new star whether it was Syxx, Jeff Jarrett, Roddy Piper etc. making an appearance.
I went back and watched Nitro and RAW from September 16th. RAW's biggest hook was the promised return of Diesel and Razor which was immediately quelled by Gorilla Monsoon who informed the audience that neither Kevin Nash or Scott Hall were going to appear on their television. The other hook was the future of Bret Hart, Brian Pillman & Owen Hart promised he'd be at the PPV and would reconcile with Owen in the city of brotherly love and Bret immediately hosed that down, so two major bait and switches. The rest of the show was largely just mid-card matches, not bad TV, but not something that's going to pop a rating either.
You had the in-ring debut of The Sultan, which was like a Dungeon of Doom esque knock off of The Iron Sheik. You had Camp Cornette distract The Smoking Gunns and cost them the match against Bob Holly & Alex Porteau. Cornette then had an in-ring demonstration against some job guy who was kicking Corny's ass until Vader interfered. Then it was the two semi-finals with Owen trying to go all Bob Orton Jr on Mero and hit him with his cast only for it to backfire. Then Faarooq goaded Sid into getting DQ'd to get us into the finals.
Meanwhile head-to-head on Nitro you had Randy Savage taking on Scott Norton and getting himself DQ'd in front of a fired up audience. Syxx appeared in the crowd and revealed he was the newest member of the nWo. Glacier made his highly anticipated debut against Bubba. Sting explained why he walked out on WCW during WarGames and turned his back on the rest of the locker room. Ric Flair & Arn Anderson were in action against Chris Jericho & Marcus Bagwell. Then in the main event it was supposed to be Lex Luger & Sting vs. Chris Benoit & Mongo but it ended up being a handicap match with Lex. Meanwhile through out the show they were cutting to the parking lot with the nWo who were revelling after their win and hatching their plan for next week.
It wasn't so much RAW was terrible, Nitro just crammed their hour with more stars and had the better atmosphere and production.
It's interesting that RAW is still doing 2s right up until Montreal despite matching WCW with their format. It really goes to show just how long it takes to win the trust of the audience and how important it is to capitilise on huge moments like that.
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Post by Ed on Apr 13, 2023 22:50:05 GMT
I love how Kilgore is always dropping gems about how guys you may have liked for a while growing up... pretty much suck. LOL suddenly the reign of terror steamrolling him makes sense because it's KANE. Does it beg the question... is a 1-day reign better than entire careers that never got one? Never watched 96 WCW (or it in general) Nobi got me intrigued to wanna watch things. Sometimes from a WWE lens, they feel undersold. Kane is athletic for a big man, which kind of fools people into thinking he was better than he is. It fooled me for a bit, too. The reality is, he has nothing going for him whatsoever and needed to be a bad cover band version of Undertaker, arguably the greatest WWF/E creation of all time, for anyone to care about him. He got handed a proven working gimmick and moveset, TWICE, each time the WWF brass was like, "Just do exactly that, except shittier," and now 26 years later we have to pretend that he was ever good because it worked for a short period on the second attempt. Here's an interesting thought experiment: Think of the best Kane match of all time, then put that match up against Diesel vs. Bret (Survivor Series '95) and Diesel vs. Shawn (IYH) and watch it pale in comparison. And yet, everyone's first instinct is to say, Kane, the reject Diesel, is a better worker than Kevin Nash. This dude has 20+ years of WWF/E television matches and can't beat two Kevin Nash matches from 1995/1996 in quality. And while the argument can be made, "Well, it was against Bret and Shawn!" Well, I watched Isaac Yankem wrestle Bret that same year, and he was no Diesel, I can tell you that much. And I'm assuming Kane and Shawn locked up once or twice during Shawn's comeback run, and safe to assume, it was not In Your House: Good Friends, Better Enemies, because I've literally never heard anyone mention one of them. Kane fucking sucks. He's like the replacement lead singer of a famous band singing the hits, just making you wish the original singer was still there. Kane was awesome. He overstayed his welcome after a while but he took whatever was given to him and made the most of it.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 17, 2023 12:25:03 GMT
It's been really cool to watch through this year and see the whole business kind of come of age. It's been a breeze I think both Raw and Nitro were only 1 hour a piece through most of the year, it's just that there was so much garbage through the first 9 months of both promotions. But you can kind of feel both leagues turn the corner by October. With WWF as soon as Bret comes back it's like everything is better all around, you can see the tracks being laid down for 1997 in Survivor Series into It's Time.
Watching through 96 in chronological order for the first time since it happened I can't help but feel like I have a newfound appreciation for Survivor Series 96. I wouldn't call it a great show but this has got to be one of the most pivotal and crucial shows in WWF history. Bret and Austin's comeback, HBK getting boo'd/Sid getting cheered for almost killing Lothario, Rocky being the soul survivor of his match, this all felt like a retroactively much bigger event than I ever really appreciated it for. It's the context that I'm just now getting after seeing the trash that WWF mostly had going all year, then the spot they were in with their backs against the wall with WCW, for them to put it all together at Survivor Series 96 the way they did just feels really huge looking back now, dare I say like one of the shows that saved the whole fed.
But getting through November and things have gotten pretty good on both sides. I really dug the Taker vs Mankind match that was on Raw there. Also seeing some good stuff in the ring on the WCW side, excellent Nitro match between Eddie vs Benoit that just had such a great feel to it the way it was shot, the way the footage looks, the crowd, lighting, commentary, everything about it just hit the spot. I also kinda dig the way they did Bischoff's turn, though it didn't feel big enough of a moment, it was a different kind of swerve with him getting caught in a big lie by Piper.
I'm still going over and watching the Saturday Night episodes along with Nitro. Earlier in 1996 Saturday Night felt like the A-show, a lot of the big stars were wrestling big matches and cutting longer, more in-depth promos than what we got on Nitro(got to say Hogan and Savage were in rare form on SN earlier in the year cutting some classic cornball promos the level of which you just weren't getting from them on Nitro). Through the course of the year and especially once Nitro hit 2 hours this fades and it becomes a nice little supplemental show where they spend more time analyzing shit that happened on Nitro. Still you had some pretty funny NWO squash segments, their squash matches would be filmed in black and white in empty arena and the names they come up with for the jobbers are to die for. One particular squash on Saturday night in November see's the Outsiders take out two clowns and the NWO passes a live mic around calling the commentary during the match, like Hall and Nash would take turns on the mic when the other one was fucking the jobbers up. Very cool(probably rarely ever seen) NWO segment for Saturday night.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 17, 2023 16:02:26 GMT
Interesting correlation I've noticed in the ratings. Both companies had a lot of bullshit going on for most of 1996, I noticed that the ratings were mostly back and forth until WWF had a run of about 6 weeks on top in April-May. Then around the time of the NWO starting in May WCW was off to the races and started their 83 week run that lasted into 1998. So by October 1996 I've really noticed both feds like took a step towards feeling more big time, you can feel the 1997 vibes starting to be laid down. The ratings make it all make sense, by October WCW had really built a swagger and felt more big time for some reason, this spilled over into 1997 where it just felt huge. With the show going to 2 hours by October the wrestlers like Benoit, Malenko, Eddie, the cruiserweights started getting more in-ring time. On the other side WWF had been getting their ass kicked since May, after trying a bunch of goofy shit through the fall they settled in around Bret's return in October and seemed to really start circling the wagons, during the build and aftermath of Survivor Series shit started to change big time for the better.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 17, 2023 16:10:36 GMT
Funny moment I caught on commentary on Nitro in I think November-December 1996, Bischoff, Hall, and Nash are on commentary. Bischoff says that NWO doesn't want to put WCW out of business, they can be the #2 promotion behind the NWO, then Hall says you can throw in one of those Japanese promotions at #3. Nash then out of nowhere says maybe ECW can be #4, then Bischoff laughs it off "I don't think so". Hall says the funny thing is you can watch them and play bingo too.
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 25, 2023 20:42:25 GMT
And with that I mean, really how fucking huge was ECW at this point in October-November 1996? You can't watch Raw without seeing the signs, now they are getting name dropped by the Outsiders on Nitro. Pretty big time for a bingo hall league. I'm starting to really think November To Remember 96 was like the hot iron time for the first PPV to be struck. I know I read that was the original plan at one time but it got pushed back.
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Post by Ness on Apr 26, 2023 0:23:01 GMT
Dude what a time to be alive. Late 95 until Austin joins McMahon. That time capsule is just fucking sexy. I get why ecw still reunions... because that was just THE moment. Did it ever reach that pinnacle again? Mania and such is huge and all, but it just didn't feel like it was ever gonna grab the public by the balls again. It's a different animal now which is why people always say it as "STILL" watching wrestling.
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Post by Baker on Apr 26, 2023 2:01:45 GMT
Dude what a time to be alive. Late 95 until Austin joins McMahon. That time capsule is just fucking sexy. I get why ecw still reunions... because that was just THE moment. Did it ever reach that pinnacle again? Mania and such is huge and all, but it just didn't feel like it was ever gonna grab the public by the balls again. It's a different animal now which is why people always say it as "STILL" watching wrestling. This guy gets it
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Post by Neo Zeed on Apr 26, 2023 19:43:41 GMT
I feel like I have truly combed through WWF and WCW 1996 at this point and I feel like I should write a final thoughts. I got to admit I burned through so much of it as background noise and didn't bother with a lot of WCW PPV(tapes that I rented probably 1,000 times back in the day). But I just feel even more confirmed in watching through all of this that everything that was awesome about wrestling came from ECW, even the NWO I feel like got a lot of style from ECW, them name dropping ECW on commentary randomly on Nitro the way they did pretty much confirms Nash was secretly watching and a fan. In watching it all go down now I realized just how much of the NWO was cornball Hogan dorkery. I've come to the final judgement that had something happened to where all the pieces didn't fall into place, if ECW just never happens pro wrestling would be mostly dead today, you still see the influence it had pretty much fucking everywhere all these years later. It's really amazing.
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Post by Baker on Apr 27, 2023 2:16:10 GMT
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Post by Neo Zeed on May 11, 2023 8:03:35 GMT
So RVD debuts in ECW 1996 its interesting to look back at how Jean Claude Van Damme's career kind of took a nosedive in 1996 as those style of action movies really fell out of style going into 1997. Looking at the year JCVD had in 1996 this was the year that Maximum Risk came out and also The Quest. The Quest seems to be a favorite and the wiki says it debuted #1 at the box office? Really? I actually always thought it was a made for TV USA Network original. I actually don't like it very much, it's a pretty weak Bloodsport clone but it's understandable they would try that formula to strike while JCVD popularity was profitable. Bloodsport came out in like 1988 from Cannon Films and didn't make any money, but I'm sure was a huge hit in video stores and probably got monster ratings on cable any time it came on in the early 90's.
Maximum Risk was not that great either. It was a well directed movie that looks cool and has interesting premise, different from JCVD's previous films. It's more of a slick international espionage type story. one of the final fight scenes has Van Dam using the Tazmission if I remember correctly. In an elevator fight scene against the main heel. This movie really tried to lean on JCVD as a legit actor, and at times it's like BJ Penn head nod gif maybe he's underrated artist but then once you get into the beef of the film he really is hung out to dry with some of the dialogue and some of the scenes, his acting gets really bad.
So coming off of a pretty hot 94-95, I always thought Sudden Death was pretty good. It was looking like JCVD was headed to straight to video in 1996 with these 2, then you knew by the Rodman/Mickey Rourke movie it was over. Always get that one mixed up with the Rob Shnieder one.
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