Darth Pipes

The Savage/Tito MSG feud was awesome. You had a trilogy of matches between the two, followed by two tag team matches. Now that's a feud.

I think this is the one where Elizabeth appears in Savage's corner, marking her last WWF appearance during a tour of Europe. I think it's a pretty good line-up. I was hoping for a little more. Particularly from his series with Tito Santana. His IC title victory is rightly there but his MSG matches with Santana are classics. Would have liked to have seen his Wrestling Classic match with Dynamite Kid and his blowoff match against Jake in 92. Still though, some stuff on the third disc I like a lot. The aforementioned HBK match, the tag match with Bret against Flair and HBK and his Raw match against Yokozuna, his final WWF Championship title shot.

Ahmed was red-hot. IC Champion and before he got injured, he won a battle royal to face HBK for the World title. His injuries though destroyed him. That Faraaq promo was interesting and he actually mentions Bobo Brazil being U.S. Champion in 1997. Speaking of Brazil, I thought the promo they showed of him from Florida was pretty damn good. -Liked the part where Tony Atlas talked about how bad his relationship with Rocky Johnson was. Those two really could have had a very successful run if they could manage to get along. I was sure what to expect from Atlas but he was a very good storyteller. -Ole Anderson came across as a real prick, huh?

The exclusion of Booker T was inexcuseable. They've had no problem mentioning Kurt Angle on this show before. I agree more could have been said about JYD and Ladd too. But I still enjoyed it. Needed to be longer.

Just saw the new Legends of Wrestling and it was very, very good. Watts, Atlas, and Long were all good editions. Next episode will be History of Texas Wrestling. I would assume that will air before WM.

JR wrote in his blog that Ron Simmons was originally going to be part of the panel but after he got released, Atlas took his place. Too bad Simmons couldn't have been there. He's a good interview and it would have been a total WCW reunion with him, Long, JR, Dusty, and Watts.

I'm fine with it for this one. No documentary will mean more time for matches.

Sheik is all kinds of awesome. I got his autograph once. The guy in front of me handed him one of the old rubber Sheik wrestling figures for him to sign. He took it and said "Oh, very valuable. Worth 500 dollar!" If Muraco and Fuji had done those Fuji Vice skits now, they would have become so popular that the WWE would have had no choice but to turn them face. Huge push today I think. Saw the rest of the show. I think Scott Keith was right that everyone was on mushrooms. The show was loaded with sexual innuendo. We had Gene saying that after seeing Elizabeth's picture, Steele went into the men's room. Liked Slick saying he liked the bear because he was black. TNT is mixed with me. Some episode are really boring. They did a year-end show for 1985 which was forty-five of the longest minutes of my life. But with the right guest, the show could be really good. Roddy Piper, Randy Savage, and Bobby Heenan were gold on that show.

Give the WWE some time. It took them almost 25 years to admit on 24/7 that taking over the Georgia Championship Wrestling slot was not a success. I think the ratings by the end of the NBC run were like 6.5. They would kill for those numbers now.

I watched that part last night and it was pretty damn funny. I guess they figured it was the last show so they'd let them get away with that stuff. Jake was making a jerking off motion too, only he didn't do it with the snake. Jake was still a heel here but you never would have known it the way he's interacting with everyone. Even the fans are on his side, with one of them asking when he'll put Steamboat out of his misery. That's what I liked about the TNT audience. They weren't plants like with the later studio audience for Prime Time in 1991. They cheered for heels like Piper and Orndorff and laughed at the jokes of Savage and Heenan. Not bad for an 80s WWF crowd. I'll have to watch the rest later...I hear Slick shows up.

I was watching that. Andre could barely move but the heel was off the charts and the double referee thing was actually quite clever. It's amazing Hogan didn't kill Hebner though. He completely missed Dibiase and Virgil and landed on the outside floor. And Andre does inexplicably refer to the WWF Championship as the "World Tag Team Championship" no fewer than three times.

I skimmed through all three discs so far and it looks damn good. I can't wait to really get into it. It's too bad they don't have a documentary but I think the Mean Gene openers for each segments work all right this time. I did find one interesting edit. When Piper is whipping Mr. T with his belt, they edited out Ventura's un-pc remark in which he says "Hey, McMahon, it's Roots 2!"

I guess they did it for the new fans. Although I actually liked colorizing it and I thought it did a good job bringing the game to life. I've heard the footage of Bruno and Buddy Rogers is lost but supposedly, the audio still exists. The earliest (official) WWE footage I know about is the Pedro/Ivan title change from February 1971. I don't know if anything from Bruno's first reign still exists.

Yeah... them keeping the local promos as is was what made this show stand-out for me. I believe Superbowl I was also the victim of networks trying to save money/space as both networks that broadcast it lost their copies... luckily, NFL Films was there to document it as well. Yeah, I've heard that about some of the early Super Bowls. I know that the original broadcast of "The Greatest Game Ever Played" between the Giants and the Colts in 58 has been lost but when ESPN did the special on it, you used the original coach's film of the game (which was about six minutes longer) and utilized local radio broadcasts along with colorized footage to put it together again.

Another funny bit is Andre referring to the WWF Championship as the "World World Heavyweight Championship." He would refer to it as that after he won the title regularly...think he might have called it the World Tag Team Championship too.

From what I understand, the WWE's Crockett tape footage goes back to the early-80s. I've heard that a lot of the seventies footage was taped over. This was a common practice of promoters at the time to save money. Sadly, networks would repeat this too. NBC taped over much of Johnny Carson's 60s footage, including his debut episode. Vince was one of the few to recognize the value of maintaining a tape library. I know that they have Crockett stuff going back to at least 9/9/81, because they've shown some footage of that on the Jake Roberts DVD. They also showed a clip of Crockett announcing Flair as the new World Champion on the Flair DVD. There's some classic Mid-Atlantic footage available on youtube, particularly between Flair and Steamboat. Anyway, watched the first episode and really enjoyed it. The wrestlers and their talent are first-rate. The tag match with Steamboat and Roberts was a tremendous tag team match. Fast-paced action with all four guys bumping their assess off. Even Roberts and I was never a fan of his actual in-ring work. Not to mention it'll be a treat to watch crazy, coked-up Heel Piper in his prime. Looks like that footage of Mosca came from the WWWF since Albano was there. Speaking of coked-up...was Jay Youngblood (great in-ring talent) high or was he always that bad when he was cutting promos? Props for them showing the local promos. I was stunned they didn't edit out the local contact information.

The September 20th NWA is shown as 24/7 skipped over the previous week for some reason. They missed out on the news that Dusty won the TV title (which he never, ever defended on TV), Garvin won the Mid-Atlantic title (finally winning a title after failing multiple times to dethrone a Horseman) and footage of the Midnight Express beatdown on the Road Warriors. We do get to see that footage, which is just plain awesome and Cornette proves to be the all-star, cutting a killer promo. Even Dennis Condrey cuts a promo. Flair has a terrific promo too and we have third episodes left until Magnum sustains his career-ending accident. Something was different about this show, either the lighting was really dark or the video quality has degraded.

Mid-Atlantic's line-up was tremendous. You had a prime Flair, Steamboat, Piper, and Valentine. Not to mention Slaughter, Snuka, the Briscos, etc. Here's a great website for the Mid-Atlantic, which leads to the equally great Kayfabe Memories message boards. http://www.midatlanticgateway.com/Lobby.htm

Pretty good stuff. Love how Monsoon was reading Heenan the riot act about passing up his shot at the WWF Championship and Heenan admitting he was only pursuing the title for the money it brought. It's a shame the Brain never got to manage the WWF Champion, even if it was only a minute. Great Heenan/Monsoon banter overall. Good point about the Bret match. Bret was one of the few heels that Monsoon pushed hard. Some more innuendo, with Monsoon noting that Steve Lombardi has found himself in a lot of compromising positions. This led to another joke about the "Terry Garvin School of Self-Defense."

The Haku/Harley match is quite good. Race could still go even after suffering such a horrific injury. He'd have a really good matcy with Larry Z on the final AWA card the next year. He could still bump and they worked well together. If anyone has ever read Race's book, when Haku was younger, he used to help Harley out when he visited Japan or something. So jobbing to him at the Royal Rumble was a way to help him out. Some funny bits in the match including Heenan constantly switching his alligences and Ventura making fun of Monsoon. Monsoon keeps admonishing Race for not hooking the leg and Ventura says he used to see Gorilla not hook the leg when he was a child, much to Gorilla's indignation.

TNT had some entertaining stuff. -Savage is an absolute riot here, pretty much just playing with the crowd and saying his usual bizarre stuff. -Mr. Homoerotic Paul Orndorff was on and cut a pretty good promo which had several in the audience cheering him. Gene reverted back to his usual "Orndorff had family members in the crowd" bit. -A lot of sexual innuendo here with Savage and even Heenan's line that he was watching what Gene was doing as his hotel room. -In today's PC world, I don't think putting on jackets with the stars and bars and waving Confederate flags would go over too well.

Oh, that was who they were blurring. Talk about trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Got the Legends of Wrestling Collection from Amazon and picked up the three bonus DVDs at Best Buy.

Heenan rips off a golden line about Duggan, saying he lost his entire family fortune in Atlantic City in the parking lot paying the parking meter for four hours.

Love Garvin's promos but why does his squashes have to take ten minutes? Yeah, it was tag team and Russian mania this week. Kind of a dull show. Cornette's near sobbing fit was great. I hope he went on to announcer some more shows after this though.

I had never seen this match until today. What spot did Michaels hurt his back on? when he dropped the elbow into the casket? I was working from home so was half distracted but I thought he got posted or something on to it , which is what kept him out for years. When he gets backdropped over the top rope and his ass lands on the casket. It compressed a ton of shit in his back. HBK said it was weird because it didn't affect him at all when it happened. He said he felt fine during the match and for the rest of the night, but couldn't move when he woke up the next day. How did I miss that - time to cue it up again. Thanks for the response. The clip of HBK clipping the casket is shown during that "Don't try this at home" montage they always show on the DVDs.