Told you the updates would be more frequent from now on. Thanks to you all for sending in your questions. We’re always on the look out for more, so send them here and we won’t send you money in return.
Onwards…
“here’s two I believe you will have some fun answering. You may have noticed that nearly every question I ask has something to do with the E on some level. I grew up on WWF/E and have been loyal to them, sometimes to a (big) fault. I never watched WCW or ECW when they were going. I watch them now on some of the DVDs or if I find an old tape in a video store. I thought you could tell me better than anyone, who did I really missed out on? Of course I’ve heard how good Flair was, and how good “the name that will never be spoken again” was. How good were guys like Lance Storm, “Fit” Finlay, Dean Malenko, Shane Douglas,and any others, cruiserweights etc.? I’ve heard that some never got their just due but they still had awesome matches in the undercard. I also never really saw any Sting matches. Was he even that good or was he just a painted up dude that only guys like Flair could pull a watchable match out of? Which leads to…
2. Speaking of Sting, was there ever any disputes
about Sting doing his later gimmick? Was there ever any possibility of Miramax/Dimension going to sue Sting or WCW for ripping off the late Brandon Lee’s awesome character in The Crow? Or were they smart enough to never actually use the Crow or Lee’s name. Or were the movie guys actually fine with it. Just wondering.”
– Mike Long
I was a WWF boy as well, on account of it being the only wrestling that I had any access to – and even that was tenuous. It only aired on satellite TV, which was still in its infancy at the time and not something we could afford, so that meant living vicariously through borrowed tapes. Actually, one of the ITV affiliates in the region next to ours started showing some NWA late at night. For reasons I’ve never fully understood, it could only be picked up through the VCR and even then the quality was terrible. I seem to recall they were very excited about the Great Muta touching Sting though, so it must have been about 1989. All the ITV stations began showing some WCW on Saturday afternoons in 1994 but that was when I was still in a colossal sulk about Hulk Hogan so I didn’t bother with it. The network felt much the same way and canned it fairly quickly, no doubt due to having to air Thunder in Paradise as part of the deal. Skip ahead two years and not only did I have cable TV but I was bored enough to discover a bastardised form of TNT airing Nitro on a two-month delay, just in time for the early months of the nWo. Basically, much like yourself, I missed out on a fair chunk of first-run wrestling action from outside the McMahon circle in those days. There are rumours of DVD anthologies for Starrcade, War Games and the Great American Bash though, so if even one of them sees the light of day then get onto it right away. The Horsemen DVD is underwhelming but the Ric Flair collection is a must-own, and there are several great NWA/WCW bouts on the Pillman, Guerrero and Cage Match DVDs. Oh, and the Benoit one. Wonder how much I would get for my copy if eBay would open up to me again…
As for the specific people you mentioned…
Lance Storm turned up in early 2000 and became one of the few fresh faces to get a pretty decent push that actually worked and got him more over with the fans. He headed up his own stable, Team Canada, and at one point held the United States, Cruiserweight and Hardcore titles simultaneously. They were promptly renamed the Canadian, 100 Kilos & Under and Saskatchewan Hardcore International titles in keeping with his character. Despite being one of the few highlights of Nitro at the time, or perhaps even the only one, the crazy booking style meant Storm didn’t really have any great matches in spite of some great performances. I mean, his biggest nemesis was General Hugh Rection.
Fit Finlay first turned up in WCW in 1995, billed as the Belfast Bruiser. He was a solid midcard worker, though never one that broke out in the same way as the likes of Benoit, Booker and Guerrero did. At a house show in July 1999 he cut his leg on a table after Brian Knobbs threw him through it, severing a nerve in his knee. It was rather serious, with doctors at one point doubting he would be able to walk again, which makes his current WWE stint all the more remarkable. He returned to action later on that year, though he wound up leaving altogether in 2000 as the dumb became dumber, eventually signing on as a road agent with the WWF in 2001. Some of his more memorable matches included defending the WCW Television Title against Benoit at Slamboree ’98 and the incomprehensible Hardcore Junkyard Invitational Battle Royal at Bash at the Beach ’99, plus various encounters with Regal and Booker on Nitro.
Like this Parking Lot Brawl with Regal from April ’96…
Dean Malenko had as good a run in WCW as he had a lame one in the WWF. He held the United States and Tag Team titles, plus four Cruiserweight titles, was a member of the Four Horsemen, had a ludicrously fun feud with Chris Jericho in 1998 and had numerous fine matches along the way. I suppose the best one was against Benoit at Hog Wild ’96. Never mind. His final match was the notorious Catch As Catch Can bout with Billy Kidman at Souled Out 2000, when he f*cked up and left the ring early on to regroup and thus got disqualified and killed the match far, far too early. Probably best to forget all about his spell in the Revolution stable too. That one was headed up by…
Shane Douglas, a.k.a. “fat”. His first stint came in 1990, when he got to be a skateboarder despite not being able to skate and thus looked like an idiot. He left fairly soon after that, returning to the promotion in 1992 to have a far better time of it by teaming with Ricky Steamboat. They had some rather tasty matches against Dustin Rhodes & Barry Windham and Steve Austin & Brian Pillman but circumstances soon led to him departing for ECW and reinventing himself by venting himself. By 1999 he returned to WCW, forming Revolution with Benoit, Malenko, Saturn and Asya, with the entire premise being based on so-what bad blood between Douglas and Ric Flair. It went nowhere. He got to join the New Blood faction in 2000 and won the United States, Tag Team and Hardcore belts during that run. Running, however, was getting more difficult for ol’ Shane by that point and his matches were pure fast-forward material. Of course, I never really rated him in the first place.
Lots of people have made analogies between early Sting and John Cena, on account of how neither of them are particularly good wrestlers but they are enthusiastic and charismatic enough to hook people anyway, so that when they get in there with a Ric Flair or a Shawn Michaels something truly special can happen. To be fair, even taking into account stellar performances of people like Flair at the first Clash of the Champions, Sting showed more in-ring aptitude on a more regular basis at that stage of his career than Cena has ever done. Sadly, his knee injury at Clash X marked the end of his improvement. He still had plenty of other very good matches after that against the likes of Vader, Foley and the Steiners, but by the mid ’90s he just seemed to get really bored with it all and stop trying. Then of course came the Crow make-over, which left him to really hone his apathy for an entire year, to the extent that he never got going again afterwards. No, not even with the ability to do Wolfpac crotch-chops. Weird, huh? Given his age, the low expectations people had for him and the general malaise of his first sting, however, he has been doing rather well in TNA of late though. But then you have to suffer the storylines where Abyss comes from space via the smegma of James Cameron and Sting has to collect fresh smegma otherwise the nuclear baby growing inside his mother’s uterus will explode, killing us all. And who can be bothered with that? Not me, I tells ya.
So far as the legality of the Crow Sting character… well, they never went out of their way to make any on-air reference to The Crow. They did change the make-up after a spell but other than that the costume was just a black trenchcoat and a baseball bat. Plus, the original incarnation of the character was more or less a psychotic mime. Animal symbolism involved scorpions rather than crows. There was a definite similarity and that’s almost certainly why Eric Bischoff (or Scott Hall, according to some sources) wanted to remould Sting in that way. Still, they could have got away with it had it ever gone to court. Apparently one time James O’Barr, the creator of the Crow, was asked about similarities between his character and Sting and replied “I just don’t see it.” Well, fair enough.
Here’s not-the-Crow at perhaps his most Crow-ish:
I love Savage taking himself by surprise during the entrance music…
And you know what else WCW did very well? Cruiserweights. Lots and lots of not-at-all-vanilla midgets playing far better than the big boys did. Check out this tribute video:
My favourite part was when the guy jumped.
Back in #033, Striker asked for info on the origins of the Ladder Match. Well, here’s some more about where it all began
In 1972, Stampede Wrestling was running a feud between homeboy babyface Dan Kroffat and evil foreigner Tor Kamata. They ran shows each Friday at the old Victoria Pavilion and were looking for a way to prolong the program between the pair. Kroffat proposed hanging money from the ceiling and during the course of a conversation with Kamata thought of bringing a ladder into play too. Stu Hart approved the idea and thus the first Ladder Match was held that September, with $1,000 as the prize. Kroffat won the match and was stopped from throwing the money to the fans by Kendo Nagasaki, who jumped him and laid him out. Bret Hart was in the crowd and managed to get a $20 note, which he apparently still has, and of course it was he who spoke to Vince McMahon about starting Ladder Matches in the WWF many years later. Kroffat and Kamata had a series of matches around the territory. In 1973 they had another, this time with the North American Heavyweight Title on the line and hung above the ring. Years later came the tables and the chairs and the briefcases and Professor Frink
â€ÂAre they really going to go for the chuffingly obvious outcome of having Kennedy Kennedy become Kennedy McMahon? I mean, that would be like having Haley Joel Osmont ask Bruce Willis if he was a ghost every ten minutes throughout the Sixth Sense, knowwhatImean?â€Â
Yeah, I knowwhatyoumean. On the surface this is a decent enough idea for a storyline but it all depends on how they wrap it up. Mr McMahon is no longer a novel enough character for them to get away with a Ministry-sanctioned, “It was me Austin! It was me all along!!†conclusion. There are certain things that they simply have to take into account in order to avoid wasting everybody’s time and patience. Obviously, the offspring has to be a son and he has to be an active wrestler. With all due respect to the retired female cripples of the world, if they’re giving this much attention to somebody then they need to be able to recoup it and that means matches. Good matches. Also, they need to have a longer-term goal in mind. Just as it was impossible to really believe Vince McMahon had been blown up, it would require far too much suspension of disbelief to think that some random wrestler had been retconned into the McMahon clan. Above all, this cannot be left to revolve around the McMahons. The thought of this person going on to feud with Shane and Stephanie fills me with apathy but no doubt that’s exactly the sort of predictable thing they have in mind. Why not go another way? Why not Harry Smith?
Yes, the British Bulldog Jr.
Think about it.
Kennedy ROLF has plenty to be getting on with in his own way and in his own time. There’s no need to smother his identity with things like this. Harry Smith’s family background dominates everything that WWE has planned for him anyway, so they might as well experiment with it. Just imagine Vince and ROLF in the ring together one night word is that Vince has finally discovered the identity of his secret son ROLF is giddy with glee the crowd thinks they know what’s going to happen Vince is chuffed to share this moment with ROLF, who he has come to rather admire then he introduces his son, Harry McMahon. ROLF is stunned. The audience doesn’t know what to think. Harry instantly becomes a main player on Raw. Over the next few weeks they start to introduce Nattie Neidhart, Teddy Hart and T.J. Wilson, each one proud of their Hart heritage. Harry becomes torn between the morally-dubious high life of the millionaire McMahons and the proud, honest, hard-graft-and-harder-knocks heritage that he once held true. The fans will Harry on to make the right decision and get back to his roots. By the time he actually does turn against the McMahons to reform the Hart Foundation, the fans should be chomping at the bit to see it happen.
Then, round about the end of the year, Shawn Michaels returns and says he made the whole paternity suit up just because he wanted to f*ck with both the McMahon and Hart families. We get a good run of uber-dickhead heel HBK once again and it’s an easy build to a white-hot Michaels vs Smith match at WrestleMania.
And just imagine how much fun Vince could have with this. He loves controversy, pissing people off and making money off of the back of folk, so why would he care about speaking ill of the dead? He gets to claim that Davey Boy was a dumb, sterile junkie who didn’t have it in him to father a child. He gets to claim that he f*cked Bret Hart’s sister, Diana. He gets to do all this and get away with it because it would all build nicely to an outcome that leaves the Harts looking like the good guys. Above all else, it would be one heck of a litmus test for the new Foundation. Are they prepared to get over themselves and sully the name of their family in order to do what’s right for business? If not, they’re in for one hell of a shock no matter what
Oh, hell, it’s only an idea.
Here they are in action in OVW
Playing second-fiddle to a midget, it seems. Things can only get better.
If you have a question you’d like to pester us with, send it here. Look out for another update, coming soon!
