The SmarK Rant for World Championship Wrestling – 11.16.86
Taped from Atlanta, GA
Your host is Tony Schiavone
The Rock N Roll Express & Brad Armstrong are out for the first hillbilly promo leading up to Starrcade, and RNR is ready for the Andersons while Brad Armstrong is also someone who exists.
Tully Blanchard v. Allen West
It’s like the amalgam of two Flashes, but in jobber form. Slingshot suplex finishes at 0:30 and it must be another college football game episode.
Jim Cornette and his entourage are out for a 10 minute promo condensed into 30 seconds. I would be remiss in not pointing out the sweet MX jackets that are very reminiscent of the ones currently worn by the Mechanics in NXT.
Dusty & Nikita (who I totally forgot were both singles champions at this point) are down to destroy some Horsemen this weekend, and Nikita flexes menacingly to prove it. I find it funny that Nikita played the role so convincingly that he could stand there furrowing his brow and totally sold that he was in fact an evil Russian merely by looks alone. Well, reformed evil Russian.
Brad Armstrong v. Bill Mulkey
Brad works the arm for an exceedingly long period of time for a 30 minute show and then survives a Mulkey flurry before finishing with the legsweep at 2:00.
Paul Ellering wants to talk about PHYSICS in advance of the scaffold match, as in big fat Jim Cornette falling off the scaffold at 86 miles per hour and hitting the mat. Yeah, no kidding, that’s why his knees are messed up to this day!
STARRCADE! CONTROL! CENTER! We get a montage of Koloff destroying geeks with the Sickle, and Flair destroying geeks with the figure-four. See, back when there was footage of jobbers getting squashed to pull from, you could create video packages where guys looked dominant and won with their finishers, so that fans would wonder who would win when they matched up against each other. Next up, we get footage of Dusty attacking Tully’s leg with a chair and then applying his terrible figure-four, which leads to the Horsemen breaking his hand with a baseball bat in the parking lot. Tony runs down the rest of the card and I think what I might do is repost the original rant of the home video version and then add the undercard stuff from the Network as a bonus. There’s still two hours of matches to review there!
Krusher Kruschev squashes some jobber with the Sickle in 10 seconds while the Network does a rare buffering stint. Didn’t catch the name, don’t care.
Paul Jones is ranting and raving about wanting to shave Big Mama bald when he beats Jimmy Valient.
Rick Rude & Manny Fernandez v. Bill Tabb & Brodie Chase
Rude was incredibly cut up at this point and you can see why Vince would be throwing money at him. They work Tabb over and Rude whips Bull into Brodie Chase with the Flying Burrito to finish at 1:30. You could tell they were heating up as a team at this point, although I never really bought them as tag champions.
JJ and the Horsemen are pretty sure that Starrcade will be Dusty’s last day on earth.
The Midnight Express v. Art Pritts & Vern Deaton
The continued banishment of “The Chase” is the biggest tragedy of the Network. Can we just do a Kickstarter to raise the money and pay Georgio Moroder? Poor Deaton just gets murdered, ending with Condrey putting him in a Boston crab and Bobby coming off the top with a kneedrop onto his head to knock him out at 1:30. Replay shows that Bobby in fact landed safely on his OTHER knee, which sucks for Eaton in the long run but made for a totally safe move.
Your wacky combo of the week: Baron Von Raschke, Wahoo McDaniel and the Kansas Jayhawks are out to threaten a variety of people for Starrcade. Man, Bobby Jaggers just vanished off the face of the earth after the 80s. I think we’ve talked about him before, but apparently he took Bruiser Brody’s murder really hard and retired as a result, then died in 2012 of Hepatitis.
Ric Flair is fully coked up and ready for Nikita.
Arn Anderson v. Tony Zane
Gourdbuster finishes at 0:20.
The Four Horsemen regroup for another ranting interview from Flair, and everyone gets their Mechanics jackets from JJ Dillon to provide final motivation for the big show.
And we’re out and ready for Starrcade ’86!
For those looking for easter eggs in the credits, wait for the end with “Makeup: Terri Boatright”.
