WWF All Star/Championship Wresting
By Scott Keith on 26 November 2020
You're a better man than me for trying to watch and review these Backlund-era WWF shows. I tried to watch a few episodes of All Star Wrestling and Championship Wrestling on YouTube and while it is really neat to see future stars like Curt Hennig and Eddie Gilbert show up to take beatings from middle-aged Mr. Fuji, these shows are awful, have no energy, and the McMahon/Patterson announce team is so bad. (To be fair to Fuji, I've come to appreciate what a solid worker he was while watching these shows.) And to think, these bad shows are the shows that inspired young kids like Mick Foley and Tommy Dreamer to become wrestlers!
You've watched a ton of these shows from all over the territories from this time frame- are the WWF shows the worst of these? Even Randy Savage's ICW tapings, while on a shoestring budget, are more polished and more fun than the garbage coming from the McMahons.
Yeah, they're pretty terrible. If you watch Mid-South or World Class from the same time on the Network, the shows are totally watchable and don't seem like they're from another century like the WWF ones do. I think maybe that's why Vince had that image of territorial wrestling as “smoky halls” that he always put forth, because that's what his father's show was and that's what he knew. Maybe he should have been watching the Von Erichs every week instead.