Written by the Winners, Wrestlemania Edition – “Wrestlemania Rewind Episode 1”
(Today is my 18th wedding anniversary, so I don’t really have time to review anything new. However, since today is ALSO the 9th anniversary of the WWE Network, here’s my review of the first show ever broadcast on it, Wrestlemania Rewind about the first Wrestlemania! Originally written for Inside the Ropes Magazine back in March 2021 and published there.).
Hey, it’s Wrestlemania season, so let’s look at an early WWE Network documentary series about the Grandest Daddy of all Stages, although I somehow doubt they can add much more to the story than they’ve gone over a million times before. But they do love to celebrate themselves.
So the idea here is that WWE takes a famous Wrestlemania main event and does a whole history of the match and buildup to it, and then shows the complete match to fill the rest of the hour. Fair enough. The first selection is of course Hulk Hogan & Mr. T v. Rowdy Roddy Piper & Paul Orndorff from the first Wrestlemania.
Of course we get the requisite talking heads putting over how Wrestlemania is “the World Cup, World Series and Super Bowl” all rolled into one! Otherwise I wouldn’t have known.
Back to 1985 we go, as Mean Gene explains to us the “unwritten rules” of promoters having territories, which were then shattered by cable TV. OK, not to be pedantic about this, but the rules actually WERE written. That was the entire point of the National Wrestling Alliance, which the WWF was supposedly a part of for a long time, as they had actual defined territories for the member groups. Anyway, Vince McMahon saw Hulk Hogan in Rocky III and decided he was going to be the biggest star in the world for the WWF. That’s some amazing scouting there. Really took a huge risk on that one. Pat Patterson admits that Vince took a lot of heat from the other promoters for stealing their stars, but WWF was innovating stuff like “closed circuit”, which was absolutely not done by any other wrestling promotion beforehand.
Next up, innovating the first ever wrestling supercard, Wrestlemania, which was also a concept never done by any other wrestling promotion beforehand. And also they add a story about how wrestlers were “nervous” about working the show because they didn’t want to get blackballed by the promotions they left. And they also add in the story about how Vince was gambling his entire company and future on the show if it didn’t sell out, which has since been debunked many times over. I mean, it’s a good story, but Vince failed bigger before and came back from it.
This leads to the introduction of Cyndi Lauper and her involvement with the Rock N Wrestling Connection, and from there Rowdy Roddy Piper. There’s actually a clip of him on Tuesday Night Titans with an amazing quote: “They say you aren’t supposed to blow your own horn. Well, who better knows the tune?” They should just do an hour of Piper quotes from the shows on Network instead of this. So after Piper attacks Lauper and Captain Lou Albano, the media was all abuzz and celebrities were lining up to join the show as tickets sold at a record pace! But also the show was potentially going to flop until the last minute and Vince could lose his fortune, don’t forget. Man, they can’t even keep their narrative straight from one segment to another.
This all leads up to the signing of the main event, with Roddy Piper and Paul Orndorff facing Hulk Hogan and Mr. T. Poor Orndorff doesn’t even get mentioned in the buildup portion here, basically just existing as a guy involved in the match while they put over Muhammad Ali as the special referee instead. No wonder he was so bitter at Hulk Hogan and turned on him later. Anyway, Hulk talks about “building the story slowly” at the War to Settle the Score, which was a month before Wrestlemania. They also don’t really explain how Mr. T got involved in the match from a storyline perspective, instead just kind of saying “Mr. T was a big star and teamed with Hogan because reasons”. Hulk talks about how the wrestlers backstage all resented Mr. T and he wanted to make sure T didn’t get beat up and run off by them, which is of course complete nonsense aside from Dr. D causing trouble once.
And with all that out of the way, we spend the other 35 minutes of the show watching the main event match, followed by Hogan returning to add his comments about how great everything turned out.
So as a “documentary” piece, this was all over the place. It didn’t add any insight into the show or the match itself that we haven’t heard a million times before on other “documentaries”. It did a pretty lousy job of explaining the motivations and buildup to the main event match and why it came about (basically amounting to “Roddy Piper hates rock n roll and also Mr. T was there”) and didn’t go into any particular detail on what actually ended up making the first Wrestlemania into a success. Plus they lied about a bunch of stuff on top of it.