Dave Reviews Wrestling — page 3

It’s the eve of Superbrawl, and that’s gonna be live, tomorrow night, call your cable operator for availability! Twenty-eight years ago!

Reviving something I tried earlier in the year, mixing clips of matches and shoot interviews. This one is with Alex Wright, who’s recently completed an interview with James from the excellent WSI. Alex is a second generation wrestler, son of the Englishman Steve Wright and nephew of Bernie Wright, both of whom I’ll be including matches of. He joined a WCW tour in 1994 and was taken onto contract by Turner Broadcasting and pushed heavily by Ric Flair, with some flak as a result. He floundered for a year or two before a heel turn as an arrogant, hip swiveling heel. That was going great until he suffered a brain aneurysm at the end of 1997, and although he came back from it he was never quite the same and declined to be taken up by the WWF when they bought WCW. Since then, he’s been a trainer and promoter in Germany.

This will be an interesting one because there’s historical significance to it… the boss is on the show – but which one do I mean?

The WWE Network is a bit here and there with their uploads of this show, missing three out of five January episodes, but this one comes a week and a half after Clash 26, which isn’t one of the most notable episodes, except for the debut of this guy.

“This is the worst news I’ve heard since my mother-in-law announced she was gonna move in a year and half ago!”

Missing a week due to the strange uploads on the Network. Going by the quality drop in the second half of the January 1st episode, I wonder whether it’s due to poor quality tape. We’ll see this week if the problem persists as the next two episodes are also missing.

A while back I had a look at the WCW Saturday Night show from 1991, with the return of Dusty Rhodes and the imminent departure of Ric Flair during a particularly dry reign. It was hard to continue due to availability of shows, but the Network has luckily uploaded some episodes from three years later, at the beginning of 1994, so I’m going to have a look at them. They’re missing three episodes in January, which I might or might not locate elsewhere, but for now here’s a slight return to WCW Saturday Night.

A “Why not?” review of a show uploaded by Armstrong Alley from a short-lived promotion run by Grizzly Smith and some other former Bill Watts local promoters. It’s 1990, Louisiana, Sam Houston and Rockin’ Robin in prominent positions, and they were probably wishing like mad that Jake lost his job with the WWF and could come and be their main star and booker.

A one-off review of one of the many incredibly obscure groups that YouTuber Armstrong Alley is uploading at the moment, with this one having an incredibly strong roster that would be off to either WCW or the GWF soon. I chose this one because of a feature that includes the biggest star of the nineties in an early part of his career.

Courtesy of Liam Savage, the full Q&A from 1995 that gave us the clip of Paul Heyman predicting the success of Nitro, which he was somewhat on the money with but not for the exact reasons. I’m skipping seventy minutes in because I’m not really as interested in listening to the wrestlers who talk about how if you could cut them in half like a stick of rock it would read ECW right through, then were gone as soon as a WWF or WCW contract worth something was slid under their noses (and rightfully so, honestly). It’s when Paul E comes in and holds court that we REALLY want to hear. Goes without saying that he’s flanked as always by Dreamer and Taz. Sound quality is about as good as you’d expect for camcorder footage from 27 years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lyv3AIQfotI

Apparently a holiday special this week, which to me were always only special in name only.

One every day across the weekend to end 1986 as it feels like these are dying on the vine, never topping the three title changes episode.

More from Tulsa!

A curious Saturday evening addition, I was down the YouTube rabbit hole and came across a channel with some episodes of this show on. Vince McMahon’s third or so attempt to branch out that resulted in failure after Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Donny Lalonde and No Holds Barred, he started up his own bodybuilding company too and put some WWF touches on it. As I got into wrestling in 1991 with the episode of Prime Time that was effectively a commercial for the WBF, with Bobby Heenan challenging a bodybuilder to a pose down and feigning an injury when he took his sweatshirt off to get out of it, I didn’t ever really know a WWF without the WBF, so watched these episodes and the second PPV that really now is just the source of the Vince and Gary Strydom meme (“Talk about a night out on the town!”) without any complaint. A sign that you’re into something you’ll watch anything.

Here we go!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45CeXTvYAR4

If the screen grab for the video doesn’t get you reading the review, I don’t know what will!

I can go for regularly reviewing UWF for a few weeks, especially as I’ve never watched this episode, directly after the three title changes episode. Let’s hook ’em up!

As Rick Martel and Tom Zenk as the Can-Am Connection came up for discussion this week, I thought I’d take a look at the shoot interview conducted with Martel a few years ago and see what the future Model had to say. It’s a long interview, so it’ll be a watch, listen and type approach for me.

After reviewing an episode of Championship Wrestling from Florida previously, soon to be bought up by the NWA, I thought I’d look at the biggest episode from the promotion that Jim Crockett would also absorb later on.

I looked at the retrospective show Mike Graham and Randy Savage were presenting circa 2001 a few weeks ago, so I thought I’d have a look at a full episode. This is from the beginning of 1986, almost a year removed from the death of Eddie Graham, and I believe the story is that anyone who had a share in the company, be it a penny or a pound, wanted in and to take control, leading to the company going into a decline and having to be sold at the beginning of 1987. Let’s see what we have here.

This was an interesting old find for me recently, something I have on tape somewhere but is much better now it’s digitally curated on the internet. The contradiction that is Jim Cornette was strict on kayfabe not only in his own promotion in the nineties but also in the new millennium as one of the heads of OVW, to the point of not letting heels and faces drive together. However, his origins were as one of the most inside of inside fans and this bleeds over into the fan weeks and cookouts he allowed access to at the same time as his big events.

This camcorder footage was recorded the day after the Superbowl of Wrestling, which was the last big event for the promotion before they stopped running at the end of the year. Lots of wrestling fans who look more like Jim and less like the wrestlers, hence why the wrestlers that get shown stand out more.

I’ve been asked in my previous review comments section to look at stuff like WXO (too milquetoast) and WSX (too late for me), but YouTuber Liam Savage has been uploading episodes of Texas All Star Wrestling, the successor of Joe and Tully Blanchard’s Southwest Championship Wrestling with a seasoning of World Class Championship Wrestling, so it’s going to be that today with an old school (for me!) bonus tomorrow.

What is good about these episodes is that Liam makes sure to include the names of some of the more familiar national and international stars in the titles so you know who to look out for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3hvx-_8tj8