Kat Reviews From The Vault

We all know of the modern-day wrestling superfans, the ones that sit in the same spot every show and pop up throughout the shows. Most of them have their own gimmick now, typically wearing the same thing every show. Some have even spawned imitators. Nowadays they will pay wild prices for WWE On Demand concepts like walking the ring aisle at WrestleMania and getting introduced by Alicia Taylor.

For many of us though, there’s a generation of superfans before them. One in particular sticks out and became a star of his own without even trying. With his trademark muscles, Vladimir Abouzeide was a regular fixture in 1980s and 1990s WWF shows. He’s certainly the only one with an official WWE documentary. He even has wrestling figures.

We started our trip into The Story of The Undertaker last time with what WWE Vault labels as Chapter 1, The Years (1990-92).  You can read that here. We see the start of his journey in WWE, his teaming with Paul Bearer, his World Title win, and end with him destroying Jake Roberts at WrestleMania.

Now we enter Chapter 2: The Giant Slayer Years (1992-94).  Help us all.

WWE Vault has been a goldmine of unseen matches and favorites from the past, but it has also done a great job at collecting moments.  One thing they do is their “The Story Of” series, which looks at the complete build of various stories.

The Undertaker is in the midst of a multi-part series looking at the moments from the various stages of his career.  This seems like an interesting thing to cover, so today I’m looking at the first edition, covering what they call The Mortician Years (1990-92).

Welcome back to another trip inside the WWE Vault!  As of this writing, the Vault is up to 164 matches that are not *legally* released to streaming on any other services by WWE.  I’ve got five more of them here in this review.

This week, we have WALTER, Tito Santana, R-Truth, Heath Slater and more!

It’s time to dive back into the WWE Vault and its vast content.  This week.. Squash!

The Vault crew released a playlist of 40 minutes of beatdowns, as they called it, and how can I resist that?  The fun thing is that a majority of these are NOT currently available (legally) through WWE-endorsed streaming releases.

Kevin Owens has been making waves in WWE lately, especially after what happened after Saturday Night’s Main Event with Cody Rhodes.  Before SmackDown tonight and the fallout from that, I thought I’d look at the Kevin Owens documentary recently uploaded to WWE Vault.

“Fight Owens Fight” was a WWE DVD release way back in 2017.  It was after the big boom period for WWE DVDs as well as the uploading of many of their documentaries to WWE Network, so it’s a lesser known documentary.  Now with WWE Vault, however, it’s out there for those of us who missed it.

That’s right friends, it’s time for another trip into the rarities of the WWE Vault.  I’ve taken a few side trips the last few visits – least watched videos, mix tapes and Shotgun Saturday Night – but now it’s time to check out another five rarities.

My rules for being a rarity: it isn’t uploaded by WWE on any other legal streaming platform in the U.S., which generally means on Peacock but can also mean The CW’s app or very shortly Netflix.  All five features today fit the bill – dark matches, behind the scenes and things we didn’t know existed.

As always, my star ratings do not matter.  Nobody’s star ratings matter.  Form your own opinions.  My personal enjoyment of a match is very possibly the complete opposite of yours.  Somebody else’s five star match might be the bore of the century to me.  It’s okay to like what you like.

WWE Vault has been a revelation since debuting earlier this year, scoring casual fans with Roman Reigns matches and the hardcore fans with dark matches, tryout matches and events we’ve never seen before.

Everything isn’t a hit though.  Sometimes it is the YouTube algorithm, which works in mysterious ways.  Sometimes it just isn’t what the viewers want.

Today I’m reviewing the ten least watched videos on WWE Vault.  One of these I’ve already reviewed, so I’ll copy and paste that one in.

It’s time for the second half of the Macho Man Mix Tape, WWE Vault’s three hour random tour through the world of “Macho Man” Randy Savage through matches, promos and rarities.

You can find the review of the first half here.

The glorious folks at WWE Vault have done it again.  In honor of “Macho Man” Randy Savage’s birthday, they’ve released a three hour video: “Macho Man” Randy Savage Mix Tape.  It’s said to contain full matches, iconic promos and unseen footage.  Sure, I’ll watch it!

This is going to be in two parts because it is three hours long and listen, I can only handle so much.  This also strays from my usual Vault review rules as some of this is clearly on Peacock already.  A lot of it isn’t though!  I’ll try to specify, but I’ll be the first to tell you I especially can’t tell you when certain interview segments aired and on what show they did.

Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!

Oh, that’s a different show.  Wrestling certainly wasn’t new to Saturday nights.  WWF/WWE had Saturday Night’s Main Event for years on NBC and then briefly FOX, while WCW Saturday Night was a mainstay of the TBS Superstation at 6:05 p.m.  However, 1997 brought a new Saturday night experiment.

Shotgun Saturday Night was WWE’s latest attempt at capturing the syndication market.  Syndication was always a tricky deal for viewers, as shows weren’t bound to one network and one time slot across the country.  Instead, the episodes are sold to individual local networks to air whenever they want to air them.  Saturday and Sunday mornings were usually WWE’s hotspot with Superstars and Wrestling Challenge.  Other times, you’d find shows sandwiched randomly at midnight between episodes of god knows what.  It all depended on the network and their programming gods.

An hour of WWE programming was an easy sell – you’d get 52 new episodes of new content a year that brings in the sponsors.  And 1997 WWE when things are peaking?  You’ve gotta give it a try, right?

Shotgun was an attempt to bring an edge to WWE’s syndicated programming.  Things that were not so PG – while shot in a way that didn’t really show things – were a bigger part of the show, as were weird gimmicks like the Flying Nuns, Mother Smucker and Sister Angelica (the Headbangers in nun outfits paired with Brother Love, of course).  Did it work?  Your mileage may vary, but it did create more content.

It’s time once again to dive into the WWE Vault.  We’re up to 48 matches that aren’t available on Peacock in the United States, which means there are more than enough rarities for me to dig into today.

Quick note: The WWE Women’s Speed Tournament review is still in the works.  Twitter – being Twitter – makes itself incredibly hard to use.  I’ve got to go back and find the various tournament matches to link up here, and I’ve chosen to waste my time doing this today instead.  I know at least three people in the entire world’s population are waiting patiently and I appreciate that.

If you’d like to visit the previous four visits into the Vault: one two three four

Welcome back to another round of Five From the Vault!  Just since the last time I wrote one of these, they’ve really jumped on uploading rarities into the Vault.  We’ve had an Omni show plus almost one unique entry a day for the last week.

We’ve also had a show reclassified as new rarities.  With NXT’s streaming rights expiring on Peacock in the United States, every episode of the baseline NXT show prior to the CW episodes have vanished into the Vault.  I’m hoping they reappear somewhere like Netflix in the future, but for now they’re in the Vault for those of us who aren’t sailing the seas or using VPNs to cross borders.  Only one NXT match that was on the show was uploaded to Vault before the move – and we’ll cover that one today – though they’ve since added a second.

If you’ve missed the previous trips into the Vault, here’s a quick plug.  The first edition featured a Rhea Ripley dark match, a WCW Football Match, a 2003 LOD match and Moreshima tryout matches.  The second edition had a match from WCW Millennium Final, the weird crossover of Drew McIntyre and the Nasty Boys, Bayley vs Meiko in Japan, Bo & Duke Rotundo, and the legendary El Generico.  The third edition included the women of Japan in 1980s WWE, Vader destroying a man, Minoru Tanaka, and Cody and Punk teaming up in OVW.

It’s the first day of fall (thank god), and that sounds like the perfect time to fall into the WWE Vault yet again.  I’ve jumped in two times before (here and here), but they’re really starting to add things.  When I was writing the first column, there were 11 rarities available and I wasn’t sure how often I’d be able to write this.  Now there are around thirty (thanks to Saturday Night, partially).

This week I’m looking at another assortment.  I originally was going to just cover the Dump Matsumoto dump, but A) Jabroniville has a great recap of it in his Joshi Spotlight column and B) Believe it or not, they’re not all rarities by the definition of “not being on Peacock.”  At least one of the matches is on an episode of Prime Time Wrestling available on Peacock and I wouldn’t be shocked if at least one more was, though I haven’t traced the lines to that yet.  I will be covering two of the matches today, both of which are on episodes of Prime Time that are before the Peacock/Network upload time dates.  I’m taking on one of the Saturday night matches to hit the 90s, a rare 00s instance of Cody Rhodes and CM Punk teaming up, and the much-hyped 1998 dark match between Minoru Tanaka and Christopher Daniels.

Welcome back to another trip in the WWE Vault. Today I’m looking at five more rare matches on the service.  If you missed the first edition, you can find it here.

For those who have missed the buzz, WWE Vault is WWE’s new secondary YouTube channel.  The idea is bringing matches and clips out of the vault, though about 90% of the content is available on Peacock and WWE’s international streaming services.  I don’t fault them, because this readily available content has triple the views of the rarities.  That said, they upload one or two rare matches a week.  Some are matches that aired but never made Peacock, others are matches we actually haven’t had access to see.

They are also experimenting with streaming classic shows, having done a watch of an  episode of WCW Saturday Night last week that Scott recapped here.  As always, I’m here to encourage you to view it and interact with future editions.  We complain constantly about classic content not being uploaded, but the views, numbers and social media interaction is just not there for the old stuff like it is the current stuff.  Want more of it?  Prove it.  We can complain on the Internet all day – and god knows we do that here – but WWE makes most of their decisions with money, not internet complaints.  If the views of streams like the Saturday Night stream are higher and they in turn make more YouTube ad money, they’ll keep it up.  If not, why would they bother?

Also a note on my star ratings: they’re made up and they don’t matter.  I’m one person.  You’re a different person.  Form your opinions and don’t worry too much about mine being different.

Today, we start a new adventure.  We are diving into the WWE Vault in search of hidden treasures.

First, an explainer.  For those of you in the dark, WWE has launched a secondary YouTube channel by the name of WWE Vault.  While the main channel focuses on videos from the current shows and hyping things up, Vault showcases matches from the past, often with a theme.  For example, we’re getting a lot of Intercontinental Title matches right now as the belt celebrates 25 years.  Building to SummerSlam, we’d get one to two SummerSlam matches in full a day.

Most of what’s uploaded is already easily out there for those of us with Peacock or its international variations.  The purpose of the channel, as with any YouTube channel, is to make ad revenue.  Roman Reigns versus so-and-so will forever bring in ten times the eyes as a Repo Man match (there is no accounting for taste).

However, occasionally Vault will throw a bone at those of us with a deeper palette.  Of the first hundred matches they’ve uploaded, fifteen aren’t available on WWE’s streaming partners.