Mike Reviews WWF — page 5

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

I did a series where I looked at every opener for WrestleMania so I decided to do it for SummerSlam as well. SummerSlam was always the pay per view I looked forward to the most in my younger days, and it usually had some of the better matches of the year on it. This week we’re covering 1988 to 1992, with every match being under tag rules. I guess they liked starting SummerSlam off with a tag match back in the day?

Happy Saturday Everyone!

Let’s stick with 1996 but jump over to the WWF this week, as we look at this IYH event from July featuring Camp Cornette Vs Shawn Michaels, Ahmed Johnson and Sid in the Main Event. Ultimate Warrior was originally supposed to be on the babyface team, but he ended up getting let go for missing House Shows and Sid got inserted instead.

Elsewhere we’ve got Stone Cold Steve Austin Vs Marc Mero in a King of the Ring rematch and Mankind takes on Henry O. Godwinn, who is subbing in for Jake Roberts. These IYH shows are usually a pretty easy watch as they come in under two hours, so this should be fun enough.

Happy Saturday Everyone!

I decided to review this one today seeing as its 27 years to the day that it happened and there’s a match on it that I remember being really good so I want to see if it still holds up. Plus, the show is only 100 minutes long, which will hopefully mean it’s a breezy watch.

In Your House represented the WWF moving to regular monthly pay per view in order to keep up with what WCW was doing at the time. WWF didn’t charge full price for these In Your House Events at first though and they only had a two hour run-time as opposed to the 3-4 hours you would normally expect for one of the WWF’s “Big Five” Events.

Welcome to the Warzone!

I decided to review this episode as I’ve enjoyed dipping into 1998 WWF recently and this show represents the moment the WWF finally won a round in the Monday Night War after 80+ weeks of WCW handing them their rear ends.

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

We enter the Two Night Mania Era this week, including two matches in front of zero fans that I’m absolutely dreading, but we’ll get through it. Both of these shows happened after I’d long since given up on following the WWE product on a week to week basis, so if there’s any relevant storyline stuff I miss out on then please feel free to note it in the comments section.

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

Back with some more Opening Matches from WrestleMania. Today we’ve got some pretty big matches, so I’m hoping we have some good match quality. Sadly we now enter the period where they stop putting numbers on the logo, as Vince apparently thought it would make the event seem too old and un-hip. Because whenever I want to know what’s hip I always want to know what Vince McMahon thinks!

Happy Maniacal Saturday Everyone!

I’ve already reviewed Royal Rumble and No Way Out from 1998, so I decided to complete the set and do Mania XIV as well so we can finish that little arc off. Main Event is Stone Cold challenging Shawn Michaels for the WWF Title with Mike Tyson as the guest enforcer, whilst Semi-Main is Kane Vs Undertaker.

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

I decided to review Mania XXVII today as I recently covered the opener in my Every WrestleMania Opening Match series of reviews and I felt like taking the whole show in again. This Mania has a bit of a bad reputation, but outside of one notable stinker of a match I don’t think it’s all that bad.

The big story for this one was that The Rock had returned to WWE as the guest host of Mania, and he’d quickly gotten into a war of words with John Cena. Going in everyone expected Cena and Rock to have some kind of confrontation and that was the main selling point of the show.

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

Back with some more Opening Matches from WrestleMania, and we’ve got at least one all-time classic for you today, so buckle in!

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

We’re back with more Opening Matches from WrestleMania, and today we’re covering WrestleMania 21 to WrestleMania 25. There are some decent matches on the docket here, so hopefully we’ll have some fun, especially as we’re now in the MITB Era of the event.

Happy Saturday Everyone!

I enjoyed doing Royal Rumble 98 and the follow up Raw last month, so I decided I’d do the February pay per view from 98 as well. I actually watched this tape A LOT back in the day and it’s the Silver Vision VHS version I’m reviewing this week, so if there’s any notable differences between what I’m seeing and what’s on the WWE Network then that’s why.

The big story coming into this one was that Shawn Michaels was out with a back injury, meaning that Triple H and the New Age Outlaws needed a replacement partner for their non-sanctioned Main Event brawl with Stone Cold Steve Austin, Owen Hart, Cactus Jack and Chainsaw Charlie. Our Semi-Main is Vader being basically the last guy physically strong enough to actually challenge Kane in some form, meaning that he’s essentially the WWF’s last hope of stopping him.

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

Back with some more Opening Matches for ya’ll. This time we’re covering the year 2000 to 2004, which seems to mostly be matches for secondary or tertiary belts. I’m not sure why the WWF got into that habit during this period. I’m guessing starting the show with a Title match is an easy way to get the crowd invested?

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

After a brief break last week with Mania X, let’s pick these up again. I’m not really looking forward to this one because I don’t think any of these matches are what you could class as “good” based on my memory, but maybe they’ll surprise me?

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

I decided that before I move on to the less-than-stellar opening matches of WrestleMania’s XI-XV, I would instead review WrestleMania X first, because I’ve already reviewed two of the bigger matches from it and it’s a show I generally enjoy watching, so watching the matches I haven’t reviewed yet shouldn’t take too long and I’ll likely enjoy myself in the process, so why not?

The big storylines coming into this Mania were that Crush had betrayed his friend Randy Savage to align himself with Yokozuna, leading to Savage coming into this show looking for vengeance. Bret Hart had an issue going on with his brother Owen, but he’d also co-won the Royal Rumble with Lex Luger, so after wrestling Owen he’s then got to come out and wrestle again against the winner of Yoko/Luger.

And if all that wasn’t big enough to contend with, Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon had a feud going on that saw the ladder match make its way to WWF pay per view for the first time (Shawn and Bret had done a ladder match previously exclusively for Home Video back in 1992).

WrestleMania X card

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

Back with some more Opening Matches, this time covering WrestleMania VI to X.

There are two particular matches here that should be great, with Shawn Michaels featuring in three of the five matches. It’s almost like this section is cheating!

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

I had an ongoing series on here where I would review Main Events, so Every WrestleMania Main Event, Every Starrcade Main Event etc.

I decided I would try the format with opening matches as well, just to see if it would garner any interest and whether I’d have any fun with it. We’ll start with Every WrestleMania Opening Match, and if you guys enjoy that we could always do other events and pay per views down the line.

Happy Saturday Everyone!

I watched WWF Royal Rumble 1998 last week and mentioned that it led to a big confrontation between Mike Tyson and Stone Cold on Raw, so I thought I might as well watch the follow up show so we can enjoy that segment. I don’t really remember anything else from the show aside from one segment in the mid-card with the NWA guys, so this might be good or it might be horrible.

Let’s find out which!

Good day one and all!

This was the first wrestling pay per view I saw in full, as prior to that I’d only been able to catch the odd thing on terrestrial TV here in the UK (which wasn’t much after the mid-90’s). My friend Jim brought a tape of this round to my house and I was pretty much hooked from that point onwards, reading the magazines and getting whatever little scrap of wrestling action I could on video until both WCW and the WWF got slots on Channels 5 and 4 respectively, meaning I could finally watch wrestling on the telly.

The WWF seemingly had three targets they wished to achieve here. Get Stone Cold ready for the WrestleMania Main Event, introduce Mike Tyson as that year’s big WrestleMania celebrity guest, and also heat up The Rock as the hottest Heel in the mid-card. Let’s see how they got on with that.

Happy Saturday Everyone!

I decided to review this one because not only does it have a Benoit/Guerrero match that I remember enjoying a lot but the DVD release also has a super entertaining fatal four way match from an episode of Smackdown, so I’ll get two good matches to watch here at least, even if the Main Event is notoriously a bit of a slog.

Happy Saturday Everyone!

I’ve been meaning to do this one for a while, being that in some ways it was one of most intricately booked shows of the entire Attitude Era and I enjoy that sort of thing.

The story here was that both Undertaker and Kane had pinned Stone Cold Steve Austin at the same time in a WWF Title match, leading to the belt getting made vacant and a big tournament needing to be held in order to crown a new Champ. Going into the show Mankind had been chosen as Vince McMahon’s hand-picked Corporate Champion, whilst Stone Cold and The Rock were the main babyface options to win the thing.