Six of the Best for Starrcade in the 90’s will be coming next week when I have some time off work. Until then though, I thought I’d review this show as its only 47 minutes long and features a storyline where poor Balls Mahoney had to play Santa Claus’ evil brother (Which someone actually asked about on the Blog today), so there’s a festive tie in at least.
If you’ve been wondering where Six of the Best for 90’s Starrcade has been; it’s because I’ve recently moved to a new flat and BT are taking a veritable age to set up my internet. As consequence, I’ve had no access to the WWE Network, and thus haven’t been able to put the list together. Thankfully I do have some shows on DVD that I can review in the meantime, so whenever I can get to somewhere with some internet I’ll upload them as and when I can.
Seeing as we’re in December, I thought I’d look at ECW’s penultimate Pay Per View Event before the company finally bit the dust in February of 2001. I’ve always been a big ECW fan, so seeing the company close its doors was not a pleasant experience, but they had least had a few decent matches on their final PPV events before closing the doors. The one benefit of ECW over any other company is that all the guys and gals were still working super hard, even as Rome was burning around them, so even if some of the matches weren’t great, the energy was usually infectious
I thought I might as well get another World War 3 in as November 2018 croaks its last breath, so here it is. I also think it’s important to expose just show bad this show is, because it never seems to get the “credit” it deserves in that regard. (I love how the poster, the thing designed to sell the show to you, shows two guys in a chin lock by the way. That was the most exciting picture they could dig up was it?)
I decided to cut Starrcade down into an 80’s and 90’s section, just because there were so many matches to select from and I wanted to give them their fair due.
As always, these are just my own personal picks. This isn’t supposed to be some sort of objective list or anything. If I leave out a match that you think warrants inclusion, then please feel free to put it down in the comments section below. As with previous lists, I’ll be listing the matches in chronological order.
So without further to do, let’s get to it!
No real reason for this one other than the fact I haven’t reviewed any Ring of Honour on here yet and we’re coming up for the eleventh anniversary of this show, so I thought it would be fun to show how the wrestling landscape has changed since this event took place. I also liked the symmetry of posting a show which contains Bryan Danielson taking on a monster World Champion when he’s just recently taken on a monster World Champion in WWE.
In the most recent Six of the Best (Where I covered Survivor Series) a poster in the comments section mentioned that Survivor Series 95 had a lot of great matches and that they were upset it didn’t feature more on the list. Seeing as we’re still a couple of weeks away from December, it seems a bit premature to do the lists for Armageddon and Starrcade, so I decided I’d fill some of the gap with a review of the show.
Despite being one of the classic “Big Four” Pay Per Views, Survivor Series doesn’t really match up to the other three when it comes to quantity of great matches. There have definitely been some excellent bouts at the annual November event over the years, but it’s always been the weakest of the four overall in my opinion. I’d never want WWE to scrap it of course, but it’s also hardly an event I look forward to like I do the Royal Rumble, WrestleMania and Summer Slam.
I think it’s telling that, with one exception, all of the matches I picked here were singles bouts as opposed to the elimination survival bouts that gave this event its name in the first place. Again, it’s not like there haven’t been good survival matches either, but I do think a lot of the reason why this event survived through the years is because they downplayed the concept of the survival match and kind of just made them normal events with a token elimination bout here or there.
As always, this is just my own personal picks and it isn’t supposed to be some sort of objective list or anything. If I leave out a match that you think warrants inclusion then please feel free to put it down in the comments section below. As with previous lists, I’ll be listing the matches in chronological order.
So without further to do, let’s get to it!
Seeing as I’ve just finished Six of the Best for this event, I decided I’d go back and watch this one as there’s some pretty decent matches on it and the main events of these shows are usually at least somewhat interesting, even if that interest has a somewhat car crash quality to it.
Let’s venture onward and see what we find!
I decided to group Mayhem in with World War 3 when it came to looking at WCW November Pay Per Views, because otherwise there’d only be four events to pick from when it came to this particular list (Which is only three when you think about it considering that World War 3 98 is one of the very worst shows of all time)
As always, this is just my own personal picks and it isn’t supposed to be some sort of objective list or anything. If I leave out a match that you think warrants inclusion then please feel free to put it down in the comments section below. As with previous lists, I’ll be listing the matches in chronological order.
So without further to do, let’s get to it!
This is the first time we look at ECW for this feature. November to Remember was ostensibly ECW’s equivalent to WrestleMania, but sadly the shows from the Pay Per View era of the company never really lived up to that billing. However, there were some great matches spliced throughout N2R’s history and I’ll be listing my six favourite today.
As always, this is just my own personal picks and it isn’t supposed to be some sort of objective list or anything. If I leave out a match that you think warrants inclusion then please feel free to put it down in the comments section below. As with previous lists, I’ll be listing the matches in chronological order.
So without further to do, let’s get to it!
I realised I’d forgotten this event, which is understandable considering it was only around for five years and was never a successful event during that time either. For those who don’t remember or weren’t even around when this event took place, Taboo Tuesday/Cyber Sunday was one of WWE’s famed “concept” shows whereby fans could vote on what the matches were. The votes were a mixture of picking challengers for titles, stipulations and even went as lurid as to deciding what type of skimpy outfit the “Divas” would wear in matches.
Buy rates for this show were never that good and they finally decided to drop it from the schedule in 2008 after a string of disappointing returns.
As always, this is just my own personal selection and it isn’t supposed to be some sort of objective list or anything. If I leave out a match that you think warrants inclusion then please feel free to put it down in the comments section below. As with previous lists, I’ll be listing the matches in chronological order.
So without further to do, let’s get to it!
Last time out I listed what I believed to be the six best matches from WWF/WWE’s No Mercy event. This time I’ll be taking a look at what was traditionally WCW’s October offering in the form of Halloween Havoc.
As always, this is just my own personal picks and it isn’t supposed to be some sort of objective list or anything. If I leave out a match that you think warrants inclusion then please feel free to put it down in the comments section below. As with previous lists, I’ll be listing the matches in chronological order.
So without further to do, let’s get to it!
Seeing as we’re now in October, I thought I’d list what I believe to be the six best matches from the traditional October pay per view events of both WWE and WCW. I was considering doing one for ECW Anarchy Rulz as well, but there were only two pay per views with that name before the company went out of business so ECW will have to wait for November before I cover them.
As always, this is just my own personal picks and it isn’t supposed to be some sort of objective list or anything. If I leave out a match that you think warrants inclusion then please feel free to put it down in the comments section below. As with previous lists, I’ll be listing the matches in chronological order.
So without further to do, let’s get to it!
I’ve had this one in my tape library for about 14 years but have never bothered to sit down and watch it all the way through, mainly because I really went off New Japan during this era and was instead mostly watching NOAH. I was looking for something to review so I thought we’d set the way back machine to 2003, when the New Japan product was pretty awful. It’s amazing to watch shows like this and see how far the company has come since these darker days.
This show took place during a period in New Japan where Antonio Inoki was obsessed with shoot fighting and was filling New Japan shows full of judo, K1 and PRIDE guys. His booking was getting increasingly erratic and it wasn’t leading to success at the box office. This show actually has three legitimate shoot fights on it, as well as an appearance by Hulk Hogan and a big 5 on 5 elimination match.
Last time out I listed what I believed to be the six best matches from the former annual September WWE pay per view Unforgiven. Seeing as I gave WWE’s former September showpiece the business, I decided to do the same with WCW’s Fall Brawl event.
The Fall Brawl pay per view event ran annually from 1993 to 2000, and was usually the show WCW chose to unleash its #1 gimmick match known as War Games. Sadly WCW had a strict no blood rule during this era and their greatest showcase bout suffered as a consequence. However, Fall Brawl still hosted its share of good matches over the years and I found more than enough matches to make a top six.
As always, these are just my own personal picks. If you think I’ve unfairly excluded a particular match then please share your thoughts in the comments section below. As with the Unforgiven list, I’ll be listing the matches in chronological order, just for the sake of ease.
I thought I’d try something new on here, although more classic All Japan is also planned for down the line.
As the name suggests, I will be looking at certain shows or wrestlers and picking what I believe to be the six best matches in a given scenario. Seeing as summer is coming to a close and the autumn months are looming ahead of us, I thought I’d compile the six best matches from WWE’s Unforgiven pay per view. Though the first Unforgiven was held in the April of 1998, the following ten versions of it all took place in the month of September before WWE stopped using the name in 2008.
These are all just my personal opinions of course. If there’s a match I haven’t listed that you think I should have included in the top six then please feel free to say so in the comments. I’ll be listing the matches chronologically just for the sake of ease.
Hello you!
I’ve been a bit bogged down with covering G1 Climax over at Gaming Respawn for the past few weeks, which has limited the time I could spend watching classic All Japan.
However, I’ve got a free evening so I decided to fill it with some hard hitting AJPW action!
First off, I’d like to thank Scott for giving me a chance to produce some content for the blog. I stumbled across the YouTube page of Roy Lucier, who has uploaded a tonne of classic All Japan Pro Wrestling episodes, so I thought I’d go a write up for one at random due to the fact they’re little more than 40 minutes long and would probably feature some good wrestling as well considering AJPW was killing it in the 90’s.
All of these matches are from the 1994 Champion Carnival, which is like All Japan’s version of the G1, so it seemed somewhat apt to review seeing as we are currently smack dab in the middle of G1 season.