The SmarK Rant for Who Killed WCW? – Episode 3

The SmarK Rant for Who Killed WCW? – Episode 3

“New Blood”

Previously on Who Killed WCW – Eric Bischoff may have been the guy to kill WCW, but then the second episode changed its mind and blamed it on executives instead. Stupid executives!

So with Eric Bischoff fired in 1999, we meet up with Brad Siegel, who was responsible for a lot of things and hated being responsible for WCW the most. So he dumps it on Bill Busch instead, and Bill goes out and hires some guy named Vince Russo from the WWF. Rock was like “Good for him, this shit happens all the time in pro wrestling”.

So we meet Vince Russo, who talks about taking his journalism degree and working for the WWF magazine, where he would write his own angles because the TV was so terrible. Then he met Ed Ferrera, a real TV writer, and they took over the writing and headed up the creative team. Russo discusses his theory of Crash TV, where people are unable to change the channel because you keep throwing new information at them before they have a chance to get bored of any one thing going on.

Smackdown was launched in 1999 and Russo got pushed beyond his limits and started having a nervous breakdown, and made the call to WCW, who immediately hired him and gave him the keys to the kingdom. The day he walked into the locker room, bro, he had all the midcarders walking up to him, presumably with tears in their eyes, thanking him for being there. Big midcarders, strong midcarders. But Hogan never trusted him, which Vince blames on Bischoff getting in Hulk’s head and poisoning the well with the big stars. Kevin Nash pops in to say that he never had any grudge against Russo, but warned him that he was getting into “some fucked up shit” with 1999 WCW.

Russo again claims that the numbers went up in the three months he was charge, which was bullshit by the way, but Brad Siegel notes that any improvement in ratings was completely offset by the advertisers bailing on his stupid crap. Booker T thinks that Vince wasn’t doing it for the boys, and he was just entertaining himself. Bret Hart describes Russo as just another idiot running WCW. This sets up clips of Seven (Dustin’s stalker pedophile character) and Jim Duggan cleaning toilets. Russo accuses Kevin Sullivan & JJ Dillon of undermining him and playing politics, at which point Bill Busch offered him a spot on a booking committee instead, and Russo decided to go home and collect his guaranteed contract money.

With Russo gone, the midcard revolted and they tried to give Chris Benoit the World title to placate him, but they all asked for their release and Busch foolishly granted it, resulting in them showing up on RAW two weeks later. They’re certainly cutting out a big chunk of context there. Konnan thinks that the office didn’t care about them leaving, and opines that if they had pushed those guys instead of cutting them, WCW might be around today still. No way, man. That’s just dumb.

Desperate for results, Brad Siegel calls Eric Bischoff and asks him to come back and work with Vince Russo, although Russo and Bischoff present very contradictory accounts of who was actually in charge. Siegel dodges the question and notes that if Eric came back, then he would have had to approve it. Bischoff notes that it was even worse when he got back. So Kevin Nash pops in and reminisces about the ridiculous bloodbath botch, and Bischoff says there was no hope at that point. He talks about the New Blood v. Millionaire’s Club, which gives us our first FROM DAY ONE out of Vince Russo. Take a drink. Russo talks about how he was still trying to get the ratings up, and then we transition to talking about Ready to Rumble and meet David Arquette. Russo talks about booking a match with Eric Bischoff & Jeff Jarrett v. DDP & David Arquette, and then Tony Schiavone pitches an idea about Arquette somehow getting the title. Bischoff didn’t see the harm in it. DDP and Arquette both thought it was a terrible idea. As did everyone else, but Russo kept claiming that people were watching so the ends justify the means. Remember, bro, anything you do is fine as long as it draws ratings, bro. Eric thought they could sustain the bad press for a couple of weeks, and he admits that he didn’t do anything to stop it. Booker notes that by this point, Eric had already stopped caring and just did whatever Russo wanted. So they ask Russo if he understands the anger, and he still doesn’t care about people who didn’t like it. Because ratings, bro.

We move onto Booker T, who was on the way up in 2000, but had given up ever being champion because of politics. Speaking of politics, Russo is getting tired of being treated like an inferior to Eric Bischoff, and goes to Brad Siegel and tells him to just put Eric in charge if he wanted Eric in charge. And then Bash at the Beach happened, and Hulk Hogan had creative control, with the plan being that Hulk would walk out of the building with the belt and “disappear” to build up a big return later to reunify the belts. But then Russo went into business for himself and goes on a crazed rant on PPV, and we get contradictory stories from Russo and everyone else about whether it was a shoot or a work. Russo says it was a work and everyone else said it was a shoot and no one knew what he’d say, so we can assume Russo is lying because it’s Vince Russo. And then the show ended with Booker T beating Jeff Jarrett to win the World title and kick off his big push. Russo thought it was a big success BECAUSE THE INTERNET, BRO. Bischoff notes that Hulk was contractually granted creative control, and now there was gonna be a lawsuit and Hulk was gone and Bischoff was gone.

Brad Siegel wanted some stability after all the nonsense, so it’s another booking committee for the next three months, with business deteriorating while Russo made himself a bigger and bigger part of the show. Russo thinks he was better as an on-air character than 80% of the roster and decided to go out and get ratings HIMSELF. And he thinks that people today still hate him because they think he’s the character he played. Oh and then he booked himself to be World champion, at which point Russo starts blaming the wrestlers for deliberately trying to hurt him. Goldberg: “If I had wanted to intentionally hurt him he’d be underground right now.”

At the start of October 2000, Russo does his last episode of Nitro and then he’s gone too. Russo sums it up by noting that he still hates the business and the same politics are around today. Yeah, boo hoo.

Next time: The bitter end!

Oh man, what a step backwards this one was. This was the very definition of “unreliable narrators”, with stories from these guys contradicting each other (especially between Russo and Bischoff) and hand-waving a bunch of stuff, not to mention having to listen to fucking Vince Russo talk for 40 minutes and somehow still not take the slightest bit of responsibility for anything that happened, not to mention completely lying about his beloved ratings. The ratings in 1999 went up a little bit because they eliminated the third hour of Nitro, which artificially boosted the number overall, but cost the company millions of dollars in ad revenue. They didn’t even mention that here. In fact they glossed over a whole shitload of stuff, like the Bret Hart injury that decimated the World title scene in early 2000, and the Goldberg injury, in order to build up the bizarre attempt at crafting a feel-good story with Booker T getting the World title for a couple of weeks. And yeah, the Arquette World title win was stupid and turned a lot of people off, but that’s like WAY at the bottom of the bigger problems that the company had in 2000. It was a symptom, not a cause. It certainly didn’t warrant a giant chunk of this episode like it did. Really, this felt like a pointless episode, in that if you’re gonna just let Russo spew lies for the entire show, they could have just summed up his involvement in five minutes and moved onto the actual death of the company.