Happy Holidays Everyone!
For those not familiar with these reviews, I take a look at a show that has a reputation for being awful and decide whether that reputation is deserved or not. We’re back to reader requests for January, so get them in if you have any shows you’d like to see get the Stinker treatment.
We’ve got a special Holiday Stinker for you all today, where I’m going to watch Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara ruin WCW’s biggest show of the year. Well, they’d already ruined WrestleMania in 1999 so it’s only right that they ruin Starrcade too in order to complete the set I guess.
This was the last pay per view they would write together, as Russo was gone by Souled Out in January when he suggested putting the World Title on Tank Abbot. WCW had a pretty decent marquee level Main Event for this show with Bret Hart taking on Goldberg, but then they booked a month of nonsensical crap television and the end result was that, even though the ratings slithered up ever so slightly thanks to the car crash appeal of the TV show, the buy rate for this event was an absolute disaster.
Just to give an example of how horrific a job the RussAra team did of getting people to actually buy the pay per views, Starrcade did a pretty miserable 145,000 buys whilst Halloween Havoc (the first pay per view of their regime) did 230,000. So with more time to promote the show and a better Main Event with which to promote it with, the golden boy duo managed to scare off 85,000 potential pay per view buyers due to their atrocious Nitro and Thunder events.
