Hope everyone enjoyed Shitload of Questions Saturday here on the blog! Of course I got another 10 questions in the inbox by the time the afternoon was done. Much like Monopoly, it’s a game that no one can win.
Maybe Sunday will also be Shitload of Questions Sunday! For the moment, however, let’s go back to 1988 again for our weekly Observer fix.
Apparently it’s a “great week for rumors, and a lousy week for news”, so this should be fun! On with the “news”!
But first, a letter!
Hey Scott,
So the latest observer flashback you mentioned Ric Flair was a rumoured to debut in Summerslam. Let’s have some fun fantasy booking , he makes his debut, then what happens? I feel they already were set on Hogan/Savage at Mania,so would he just been slotted in the Bossman role in the autum n/Survivor Series,but then what? I really not sure how he fits in that time period besides joining the Heenan Family.
Good question. But given that Dusty was going to be a free agent by the end of the year, we could have ended up with a double main event of Hogan/Savage and Dusty/Flair for Wrestlemania! Like, holy shit!
– Top story this week is more updates on Bruiser Brody’s murder, with a whole lot of “We’re not sure what’s going to happen with charges against Gonzales”.
This is the extended obituary issue for Bruiser Brody, which is a really interesting history of the wrestler but not much for news, so this will be a quick one otherwise.
– Actual numbers for the Bash PPV, which in fact did between 350,000 – 400,000 buys. That sounds REALLY high, but just shows how impressive the PPV market used to be. That’s with a “universe” of 10 million homes, assuming a 4% buyrate. Outside of WWF shows and some boxing, this makes the Bash the highest-grossing PPV in the short history of the medium.
– A Japanese paper is reporting that the TBS purchase of the NWA happens within 60 days, with Jack Petrick overseeing the merger and Dusty Rhodes left in control of the promotion.
– Jerry Lawler and Kerry Von Erich have been doing “unification” matches in the Memphis area, typically ending with Kerry piledriving him for the DQ because a piledriver is illegal. However, the World Class title is supposed to change hands on a DQ (really? I thought it was just countouts?) so someone dropped the ball on the booking. Rematches will be no-DQ, there must be a winner matches, so Dave wonders how they’re going to get out of those ones.
– Verne Gagne is planning “WrestleRock III” from the Metrodome in November, to be shown on PPV with 50,000 people in the stadium and ZZ Top playing a concert. There is literally no part of that statement that didn’t turn out completely false.
– DJ Peterson and Curt Hennig are both coming into the WWF. I recall Peterson’s stay being extremely short-lived, like doing some house show jobs. Hennig has a strong chance of not happening because he already agreed to terms twice previously and then burned Vince by staying with the AWA.
– Hercules sliced his arm open taking a table bump in a match with Ultimate Warrior at a TV taping and needed 76 stitches. Hopefully he’s got some kind of magic medical serum to help his muscle heal faster. Apparently both guys have heat for smashing TV monitors in the process, which isn’t surprising because they’ve been seemingly using those same damn monitors since 1987 to save money.
– Dean Malenko has retired from wrestling and is working the counter for an airline.
Light news week this time around, but the Brody bio is well worth reading.
Hopefully nothing else incredibly morbid happens this week, since we just had the Adrian Adonis obit last issue. But I mean, how likely would that be?
Well, it’s our first obit issue of 1988, back when wrestlers dropping dead before 40 was a RARE occurrence.
This week: Actual big, business changing news. Sort of. To the retro-mobile!
Back to the summer of 88 again! This is actually a slow news week, as opposed to Dave’s usual definition of one.
We’ll take it week-by-week now I guess, since this is gonna be a regular thing now and I don’t wanna burn through everything.
Moving onto June of 1988, with Dave having recovered enough from the AWA TV taping that he was able to make it to a WWF Superstars taping. It was at least much better.
Someone had asked about the infamous “I Survived An AWA TV Taping” issue, so let’s skip ahead two months to May of 1988 and see what’s in the news.
Since I had the March 28 / 88 issue of the Observer handy for the AWA show I reviewed last night, I figured I’d do another look back at the week that was since people seemed to like the one from January. This of course was the week just before the Clash vs. WM4 showdown, and Dave’s pretty jazzed about it in this issue.
The Observer site actually posted the Royal Rumble 88 issue of the Observer today because of the Rumble, which is interesting because previously 1991 was as far back as they’ve gone. And I just can’t resist going through the newsbites and reports, back when Dave was much more gung-ho about giving opinions and snark…