Scott’s Mailbag of Doom! — May 12, 2015
WWE Network's numbers must be plummeting, even with the second free month in a row, because the Elimination Chamber has been added as a second show for May, this time as a “network exclusive special,” which puts it on par with Jerry Springer’s "Too Hot For TV" and Hulk Hogan’s Rock N Wrestling in terms of importance.
MAILBAG OF DOOM: Ziggler, Luger, Hogan | Cena vs. Undertaker? | Wyatt, Heyman, Rollins | Memphis, DVD ideas, KotR '94
I think it’s cool that the network is resurrecting the match again, but doing it two weeks after Payback when people already don’t care about that show? That seems like pretty suspect logic.
Besides, given a rash of injuries (Daniel Bryan, Sami Zayn, Hideo Itami), this doesn’t seem like the best time to put on a dangerous match like the Chamber followed by the Money in the Bank ladder match a couple of weeks after that. But hey, network numbers are down, so if everyone has break their necks in the name of a few more subscribers, so be it.
Maybe I’m just cynical that way.
I guess logically the way to go now would be a Chamber match for the Intercontinental title, what with Daniel Bryan having to forfeit yet another major title due to injury. This guy’s worse than Shawn Michaels in the '90s, AM I RIGHT? High five! Anyone? No? OK, then, let’s hit the mailbag.
LETTER NO. 1!
Reform the Nexus! Barrett is king. He needs subjects. Bryan is injury prone and needs protection too. Slater has no direction and you could dust off Otunga. It turns Bryan heel and plays up his injuries. It gives Barrett control over a faction, which was his strong suit in the original group and provides the potential to elevate him to main event status. Slater and Otunga are now a tag team with support.
This group could go six months to a year before needing to break up.
Things I think about while giving my one-year-old a bottle.
Duly noted. But really, again with the Nexus? Wade Barrett (the character, not the person) in charge of anything more important than a coin-op car wash at this point is just asking for trouble.
It’s bad enough that poor Darren Young is reduced to doing “edgy” impressions to try to get over; let’s not drag down anyone else with a five-year-old gimmick that barely anyone even remembers at this point.
And anything that involves bringing back David Otunga in any form is a thumbs down from me, sorry. And what do you mean Slater has no direction? Some day he’ll get a fair chance against that rascal John Cena, and it’ll be epic! EPIC!
LETTER NO. 2!
I saw Tommy Hall's redo of Starrcade 1999 (really talented guy, have to say) and then I recognized a trend of Starrcade from reading his material. Apparently, Starrcade sucked horribly starting from 1994 (Hogan's first show against Ed Leslie) all the way to the end with 2000.
Not to mention, they all found new and interesting ways to suck, from horrible booking (1997, you know why) to being full of too many angles (1999) to being booked in a way that you wouldn't tell it was their biggest show unless someone told you (2000). If WrestleMania had a string of bad shows as long as that, I doubt anyone would take it seriously anymore.
But why did Starrcade just suck for that period of time? Was it just weird timing?
The most common theory is that Eric Bischoff was more invested in making the shows in the middle part of the year into bigger deals, as he basically saw Superbrawl or Great American Bash as the WCW version of Wrestlemania rather than Starrcade.
In fact, Sting’s original showdown with Hulk Hogan was supposed to be Great American Bash 1997, but things got stretched out farther than they wanted and ended up at Starrcade instead.
Turned out to be their biggest show in history, so that at least worked out for them. Let’s break it down for fun, though:
Starrcade '94: Hogan vs. The Butcher on top, but this was WCW trying to make it a big deal, honestly.
You had Hogan against his former best friend (who could not be named as such for legal reasons), Sting vs. the Guy Formerly Known as Earthquake, Mr. T involved because reasons, really all very reasonable attempts to make it feel like a big show. It failed miserably on every level, of course, but not for lack of trying.
Starrcade '95: This was a GREAT show. You, sir, are nuts for not loving it. Flair bleeding all over the place in the main event, multiple four-star matches in the New Japan challenge series thing, what’s not to love? NOTHING.
Starrcade '96: Hogan vs. Piper for the first time in WCW. Yeah, again, terrible, but they were trying.
Most of the undercard was the bee’s knees, however, because they could throw eight million combinations of Malenko, Guerrero, Benoit, Mysterio and Jericho out there and they would all rule. Plus a pretty awesome Giant vs. Luger angle with Sting and such. This was decidedly not terrible as a whole.
Starrcade '97: Yeah, OK, this one was pretty bad. We’ve all been over Sting vs. Hogan a million times and why it was such a badly booked match, but mostly the rest of the show was the heels going over every babyface and making WCW look like clods, as usual.
Starrcade '98: Goldberg loses, Kevin Nash books himself to the world title (even though he still denies it to this day), Ernest Miller and Jerry Flynn get PPV payoffs. No idea what the thought process was here.
Starrcade '99: Vince Russo’s first Starrcade and he pretty much kills the show dead and retires Bret Hart in one fell swoop. Who says he doesn’t have talent?
Starrcade 2000: I don’t even remember what happened here.
So I’d argue that it wasn’t a specific degrading of the show itself, but rather just a symptom of WCW collapsing into a black hole of suck in general and taking Starrcade down with it. That’s just science.
LETTER NO. 3!
Hey Scott,
1. Besides Ric Flair, who were the best at carrying mediocre or plain deadwood to ***+ matches?
2. Who did a better job, Shawn Michaels or Bret Hart, carrying: A) Taker, B) Diesel or C) Sid
I'm trying to think of others both carried to 3-star matches or more.
1. I’m pretty sure Shawn Michaels is the clear answer here, and he was even better than Flair in a lot of ways because he used to get guys into great matches out of pure spite and determination to have the best match no matter what.
Flair’s motivation always seemed to be making his opponent look good, whereas Shawn was just a selfish jerk a lot of the time. Like really, how many bad Shawn Michaels matches have we seen, even when he was out of his mind on illicit substances in the '90s or clowning on Hulk Hogan in 2005? Pretty much none. He was so good that he tricked people into thinking Kevin Nash was a worthwhile wrestler just by teaming with him in 1994.
2. Oh, man, multiple answers within the list? I’m getting too old for this. All right, let’s give it a go.
A. Undertaker. I wouldn’t say either person really carried Undertaker, as both Shawn and Bret had tremendous matches with him under very different styles and circumstances.
I mean, Undertaker and Shawn had three of the best matches in the history of professional wrestling together (Badd Blood, Wrestlemania, Wrestlemania) and it’s pretty callous to totally disregard Undertaker’s part in that.
But either way, Hell in the Cell totally eclipses whatever minor classics that Undertaker had with Bret Hart that no one remembers, so you have to go with Shawn here.
B. Come on, man, Shawn Michaels is such a genius that he completely sandbagged his own best friend at Wrestlemania XI and made himself look like a bigger star, and had Nash THANKING HIM for such a great match afterwards. That is some next-level Dr. Evil brilliance right there, even if Bret might have technically had the better match at Survivor Series later in the year. Shawn again, boom goes the dynamite.
C. Close call. Survivor Series 96 is a Shawn Michaels Special as he bumps from one end of the arena to the other to make Sid look like a hero, but Bret pulled out some pretty good brawls with Sid in the early part of 1997 and understood how not to make him look like the clumsy oaf that he typically was.
I’m gonna vote Bret here, although extra points to Shawn for calling Sid “the biggest piece of luggage in the WWF” while doing color commentary at Wrestlemania 13. Maybe it’s a draw when you add that in, I dunno.
Any quickies before we wrap it up?
LETTER NO. 4!
Hey Scott,
I'm the guy who e-mailed you once a while back about seeing Ricky Morton pulling out every coin he had for cigarettes at our local grocery store.
Well, while buying food for my daughter's baseball team this morning at said grocery store, who do I run into but Ricky Morton? I've never talked to him before, but I guess he recognized me, because he stuck out his hand and said, "Hey, man, how are you doing?" We chitchatted a little, and turns out he's quite the nice guy, actually.
Gotta admit, it was painful to see him walk, as years of in-ring abuse and God knows what all else has reduced him to a slow limp.
Nonsensical story but this does lead into my question: Best/worst experience meeting wrestlers, since in your line of work recapping wrestling you've met a few in person and interacted with several more via e-mail and the like.
Well, Honky Tonk Man once left an angry promo on my voicemail, but then again my friend paid him $20 to do that so that hardly counts.
Best was definitely going to listen to Ted DiBiase speak at a church in Edmonton in 1998-ish. I’m not a religious guy, like at all, but that was a tough one to pass up.
He was fresh out of WCW at that point and talking about all the places his life had gone wrong, and just hanging out and talking with him after the show was tremendous and gave me huge respect for him. He was a humble guy who understood his place in the business and was happy where he ended up.
Worst was probably Edge and Chris Jericho throwing temper tantrums in my e-mail in succession in 2002 because I didn’t give matches ***** ratings. Sadly, I lost all those conversations when I switched to Gmail in 2006.
Runner-up was meeting Teddy Hart backstage a few times when he was first starting out, as he would literally not shut up about getting a WWE tryout and what a big star he was going to become because he happened to be born into the Hart family. That really worked out well for him, didn’t it?
And with that, we close up the mailbag for another week. See you on Thursday morning for a wrapup of NXT!
