This episode is significant for two reasons. One is that it is the first episode of WCW Nitro to expand to a full two-hour program.
But the second reason this episode is significant is because of this man…
Yes, Scott Hall (who doesn’t get named until weeks down the line) makes his first appearance on WCW Nitro to fire the opening shot of the invasion that would change the face of wrestling forever….
Or at least, until the next changing of the face of wrestling forever.
The show opens with Ric Flair & Arn Anderson making short work of the American Males in preparation for their Great American Bash encounter between Mongo McMichaels and Kevin Greene. And then we get a jobber match that is interrupted by the man of the hour, who cuts the promo in his familiar Razor Ramon cadence… never mentioning a name, but mentions a war. You can look up the promo on Youtube and see for yourself because nothing I say will do this justice… and really, everything there is to say about this thing has already said, so I will just ask one thing…
Scott Hall was in WCW beforehand as the Diamond Studd… and I realize that was a long ways off at the time, but at no point did anyone go “It’s Duh Diamond Studd!” Even when Hall is mouthing off with Bischoff at the commentary desk, one of those commentators is Bobby Heenan, who was in WWF. And he had commentated on a couple Razor matches before he left, but all of a sudden, Heenan has selective amnesia? This doesn’t detract from the moment. It’s a great moment. It’s an important moment, but these are questions that pop up because I think too much on these things for the sake of a different take on things.
Other than that, there’s a bunch of matches and they’re just kinda, sorta there. There’s a Giant/Shark match that ends with Big Bubba cutting off half of Shark’s hair, and there’s also a pretty decent Steven Regal/Alex Wright that ends with Regal winning with a roll-up. And after a fierce Sting/Scott Steiner that ends with a Lex Luger run-in that results in a no-contest, the show ends with Scott Hall going up to the commentary desk and challenging Billionaire Ted and his big boys to settle things in the ring. It’s a surreal visual, for sure; the big time WWF guy showing up on WCW television and challenging their talent to a fight… and being treated as something of a major threat. Other than the Scott Hall bits, this was two hours of meh.
And with that, we conclude our weekly lookback at the early days of WCW Monday Nitro. Unlike our venture into NWA-TNA territory where the end date was going to fluctuate, the endgame was set in stone from day one and I never really had much incentive to go beyond that. The idea was to strictly watch the hour-long Nitros and end this run at the very moment the Scott Hall return aired. Part of it begin that I was more curious about pre-nWo Nitro and how that show would’ve played out before this one fateful encounter. Like any show, there were some episodes where either nothing of note happened or was so bad that it made me questioned why I wanted to watch these things in the first place, but I found more to like on these shows than dislike and on a whole, I did find myself enjoying these shows more than I thought I did.
Would it have been nice to have pushed this forward until September so that we can at least say we did a year’s worth of Nitro? The thought did occur to me at some point, but at the same time, I’ve already seen the origins of the nWo in some form or fashion that watching these in context with the rest of the show that was still trudging along with the “business as usual” mindset would have been somewhat counterproductive. At the end of it all, I found myself asking the inevitable question of where WCW would have gone from this point had Scott Hall not arrived on the scene and changed the fortunes of WCW forever. It’s a question that will never get its answer.
So that’s the end of this Nitro experiment. Will the opportunity arise to revisit Nitro in the future? I’d be open to the idea, but not to this extent. Maybe different spot episodes here and there to mix things up a bit, but that’s about it, really. I don’t see myself watching two hour or even three hour Nitros on a weekly basis for a silly bit – I may as well watch RAW or Smackdown if I… actually, you know what? Never mind. I don’t want to make stupid promises I have no intention of keeping.
I’ll be posting musings for last Sunday’s Double or Nothing PPV tomorrow and then Friday will see musings for tonight’s Dynamite before we put a pause on any wrestling related posts for the month of June. Starting in July, we’ll be going through TNA’s Bound For Glory PPVs for the next few months every Wednesday up until this year’s event. Most of them are already in the can, so no worries about that. Will we do other shows? I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see.
That’s it for today.
Later.
dtm666 