Category: Wrestling PPV Musings

WCW Bash At The Beach 2000

Listen, I know I’m pinching things here by pushing both videos to a New Year’s Eve clusterfuck. And I realize that this isn’t a fair trade off… but trust me, I want these vids to actually be worthwhile. So it gets the extra time to cook. In the meantime… you get this piece of business, which surprised me more than anyone.

Right, so sometime last year, while I was doing my weekly Wednesday PPV musings, I did musings for WCW Mayhem 2000 and I had declared it the final WCW 2000 that I would ever watch. A little over a couple months later, I was kindly informed that in all the time I’ve been bitching over having to put up with every horrible WCW 2000 PPV and the utterly miserable time I’ve had watching these goddamned shows, I have never done a musings on the one show from that year that genuinely mattered in the long term of things.

At first, I dismissed the notion. Surely, that’s a mistake. Surely I must have d0ne a musings on that show and it’s possible that it never published. Sometimes, that sort of happens around here where I would have something ready to go and it wouldn’t launch on schedule… or god forbid, a post would launch before it was even ready to do so. So I did a quick check on things and sure enough… I had the one hole left in that WCW 2000 checklist.

And sure enough, it was the show.

Bash At The Beach 2000.

Cue the Cornette face because I ain’t doing a banner for this shitshow.

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WWE Survivor Series 2024

It’s Survivor Series…

WARGAMEZ!

From last year…

So yeah, full disclosure: I had this laying around last year and never got around to posting it, but since it’s around that time again, I’d figured why not. Here are my (very quick) musings on last year’s Survivor Series PPV, which featured the reunited Bloodline (led by Roman Reigns and also featuring CM Punk) and the Bloodline B-Team led by that Solo guy and a bunch of other Samoans that got signed from New Japan or something. If, a year after the fact, this is what I’m referring to that “other” Bloodline team, maybe it’s not as effective a storyline as some would suggest.

Also, yes, even though most of this was written last year and promptly forgotten about, there will be occasional notes to try and keep this more timely, as though it was written up on a few days ago as opposed to months prior or even a whole year previous.

Anyway, let us begin…

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WCW Halloween Havoc 1998

(Quick note: This was originally going to be posted in July, but then Hulk Hogan passed away and to publish musings on one of his worst outings would have been too soon… so I held it off until now, which is October and thus makes it appropriate for the time. My grace period over the Hulk Hogan Creative Control Card has ended. It’s back to the schlocking, which you can find more of in my weekly WCW Nitro musings posted every Thursday.)

Before anyone asks, yes, the entire show can be viewed on the WWE Vault YouTube Channel… for free, no less. And yes, before anyone else asks, yes, I’m skipping over the Fall Brawl ’98 PPV… one day, we’ll get to that one, but this one is the bigger deal.

So yes, consider this an out-of-season bonus for this final week of July before we start jumping into some recent PPVs that I’ve witnessed or am going to witness next month.

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WWE Evolution 2025

Yes, we’re doing the PPV musings early this week. Also, this is the last one for a while, as next Wednesday will begin my weekly visit to the first year of WCW Monday Nitro, which turns 30 next week. Hopefully, this run lasts longer than the NWA-TNA run did.

In any event, the people have wanted it and after almost a decade, WWE has delivered another all-women PPV event because we have an AEW megashow to counterprogram and we’re going to do that by swamping the weekend with all sorts of mediocre programming. Starting off with a run of the mill NXT show that featured a Slammiversary contract signing and nothing else of note unless you’re a regular NXT viewer – and I’m not – and then following that up with the latest Saturday Night’s Main Event, which featured GOLDBERG coming out of retirement to lose in his retirement match against GUNTHER and then getting cut off in the middle of his retirement speech.

And then there’s this show… which I’m only watching because I am genuinely curious to find out if there was any match that could match or surpass the superb All In match between Timeless Toni and Mercedes. This show that WWE pulled out of their ass purely for the sake of counter-programming AEW. I mean, let’s call a spade a spade. The only reason there was an Evolution PPV in the first place was to give the women something to do because they couldn’t wrestle in Saudi Arabia. Once that started to lighten up, there was no need for another Evolution… that and there was no Cold Ronda to build this show around.

So was there anything on this show that surpassed the All In match that I mentioned? The short answer is “maybe.” The long answer is the rest of this post.

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WWE Summerslam 2025

Sorry for the week delay on this show, kids… but you know how it is with these WWE PPVs that go fifteen hours… and then on top of that, you double it up. Anyhoo, it’s Summerslam 2025 – at the beginning of August so we can clash in Paris or something at the end of August… or is it Saudi Arabia? I’m not quite sure. All I know is that, unless one of these other “premium” shows boasts a card that’s worth my time, this will probably be my last WWE PPV musings for the year until next year’s Royal Rumble.

Yeah, sorry that I didn’t watch the Money In The Bank event from last month and that I would rather watch a bunch of crappy old WCW PPVs than a generally mid-level modern WWE PLE offering. Even moreso, I’m sorry that I’m not in the least bit interested in this John Cena retirement tour that went off the deep end when Dwayne interjected and then decided that his planet needed him or something. (No, Dwayne didn’t show up on this show… but someone else did; we’ll get to that.)

And yes, I did recycle the Buy One Get One Free banner of Ramblemania 41 for this year’s Summerslam as soon as I heard the announcement that they were going to make it a two-night event months ago. The fact that CM Punk would end up main eventing one of those nights was more of a happy coincidence.

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WCW Fall Brawl 1999

(Breaking the kayfabe here a bit, but this was written before the passing of Hulk Hogan. It’s been left as is, so if you’re not in the mood for anything but positive Hulkster vibes, best skip this one. Also, was planning on having this up much later this month, but… well… anyhoo…)

I wish I could say that the banner had a typo… but it’s WCW circa 1999, so…

Apparently, I still have this on DVD-R… and this is a vintage recording too. One of the few PPVs that I recorded onto VHS and would later transfer to DVD-R once I got my own DVD Recorder. It’s a fun time to be had by all, I’m sure.

To be honest with you, I’m not quite sure why I felt compelled to pull this one out. I realize that I had just watched Road Wild 1999 and… maybe I needed to remind myself of how long this Hulkamania ’99 run was going to continue (spoiler: it lasts until Russo came into play), but I figured since I had a copy of this on-screen, I might as well give it a watch.

Note to self: please do not indulge these needless and oftentimes dangerous diversions for the sake of your own sanity.

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AEW All In Texas 2025

Before anyone asks, yes, the banner does indeed feature a promotional mugshot of the late Don S. Davis, who is perhaps best known for his role as General George Hammond in the sci-fi television series, Stargate SG-1. One of the characters on the show referred to him as “Hammond Of Texas.”

So now why am I featuring the late, great General Hammond on the banner for an AEW Pay-Per-View event from Texas?

Because I feel like it… and also fuck you.

So Summerslam is coming up… and it’s the first edition to go two-nights, which honestly doesn’t surprise me if they eventually do the same with Royal Rumble as well…. which wouldn’t be a bad idea – two nights, each headlined by a Rumble match… makes the most sense, actually. But we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about AEW’s big All In PPV event that took place from Texas. (No go on their annual New Japan get-together… undecided on All Out… but we’ll eventually cover Slammiversary, even though it’s a NXT show disguised as a TNA show.)

Anyway, this is the other AEW PPV that I planned on watching this month – the other being this year’s Double Or Nothing PPV – and really, nothing else in the horizon seems to be on my radar unless they book a really amazing card that has me going, “Yes! That sound exciting! Shut up and take my goddamned money!”

To date, there hasn’t been an AEW show that has done that. Double Or Nothing wouldn’t have been a blip on my radar if it had been a show under any other name. Quite honestly, neither has All In. But both were special events.

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WCW Road Wild 1999

So here we are… the last WCW Road Wild PPV event from Sturgis… the last WCW biker rally PPV before Eric Bischoff was turfed from his role as WCW President and replaced by office accountant Bill Busch, who would bring it a couple blokes from WWF to head creative. And with WWF at an all-time high, it seemed like a good idea at the time… but we all know how that turned out and so I will spare you the bloody details… because they bare no relevance to Eric Bischoff’s last WCW show at a biker rally.

Listen, I’m going to refrain from the one positive about these shows – the outdoor setting, because at this point, it’s a broken record. Yes, it’s a neat visual for a wrestling show, and honestly I wish more shows these took place in these weird outdoor settings just for the visual variety – AEW being more likely to do this stuff, honestly – but after three years of WCW holding these shows at a biker rally before a largely apathetic crowd that didn’t give two fucks about this rasslin’ stuff unless it involved big, burly Americans or something didn’t exactly pan out. But Eric loves his motorbikes and they kept booking the show until he was no longer in power.

And also let’s be honest; this isn’t going to be a fair show.

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WCW/nWo Road Wild 1998

Yes, this is the one that you’re waiting for me to revisit, isn’t it?

The one with Jay “Big Jaw” Leno.

You know, contrary to past claims, I’m not quite as dreading this revisit. It’s been well over a decade since I last touch this thing. On the one hand, I don’t expect this to be a better show. If anything, I’m expect this to be as bad as I remember it.

On the other hand, though, I have seen considerably more WCW material in the past two years alone and certainly enough that I might have something more to add to this show longer after my last viewing. Does the additional exposure to WCW in recent time, thus making some of this stuff as fresh as it was back in the day, does that give me new appreciation for this show and perhaps see in softer eyes? Or is it the same old shit that I perceived it to be ages ago? Or… maybe it’s gotten worse?

Only one way to find out, I suppose.

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