WWF No Way Out (Of Texas) (Feb. 1998 PPV)

So here’s a musing that’s been hanging around for a couple years now and I may as well get it up there as a bit of a bonus to be published at precisely 3:16 P.M. Nobody is going to get that.

Fun Fact: The event was originally known as simply WWF No Way Out, but someone wisely saw that the initials for the event were very similar to WCW’s very popular and very profitable stable (as demonstrated in the banner above), prompting the addition of “Of Texas” to the title. Funny how they didn’t have that issue when No Way Out became the name of a February 2000 Pay Per View event. In any event, I bought the VHS tape of this thing when it was on sale at that HMV store (yes, kids. Canada has HMV stores) and long after it still bore any relevance. This was probably late-98 or 99 when I bought it. I honestly don’t recall.

In retrospect, I doubt there was any need to actually watch this since the February WWF/WWE PPV was/is typically the filler show between the Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania… but I guess I really needed to see that big eight-man tag-team match or something. I don’t know.

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WWF Survivor Series 1996

A buddy of mine suggested I do a musings on the 1996 Survivor Series since it features Steve Austin vs. Bret Hart. At the moment, the current crop of Wrestling Wednesday features is filled for the next couple months, but a quick musings done on March 16th (3/16. Get it? Of course you don’t.) shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.

This is the first of two PPVs that I’m posting today. The next one will be posted twelve hours later.

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WWE Vengeance 2002

Once upon a time, a long time ago, back in 2000, I did a quaint little website called DTM Webstation… it was online, but rarely untouched until about a couple years later when I had regular internet access. Around that time, I started doing a series of commentaries quaintly titled “The Bite.” Essentially my own rambling blog before such blogging ease was available to the masses or at least any that I was remotely aware. The Bite commentaries covered whatever came to mind, but one of the things I did in those commentaries was do quick predictions for then-upcoming WWE PPV shows, from time to time. Once I started up the DTM Blog, those predictions became a regular feature and the Bite commentaries became… well, obsolete. This was a regular thing even during the early years of this blog before I eventually just went with straight up random ramblings on the various shows.

Those early predictions (along with some updated thoughts) were what I reposted onto the blog early on and subsequently linked to the Wrestling Stuff page. The problem with including those on that page is people who only read the recent musings will assume I’ve done similar write-ups in the past when it simply isn’t the case. As such, there’s been this massive disconnect between the current format and this older, antiquated format that was posted purely for archival purposes and does not necessarily reflect my current thought.

So what I’ve gone ahead and done is pull out most of my old DVD-Rs that hosted these PPV recordings and decided to give them a nice rewatch and I’d figure it make for a nice weekly segment here on the blog. And that’s what we’re going to do from here on out; every Wednesday, we’ll be looking at an older wrestling card from years ago and while the current format is to do the old WWE PPVs from 2002 to whenever I stopped doing the old format, sometimes I might veer off course and do another “old” show. (Newer PPVs, should I feel inclined to cover them, will not be part of this weekly package.)

So enough waffle; let’s watch Vengeance 2002 for the first time in sixteen years and live to regret it.

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WWE Fastlane 2018

Note to WWE Creative; If I’m going on a fast lane, it’s not so I can make stops along the way. But I guess I should expect this sort of incompetence from people who confuse the 25th iteration as an anniversary, but I digress.

Despite being on the “Fastlane” to the Road To Wrestlemania, we have another 3-hour digress featuring a bunch of matches that will do nothing to set up the upcoming Showcase Of The Immortals and will instead waste plenty of time to reach their foregone conclusions. I will be perfectly honest; I had no real intention of watching this show, but a trip to the Amerindian Museum in southern Quebec left me a bit queasy and I found myself lying on my bed watching the show to pass the time… which meant no work done on stuff that needed to get done, but I digress. (On that note, either expect videos to resume again on Wednesday, or maybe I’ll hold off until Friday and resume the daily stream from there.)

Anyway, Fastlane is otherwise significant as it is the final brand-specific PPV, as from this point forward, we’ll be getting monthly dual-brand PPVs that will last for ten hours and then we’ll wonder why nobody is watching their PPVs any more. Yes, I’m sure Network number will jump up because Wrestlemania is right around the corner, but how many of those folks are going to stick around after the fact?

Anyway… again… on with the show.

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WCW/nWo Slamboree 1998

The following bit is the closing statement on my recent Elimination Chamber musings:

“A couple hours later, I load up the WWE Network and I start up an old WCW Pay-Per-View. And the first thing I see is Eric Bischoff reading a letter from Vince McMahon’s legal attorney saying that Vince wouldn’t show up. I remember this bit being completely ridiculous, but completely forgot about the bit where WCW head of security, Doug Dillinger, went out and asked if anyone had seen McMahon. In Doug’s hand was a ready-made backstage pass with Vince’s face on it. It was absurd, but also outright hilarious.

“Already, I got more entertainment value out of the first five minutes of an old WCW Pay Per View than I did three plus hours of a modern day WWE B-Level PPV. What a world.”

Let’s continue that train of thought with a full-blown musings of this “classic” WCW Pay-Per-View event, courtesy of the WWE Network, because I clearly had a good time… or did I?

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WWE Elimination Chamber 2018

Fun fact: Not counting Survivor Series and Royal Rumble, this is the third straight WWE B-show that I’ve used the sleeping cat for a header. Another fun fact is that this is the first time I’ve sat down to watch a WWE B-show since Hell In A Cell left a sour taste in my mouth. Turns out I had a bit of free time and needed some background noise.

So I suppose the first noteworthy positive of having signed Ronda Rousey and advertising her on this show is that I’m watching a WWE B-level PPV for the first time in months. I assure you that has less to do with “Cold Ronda” and more to do with how WWE is going to pull off their “history making” seven man Elimination Chamber match.

Also, the women are getting an elimination chamber match. That’s also “history making” too, right?

Make note of this, folks. This is probably the last stretch of WWE B-shows that I’m going to watch before the ill-conceived notion of dual-branded ten hour B-shows come to fruition once Wrestlemania has come and gone. That means more multi-person matches and less reasons to actually give a shit about anything that’s going on. If nothing else, I’m hoping the creative ups their game… but that’s basically a fool’s hope at this point.

Anyway, on with the show…

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Royal Ramble 2018

Yeah, this is going up a bit late and to be fair, that’s sort of the plan here.

I didn’t have a whole lot to say about the Rumble. The most I did was a brief results write-up and mentioned a more complete musings will be posted the following year. Well, it turns out you only needed to wait a month or so, but better late than never, I suppose.

Anyway, on with the late show…

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Royal Ramble 2000

We end the string of Royal Rambles by taking a trip back to 2000, where we go from Rocky winning the WWE championship to build to a needless Mania rematch to Rocky winning the Royal Rumble in controversial fashion and never getting that one-on-one title match at Wrestlemania 2000… sorry if I spoiled the movie for you.

In any event, this was a return to form after the rather abysmal 1999 iteration that saw Vince McMahon win the Rumble and a whole lot of bullshit follow. Not only is this a better show, it is perhaps one of the best Royal Rumbles in a long time – either in terms of the Rumble itself  as well as the overall show.

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Royal Ramble 2013

I was going to touch on a much older Rumble, but in looking back at the older blog posts, I found that I never did do a “proper” musings on the 2013 Royal Rumble. And then I did a little digging as to why and that’s when I remembered why I didn’t do it… because it was the build-up to the most needless rematch in the history of anything and I never bought the show. So I didn’t watch it and proceeded to not watch it for years because it was needless, given what the end game was going to be.

But then I came across a curious post that I did around that time, which involved a man nearly losing an eye during a robbery. A traumatic event to anyone, but in his mind, the worst thing to happen to him that week wasn’t the robbery or even the eye injury, but the fact that The Rock ended CM Punk’s year-plus long reign as WWE Champion. And that did put a smile on my face. Now if that doesn’t inspire you, then I don’t know what will.

But anyway, it’s time to give this show a proper write-up… whatever that means.

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