Well, kids. We’ve reached the end of our Starrcade Week of write-ups. Tonight, WWE will be hosting its own Starrcade event from the Greensboro Coliseum and hopefully, this will make it over to the WWE Network somewhere down the line. And it seems almost appropriate that on the eve of the first new Starrcade wrestling card, we look at the final event to grace PPV back in 2000.
And so, here we are… the last ever WCW Starrcade Pay-Per-View event.
Oooh… It’s Sting vs. the Black Scorpion… by which I mean the masked wrestler and not the Roger Corman-produced superheroine film that spawned a short-lived TV show.
This is a random choice… and to be honest, I don’t know why I went with this one other than to have a “classic” era Starrcade to fill the slot or something. In hindsight, I should’ve tried my luck again and went for one of the 80s iterations. However, what’s done is done and we can’t take that back.
Would’ve been nice…
1983… the year the Granddaddy of them all was born.
This is my first time watching the inaugural Starrcade. I have seen bits and pieces of it via DVDs and online clips, but never got around to watching the whole thing until I got access to the WWE Network. In fact, a lot of the old NWA stuff is new territory from a bygone era that I was never that widely exposed to.
This is a point worth mentioning because it can certainly color my perceptions of the matches and all that stuff. Another point worth re-iterating when it comes to these musings is that they are just that; random thoughts, brief thoughts, observations, and just general impressions. Don’t take this to be some kind of critical review because that’s not my intention. (They’re labeled MUSINGS, not REVIEWS, which should be very distinct from each other.)
I debated between watching this show and the 97 version for today’s slot and after a bit of personal reflection, I opted to go with this one and save the 97 show for next month. This had “less” stuff going on compared to that other one and I wanted to watch a Starrcade that wasn’t complete shit for once. And while this might not be great, it was at least good enough… but that’s jumping ahead here.
Warning: The above image never appears on today’s subject matter, since by this point, the Hollywood Blonds tag team has long since split and went their separate ways.
Another Warning: The above parody turned out to be not an accurate portrayal of old Ric Flair, who nowadays looks like a living skeleton. On the up side, at least he’s still alive and kicking… so good on ya, Ric.
All “kidding” aside, we go back to 1993 where we have Ric Flair putting his career up on the line against Big Van Vader for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. This was a last minute change from the originally-intended main event that would’ve seen Psycho Sid Vicious Justice Guy beat the Mastadon for the title… but then Arn Anderson and a pair of scissors wished Sid the best of luck on all his future (softball) endeavors and we got this match instead.
And for what is essentially a last-minute booking job, they did a rather fine job of building to this main event throughout the show, as cameras showed Ric Flair leaving his house, taking a rather somber limo ride with Mean Gean, and other backstage bits to somewhat give the impression that this could very well be the end of a long career… that wouldn’t come along until a decade and a half later, but I digress. The point is that this is a wonderfully told little backstory that did enough to get you up to speed on the stakes of this show’s main event.
But first… we have the rest of the card to blow through.
And blow we shall…
Or rather, blow the show shall while we witness it fall way the fuck apart.
Oy, oy, oy… maybe continuing onwards wasn’t such a good idea…
So we jump ahead to 1999 and by this point, WCW was teetering on the edge; their glory days feeling like a fleeting memory. Eric Bischoff, the man who brought WCW to new heights, had been turfed and in his place was a man named Bill Busch, whose first big move was to hire former WWF writers Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara and have them steer the WCW ship. Seemed like a good idea at the time; the guys responsible for planting the seeds to the WWF’s rise to prominence would surely be able to replicate the same results here.
Well, that didn’t quite happen, now did it?
WWE recently announced the return of “Starrcade” as a live event in Greensboro… so why not celebrate the occasion by spending a week revisiting old Starrcade events from the WCW days… because I haven’t seen any of the NWA era shows beyond brief snippets here and full-length matches in compilations there… though, for the sake of fairness, I might look at one of those along the way because that’ll be fun to experience.
Unfortunately, today’s foray into Starrcade revisitation is the show from 1998… the one that some would argue was the first bullet in what would eventually be the downfall of a once prominent wrestling organization… though others would argue that first bullet came the year prior, but we’ll go with this one since the aftermath was slightly more damaging.
This PPV took place twenty years ago and apparently features an incident of some importance in the professional wrestling/sports entertainment context. And this trivial event apparently merits a revisit for whatever reason.
I live in Montreal. I was born in dee Montreal. I spend my living years on this planet in dee Montreal. However, I didn’t see this show live, as I didn’t start following WWF until mid-98ish. And because I wasn’t following the product at the time, I was oblivious to the whole Bret Hart fiasco – though I can recall some rumblings about Bret jumping ship, I never gave it much thought. When I did get around to watching this show, it was on VHS thanks to a rental from the local video store and it was mostly due to wanting to watch the rematch between Stone Cold and Owen Hart; the first such match between the two since the Summerslam encounter and the piledriver that almost ended a career.
Even watching the show, the whole controversy eluded me until I eventually saw the Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows documentary on A&E, where the significance of the event became more apparent. Naturally, it’s something that gets discussed and talked about over the years and while some feelings were mended and more things are put out in the open, this is something that has its place in wrestling lore, for better or worse. And as much as we want to trivialize this event, it really did have a hand in planting the seeds to the rise of WWF and the slow, sad decent of Bret Hart’s career.
So here we are; twenty years later and watching this show again for the first time since… well, that one time I rented the VHS tape from the local video store. The WWE Network seems to have the whole show in one piece, so we might as well check it out…
Oh lookie, another WWE PPV I completely forgot about.
But it’s not my fault. I blame Discovery. Hey, did you know this new starship has spinning saucers? It further lends credence to my theory that this was intended to be a pizza cutter or something, but I digress.
Won’t be long with this one. In fact, I’ve so little to say about this show that didn’t interest me in the slightest that it changed the way I watch PPVs from this point forward.
Full disclosure: I did not watch No Mercy live on the WWE Network… because Star Trek: Discovery just debuted and new Star Trek will always take top priority over a B-level WWE show. Saving my thoughts for another time, but I thought it was a good start. There were some bits I didn’t care for, but there was enough for me to like that I’d be willing to give this show a follow and that’s as far as I’ll go.
In any event, I watched this over the span of two days; this packed B-show with two high-caliber matches that will end up be pretty disappointing no doubt… let’s get on with it.
dtm666 