Category: Wrestling PPV Musings

There is indeed a king reigning in this ring. His name? Vince Russo.

In all honesty, this is where we get to the point in which a lot of the Attitude Era stuff becomes hard to sit through nowadays. It’s that feeling I get where I would watch something I hadn’t seen in ages for the first time in a long while, recalling how much I enjoyed that thing the first time, and then after watching it, I often wondered how I got into that stuff. This is one of those instances. Anyway, here we go…

Oh, lookie. We’ve got quarterfinal matches… hurray. Anyway, given that these things are usually short, I’ll keep my thoughts short and sweet.

X-Pac beat Hardcore Holly. This match was too short to be worth anything.

Kane beat Big Show with a number of chair shots following a choke hold that took more air out of the audience than it did Big Show. For fuck’s sake, why did that choke hold need to last fifty years? The sad part is that if that spot happened today, #ChokeHoldCityBitch would be trending on Twitter because that’s how sad things have gotten.

Billy Gunn beat Ken Shamrock via blood stoppage when Shamrock started “bleeding” from the mouth due to some unspecified injury that is never elaborated on. The blood looks so phoney and fake it’s sad. I could come up with “more real blood” (sic) on Microsoft Paint.

Roadd Dogg beat Chyna thanks to a metal cup. See, Chyna generally likes to go for ball shots and this has taken many of males down, but Road Dogg shows off some intelligence by actually wearing a cup. If only others had shown as much foresight…

So it’s Kane vs. Billy Gunn and X-Pac vs. Road Dogg for the semi-finals. Smart money would suggest that this would lead to a tournament finals between two former partners dueling it out… but then again, this is Vince Russo we’re talking about here.

The Hardy Boyz beat Edge & Christian to earn themselves a tag-team title shot against then-champions the Acolytes (or A.P.A. as they would be known later on). Quick match, but you can already tell these guys had something. And that would be expanded upon in their later feuds over the years.

Alright, time for the semi-finals. Looking forward to this… not.

Continue reading “WWF King Of The Ring 1999”

King Of The Ring 1998 is known for exactly one thing; Hell In A Cell.

The other notable thing on King Of The Ring 1998 that occasionally gets mentioned; the First Blood match between Stone Cold Steve Austin and Kane for the WWF Championship.

The focus of the opening video package; the two aforementioned matches.

The King Of The Ring tournament that just so happens to be the reason for this PPV’s existence; treated as an afterthought… and for good reason.

Continue reading “WWF King Of The Ring 1998”

So this was a show that happened one night in June… and in all honesty, not a whole lot to say about this one. I probably rented the tape once or twice, but that’s about it. Therefore, this is going to be fairly brief, with one or two matches of note at most.

Continue reading “WWF King Of The Ring 1997”

WWF King Of The Ring 1996 was the event where Austin 3:16 was born. The End.

Okay, maybe not.

I suppose, if nothing else, that’s the main talking point of this PPV and perhaps the only memorable thing about this show. And as much as WWE and Steve Austin will have you believe, this one promo didn’t set the world on fire from the get-go… especially when WCW was in the midsts of starting their own wildfire thanks to two former WWF’ers messing things up, as it were. But the promo planted the seeds to a future superstar in the making. But there are other noteworthy moments on hand here… so let’s check them out together.

Continue reading “WWF King Of The Ring 1996”

For most old-school fans of professional wrestling or “sports-entertainment” as some would prefer to call it, the 1995 edition of the WWF King Of The Ring event ranks up there as one of the worst wrestling cards ever conceived. Held in the wrestling hotbed of Philidelphia, Pensylvania, which was home to an underground cult promotion that was making the waves, King Of The Ring 1995 was pretty much a showcase of everything that was wrong with the WWF at the time… and pretty much an example of a company ignoring all the warning signs thrown at them and staying the course when it would’ve been wiser (and smarter) to jettison the load and try something else…

Perhaps that was a poor choice of words…

Since I got the WWE Network back in February, I’ve been mostly fond of catching some of the older PPVs and shows. I’ve seen a bunch of Clashes, a bunch of good PPVs… and then this comes along. Well, it was only a matter of time, wasn’t it? And since I’m sorta blowing through these KOTR events for the sake of this challenge, I might as well get it out of the way. And let me tell you something (brutha)… considering a lot of the other 1995 WWF stuff I’ve witnessed thus far, I am not looking forward to this one bit.

Continue reading “WWF King Of The Ring 1995”

Apparently, the inaugural King Of The Ring PPV event in 1993 was such a resounding success that they decided to have another one and make it something of an annual thing. This would last until 2002 for those keeping count, when Brock Lesnar won and killed the event. Longtime voyeurs of Wrestlecrap will know this show for being the one with football great Art Donovan doing commentary and such a bang up job he does, as well… although poor guy should do a little more prep work. After all, shouldn’t he already know how much these guys weigh?

Sigh… how sad is it that all three members of the announce team are now deceased?

Oh, well. On with the show, I guess.

Continue reading “WWF King Of The Ring 1994”

So, in a vain attempt to try and beef up some content, I’ve been spending whatever time I could doing little write-ups on. For this week, we’ll do the first seven King Of The Ring Pay-Per-View events from 1993 to 1999. Though there have been other King Of The Ring tournaments prior to ’93, this is the first to be on PPV and for a time within WWF/E canon, all those other tourneys never existed.

Also, I’ve never seen those tournaments, so I can’t really say much.

So, we begin with the quarterfinal matches of the tournament and for the sake of brevity, I’ll keep these short and sweet. I suppose I could dwell deep into the mechanics of each match like a proper review would, but then there’s a reason why I call these wrestling musings and not reviews.

Continue reading “WWF King Of The Ring 1993”

Pulled this one out of the archives and had a chance to watch this one via very old VHS recording transferred to DVD-R. Consider this a bonus of sorts; seeing as I’m posting the first In Your House musings, we might as well toss in the final In Your House-branded WWF PPV, which just so happens to be the very first Backlash event.

Context: this PPV follows Wrestlemania XV, which saw Steve Austin usurp the Rock to win his third WWF Championship. The next night on RAW, Austin gives Vince back the Big Eagle because he wants his Smoking Skull belt back… except now the Rock has said belt. And so we have the rematch where Austin holds the “proper” title while Rock has the trophy belt. Also on the card is a Boiler Room Brawl between Mankind and FUCKING BIG SHOW, who debuted in WWF back in February and has already pulled off a dozen turns in his short time with the company. Brilliant.

Continue reading “WWF Backlash 1999”