This isn’t off the Network, but I had it on my back-up drive, so…
1996 was the year WCW struck gold with the nWo gimmick that would dominate the rest of their existence for better or worse. 1996 was also a pretty miserable year for the WWF, as nobody seemed to give a shit about HBK and his boyhood dream story.
Auckland, New Zealand
June 8, 2003 (Taped May 25, 2003)
And so we come to the final WWA PPV show, as shortly thereafter the company would fold and be a forgotten footnote in the annals of wrestling history. As such, this PPV is about unifying the WWA titles into the various NWA-TNA titles. With this in mind, the NWA-TNA champion wins. This much was spoiled on an edition of the NWA-TNA weekly PPVs where they showcased a brief snippet of NWA champ Jeff Jarrett beating WWA champ Sting to unify both belts. Way to kill off any reason for people to want to buy this one last PPV, guys.
Glascow, Scotland
December 06, 2002 (aired February 9, 2003)
This was a surprise to me when I first heard about it because by this point, you already had NWA-TNA (that’s the original moniker for Impact Wrestling, kids) and that was the “cool” alternative to WWE. So it was easy to assume that once TNA became a thing, the World Wrestling All-Stars tour would be nothing more than a distant memory… and yet here we were in 2003, the overall fourth Pay-Per-View event under the WWA brand. And in even more of a surprise, you actually have some TNA talent on here, including then-reigning NWA World Champion Jeff Jarrett. So that’s something.
Melbourne, Australia – April 14, 2002
The third WWA PPV event went back to the land down under and this would be the final WWA event before the Jarretts would begin showcasing NWA-TNA via weekly $10 pay-per-views in June that year… but not the final WWA event overall. Let’s not get to that now. Because Jeff Jarrett was tending to his own house, so to speak, he would drop the WWA World Title to Nathan Jones, a guy perhaps best known for being signed by WWE and doing nothing of note because, well, he wasn’t very good at what he did. WWA, on the other hand, thought he was good enough to their World Champion. I suppose being a local Aussie kid helped in that decision-making.
Yesterday, I posted musings from a 2001 Pay-Per-View produced by the long-defunct World Wrestling All-Stars, a promotion out of Australia that gathered most of the former WWF, WCW, and ECW stars not working for Vince at the time. Since I’m trying to maintain some semblance of a theme here, let’s do the next one.
Airing February 24th, 2002 out of the Aladdin Casino Center in Las Vegas – essentially a theatre – The Revolution is the second WWA PPV to be broadcast and the first to emanate from U.S. soil. It is also the only WWA event that took place in North America, which isn’t a particularly good sign for a promotion hoping to provide an alternate to the only other major promotion in the continent.
Continue reading “WWA: The Revolution (2002 Australian PPV)”
Heroes of Wrestling.
If those three words don’t mean anything to you, then chances are you weren’t around when this special event took place in 1999, during the height of professional wrestling’s most lucrative period. A time when professional wrestling was at its hottest peak and was pretty much all over the place whether you liked it or not. If those words do mean anything to you… bless thy hearts.
Continue reading “The Infamous Heroes Of Wrestling PPV From 1999”
The year is 2001. The World Wrestling Federation had acquired the assets of fledgling rival promotion World Championship Wrestling, Philidelphia outfit Extreme Championship Wrestling went bankrupt, and suddenly there is a tremendous void in the wrestling stratosphere for an alternative to Vince McMahon’s wrestling monopoly, as well as a bunch of name talents not employed by the WWF. As such, there were attempts to gather these talents and build a promotion out of them in an effort to provide that much needed alternative… to mixed results.
One of these promotions was World Wrestling All-Stars, an Australian touring outfit run by concert promoter Andrew McManus. Signing a bunch of well-known names such as Jeff Jarrett, Brian “Road Dogg” James, and Bret Hart among others, the promotion would embark on an international tour of live events. Some of these live events were made into Pay-Per-View shows… with the first of these dubbed “The Inception.”
The Inception took place on October 26th, 2001, but didn’t make North American PPV markets until January 2nd, 2002. The WWA would eventually produce five PPV events in total before being shuttered in 2003. This week, we’ll be looking at all five PPV events.
WCW Halloween Havoc 2000 is the only full show that I have from my original PPV tapings during 2000s… because I used to get all the PPVs and I’d put them on tape and unfortunately, very few of those survived. One of those being Halloween Havoc 2000… Halloween Havoc 2000 was a show taking place during the dying days of WCW. I’m not quite sure if Vince Russo was still writing the shows at this point, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did.
Anyway, my hopes aren’t high for this show, because my recollections of WCW from this time frame are thankfully few and far between. Because WCW, during its dying days, was hard to watch. It was the classic example of writing that threw shit on the wall and went with what stuck. And it would be a fairly safe bet that my only viewings of WCW around that time were the PPVs that either I or a friend would tape and pass it along to each other to share the torture, as it were. The only time I tuned in to Nitro was when the show was cancelled.
But alas, that’s another story. Onwards to Halloween Havoc.
WARNING: The following post contains mentions of Chris Benoit. Discretion is advised.
WCW Souled Out 2000 opens with the typical WCW signature video that had opened many WCW programs since mid-1999 and from there, instead of an opening video montage detailing the card for the program, we go straight to the arena shot and pyro, where announcer Tony Schiavone welcomes us to the first WCW Pay-Per-View event of the 21st century. And we begin with about five minutes worth of recaps. This is the sign of a program that has been rewritten (almost literally) at the last second, which might be the norm for WCW, but the reasons here are far more grave than the typical excuse of nobody having a clue as to what the show’s about.
The original card for Souled Out was to feature Bret Hart defending the WCW World Heavyweight title against Sid Vicious and Jeff Jarrett defending the US title against Chris Benoit. Of course, with Bret suffering from a concussion that would end his wrestling career and Jarrett also saddled with injuries that forced him out of action for the short term, WCW was forced at the last second to rebook the top of the card. And that’s how we ended up with the main event of Sid vs. Benoit for the vacant World title.
Going into this viewing, I had not seen the PPV in years; more than likely since its original airing back in 2000. However, one thing I remember was that in the weekend of the show, I’d watch the PPV preview channel and I’d distinctly recall a card that would pop up and announce that Bret Hart would not compete and the main event was going to be Sid vs. Benoit for the World title. Whether that was a WCW thing or a Viewer’s Choice thing, I thought that was a cool bit for them to update the card so that fans would not have false expectations. It is generally a rule of thumb to not mention these things until the show is taking place. So, this forward thinking is actually a surprising gesture. Whether it’d helped or hurt the buyrate… I’m probably the wrong guy to ask about that.
Anyway… on with the show… as it were…
Summerslam is hitting the network, so I guess to coincide with the challenge here on the blog, we might as well hit a couple of these up as they play.
This is one of the more “interesting” shows in that it features two big matches. In one main event, reigning WWF Champion Bret “Hitman” Hart defending his title against his young brother and newly crowned King Of The Ring winner Owen Hart. In the other main event, both Ted Dibiase and Paul Bearer have Undertakers and the two fight it out to see who’s the genuine article… except it should be plain as day who’s the real deal given that the other one is played by some other due.
Should be fun, I guess… then again, maybe not.
dtm666 