Category: Wrestling PPV Musings

WWF King Of The Ring 1995

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.

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WWF King Of The Ring 1994

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.

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WWF King Of The Ring 1993

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.

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i-Generation Superstars of Wrestling: Rodman Down Under (2000 PPV)

Date: July 30, 2000
Location: Sydney SuperDome, Sydney, Australia

What? You thought we were done with the Australia-themed wrestling shows? You foolish people, you.

So 1999 saw Heroes Of Wrestling, which was an unmitigated disaster which featured a bunch of old guys (known today as “wrestling legends” and “WWE Hall of Famers”) and a somewhat-not-sober Jake Roberts stroking his snake. And while Heroes of Wrestling didn’t get a follow-up for obvious reasons, 2000 saw some other company attempt the same thing, but with “lesser” name talent. How much “lesser?” Your main event for the evening was “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig defending some “World” title against Dennis Rodman. Now if THAT doesn’t get you excited, then you have far more sense than anyone booking this show.

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WWF Backlash 1999

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.

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WWA: The Reckoning (2003 Australian PPV)

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.

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WWA: The Retribution (2003 PPV)

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.

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WWA: The Eruption (2002 Australian PPV)

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.

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WWA: The Revolution (2002 Australian PPV)

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.

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