WCW PPV Musings

WCW Halloween Havoc 1996

Halloween Havoc was World Championship Wrestling’s signature October PPV event before the name was adopted into a special episode of NXT that would play around this time. I’ve only dabbled in a few of these PPVs and never did bother to make these a tradition on the blog… and a few have wondered why that’s never the case. Well, the plain and simple answer is that none of these Halloween Havoc shows were actually any good and even some of the better shows were simply a matter of being “less bad” than the usual stock. Sure, there was some good stuff – usually on the first half of the card – but the bad stuff was generally very bad and offset the few highlights on these shows.

With that having been said, since I’ve been on the WCW 1996 PPV kick during the summer, I might as well cover that year’s Halloween Havoc PPV, which I have never seen. Fall Brawl closed out with a significant push forward in the nWo saga, with Sting out of the picture and the nWo running roughshod. Our main event for the show is Hogan vs. Savage.

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WCW Fall Brawl 1996

(Yeah, we’re shuffling the Musings a bit here. Today and tomorrow gets one and next week gets none. Things will be back to normal here in a couple weeks, promise.)

Yeah, we’re going back to the WCW 1996 PPV well… mostly because I want to do a musings on that year’s Halloween Havoc. To the best of my recollection, this was the first WCW PPV I actually watched back in the day… and yeah, that was a thing.

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WCW Road Wild 1997

Another year. Another Sturgis show. Yippee. This show was following the 100th episode of Monday Nitro, which saw Lex Luger defeat Hollywood Hulk Hogan for the WCW World Heavyweight Championship and all his friends came out to celebrate with him on the accomplishment of actually winning a world title over a hated heel and not over a countout win.

So now let’s see how WWE WCW fucks all that up because of course they would…

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WCW Hog Wild 1996

Easy E decided to hold a free wrestling show in Sturgis during one of their biker rallies. Apparently, it went over so well that he’d make it an annual thing until the end of his presidential tenure. Sadly, the event that would replace it in 2000, New Blood Rising, is a largely awful show known for featuring Lance Storm’s best match ever.

So, yes, the first event was called Hog Wild, but that name didn’t stick for the other annual shows due to copyright concerns and thus was changed to Road Wild. I’ve already mused on the 98 and 99 editions of the event, but never touched on these early shows. Let’s fix that, shall we?

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WCW Bash At The Beach 1996

“Whose side is he on?” The immortals words of one Bobby “The Brain” Heenan were uttered (and consequently scrubbed from subsequent WWE Network airings of this event as I recall) should have cast doubt as to whether the man coming down the ring would be the man who would fend off these callous Outsiders from up there or be the much-vaunted third man that had been teased weeks prior. That faint warning was quickly dismissed because there’s no way it could be.

But for those truly in the know, who else could it have been?

Before we get to that pivotal moment in wrestling history, we have the Bash At The Beach undercard, which is about as business as usual as you can get given a night that nobody figured would have big ramifications for the business going forward. Let’s get that out of the way so that we can get to the good stuff.

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WCW Great American Bash 1996

The prelude to what would end up being the angle that changed the fortunes of World Championship Wrestling in more ways than one… is just Kevin Nash and Scott Hall beating up Eric Bischoff and powerbombing him through a stage. Now that we got that piece of business out of the way, let’s sample this Great American Bash 1996 PPV program, which was probably one of the first WCW VHS tapes I actually bought at a used video store somewhere.

This is a tremendous show, so tremendous that I’m left speechless as to how tremendous this show is. So expect plenty of quick blurbs and if you want more… just watch the damn show because it is GREAT!

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WCW Great American Bash 1989

Expecting some other show? Sorry, kids, I didn’t watch it for reasons outlined previously. But I did watch another great wrestling show… this one from the ol’ NWA/WCW days.

Wargames! Flair vs. Funk!

I’ve never seen this one, kids. I’ve heard good things. Always been curious about this one and with Blood & Guts II on the horizon tonight, I’d figured this would be a good primer.

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NWA Starrcade 1985

So Starrcade ’84 was a bust. Starrcade ’85, on the other hand… not so much. And only because it is the show that features perhaps the most famous and single greatest match in the history of Starrcade and certainly one of the all-time greatest wrestling matches ever conceived.

Tully Blanchard. Magnum TA. Steel Cage. I Quit Match. Nuff said.

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NWA Starrcade 1984

If I could find a Cornette Face circa 1984, I would… because it’s the only thing that could justly depict my reaction to this show.

So once upon a time, there was a thing called Wrestlemania and it was touted as a big deal. The following year, they had a thing called Wrestlemania 2 and the only thing people remember about that one was that it was held in three arenas on the same night and the card was largely bad.

Going a bit further back, there was a thing called Starrcade and it was touted as a big deal… and it was, seeing Ric Flair defeated NWA World Champion Harley Race to win his seond world title. The following year, there was another Starrcade event… and the only good thing to come out of that show was a pretty good match between reigning TV champion Tully Blanchard and Ricky Steamboat.

Other than that, the show was complete and utter trash.

Rarely do I watch an old show from the WWE Network that I had to STRUGGLE with in order to keep going. There were multiple points where I just wanted to stop outright because the show was so BORING. A whole bunch of short, shitty matches with a lot of downer endings because it’s mostly heels winning. This isn’t a case of different times; Starrcade 83 had some downer stuff, but it also had some really good shit and there were a couple other shows from the early days that I thought were pretty good for the most part… if only because there was one or two matches that made the rest of the show worth sitting through.

Starrcade 84 is not one of those shows.

There’s a bunch of titles being defended; Junior Heavyweight, Florida Heavyweight, Brass Knuckles Heavyweight, Mid-Atlantic title, TV title, US title, World title… I think if you look hard enough, there might be a Coal Miner championship being defended somehwere on the card. Outside of the aforementioned TV title match, none of these are any good. Yes, the main event is Dusty Rhodes challenging Ric Flair for the World title, with the winner getting an additional one million dollars to sweeten the pot, but even that match sucks, with Flair punching Dusty a whole bunch of times before guest ref Joe Frazer stops the match. For fuck’s sake, the main event to your biggest event of the year – the Thanksgiving Day tradition at the time – and THAT’s the fucking finish you give the people?!

I could just find the results on some random Wikipedia page somwhere and copy-paste the bastard here to save some time… and I ended up doing just that. What the fuck can I say about each one other than some variation of “This was a thing that happened” or “This match sucked.” This is as bad as sitting through one of those AWA shows from the 80s, except those have slightly better production values – probably the only time I would say such a thing in regards to those PPVs.

I am only doing a write-up on this show to fill the gap and despite appearances, I really, REALLY wanted to give this show a fair shake… but something to consider here; anyone who says I am too harsh towards WWE in my various musings, at the very least, I’m willing to share some thoughts on the matches featured, even if it’s a quick blurb or two. I couldn’t even be bothered with this one. THAT’s how painfully dull this show was and that’s saying quite a bit.

So yeah, don’t watch this show, everyone. It sucks.

Results (courtesy of Pro Wrestling Wiki)

Denny Brown defeated NWA World Junior Heavyweight Champion Mike Davis to win the title (5:38)

Brian Adias defeated Mr. Ito (4:00)

NWA Florida Heavyweight Champion Jesse Barr defeated Mike Graham (11:43)

The Assassin and Buzz Tyler defeated The Zambuie Express (Elijah Akeem and Kareem Muhammed) (w/ Paul Jones) in a Tag Team Elimination Match (5:26)

Manny Fernandez defeated Black Bart (w/ James J. Dillon) to win the Brass Knuckles Heavyweight Championship (7:35)

Paul Jones defeated Jimmy Valiant in a Tuxedo Street Fight Loser-Leaves-Town match (4:35)

NWA Mid-Atlantic Heavyweight Champion Ron Bass (w/ James J. Dillon) defeated Dick Slater by disqualification (9:12)

Ivan Koloff and Nikita Koloff defeated Ole Anderson and Keith Larson (w/ Don Kernodle) (15:28)

NWA World Television Champion Tully Blanchard defeated Ricky Steamboat to retain the title and win $10,000 (13:17)

NWA United States Heavyweight Champion Wahoo McDaniel defeated Billy Graham (4:18)

NWA World Heavyweight Champion Ric Flair defeated Dusty Rhodes to retain the title and win $1 million (12:12)

WCW Slamboree 2000

For the uninitiated, this is the show that featured the sole main event of one-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion and once big-time Hollywood actor, David Arquette.

Some background is in order; once upon a time, World Championship Wrestling had a movie called Ready To Rumble, which starred David Arquette. Someone at WCW (not mentioning names) had the bright idea to have David Arquette win the World title in an effort to drum up some much needed good press. And so David Arquette won the title in a tag-team match on Thunder by pinning Eric Bischoff, who was not the champion, but rather the (now former) champion was David Arquette’s tag-team partner, Diamond Dallas Page.

Long story short – the move got one mention on some rag nobody cares about and the television ratings for Nitro continue their plummet into obscurity while the top prize in WCW – once something that mattered – meant a hell of a lot less… which, in the year 2000 where WCW was being overseen by the creative “genius” of Uncle Eric and Vinny Ru, wasn’t saying a whole lot.

A lot can be and has been said about the move and I will reserve my thought for another time down the road, but for now, we have ourselves a cage match between current champion Arquette, former champion DDP, and Jeff Jarrett.

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