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.
The following WCW event took place in November of 1995.
So Halloween Havoc 1995 happened. The Giant (a.k.a. Big Show) made a big splash by defeating Hulk Hogan in his very first match and winning the WCW World title in the process thanks to interference. However, the win came under scrutiny and the title was soon held up. How else to settle the matter than to have SIXTY GUYS compete in a three-ring battle royal for the right to lay claim to the greatest prize of them all?
Even some 21 years after the fact, this idea seems way too far-fetched. Even that one Royal Rumble where they had forty guys in it seemed a bit stretchy for my tastes and then I remember that this was thing for a couple years. (2024 Note: Just wait until they go to Saudi Arabia next year.)
WCW Halloween Havoc is instantly my favorite WCW show of 1995 for one reason; it ended the horrible reign of Hulkamania and began a shift towards actually producing something that people would actually want to watch. Imagine that.
Much like most of my WCW PPV viewings these days, this is being shown off the WWE Network. Some bits may or may not be missing, I imagine.
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.
dtm666 