The last 2002 PPV from World Wrestling Entertainment, pretty much set’s the stage for the PPV offerings of 2003. And believe me when I say this; it’s only going to get worse from hereon out.
Category: WWE PPV Musings
WWE Survivor Series 2002
(2024 Note: For those wondering where the recurring term FUCKING BIG SHOW first started, I present you Exhibit A… that is all.)
You know, I was going to skip this one and save it for a later time, but since I don’t want to have another huge gap in the sequential posting of these old shows, I may as well do this one now. This show has significance to it, as it is the first show to feature the brand-new Elimination Chamber gimmick; a (storyline) creation of Eric Bischoff which combines aspects of the Royal Rumble, Survivor Series, and Wargames. The hype for this thing was something fierce and this would’ve been the first time people would bare witness to the final product.
Now I honestly don’t recall if I ever did a predictions sheet on this one; chances are I might not have, so unless it’s mentioned in the old commentaries of the day, I may never know what I originally thought of this show back then. Would’ve been nice to know, but in any event… here we are.
Survivor Series 2002. Let’s get started.
WWE Unforgiven 2002
So if you’re following this on tap, we’re skipping Summerslam 2002 since I want to save that one for the eventual Summerslam recall week and since we’ve already touched on No Mercy 2002 a couple years ago and I want to forgo doing Survivor Series until later down the line, next week will be jumping straight to Armageddon 2002.
In any event, we’re a month after Summerslam. Brock Lesnar is WWE Champion and exclusive to Smackdown, leaving Eric Bischoff’s RAW GM Eric Bischoff to pull out the old WCW World title (a.k.a. the Big Gold Belt) and give it to Triple H… and now he’s World Champion. We haven’t reached the point of diminishing returns just yet, but we’re not that far off.
WWF No Way Out (Of Texas) (Feb. 1998 PPV)
So here’s a musing that’s been hanging around for a couple years now and I may as well get it up there as a bit of a bonus to be published at precisely 3:16 P.M. Nobody is going to get that.
Fun Fact: The event was originally known as simply WWF No Way Out, but someone wisely saw that the initials for the event were very similar to WCW’s very popular and very profitable stable (as demonstrated in the banner above), prompting the addition of “Of Texas” to the title. Funny how they didn’t have that issue when No Way Out became the name of a February 2000 Pay Per View event. In any event, I bought the VHS tape of this thing when it was on sale at that HMV store (yes, kids. Canada has HMV stores) and long after it still bore any relevance. This was probably late-98 or 99 when I bought it. I honestly don’t recall.
In retrospect, I doubt there was any need to actually watch this since the February WWF/WWE PPV was/is typically the filler show between the Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania… but I guess I really needed to see that big eight-man tag-team match or something. I don’t know.
Continue reading “WWF No Way Out (Of Texas) (Feb. 1998 PPV)”
WWF Survivor Series 1996
A buddy of mine suggested I do a musings on the 1996 Survivor Series since it features Steve Austin vs. Bret Hart. At the moment, the current crop of Wrestling Wednesday features is filled for the next couple months, but a quick musings done on March 16th (3/16. Get it? Of course you don’t.) shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.
This is the first of two PPVs that I’m posting today. The next one will be posted twelve hours later.
WWE Vengeance 2002
Once upon a time, a long time ago, back in 2000, I did a quaint little website called DTM Webstation… it was online, but rarely untouched until about a couple years later when I had regular internet access. Around that time, I started doing a series of commentaries quaintly titled “The Bite.” Essentially my own rambling blog before such blogging ease was available to the masses or at least any that I was remotely aware. The Bite commentaries covered whatever came to mind, but one of the things I did in those commentaries was do quick predictions for then-upcoming WWE PPV shows, from time to time. Once I started up the DTM Blog, those predictions became a regular feature and the Bite commentaries became… well, obsolete. This was a regular thing even during the early years of this blog before I eventually just went with straight up random ramblings on the various shows.
Those early predictions (along with some updated thoughts) were what I reposted onto the blog early on and subsequently linked to the Wrestling Stuff page. The problem with including those on that page is people who only read the recent musings will assume I’ve done similar write-ups in the past when it simply isn’t the case. As such, there’s been this massive disconnect between the current format and this older, antiquated format that was posted purely for archival purposes and does not necessarily reflect my current thought.
So what I’ve gone ahead and done is pull out most of my old DVD-Rs that hosted these PPV recordings and decided to give them a nice rewatch and I’d figure it make for a nice weekly segment here on the blog. And that’s what we’re going to do from here on out; every Wednesday, we’ll be looking at an older wrestling card from years ago and while the current format is to do the old WWE PPVs from 2002 to whenever I stopped doing the old format, sometimes I might veer off course and do another “old” show. (Newer PPVs, should I feel inclined to cover them, will not be part of this weekly package.)
So enough waffle; let’s watch Vengeance 2002 for the first time in sixteen years and live to regret it.
WWE Fastlane 2018
Note to WWE Creative; If I’m going on a fast lane, it’s not so I can make stops along the way. But I guess I should expect this sort of incompetence from people who confuse the 25th iteration as an anniversary, but I digress.
Despite being on the “Fastlane” to the Road To Wrestlemania, we have another 3-hour digress featuring a bunch of matches that will do nothing to set up the upcoming Showcase Of The Immortals and will instead waste plenty of time to reach their foregone conclusions. I will be perfectly honest; I had no real intention of watching this show, but a trip to the Amerindian Museum in southern Quebec left me a bit queasy and I found myself lying on my bed watching the show to pass the time… which meant no work done on stuff that needed to get done, but I digress. (On that note, either expect videos to resume again on Wednesday, or maybe I’ll hold off until Friday and resume the daily stream from there.)
Anyway, Fastlane is otherwise significant as it is the final brand-specific PPV, as from this point forward, we’ll be getting monthly dual-brand PPVs that will last for ten hours and then we’ll wonder why nobody is watching their PPVs any more. Yes, I’m sure Network number will jump up because Wrestlemania is right around the corner, but how many of those folks are going to stick around after the fact?
Anyway… again… on with the show.
WWE Elimination Chamber 2018
Fun fact: Not counting Survivor Series and Royal Rumble, this is the third straight WWE B-show that I’ve used the sleeping cat for a header. Another fun fact is that this is the first time I’ve sat down to watch a WWE B-show since Hell In A Cell left a sour taste in my mouth. Turns out I had a bit of free time and needed some background noise.
So I suppose the first noteworthy positive of having signed Ronda Rousey and advertising her on this show is that I’m watching a WWE B-level PPV for the first time in months. I assure you that has less to do with “Cold Ronda” and more to do with how WWE is going to pull off their “history making” seven man Elimination Chamber match.
Also, the women are getting an elimination chamber match. That’s also “history making” too, right?
Make note of this, folks. This is probably the last stretch of WWE B-shows that I’m going to watch before the ill-conceived notion of dual-branded ten hour B-shows come to fruition once Wrestlemania has come and gone. That means more multi-person matches and less reasons to actually give a shit about anything that’s going on. If nothing else, I’m hoping the creative ups their game… but that’s basically a fool’s hope at this point.
Anyway, on with the show…
Royal Rumble 2018 Quick Results
Too busy to do a proper Ramble, so here are your quick Rumble results for now…
WWF Survivor Series 1997
This PPV took place twenty years ago and apparently features an incident of some importance in the professional wrestling/sports entertainment context. And this trivial event apparently merits a revisit for whatever reason.
I live in Montreal. I was born in dee Montreal. I spend my living years on this planet in dee Montreal. However, I didn’t see this show live, as I didn’t start following WWF until mid-98ish. And because I wasn’t following the product at the time, I was oblivious to the whole Bret Hart fiasco – though I can recall some rumblings about Bret jumping ship, I never gave it much thought. When I did get around to watching this show, it was on VHS thanks to a rental from the local video store and it was mostly due to wanting to watch the rematch between Stone Cold and Owen Hart; the first such match between the two since the Summerslam encounter and the piledriver that almost ended a career.
Even watching the show, the whole controversy eluded me until I eventually saw the Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows documentary on A&E, where the significance of the event became more apparent. Naturally, it’s something that gets discussed and talked about over the years and while some feelings were mended and more things are put out in the open, this is something that has its place in wrestling lore, for better or worse. And as much as we want to trivialize this event, it really did have a hand in planting the seeds to the rise of WWF and the slow, sad decent of Bret Hart’s career.
So here we are; twenty years later and watching this show again for the first time since… well, that one time I rented the VHS tape from the local video store. The WWE Network seems to have the whole show in one piece, so we might as well check it out…
dtm666 