Since people have responded well to my M.A.S.H review thread , I decided to stick with something I'm really damn good at reviewing. Classic pro wrestling stuff I grew up with. The Monday Night Wars is something a good many of us wrestling fans grew up with. Anyhow , with this thread I will look back at Monday Night Nitro. One of the shows that kick started the revival of interest in pro wrestling in the mid to late 1990's.
Monday Night Nitro - September 4th , 1995 : Mall of America .
Your Hosts - Eric Bischoff , Bobby Heenan and ...Steve McMichael ?
The show opens with some great graphics and we kinda know who the stars of World Championship Wrestling are. Its Hulk Hogan , Sting , the Giant and more as we see them. Then we get introduced to the show as Bischoff welcomes perhaps the worst WCW announcer in history of fucking mankind ....Steve McMichael. Bobby Heenan lucky for us is announcing so he can drown out McMichael and Bischoff at times.
The 1st match ever on WCW Monday Nitro sets the tone of what Nitro is gonna be about under Bischoff's reign. He has Jushin Liger vs Brian Pillman. Its been about 3-4 years since Pillman/Liger had their classic for the folded WCW Light Heavyweight championship. But after some feeling each other out , the 2 men start clicking within minutes.
Bischoff seemed to know he needed to offer this type of difference in his program. Lighter , faster paced opening matches with cruisers more or less. Pillman was such a great high flyer . This match seems to show some of what he could do then. He wins after a pretty decent , fast opening match. Post match Pillman walks over , helps Jushin Liger up and shakes his hand. Its a great show of respect that Pillman had towards him.
We get a cool promo from Sting during his Sgt. Pepper , surfer days. He faces Flair later.
Tonight the Hulkster faces Big Bubba in the main event. Hogan is signing autographs and promoting this folks. This tells you how bad things was getting for Hulk in 1995 for WCW.
Little known fact , Hulk Hogan's Pastamania would open and close in Mall of America within months.
Its Sting vs Flair as the 2 men are in their prime years basically. Its weird to say that , 20 years later. But there is Surfer Sting and he's all ready for Flair. Before the match begins , out walks ...Lex Luger as fans do a WTF . Setting the stage for what would become a normal thing we'd see on Nitro. In one of the wildest scenes and to sum up that this was a mid 40's Flair , the guy ...does a flying body press into Sting ...throwing each other over the top rope. Its pretty wild to see that.
Minutes in out comes Arn Anderson. At this point AA and Flair who were best friends onscreen and off , had been having problems. Many of course wondered if he was out to jump Flair. Or if Luger was there to jump Sting. Since he had left in 1992 after a feud with Sting after being former friends.
Sting never gets much credit for being a great worker. But honestly...he is a great worker. The man knows what he has to do out there and he never gets the props he should. The match ends as Anderson stops Flair from the figure 4 and brawls with him. Complete insanity breaks out as Scott "Flash" Norton appears screaming he has a WCW contract and wants to face SOMEONE. Macho Man slaps him on the back and tells him WE CAN GO RIGHT NOW ! OOOhhhh yeeeaaahh !!!
A promo for the debut of Sabu airs. With really no reason you would care. Its the tamest promo ever for someone like Sabu showing up in WCW.
Bischoff and company promote WCW Saturday Night. Which was the signature TV show for World Championship Wrestling for years. Then Nitro came...
We get a promo of the arriving soon , Michael Wallstreet (aka Mike Rotunda). Wallstreet was a play partly on his I.R.S character from the WWF run and ....well the next review will discuss that one folks.
During this time Hogan was in a feud with the Dungeon of Doom. Kevin Sullivan's group that consisted of Big Bubba , The Shark and many other odd characters. So Hogan is facing Big Bubba (aka Ray Traylor) . One of the many gimmicks that Traylor would have and to be fair he was Big Bubba Rodgers in the Crockett era WCW. (It at least beat the Guardian Angel gimmick he had before this)
Hogan wins as usual and does the signature pose down as the kids in attendance at the mall go crazy. Then out comes Sullivan's stable and we see Hogan taking each guy on , one on one til Luger arrives. Hogan and Luger aren't happy as Sting and Savage attempt to broker peace between the two. Sting and Luger on one side basically while Hogan & Savage the other.
Luger details that he's in WCW now to take down Hulk Hogan and become World Heavyweight Champion. He also claims he's sick of being around kids and wants that belt. Hogan tells him to shake his hand and he will face him next week on Nitro for the World title !
The Bad - In the history of wrestling , pro wrestling and WCW ...no announcer is worse than Steve McMichael. Sure you can float the names of ...David Crockett , Stevie Ray and more. But the guy who tops them all is Steve McMichael. Why Bischoff or Turner for that matter decided to hand a key announcer job to a football player with no experience announcing anything boggles my mind. Heenan like he did when Monday Night RAW started years earlier , basically tries to drown out McMichael more or less.
Another silly thing is the aspect that Bischoff signs one of the most feared insane as fuck guys to ever step in a ring at that point. A man who would f'n staple his own wounds....this guy....
Show nothing really extreme at all from the packaged WCW clips of him at shows before his Nitro debut ..and expect people to get what Paul Heyman packaged. In all it was the complete miss-fire on what is Sabu.
OVERALL : ***1/2 outta 5. While the 1st episode was a 1st and end of an era for a lot of reasons. My teenage mind had no clue the wrestling landscape was changing folks. That Nitro marked the end of WCW Saturday Night as the marquee show for World Championship Wrestling. Or that the next near 5+ years would change the scope of me being a fan.