Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
Who Killed WCW?
Eric Bischoff
Hulk Hogan
Vince Russo
Jerusalem
View Results
 
  • Post
  • Reply
LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

DJExile posted:

I SAID, DID YOU FORGET YOUR SCISSORS???
It's been a while since we did this, and I'm so glad it's back.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Maxwell Lord posted:

But how did he violate the contract? By calling Hogan bald?
Hogan had creative control written into his contract. He used it to be an rear end in a top hat, and we can hate him for being a dick, but Russo overruled his creative control, violating his contract.

Nobody should have given him that contract, but he's not wrong to use it and management were entirely in the wrong to attempt to supersede it. Bischoff left over it too.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Yinlock posted:

he can write some good stories whenever he's not huffing a bag of his own farts, which is rarely
No he can't.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

What is this good story Vince Russo wrote?

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

DeathChicken posted:

"Bray Wyatt is in the ring. Lights go out. Lights come back on. Bray Wyatt is still in the ring."
That stream was really enlightening, because you could see Russo have a good idea, think it was great, then get bored with it and change it not ten minutes later.

Couldn't even get through booking a show without getting bored.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Call me when they get all the Saturday Nights and I still won't give the company money, but I'll be bummed I can't throw on the ol' 6:05 mothership whenever I'm bored.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

MrBling posted:

Spring Stampede 99 (the April ppv) was probably the best PPV they would have until the very end in 2001 when there was no real booking to care about. But I guess quality of show doesn't always correlate with buy rates.
Sixteen-year-old boy-version me was there and it was amazing.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

ChrisBTY posted:

Hogan vs Shawn was a situation where everybody got what they deserved. Hogan got clowned on, Shawn didn't get his way and ate a pin, Vince had a once in a lifetime match turned into a farce.
Legit.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

oldpainless posted:

She also named the boat Alimony
She named it Alimoney, and for the life of me I can't figure out if it's because she was making a pun or because she can't spell.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

The superior 3 Stooges name was Hammond Egger.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

It's loving wild that Juggalos and Furries were our mortal enemies and only when the fascist takeover of the U.S.'s government happened did we realize we were the assholes.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

rare Magic card l00k posted:

Mike Awesome is the dangerous worker people pretend Goldberg was.
I'm surprised he didn't get a bigger push regardless considering he's related to Hogan.

DeathChicken posted:

Blitzkrieg was the single reason I was watching Nitro for awhile. He was that good
He was only around for like two months.

I got to see him wrestle at Spring Stempede 99 and hell yeah, he was freakin' awesome.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

You don't have to be blood related to be family.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

remusclaw posted:

Hogan isn't going to back a push of someone who has talent. His M.O. has always been to get his untalented friends jobs. Anybody who could threaten him though? No way Jack. Horace was safe, making money on the under-card, no fan was asking for a Horace Hogan push. Awesome on the other, Hogan would see him as a threat, he would either get him turned and squash him or, say, have him do a dumb Beefcake style gimmick that has a clear ceiling.
This is an excellent point.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

TheKingslayer posted:

I appreciate this reference.
Ruin the joke and catch us up?

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Hirez posted:

The only thing about Bret Hart in WCW I remember was him wearing that plate of armor under his shirt when Goldberg speared him :canada:
This moment was supposed to be the start of his big push. He tricked Goldberg, got a visual pinfall on him in Canada, cut a promo on Bischoff, and then quit.

Then Kevin Nash went on The Tonight Show and said since Bret didn't work for WCW anymore, he couldn't wrestle him there, but he'd wrestle him on The Tonight Show. Another big bit of cross-promotion after their collaboration for Road Wild '98. But then Owen died and it all got scrapped. So they brought him back, he did the tribute match with Owen, and by the end of the year he was champ and nWo 2000 formed, but then Goldberg kicked him into retirement.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Why do we call him surfer Sting? When I think of surfers, I don't think of a body builder with a bleached flat-top wearing a Sgt. Pepper jacket.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Punch McLightning posted:

He went to WWE when he was 45, which Vince thinks is ancient and not worth pushing.
WCW dropped the ball on him long before the buyout. He turned heel at a time when WCW was suffering for babyfaces and he was still getting cheered.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

ChrisBTY posted:

DDP and Flair turned heel on the same night Nash and Hogan turned face for no good goddamn reason.
Starrcade '98 is when the deadly wound was inflicted. Teenage WSAENOTSOCK didn't notice the wound until the fingerpoke, and didn't see the blood pooling until these very events.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Q_res posted:

It's really stupid because they should have remembered how much nobody gave a gently caress about DDP when he was a heel pre-NWO. He was basically an anonymous mid-card heel until he got the offer to join the NWO. I think that was the first time someone told the NWO to gently caress off and actually got one over on them. The fans ate it up and he rode that and a cool finish to being over as gently caress.
There was a time when the dream card for WCW and WWF was:

Goldberg Vs. Austin, champion vs. champion, and also they kinda' look alike.

Sting Vs. Undertaker, because they're both spooky and play theatrical mind games.

and DDP vs. The Rock, People's Champion vs. People's Champion.

That card would've done 2 million loving buys.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

shiksa posted:

mein gott

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Punch McLightning posted:

Lash LeRoux was the last new thing I remember loving about WCW before I stopped watching wrestling for about eight years, and I can’t make myself go back and watch anything out of fear that he was Actually Bad.
The Ragin' Cajun. The Ayatolla of Shrimp Creolla.

Lash LeRoux should've been an over-as-gently caress television champion contender at least.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

I'd argue WCW did way more with Raven than WWE did. He had the run with the flock, which made Kidman, Kanyon, and Saturn into viable midcard acts, culminating in one of WCW's only actual blowoff angles of the era, where Saturn beat Raven to disband the Flock at Fall Brawl '98. He was kinda' directionless after, tagging with Kanyon and Saturn after his Ferris Beuller vignettes, but in WWE I don't think he was ever even part of his own angle.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

TNA was so good during that post-FS1, Pre-Spike days right up to that moment they rehired Russo that I went full "it's just a little airborne! It's still good! It's still good!" for like eight years because I hated WWE so much.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

I love that the birdshit logo was so bad that WCW magazine probably took one look at it, said "absolutely not," and had their graphic designer make a different one.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

The Big Gold Belt was an upgrade in every way, but WWE owns that design now, and the NWA is primarily driven by nostalgia, so they won't ever change it.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Maxwell Lord posted:

The AEW title is very clearly inspired by the Big Gold Belt (at least in the sense of being A) quite large and B) quite gold.)
The original TNA Heavyweight Championship did a better job of it, save for the awful company name.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Mr. Carlisle posted:

The design of the AEW title is far better than that TNA nonsense but Big Gold will always be the best
That's a replica under bad lighting. Here's Kurt with the actual stap.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

MassRafTer posted:

The TNA title is so worthless Sting once basically gave up in a match so AJ Styles could get a shot at it.

The AEW title is so valuable an elaborate conspiracy to steal it was hatched within hours of the first champion being crowned.
The prestige of the title has nothing to do with its aesthetics.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

rujasu posted:

I know Russo is an easy target but he really did take an already-declining product and immediately make it unwatchable. Pre-Russo WCW was uneven but worthwhile overall. Russo's WCW was some of the worst TV I have ever watched.
Russo was an improvement when he arrived. Not because he was good. But because the product had gotten that bad.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Sullivan booked WCW during its best period, but he wasn't alone. And that period in 2000 between Russo's first and second runs was abysmal. Al Greene was a literal dog. A dog in the body of a man, wrestling matches. Holy poo poo was that era ever terrible.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Maxwell Lord posted:

Halloween Havoc 98 at least has a good main (that a lot of people didn't see because of the PPV screwup.)

Starrcade 98 felt like the turning point for me. Not only do they have the horrible finish with Goldberg losing well before he should've, the whole show was just bad- it feels like that was the point where Bischoff no longer knew how to put on a good wrestling show.
Kidman's two matches were pretty good. But, yeah. That was it. Legend has it, Heenan turned to Tenay in their rental car after the show and basically said, "that's it. We're done. We're never coming back from that."

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

DJExile posted:

This was seriously the most absurd thing. They went through the time and expense of running a third hour and did less than nothing with it. Eric was so loving obsessed with winning the head-to-head ratings that he never bothered to put an entire unopposed hour in prime time to use.
I'm pretty sure this isn't true. The first hour of Nitro was the proper beginning of the show. It's even noteworthy that the one time they didn't run a single match in the first hour was that time right after the Fingerpoke of Doom that lives in infamy.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what we're talking about.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

STAC Goat posted:

The fact that WCW used to have a different set of announcers for the first hour certainly didn't help dissuade the "preshow" idea.
Swapping out Larry Zbyszko for Bobby Heenan never really felt like "okay, now the real show begins" to me. It was still Schiavone and Tenay.

Tato posted:

It could not be more obvious by mid 98 that Bischoff is checked out and trying to move to Hollywood with his Jason Hervey contacts and letting the whole thing go to poo poo. But no one in Turner understands what’s up, the ratings are okay, just let it roll. But the damage being done in that period is catastrophic.
Is this what happened?! I always wondered. I mean, he was clearly into things right up until Warrior flopped and then everything just got... gah. When did Zane stop being a part of things?

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Tato posted:

Yes. Several Observers from the second half of 1998 go into detail about how Bischoff isn't there, how he's in Hollywood trying to make contacts, how he's left Nash in charge of booking and starts not even showing up to tapings some weeks. You could say that maybe he saw the sinking ship on the horizon and was starting to bail once the ratings war got hard, but he was definitely putting a foot out the door. He was obviously hoping to catapult the WCW success into moving upwards in Turner or to another production company, but it didn't work out. By the time he checked back in, stuff was truly hosed. I don't think he would have let Nash destroy things so much if he intended to come back.
I don't think Nash got the book until '99.

Better Than You posted:

The thing that annoyed me the most about the cruiserweight matches back when Nitro was kicking RAW's rear end in the ratings every week was that the announcers would literally spend about 85% of the time talking about the NWO rather than the match itself.
I've been saying this for almost two decades now, but WWE has boring twenty-minute promos to start every Raw where they explain the angles to the audience, and people interrupt other people, and everybody stands around letting other people talk poo poo about them without doing anything about it. I'm being a bit too colorful here, because my only real point is that the promos are so loving loooooooong. Imagine if that segment was two-or-three matches, and the announcers talk up the big angles.

I'd rather have the matches.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Steiner Brothers should've been a bigger deal as a tag team and Scott Steiner should've ended Goldberg's streak.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

Bill Busch was a bigger part of this than anybody ever talks about.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

I've always thought Sting was a much bigger influence on John Cena than anybody ever talks about, and this certainly backs that up.

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

MassRafTer posted:

Fun ratings fact, in the minute by minute ratings the Nitro Girls were a huge draw.
Which makes it loving baffling that WCW phased them out and turned them into characters on the show instead of a dance troupe.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

LividLiquid
Apr 13, 2002

jesus WEP posted:

hey sock good to see you round
:3: Thank you! I missed talkin' to y'all.

Flight Bisque posted:

Ciclope
.....

THAT'S NOT CICLOPE! :aaa:
I never get tired of this gag.

Though I do feel a little bad for Ciclope that his biggest moment in US wrestling took place without him even being present.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply