WWF WrestleMania VI: The Ultimate Challenge
Hello everyone, and welcome back to BRM’s Monthly â€"This Day in Wrestling History†Review Series, where WrestleMania comes a bit early this year. While all of you will have to wait until tomorrow to cross your fingers and hope that WWE doesn’t manage to screw things up at WrestleMania, I’m going to be doing that today as well, with WWF WrestleMania VI: The Ultimate Challenge.
INTRO VIDEO - Hilariously awesome. We start off with Vince talking about the constellations as we watch an animated star-field. Vince calls them â€"powerful forces,†but then tells us that â€"the most powerful of all†are Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior, as watch constellation Hogan and Constellation Warrior lock up.
Martel jumped the bell on Koko. Once Koko started to get some offense in, there was a random fade to black for a second before picking up what seemed like right afterwards. Did they clip this match for Peacock?
Martel won a fine opener by submission. For a match that didn’t even last four minutes, this was tremendous.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS THE COLOSSAL CONNECTION & BOBBY HEENAN - Fine. Gene called them the â€"Colostomy Connection.â€
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS DEMOLITION - Ax was great. Smash was… how shall I put this lightly: WHAT THE F*CK?!
Smash said that he wanted to throw Andre and Haku into the back of a semi truck. Then he wanted to get behind the wheel, push the pedal to the metal, DRIVE IT OFF A CLIFF, and â€"WATCH†them get smashed to smithereens.
1. He wants to commit a double-murder-suicide.
2. He doesn’t seem to understand that if they’re in the back of the truck and he is in the front, he can’t see them get smashed.
WWF WORLD TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH:
Basic tag team stuff. The finish saw Haku accidentally superkick Andre, resulting in Andre getting tied up in the ropes so he couldn’t stop Demolition from hitting their finisher for the win.
POST-MATCH SEGMENT - Good. Heenan blamed Andre for the loss slapped him so Andre turned babyface. Haku tried to attack Andre, but Andre fought him off.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS JIMMY HART & EARTHQUAKE - Entertaining cartoonishness.
After seeing the babyfaces get jumped earlier in the night, Hercules was ready for it. That was a nice little touch. This was short. Earthquake worked the back a bit and won cleanly, then hit his finisher on Hercules again after the match just because. While watching this, it occurred to me that if Earthquake had come around in the modern era, he would never be able to be a heel because fans would come up with some dumb thing like spelling out â€"E-A-R-T-H†when he jumped and then holding the A in QUAAAAAAAAAAKE†while he hit the ropes and jumped.
RONA BARRETT INTERVIEWS MISS ELIZABETH - Liz explains that she has been working the WWF in an â€"advisory capacity†because she didn’t want to disappoint her fans by not getting physically involved because she was worried that he wasn’t be able to make a difference. She says that if she returns, she will get a lot more physically involved than ever before.
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS BRUTUS â€"THE BARBER†BEEFCAKE - Fine.
Perfect got the heat after hitting Brutus with a… scroll. Scrolls are generally not very hard. Brutus won after sling-shotting Hennig and Hennig’s head â€"hit the post,†even though yu could tell that it clearly didn’t from the camera shot.
POST-MATCH SEGMENT - Boring and unnecessary. The Genius tried to steal Brutus’ clippers, so Brutus went after him and eventually put him down with a sleeper hold and cut his hair. This was pointless, as he had already cut Genius’ hair once during this feud.
MEAN GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS RODDY PIPER - Yeah… it’s this one. Piper is in half-blackface… but that’s not the only issue. Referring to Bad News’ as having â€"bug-eyes†wasn’t good, either. Even the artistic point that Piper was trying to make here about their being two sides to him and Bad News wouldn’t know which version of Piper to prepare for really falls short, as he barely focused on that, instead spending much of his time saying weird things about Bad News’ face, like claiming that he had a three-foot-long nose hair that he could pull a car with. Even without the racial problems, this was a bad rambling 1980s WWF promo. With them, it’s even worse.
The bell rang… and we still stayed looking at the crowd for a good six seconds or so instead of cutting to the ring. Fortunately, they didn’t actually do anything, so we didn’t miss anything. Piper started to disrobe and then dance, made Bad News quite angry, but the referee kept trying to back Bad News away. WHY? The bell already rang!
He then backs Roddy up into a corner and lets them go. Bad News takes Roddy down, Roddy gets some shots in, they wind up in the ropes… and then the referee orders them back to their corners. What the f*ck?
After several restarts, referee Danny Davis finally gave up trying to separate them. Bad News got the heat and applied a nerve hold. Piper fought out of it. They each went to the eyes (Piper first). Bad News took a turnbuckle pad off, but Piper reversed the Irish Whip and sent Bad News into it. Piper took a white glove out of his trunks and put it on his hand (the one that was painted black), put it on, and started punching Bad News with it. Shouldn’t the referee be insisting on checking this glove? If it was legal, why wouldn’t Piper have just started the match with the glove on?
Piper set Bad News to the outside. Bad News tripped Roddy up and pulled him out. He lined Piper up for a punch on but Piper moved and he punched the ringpost. Piper got a chair and swung it at Bad News but Bad News missed, and they were both counted out in one of the quickest count-out counts I can remember. A double-count-out at WrestleMania, in an Era where there were only four PPVs a year.
They kept brawling into the crowd. This feud would never be resolved because neither man was willing to do the job. Here’s an idea: How about you ask them that BEFORE YOU START THE PROGRAM?!
REHEARSAL OF THE RUSSIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM WITH STEVE ALLEN & THE BOLSHEVIKS - This approached being funny at times, but was quite mean. Also, why were they rehearsing in a bathroom?
Not only did the babyface Hart Foundation not respect the singing of the Soviet National Anthem, but they jumped the Bolsheviks from behind during it. Jumping people before the bell is what the heels have been doing the whole show!
The Harts hit their finisher and won clean in nineteen seconds, as a result of cheating. That on its own is enough to get a DUD from me, but when you factor in the fact that this show has going to long and not have much in the way of good action, why would you not let the Hart Foundation have an actual match? And why wouldn’t let the hometown fans see their guys?
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS TITO SANTANA - Meh.
Barbarian won a short match with a flying clothesline. Tito had things won before that with the flying forearm, but Heenan but Barb’s foot on the ropes. For just four-and-a-half minutes, this was outstanding.
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS DUSTY RHODES & SAPPHIRE - Fine.
MIXIED TAG TEAM MATCH:
This was the first mixed tag in WWF history (supposedly). Dusty’s reveal that Miss Elizabeth was managing them got a HUGE pop. And, knowing where we’d wind up in a year, it was some nice bookending.
There was some good stuff in here, but also quite a bit of stuff that wasn’t good. I have to agree with Jesse that I can’t really get upset about the heels breaking ules when the babyfaces break them first, and there was a lot of breaking the rules in this match, and often right in front of the referee.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS BOBBY HEENAN - GREAT! Heenan cut a great promo on Andre.
JESSE VENTURA & GORILLA MONSOON INTERVIEW RONA BARRETT - Weird. She claimed to have footage of Jesse Ventura doing porn and thought it would be okay to play it here on this family PPV.
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS RANDY SAVAGE & SHERRI - Great crazy Macho Man stuff.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS DEMOLITION - Fine. Mean Gene tried to bring up the Hart Foundation as potential challengers, but all Demolition wanted to talk about was their victory.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS HULK HOGAN - Good. Hogan’s comments about the fans being â€"his people†can certainly be read in a very interesting way. He also did a beautiful job of planting the seeds for himself stealing Warrior’s spotlight in his moment of victory later on. I am fascinated by Hogan’s ability to be raving nutjob on his promos and yet still word things so perfectly for the politics he was playing. He probably could have been a really great promo if he put his mind to it, instead of just a crazy yelling guy.
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR - Standard bat-sh*t crazy Warrior promo. This started off with Warrior grabbing Mooney, telling him that he â€"didn’t deserve to breathe the same air†as him and Hogan, and shoving him away. Warrior proceeded to cut a promo without the microphone there, but we had no trouble hearing him because… well… it’s Warrior and he was screaming the whole time.
This was the standard Warrior insanity. He came off like a heel with a messiah complex. He also ended his promo by saying that after defeating Hogan, he would take their shared beliefs about facing all challenges â€"to places where it shall never have been.†I don’t think it’s possible to come up with a more awkward way to phrase a basic idea than that.
I assume the large number of promos before this meant that there was an intermission live, so this was the first match back from that, and so they worked at a good pace to get the crowd back into things… and then they killed that with the Orient Express winning via count-out when Sato threw salt in Marty’s eyes so he couldn’t find the ring.
STEVE ALLEN INTERVIEWS RHYTHM & BLUES - Dumb. More of Steve Allen making fun of the heels and them just taking it. Is this actually going anywhere?
Duggan overcame the heels’ cheating ways and paid them back in kind, getting the win with his two-by-four. The heels beat him up after the match, ending with Earthquake squishing him multiple times. No one came out to help Duggan.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS JAKE â€"THE SNAKE†ROBERTS - F*CKING AWESOME! I loved how despite being a babyface, Jake still felt like Jake, deciding that Dibiase needed to be punished and humiliated to get his title back the same way that Dibiase had done to others for money.
MILLION DOLLAR TITLE MATCH:
This was the best thing on the show so far by MILES. It certainly helped that this was the first match to go over ten minutes (and just the second to go more than eight), but it was also the first match since the mixed tag, and only about fourth or fifth so far that felt like it had any real of importance to it.
And even in this match, we couldn’t get a f*cking clean win. Instead we got another heel win via count-out. Jake attacked the heels after the match and hit Dibiase with the DDT and gave his money away, but Virgil was able to save Dibiase from getting… snaked, I guess? Is that the right verb for having a snake put on you?
SEAN MONEY INTERVIEWS SLICK & AKEEM - Fine. They’re upset with Bossman because he won’t take Ted Dibiase’s money anymore.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS THE BIG BOSSMAN - Meh. He doesn’t take money from anyone.
Ted Dibiase had been hiding under the ring, and he jumped Bossman before the match. Bossman overcame this handicap and won a short match cleanly. He even got to shove Slick afterwards. For a match that didn’t make it to the two-minute mark, this was great.
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS FANS - One young fan buries Rhythm & Blues upcoming musical performance. Another young fan was in favor of it.
SEAN MOONEY THEN INTERVIEWS MARY TYLER MOORE, SITTING AT RINGSIDE - This was all pointless. It wasn’t even the first time they got Mary Tyler Moore on camera.
A MUSICAL PERFORMANCE BY RHYTHM & BLUES - Kill me now. Because a show that was already infuriatingly boring definitely needed them to get through two whole songs before the Bushwhackers came out and chased them away and broke their guitars.
Gorilla criticized Rhythm & Blues for their cowardice, saying that someday they would have to face the Bushwhackers in the ring. What a great idea! Perhaps this could be done on the same show as a bunch of other grudge matches. Oh well. It’s too bad there wasn’t any show like that where the match could have been booked for.
Steve Allen joined the commentary team for this match. He was terrible. Rude won a short match cleanly.
TITLE VS. TITLE MATCH:
The crowd was on fire for this and there was some great drama and some really cool ideas (I thought the finish in particular was great), but I found the match to be rather incoherent. It started off feeling like it was going to be the story of Hogan having to overcome this unstoppable force who is, in terms of style, a younger version of himself (that spot where Warrior no-sold Hogan’s bodyslam, then slammed Hogan and Hogan sold it a bunch while getting to his feet, then Hogan injuring his knee getting clotheslined to the outside), and Hogan felt like the babyface… but then Hogan wound up on offense and the injured knee was forgotten. Then it turned into the story of the two heroes fighting dirty with eye rakes and so forth (although I guess Hogan did that all the time anyway), and then we got the ref bump and phantom pins, which served no purpose other than to undermine Warrior’s victory with Hogan getting the first visual pinfall, and by the end (with Hogan kicking out at 3.1), it didn’t really feel like much of anything. Some of that stuff (kicking out at 3.1, the visual pinfall) theoretically played into the idea that Hogan might turn heel afterwards when he snatched the belt, but because there was no turn and Hogan respectfully presented the belt to Warrior, they turned out to just be a bunch of spots built into a match to set up a swerve… and is that really worth it if those spots undermine the credibility of the guy you’re trying to have the torch passed to?
POST-MATCH SEGMENT - Good. Enough has been written about how Hogan’s reactions undermined Warrior’s big moment, but watching this with that in mind, I found it hard to blame Hogan for the following reasons:
1. Whatever sneaky ploy Hogan intended here wouldn’t have worked if the cameras didn’t follow him, and I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t have followed him without Vince’s direction, so Vince had to be in on whatever Hogan did.
2. Focusing on Hogan after his loss felt natural. He has been the champion for a year, and he had just cut a promo saying that it’s not about if you win or lose, but rather about how you lose, so focusing on his reactions as much as Warrior’s felt natural.
3. Are we really getting angry at Hogan because his acting was too good? What was he supposed to do? Not sell the emotion of the loss because the guy who beat him is a sh*tty actor? If Hogan hadn’t sold the emotion of the loss, that would have made Warrior’s win feel less important because the guy who just lost the title didn’t even care about losing it.
Final Thoughts
Yeah… this show was absolutely wretched. It had FOURTEEN matches on it, and just three of them went longer than eight minutes. Half of them didn’t even make it to five. My suspicion about that is that they were worried about something overshadowing the main event due to people going gaga over the work-rate like what happened at WrestleMania III, but that worry seems completely illogical to me because either your philosophy is â€"we don’t care about work-rate; we just care about making money†and thus you’ll go with the match that will make you the most money in the main event and won’t give a sh*t if something on the undercard gets more snowflakes than it, or you do care about work-rate, in which case you wouldn’t have put Hogan vs. Warrior as your main event in the first place.
Even ignoring work-rate, though, this show was long and boring, and in a way that felt completely unnecessary. Of the fourteen matches, only five or six felt in any way important (the tag title match, the mixed tag, Jake vs. Dibiase, Piper vs. Bad News, the main event, and maybe Akeem vs. Bossman). Everything else felt like I was watching a random house show. That’s the exact opposite of what WrestleMania should feel like.
Now combine the fact that we had pointless, short, matches and terrible work-rate, and that makes a show feel needlessly long. Then you add in the other stupid padding with some of the celebrity segments and that musical abomination, and it just makes things worse by making the show feel even longer. And for me it was even longer than that, because Peacock crashed about every ten or twelve minutes while I was trying to watch this show. In hindsight, this was probably G-d trying to tell me that I shouldn’t watch this show, and I foolishly ignored the warning. Given my past few experiences and the fact that the original purpose of this review series was to force me to watch some of the DVDs I bought well over a decade ago that I haven’t gotten around to watching yet, I can confidently say that it will be a LONG time before we come back to this era of WWF. In fact, this show was so scarring that next month, I’m going to my happy place.
INTRO VIDEO - Hilariously awesome. We start off with Vince talking about the constellations as we watch an animated star-field. Vince calls them â€"powerful forces,†but then tells us that â€"the most powerful of all†are Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior, as watch constellation Hogan and Constellation Warrior lock up.
KOKO B. WARE vs. RICK MARTEL - 4/10
Martel jumped the bell on Koko. Once Koko started to get some offense in, there was a random fade to black for a second before picking up what seemed like right afterwards. Did they clip this match for Peacock?
Martel won a fine opener by submission. For a match that didn’t even last four minutes, this was tremendous.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS THE COLOSSAL CONNECTION & BOBBY HEENAN - Fine. Gene called them the â€"Colostomy Connection.â€
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS DEMOLITION - Ax was great. Smash was… how shall I put this lightly: WHAT THE F*CK?!
Smash said that he wanted to throw Andre and Haku into the back of a semi truck. Then he wanted to get behind the wheel, push the pedal to the metal, DRIVE IT OFF A CLIFF, and â€"WATCH†them get smashed to smithereens.
1. He wants to commit a double-murder-suicide.
2. He doesn’t seem to understand that if they’re in the back of the truck and he is in the front, he can’t see them get smashed.
WWF WORLD TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH:
The Colossal Connection(c) vs. (w/Bobby Heenan) vs. Demolition (Ax & Smash)- 4.75/10
Basic tag team stuff. The finish saw Haku accidentally superkick Andre, resulting in Andre getting tied up in the ropes so he couldn’t stop Demolition from hitting their finisher for the win.
POST-MATCH SEGMENT - Good. Heenan blamed Andre for the loss slapped him so Andre turned babyface. Haku tried to attack Andre, but Andre fought him off.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS JIMMY HART & EARTHQUAKE - Entertaining cartoonishness.
HERCULES vs. EARTHQUAKE (w/Jimmy Hart) - 3.75/10
After seeing the babyfaces get jumped earlier in the night, Hercules was ready for it. That was a nice little touch. This was short. Earthquake worked the back a bit and won cleanly, then hit his finisher on Hercules again after the match just because. While watching this, it occurred to me that if Earthquake had come around in the modern era, he would never be able to be a heel because fans would come up with some dumb thing like spelling out â€"E-A-R-T-H†when he jumped and then holding the A in QUAAAAAAAAAAKE†while he hit the ropes and jumped.
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS BRUTUS â€"THE BARBER†BEEFCAKE - Fine.
BRUTUS â€"THE BARBER†BEEFCAKE vs. MR. PERFECT (w/the Genius) - 5.5/10
Perfect got the heat after hitting Brutus with a… scroll. Scrolls are generally not very hard. Brutus won after sling-shotting Hennig and Hennig’s head â€"hit the post,†even though yu could tell that it clearly didn’t from the camera shot.
POST-MATCH SEGMENT - Boring and unnecessary. The Genius tried to steal Brutus’ clippers, so Brutus went after him and eventually put him down with a sleeper hold and cut his hair. This was pointless, as he had already cut Genius’ hair once during this feud.
MEAN GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS RODDY PIPER - Yeah… it’s this one. Piper is in half-blackface… but that’s not the only issue. Referring to Bad News’ as having â€"bug-eyes†wasn’t good, either. Even the artistic point that Piper was trying to make here about their being two sides to him and Bad News wouldn’t know which version of Piper to prepare for really falls short, as he barely focused on that, instead spending much of his time saying weird things about Bad News’ face, like claiming that he had a three-foot-long nose hair that he could pull a car with. Even without the racial problems, this was a bad rambling 1980s WWF promo. With them, it’s even worse.
RODDY PIPER vs. BAD NEWS BROWN - DUD!
The bell rang… and we still stayed looking at the crowd for a good six seconds or so instead of cutting to the ring. Fortunately, they didn’t actually do anything, so we didn’t miss anything. Piper started to disrobe and then dance, made Bad News quite angry, but the referee kept trying to back Bad News away. WHY? The bell already rang!
He then backs Roddy up into a corner and lets them go. Bad News takes Roddy down, Roddy gets some shots in, they wind up in the ropes… and then the referee orders them back to their corners. What the f*ck?
After several restarts, referee Danny Davis finally gave up trying to separate them. Bad News got the heat and applied a nerve hold. Piper fought out of it. They each went to the eyes (Piper first). Bad News took a turnbuckle pad off, but Piper reversed the Irish Whip and sent Bad News into it. Piper took a white glove out of his trunks and put it on his hand (the one that was painted black), put it on, and started punching Bad News with it. Shouldn’t the referee be insisting on checking this glove? If it was legal, why wouldn’t Piper have just started the match with the glove on?
Piper set Bad News to the outside. Bad News tripped Roddy up and pulled him out. He lined Piper up for a punch on but Piper moved and he punched the ringpost. Piper got a chair and swung it at Bad News but Bad News missed, and they were both counted out in one of the quickest count-out counts I can remember. A double-count-out at WrestleMania, in an Era where there were only four PPVs a year.
They kept brawling into the crowd. This feud would never be resolved because neither man was willing to do the job. Here’s an idea: How about you ask them that BEFORE YOU START THE PROGRAM?!
REHEARSAL OF THE RUSSIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM WITH STEVE ALLEN & THE BOLSHEVIKS - This approached being funny at times, but was quite mean. Also, why were they rehearsing in a bathroom?
THE HART FOUNDATION vs. THE BOLSHEVIKS (Boris Zhukov & Nikolai Volkoff) - DUD!
Not only did the babyface Hart Foundation not respect the singing of the Soviet National Anthem, but they jumped the Bolsheviks from behind during it. Jumping people before the bell is what the heels have been doing the whole show!
The Harts hit their finisher and won clean in nineteen seconds, as a result of cheating. That on its own is enough to get a DUD from me, but when you factor in the fact that this show has going to long and not have much in the way of good action, why would you not let the Hart Foundation have an actual match? And why wouldn’t let the hometown fans see their guys?
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS TITO SANTANA - Meh.
TITO SANTANA vs. THE BARBARIAN (w/Bobby Heenan) - 5.25/10
Barbarian won a short match with a flying clothesline. Tito had things won before that with the flying forearm, but Heenan but Barb’s foot on the ropes. For just four-and-a-half minutes, this was outstanding.
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS DUSTY RHODES & SAPPHIRE - Fine.
MIXIED TAG TEAM MATCH:
Randy Savage & Sensational Sherri vs. Dusty Rhodes & Sapphire (w/Miss Elizabeth) - 4/10
This was the first mixed tag in WWF history (supposedly). Dusty’s reveal that Miss Elizabeth was managing them got a HUGE pop. And, knowing where we’d wind up in a year, it was some nice bookending.
There was some good stuff in here, but also quite a bit of stuff that wasn’t good. I have to agree with Jesse that I can’t really get upset about the heels breaking ules when the babyfaces break them first, and there was a lot of breaking the rules in this match, and often right in front of the referee.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS BOBBY HEENAN - GREAT! Heenan cut a great promo on Andre.
JESSE VENTURA & GORILLA MONSOON INTERVIEW RONA BARRETT - Weird. She claimed to have footage of Jesse Ventura doing porn and thought it would be okay to play it here on this family PPV.
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS RANDY SAVAGE & SHERRI - Great crazy Macho Man stuff.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS DEMOLITION - Fine. Mean Gene tried to bring up the Hart Foundation as potential challengers, but all Demolition wanted to talk about was their victory.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS HULK HOGAN - Good. Hogan’s comments about the fans being â€"his people†can certainly be read in a very interesting way. He also did a beautiful job of planting the seeds for himself stealing Warrior’s spotlight in his moment of victory later on. I am fascinated by Hogan’s ability to be raving nutjob on his promos and yet still word things so perfectly for the politics he was playing. He probably could have been a really great promo if he put his mind to it, instead of just a crazy yelling guy.
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR - Standard bat-sh*t crazy Warrior promo. This started off with Warrior grabbing Mooney, telling him that he â€"didn’t deserve to breathe the same air†as him and Hogan, and shoving him away. Warrior proceeded to cut a promo without the microphone there, but we had no trouble hearing him because… well… it’s Warrior and he was screaming the whole time.
This was the standard Warrior insanity. He came off like a heel with a messiah complex. He also ended his promo by saying that after defeating Hogan, he would take their shared beliefs about facing all challenges â€"to places where it shall never have been.†I don’t think it’s possible to come up with a more awkward way to phrase a basic idea than that.
THE ROCKERS vs. THE ORIENT EXPRESS (Tanaka & Sato) (w/Mr. Fuji) - 5.75/10
I assume the large number of promos before this meant that there was an intermission live, so this was the first match back from that, and so they worked at a good pace to get the crowd back into things… and then they killed that with the Orient Express winning via count-out when Sato threw salt in Marty’s eyes so he couldn’t find the ring.
STEVE ALLEN INTERVIEWS RHYTHM & BLUES - Dumb. More of Steve Allen making fun of the heels and them just taking it. Is this actually going anywhere?
JIM DUGGAN vs. DINO BRAVO (w/Earthquake & Jimmy Hart) - 4/10
Duggan overcame the heels’ cheating ways and paid them back in kind, getting the win with his two-by-four. The heels beat him up after the match, ending with Earthquake squishing him multiple times. No one came out to help Duggan.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS JAKE â€"THE SNAKE†ROBERTS - F*CKING AWESOME! I loved how despite being a babyface, Jake still felt like Jake, deciding that Dibiase needed to be punished and humiliated to get his title back the same way that Dibiase had done to others for money.
MILLION DOLLAR TITLE MATCH:
Ted Dibiase(c) (w/Virgil) vs. Jake â€"The Snake†Roberts - 6.75/10
This was the best thing on the show so far by MILES. It certainly helped that this was the first match to go over ten minutes (and just the second to go more than eight), but it was also the first match since the mixed tag, and only about fourth or fifth so far that felt like it had any real of importance to it.
And even in this match, we couldn’t get a f*cking clean win. Instead we got another heel win via count-out. Jake attacked the heels after the match and hit Dibiase with the DDT and gave his money away, but Virgil was able to save Dibiase from getting… snaked, I guess? Is that the right verb for having a snake put on you?
SEAN MONEY INTERVIEWS SLICK & AKEEM - Fine. They’re upset with Bossman because he won’t take Ted Dibiase’s money anymore.
â€"MEAN†GENE OKERLUND INTERVIEWS THE BIG BOSSMAN - Meh. He doesn’t take money from anyone.
THE BIG BOSS MAN vs. AKEEM (w/Slick) - 2/10
Ted Dibiase had been hiding under the ring, and he jumped Bossman before the match. Bossman overcame this handicap and won a short match cleanly. He even got to shove Slick afterwards. For a match that didn’t make it to the two-minute mark, this was great.
SEAN MOONEY INTERVIEWS FANS - One young fan buries Rhythm & Blues upcoming musical performance. Another young fan was in favor of it.
SEAN MOONEY THEN INTERVIEWS MARY TYLER MOORE, SITTING AT RINGSIDE - This was all pointless. It wasn’t even the first time they got Mary Tyler Moore on camera.
A MUSICAL PERFORMANCE BY RHYTHM & BLUES - Kill me now. Because a show that was already infuriatingly boring definitely needed them to get through two whole songs before the Bushwhackers came out and chased them away and broke their guitars.
Gorilla criticized Rhythm & Blues for their cowardice, saying that someday they would have to face the Bushwhackers in the ring. What a great idea! Perhaps this could be done on the same show as a bunch of other grudge matches. Oh well. It’s too bad there wasn’t any show like that where the match could have been booked for.
JIMMY SNUKA vs. RICK RUDE (w/Bobby Heenan) - 4/10
Steve Allen joined the commentary team for this match. He was terrible. Rude won a short match cleanly.
TITLE VS. TITLE MATCH:
Hulk Hogan(WWF World Heavyweight Title) vs. the Ultimate Warrior(WWF Intercontinental Title) - 7/10
The crowd was on fire for this and there was some great drama and some really cool ideas (I thought the finish in particular was great), but I found the match to be rather incoherent. It started off feeling like it was going to be the story of Hogan having to overcome this unstoppable force who is, in terms of style, a younger version of himself (that spot where Warrior no-sold Hogan’s bodyslam, then slammed Hogan and Hogan sold it a bunch while getting to his feet, then Hogan injuring his knee getting clotheslined to the outside), and Hogan felt like the babyface… but then Hogan wound up on offense and the injured knee was forgotten. Then it turned into the story of the two heroes fighting dirty with eye rakes and so forth (although I guess Hogan did that all the time anyway), and then we got the ref bump and phantom pins, which served no purpose other than to undermine Warrior’s victory with Hogan getting the first visual pinfall, and by the end (with Hogan kicking out at 3.1), it didn’t really feel like much of anything. Some of that stuff (kicking out at 3.1, the visual pinfall) theoretically played into the idea that Hogan might turn heel afterwards when he snatched the belt, but because there was no turn and Hogan respectfully presented the belt to Warrior, they turned out to just be a bunch of spots built into a match to set up a swerve… and is that really worth it if those spots undermine the credibility of the guy you’re trying to have the torch passed to?
POST-MATCH SEGMENT - Good. Enough has been written about how Hogan’s reactions undermined Warrior’s big moment, but watching this with that in mind, I found it hard to blame Hogan for the following reasons:
1. Whatever sneaky ploy Hogan intended here wouldn’t have worked if the cameras didn’t follow him, and I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t have followed him without Vince’s direction, so Vince had to be in on whatever Hogan did.
2. Focusing on Hogan after his loss felt natural. He has been the champion for a year, and he had just cut a promo saying that it’s not about if you win or lose, but rather about how you lose, so focusing on his reactions as much as Warrior’s felt natural.
3. Are we really getting angry at Hogan because his acting was too good? What was he supposed to do? Not sell the emotion of the loss because the guy who beat him is a sh*tty actor? If Hogan hadn’t sold the emotion of the loss, that would have made Warrior’s win feel less important because the guy who just lost the title didn’t even care about losing it.
Final Thoughts
Yeah… this show was absolutely wretched. It had FOURTEEN matches on it, and just three of them went longer than eight minutes. Half of them didn’t even make it to five. My suspicion about that is that they were worried about something overshadowing the main event due to people going gaga over the work-rate like what happened at WrestleMania III, but that worry seems completely illogical to me because either your philosophy is â€"we don’t care about work-rate; we just care about making money†and thus you’ll go with the match that will make you the most money in the main event and won’t give a sh*t if something on the undercard gets more snowflakes than it, or you do care about work-rate, in which case you wouldn’t have put Hogan vs. Warrior as your main event in the first place.
Even ignoring work-rate, though, this show was long and boring, and in a way that felt completely unnecessary. Of the fourteen matches, only five or six felt in any way important (the tag title match, the mixed tag, Jake vs. Dibiase, Piper vs. Bad News, the main event, and maybe Akeem vs. Bossman). Everything else felt like I was watching a random house show. That’s the exact opposite of what WrestleMania should feel like.
Now combine the fact that we had pointless, short, matches and terrible work-rate, and that makes a show feel needlessly long. Then you add in the other stupid padding with some of the celebrity segments and that musical abomination, and it just makes things worse by making the show feel even longer. And for me it was even longer than that, because Peacock crashed about every ten or twelve minutes while I was trying to watch this show. In hindsight, this was probably G-d trying to tell me that I shouldn’t watch this show, and I foolishly ignored the warning. Given my past few experiences and the fact that the original purpose of this review series was to force me to watch some of the DVDs I bought well over a decade ago that I haven’t gotten around to watching yet, I can confidently say that it will be a LONG time before we come back to this era of WWF. In fact, this show was so scarring that next month, I’m going to my happy place.