Retro: WCW Uncensored 1996
Can it be worse than 1995?
It’s been a while since I dipped back into the retro archives that have been uploaded onto YouTube. I started with WCW Uncensored 1995 [which you can read here] and I thought why not jump the gun on the anniversary for the following years event. Why not? It’s only got an infamously bad main event. One of the biggest conceptual nightmares that ever made North American broadcast. And surely there are some hidden gems? Surely.
The show takes place in the birthplace of Elvis Presley. Or more specifically the Tupelo Coliseum, in the same city as Elvis was born. Tony Schiavone, Bobby Heenan, and Dusty Rhodes are the commentary trio, and are one of the shows biggest highlights.
The show kicks off with a deeply sinister opening hype package, that focuses on the main event Doomsday Cage match. Only a few of the actual wrestlers have a line, Jimmy Hart laughs for the most part. A bit less of a manic focus on the ‘No Rules’ aspect of Uncensored than there was the previous year. Commentary get mismatched name keys and an opportunity to riff on Heenan’s choice to wear a leather jacket, as you do.
Konnan vs Eddie Guerrero - WCW United States Championship
This will be a bit of a trip if you’re used to both of them from later in their career. Guerrero is much more strait-lacked than he would become as ‘Latino Heat’ and Konnan looks far more the traditional luchador.
A lot of good chemistry on show in the early going, working through phases of technical exchanges. Very enjoyable for fans of the technical side of wrestling. Not pedal to the floor early on but it takes a nice turn up in pace, and gets a bit chippier between these two friends. After the feeling out process of the opening there’s a nice escalation of athleticism as it continues. The crowd are split between the two men for the most part, although Guerrero seems to have a slight advantage. They keep returning to technical exchanges, the more high paced moves peppered in. An awful lot of discussion on commentary about how international the whole event is. Very fun back and forth, nice work to contrast moment to moment. For 1996 this is a forward thinking style of match in the US with the blending of submission work and high flying. There are very few near falls into a long way into the match. There’s a smooth logic to the progression of the moves, both men slowly building up to their bigger moves and rarely repeating any.
A bit of a strange finish as Guerrero tries to leapfrog Konnan and inadvertently takes a headbutt to the groin. This keeps Guerrero down for a three count and Konnan retains. The incidental contact sours the ending a bit but it was a good match to that point.
Backstage to Gene Okerlund, who warns Col. Robert Parker not to soil himself and plugs the Compuserve online chat facility. Parker, and his charge Dick Slater, join Okerlund for an interview ahead of Parker’s match against Madusa later. Parker makes reference to Elvis Presley and things go slowly off the rails.
Lord Steven Regal vs The Belfast Bruiser
From a slick Mexican inspired technical match to a bruising European affair. Regal has a butler called Jeeves with him, The Belfast Bruiser is accompanied by a mullet and large shoulder pad. Bruiser is best known as Fit Finlay and he is occasionally referred to as such on the show.
History between them from the UK scene, that they played into with the personal grudge.
No slow feeling out process, they’re throwing bombs at each other right away. Regal takes every punch like death. The European Catch wrestling holds are on show from both men, with hard strikes mixing it up. Bruising, if you’ll pardon the pun. Even the pin attempts see little vicious details, Regal placing his forearm across Bruiser’s face. Wrestling at its best looks like it hurts, this looks like it absolutely kills. Commentary are a bit distracted throughout, it does pull focus on occasion.
Bruiser is on top more often than Regal, but it is never one sided in either direction for too long. There is a general sense of urgency, not in the speed, but in the improvisatory feel, it looks like they’re both taking any opportunity to hurt the other. The facial expressions of Regal are amazing. Dusty Rhodes can’t pronounce ‘Gluteus Maximus’. They’re absolutely clattering each other with some of these shots, a right hand from Finlay busts Regal’s nose open. There is a parallel to the opener in the ebb and flow of the action.
They fight onto the ramp and right up to the Cage for the main event but this leads to the Blue Bloods (Regal’s faction) running down to attack. Robert Eaton and Dave Taylor beat Finlay down and the match ends in disqualification. Sad that such a good physical match should end with a disappointing finish. This is meant to be Uncensored, where there are no rules. They’d go on to have a Parking Lot Brawl on Nitro the following month.
No time to breathe as we go straight to Jimmy Hart and The Giant. Jimmy Hart is excitable, Giant is rhyming. After some stand up, there’s a Loch Ness promo. More famously Giant Haystacks in the UK, his Mancunian brogue stands out on this show. Okerlund makes a crack about his teeth.
Col. Robert Parker vs Madusa
Hard turn into the silly. Parker and Madusa have been at odds, mostly via Madusa’s issue with Sherri. Madusa is still fairly new to WCW, they reference her infamous binning of the WWF Women’s title belt.
This is essentially a comedy match, Madusa was a quality wrestler for the era, and is saddled with this silly concept. Parker’s ability to execute a basic lock up almost gives Rhodes and Heenan an aneurysm in shock. Madusa executes 95% of the recognisable wrestling moves of the match, to actual noise from the crowd. Madusa manages to suplex her much larger opponent but on the bridge has her leg pulled out by Dick Slater. Parker rolls on top of her to ‘pin’ and win. A minor diversion that shows WCW could have committed to women’s wrestling far more if they’d been willing to give Madusa the ball.
Lee Marshall is backstage, accompanied by hyperbole about the quality of the show. He talks to the Road Warriors, who tell as they often did. The Road Warriors are going to remove their opponents brain stems and make them incontinent, because coherent promos with measured sentiments are desperately overdone.
Diamond Dallas Page vs The Booty Man - I Quit Wrestling match
DDP has put his wrestling career on the line against the Booty Man, who has DDP’s former valet by his side. If DDP wins he gets Kimberly (aka the Booty Babe/The Booty Girl) back, and her money with it. DDP is very down on his luck, looking grizzled and run down. The Booty Man is the former Brutus Beefcake, and now having left the Dungeon of Doom he is really interested in posteriors. Aren’t we all.
Shed loads of shtick to start out. DDP flees the ring repeatedly. They both poll the crowd. Even when they do make contact there’s not a lot of action. Commentary are the primary reason this won’t make you fall asleep. DDP does shout ‘Fat Pig’ at someone or other. They are getting some of the loudest crowd reactions of the night for whatever reason. A lesson in getting more of a reaction for doing less. Kimberly Page arrives to add some frills to the gear on show, she’s dressed in matching gear to Booty Man. The general pace stays slow. The shtick is what carries it. Inexplicably they get over 15 minutes. A large chunk of the front row on the hard cam are openly gawking at Kimberly when she passes by them. A headlock feels like it lasts a geological age. Once that is over, DDP tells at his former valet, kisses her, gets a slap in response, Booty Man hits the ‘High Knee’ (get it) and wins.
DDP has to retire from wrestling. Booty Man kisses Kimberly in front of her real life husband. DDP would be back in the ring in 4 and a half weeks.
In some ways it’s a masterpiece of getting a reaction despite doing something very boring. In other ways that matter more it is incredibly boring.
Jimmy Hart is backstage saying tonight will be the last night he’ll be in Lex Luger’s corner, offering him a jacket before leaving the shot. Luger was essentially forced into the main event by Hart, which might charitably be why the promo is bland.
The Giant vs Loch Ness
Two very large men. One at the start of his career and very green. The other at the end of his and very immobile. The winner will get a match for the WCW World Championship the following episode of Nitro. Loch Ness is announced as 699lbs. It’s believable at this point.
You could probably count the amount of moves that weren’t just clubbing blows without taking your shoes off. And a decent chunk of those attempted actually miss. Giant is fairly agile for his size at least. A leg drop from Giant and he wins. 2 and a bit minutes of a diversion. Giant’s WCW World Title match would end in a no contest the following night.
Lee Marshall gets to hype up the other half of the Chicago Street Fight, with Booker T and Sting. Booker starts, and Sting responds by also shouting about being a ‘Straight OG’. They’re a tense duo.
Sting & Booker T vs The Road Warriors (Hawk & Animal) - Chicago Street Fight
Booker T is helping out WCW Tag Team Champion Sting in this match against the Road Warriors in return for a future shot at those tag team titles. It is a Chicago Street Fight because the Road Warriors are from Chicago, even though we’re in Tupelo. No time limit, anything goes, pinfalls count anywhere.
Big stiff fight from the first bell. Chaos, decently captured with judicious use of split screen camerawork. There’s finally some intensity back in the show after a long dry spell. The main issue is that it has one note, one tone, and it goes on and on. They start off at a high level of physicality, and don’t deviate from it. The variety is brought by some chairs but it basically just stays the same for a long time. The Road Warriors really only wrestled at a single speed the whole time anyway. Bobby Heenan begging from commentary for one team to double up on an opponent goes largely unheeded. This boils down to an entertaining 15 minute street fight that is for some unknown reason twice that length. You can wander off for 5 minutes and come back to find everyone in the same situation. A sense of deja vu will wash over you as portions of the match feel like they are repeating. Why this is almost half an hour is inexplicable. It doesn’t evolve or change. It doesn’t escalate or progress. It simply occurs. Repetition? Discipline?
Watching this match changes your perception of time, and the relationship between quality and time. The Archer’s Paradox states that everything is motionless in any given instant, and given that all of time is made up of instants, then motion is essentially impossible. At any given instant this match is decent, there are just so many instants. Motion feels impossible. Half an hour is not a long time, there are 48 every day. This will draw you into believing you have watched this for all of them.
Some variety eventually appears when part of the fight spills to the back, and Lex Luger & Stevie Ray join in the brawl. This finally isolates Hawk away from his partner, and after two weeks, Booker T pins Animal to win the match and end things.
Doomsday Cage Match - Hulk Hogan & Randy Savage vs The Alliance To End Hulkamania (Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, Meng, The Barbarian, Lex Luger, The Taskmaster, Z-Gangsta & The Ultimate Solution)
Hogan’s WCW run at this point had largely been spent rehashing what had worked for him in the 80s. Namely facing seemingly insurmountable enemies, and beating them. This is the logical culmination of that trend. A lot of his time had been spent facing off with the cartoonish Dungeon of Doom, who are joined in this 8 on 2 handicap by other enemies of Hogan from across the whole spectrum of wrestling. Z-Gangsta is Hogan’s co-star Tiny Lister from ‘No Holds Barred’ thawed out and vaguely repackaged. The Ultimate Solution is a bodybuilder who’d later play Bane in ‘Batman Forever’. His original name was The Final Solution, because apparently WCW creative hadn’t heard of the Holocaust.
This is laid out like a gauntlet, but each team apparently has different ways to win. Plus, no one in the match wrestles like they care about or even know these apparent rules. Main event announcer Michael Buffer tries to explain things. He also introduces everyone in his generally verbose style, a mini rundown of each men’s backgrounds and reason for being for here. Neither Z-Gangsta nor Ultimate Solution actually show up at this point. Apparently Brian Pillman was meant to be on the Alliance team (or so Schiavone implies on commentary).
Things start with Savage & Hogan opposite Flair & Anderson, comfortably the best workers involved. They’re in a room with a mesh floor though so no one can really walk around properly. Given how difficult it is to see anything via the cameras, it can’t have been that obvious what was going on in person. Powder of some description is thrown around. Hogan & Savage reach the second level, apparently Anderson and Flair are now eliminated. This level is even more packed, and even harder to follow. Commentary can seemingly see more of what is going on that the camera can. Hogan tries to murder The Taskmaster by throwing him from a scaffold to the floor, doesn’t succeed. Most of the entrants are locked on the second level whilst Savage & Hogan fight Taskmaster & Luger to the ring, for some reason, Savage and Luger don’t get to the ring. They all fight back towards the cage, and back to the ring. No structure or even the beginnings of one.
Somehow this is the most interesting part of the match, basically just a regular tag team match. This lasts until Z-Gangsta and The Ultimate Solution arrive. They’re both as big as they are untalented. And boy are they huge. For whatever reason the match goes back to the cage, now the ring on the bottom level, with Hogan & Savage facing their least capable opponents so far. What an amazingly laid out match. The purple lighting briefly reminds one of the existence of Prince, it doesn’t last long.
Anderson & Flair come back into the match, their elimination not having much effect. The match just kind of continues for a while. More powder gets thrown, and Booty Man makes a cameo appearance to hand Hogan & Savage frying pans. The lack of connective tissue and logic between the various moving pieces of the match is epic.
Luger goes to hit Savage, who is being held by Flair, but Savage ducks and Luger hits Flair instead. Savage pins Flair to end this match. The Alliance to End Hulkamania lose.
Or did they? Given that Hogan turned his back on the fans and formed the New World Order just a few months later, Hulkamania ended one way or the other.
No one in the credits has a second name.
Overall
The first two matches are head and shoulders above the rest. From the moment that Regal/Bruiser slips up with a disqualification finish the trajectory is downhill. Madusa/Parker and Giant/Loch Ness are too brief and/or comedic to be memorable. I Quit is bland posturing masquerading as a match. The tag team match may still be going somewhere. And the main event is one of those rare matches where the reputation for its awfulness is potentially underplayed. It makes zero conceptual sense, it is barely watchable on a pure “can I see what is happening” level, and it makes the participants all look like chumps. And most of them don’t even deserve it.
The remarkable thing about this era of WCW is how close they are to hitting on the big creative idea that took them to their peak. Knowing that the New World Order are just around the corner, that the mid-card is about to become far more interesting, makes it all the more remarkable how boring this show is. The opening pair of matches are the only bits you need to watch if you care about quality, the rest is a chore.