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A famous piece of wrestling TV amongst a certain sect of us, the famous brief Bill Watts era of Raw.
Before discussing the match, there are two things before and around the match that strike my interest in particular.
The highlight of the entire segment and show might have came before the bell even rings, with this absurd video of Shawn Michaels talking to kids and then being interviewed about it. He’s a stammering wreck, constantly talking instead about how cool it is that kids think he’s important and how good it feels for him, just total maniac shit, unable to talk about anything but himself and doubly as inept at portraying himself as a good human being. Shawn obviously can talk, but he’s not a very good liar. There’s an old Patton Oswalt bit from the early 2000s that I’m sure is nowhere near as funny now as it was then about how George W. Bush was only a dummy when he had to talk about normal stuff, but could talk when he was talking about war and vengeance. That came to mind again watching this, this total dullard at a loss for words when asked to convey any sense of sympathy or humanity, revealing this dead eyed husk going through motions because he’s supposed to care about kids or something. Shawn isn’t exactly W, but they are both cokeheads from Texas who got positions far beyond their skills or talents based entirely on personal relationships, so one can’t help but see that also.
The other, of course, is how great Vince McMahon is on commentary.
You can say he’s bad. Talk about him enthusiastically shouting “KICK SOME BUTT” when Diesel comes out or the perverse groans of sexual elation that escape his lips when Shawn Michaels comes down the aisle, or when the big guys are fighting. None of this is incorrect, and it’s one of those situations in which I 100% see the other side and acknowledge it as equally correct. Much like with points of view on Davey Richards’ wrestling, I don’t think there’s a wrong opinion.
Is Vince bad on commentary? Yeah, maybe. He certainly undercuts his top acts by being so lame and over the top in his obvious cheering. At the same time, I love it. That’s not just because he’s one of the voices I grew up with as a result of constantly renting these tapes from video stores when I ran out of 1998/1999 WWF and WCW pay-per-views to rent, but I get a real thrill out of it years later too. Not only is he wildly entertaining and very funny on accident, but I always really like it when you get a booker or the head of the company behind the announce desk.
Not only is usually it a sign of a true control freak like a Vince McMahon or a Gabe Sapolsky (Ian Rotten may be the exception here, as always), which is always fun, but it’s a chance to get the true unfiltered vision of what something is supposed to be. As direct a presentation of someone’s ideas, in this medium, as there possibly can be.
Honestly, any booker who doesn’t also do commentary on their shows is kind of a coward.
Anyways, there’s also a match here, apparently?
The match itself isn’t some bell to bell marvel exactly, but it’s exactly what it needs to be. If I was reviewing 1995 as a whole, it’s the sort of a match I would put on a preliminary list, but not feel too shaken up about cutting if I wanted to hit a certain deadline or if I just wasn’t feeling it. It’s good and I like it a lot, but as a match itself, hey whatever.
Shawn and Owen work really well together for most of this. I like Shawn with all three of these guys, honestly, and Taker and Yokozuna is a great match up that emphasizes the best qualities of each man. There’s guys here that I think people might expect me to be mean towards and that I usually love to be mean towards, but this is not a match that inspires any sort of meanness. Shawn does nothing offensive, Kev and Taker are utilized in short bursts, and everyone on Camp Cornette is so much fun to watch. It’s pure formula, but one executed well. Offense that mostly looks good, big personalities, not a lot of waste. Certainly there are better versions of a WWF/WWE TV main event tag over the years (one of them being perhaps my single favorite match ever), but this is all fine enough.
The meat comes after the match, in a classic Wattsian finish and post-match.
Bulldog benefits from the Camp being a much more polished unit, hitting Diesel with his slam and getting the pin when Yokozuna follows it with one of those big boy 600 lb legdrops, getting a mostly clean win going into his title match on pay-per-view. It’s sort of wasted on a nothing challenge like Bulldog as nobody believe he would beat Diesel anyways, but it’s a nice sentiment with Diesel’s first loss in a real long time and it coming in a perfect sort of a way, clean but still just a little bit unfair.
After the match, both King Mabel and Dean Douglas come down and help the Camp beat up the good guys (certainly not Our Heroes, but the protagonists of the story all the same). Shawn gets the piss beaten out of him by Shane Douglas on the outside in perhaps the best non-Yokozuna bit of action in this entire thing, ending with a Gourdbuster on the steps. Mabel and Yokozuna gang up to hit like a thousand splashes and leg drops on the dead guy, eventually breaking his face.
A more prolonged, effective, and brutal beating than you usually get from the heels in the WWF, resulting in them (briefly) feeling like actual threats instead of just villain of the month tackle dummies as they so often did in the mid 1990s.
Less great as a match than I remembered, but a lovely angle and a wonderful chunk of pro wrestling television. A real classical sort of a thing, and different from so much WWF TV. First in having them still down in the ring after the break, giving you the feeling this is something a little more than a TV show about wrestling as something goes wrong like they do in real athletics. Couple it with a classic territory style promo at the end of the show, and it’s no surprise people have remembered it for all this time. Not a reinvention of the wheel, but a hell of a wheel on display all the same.
Something to be watched and studied, and something that still stands out over a quarter century later.
HANDWERK 