Hey Scott,
2 Quick questions:
1) I'm listening to the SCSA podcasts and he talks about doing a bunch of jobs to HBK and Hitman when he started out. This, of course, blew my mind and have been searching, non-stop for these matches, but haven't been able to find, EVEN ON YOU-TUBE, any of these (I'm assuming) apocalpytically good 1995-Earlier 1996 Pre-Neck Injury Ringmaster matches. Any thoughts on this?
2) As part of my Austin-HBK-Hart crusade, I was looking at some old IYH entries on Wikipedia and was shocked to find some amazing main event-level matches that were taking place in dark matches. To Wit:
IYH 7 UT/Mankind- (Within weeks of their feud starting)
IYH 10 Sid/Vader
IYH 11 HBK/Goldust (THIS IS A WORLD TITLE MATCH)
IYH 12 HBK/Mankind- (Because of course you would follow their life-changing match 2 months earlier, with a dark match on one of the least-talked-about PPV in history).
What was going on here? More importantly, Where are these matches and why isn't anyone talking about them?
1) Had Bret been around past 1997 he would have returned those jobs tenfold, so I don't think anyone was sweating it. Also, Bret tended to completely phone it in on house shows, so I wouldn't think you were missing anything mindblowing.
2) My assumption would be that they were just trying to pop a bigger gate since those IYH shows drew abysmally (much like everything else for WWE in 1996). Plus if you were a fan going to a PPV show and only getting two hours, you'd feel ripped off.