The Smark Rant for WCW Monday Nitro–09.25.95

The SmarK Rant for WCW Monday Nitro – 09.25.95

FINALLY! And the shows have all been renumbered to make sense now, too. Of course, wouldn’t you know that I did the past few episodes in one marathon session because I was going to be out of town for a few days and didn’t want to kill anyone by missing a day. And once I had already got three episodes and the WW3 repost in the can and pre-posted, THEN someone e-mails me being all “Dude, the 9/25 Nitro is finally up!” And of course I’m not anywhere that I can actually access the Network to even check it out for myself. So now, at long last, before I have the chance to change my mind and do a stupid running joke to milk it for weeks, the missing episode of Nitro.

Try not to poop yourself with excitement.

LIVE from nowhere they wanted to advertise, apparently.

Your hosts are Eric Bischoff, Bobby Heenan & Mongo

Alex Wright v. Disco Inferno

The Boogie Knights collide for the first time! I think this would have been Disco’s wrestling debut on Nitro. I would like to point out here that his theme music is one of the few where they nailed the style and gimmick perfectly on the first try. Disco tosses him, but Wright comes back in with a missile dropkick and a leg lariat for two. Wright dumps him again and follows with a plancha, but Disco catches him with a stungun. Now here’s an interesting tactic by the announcers to deal with football instead of passive-aggressively booking things during halftime: Mongo just comes out and says “You know San Francisco is gonna win the football game, so don’t even bother watching!” They’re even trying to give away the finishes of the FOOTBALL GAMES! When did they lose those big brass balls? Disco controls and goes up, but Wright dropkicks him down and wins a slugfest, following with a back elbow for two. Disco goes for the neckbreaker, but Wright gets a backslide for the pin at 4:05 and Disco is already on a losing streak. Non-stop action here. **1/2

Meanwhile, Hogan is rocking the neck brace but hasn’t gone black yet. Because once you go black, you often have trouble reverting to your previous life choices. Or something. Anyway, Hogan challenges that big, stinky, nasty, wart-infested Giant to a title match for Halloween Havoc, where he will be thusly buried next to the corpse of his father. Wait, so Hogan killed Andre the Giant in Detroit now? That’s messed up even for him.

Last week, Lex Luger and Randy Savage get into a spat.

Randy Savage calls out Lex Luger, and Lex answers, wanting RESPECT. So next week, they have a match where Luger puts his career on the line against Savage. Well Savage was certainly due to win one of those.

Kurasawa v. Sgt. Craig Pittman

Kurasawa throws kicks to put the Sarge on the floor, then pulls up the mats and suplexes him onto the hardwood. That would suck. Back in, Kurasawa goes to work on the arm, but Pittman dumps him to catch a breather. They brawl on the floor and Pittman hauls him back in by the arm and follows with a belly to belly throw. Code Red armbar, but Kurasawa makes the ropes. He tries for his own armbar, but Pittman throws him to escape and Kurasawa finishes with a questionable pinfall off a bridged german suplex at 4:40. Didn’t seem like he was actually down for the three count. Whatever, it was an entertaining trainwreck of a match, with both guys throwing bombs without caring if they hit or not. **1/2

Brian Pillman and Arn Anderson are pretty sure that Flair isn’t gonna find a partner but they’re happy to kick the shit out of him all alone. Arn rightly points out that all the people Flair has been asking are people that he previously turned on and crippled, so it’s not surprising that they would tell him off. Plus now he doesn’t have Arn to back him up.

Meanwhile, on the beach, Randy Savage is randomly lifting weights and gets attacked by Kevin Sullivan. How do you even sneak up on someone on the BEACH? It would take like 2 minutes to get from the boardwalk out to where the weight set was!

Randy Savage v. Kevin Sullivan

Well, here’s the blowoff of this blood feud we just learned about before the commercial break. There’s certainly something to be said for efficiency. Zodiac attacks Savage on the floor to allow Sullivan to take control, and they brawl on the floor. Quite the fall for Beefcake, as he goes from main eventing Starrcade against Hogan to acting as Damien Sandow to Kevin Sullivan’s Miz. Also, I’ve probably mentioned this before, but Tom Zenk claims that the Zodiac Man was the gimmick they originally gave him before he told them to go get stuffed and just went by Z-Man instead. So they thought this gimmick was such a brilliant idea that they held onto it for four years before finding someone else to play it. Typical WCW stupidity, thinking that some jerk who runs around going “Yes! No! Yes! No!” would ever get over. I mean, REALLY NOW.

Come on.

As if.

Puh-lease.

Nig…well, you get the idea.

Back in the ring, Sullivan pounds away with the usual, but Savage gets a backdrop on the floor and stops to beat up Zodiac for the DQ at 3:00. SO MUCH FRINGE! ½* Poor Beefcake takes a Macho Elbow but the Giant heads out and chokeslams the bejeezus out of Savage. Even Frankie Lancaster and Mark Starr aren’t able to stop the path of Gigantic Rage! Bischoff is all “It’s Lex Lu…” before realizing that his timing was horribly off and catching himself. And indeed, Luger finally comes out to make the save after Alex Wright fails more horribly than usual. They’re even spoiling THEIR OWN SHOW! These guys can’t be stopped! Man, they did an awesome job of making the Giant into a big deal in a hurry, although after their “clever” booking of Havoc they had no real plan to follow through with it.

Lex Luger v. Meng

Luger is tenderized by the previous segment, so Meng runs out and kicks his ass further, but Bischoff has an update: Hulk Hogan will be in Denver next week! Now they’re spoiling NEXT WEEK’S SHOW! Meng chokes away and gets a piledriver for two, then goes back to the choking because it was working pretty well. Suplex gets two. And now the dreaded VULCAN NERVE PINCH and he stomps away after Lex somehow escapes. To the chinlock, but Luger fights out and makes the comeback. Sadly, Meng hits him with the LOADED THUMB OF DEATH to finish at 6:45. So this was a match that happened. DUD

The announcers wrap it up, and obviously this version is from the WWE Classics on Demand library because Bobby Heenan talks about how Luger jumped from the WWF, and they bleep out the “F”. So back in 2006, even on another promotion’s show, they were still censoring the WWF name. What, was the Fund gonna go back in time and retroactively sue WCW?

Next week: Well we’ve already covered that. Duh. Back to November 1995 again tomorrow.

Really liked this show, by the way.  Fun and breezy AND easy to mock at the same time. That’s a tricky tightrope to walk and WCW pulled it off here.