STRAIGHT TO HELL #3: June 10, 1996
June 14, 2013
STRAIGHT TO HELL is a week-by-week look back at the dramatic rise and spectacular crash of World Championship Wrestling. It focuses on storylines, memorable moments, and bizarre flukes of history, rather than the standard “match recaps and star ratings” format. Each week’s installment will correspond to one actual week of past WCW television, beginning with Memorial Day 1996 and carrying through till the end.
By now, WCW is within spitting distance of the 1996 Great American Bash, which will be covered in the next Straight to Hell. The storylines are coming together: the “invasion” of WCW by the WWF (or so we’re meant to believe), the rivalry between Mongo McMichael, Kevin Greene, and the Four Horsemen–and by extension Macho Man Randy Savage’s feud with head Horseman Ric Flair–and the Dungeon of Doom is just kind of… there. WCW World Heavyweight Champion The Giant, despite wearing the “big gold belt,” has no real storyline to speak of, other than wanting very badly to beat up Lex Luger.
I try not to forecast too much in these articles. If I spend a thousand words saying “well, in 1998, the storyline will be here, and that wrestler will be there,” then by the time I get to 1998 I’ll just be repeating myself. Still, I can’t help but make a mountain out of a molehill of what, in 1996, seemed like a rather inconsequential opening bout. It would end up a United States and World Heavyweight Championship unification match when run again, in March 2001:
At this point, the match was just fodder for the buildup of the Tag Team Championship situation. Sting and Lex Luger were still the champs, but WCW’s absurdly deep roster meant that it always had plenty of tag teams to go around. “Plenty of teams” doesn’t always mean “plenty of good teams,” mind: look at, say, the Nasty Boys versus the Public Enemy, a match which occurs on this Nitro and feels like it’s three hours long. But in ’96 WCW, the Steiner Brothers and Harlem Heat were top of the heap, talent-wise. And Scott Steiner and Booker T. were the more talented, watchable members of their respective teams. They didn’t break any new ground in the sport of professional wrestling here, but they put on a solidly entertaining match that just makes those versed in WCW’s later years wonder how it would have gone if Steiner hadn’t been riddled with injuries and a seemingly unsustainable physique.
Aside from this and the further development of the “invasion” angle, the June 10th Nitro was a pretty bleh show. The last big show before the pay-per-view–the “go home” show–is usually meant to be the point where the tension is ratcheted up the highest, so that a hard sell can be made. “Buy this PPV, or go to hell,” or something to that effect. Not so, here.
Example: Konnan, a Mexican superstar whose connections in the lucha libre world resulted in a proliferation of Mexican talent in 1990s WCW, held the United States Championship. (This was reportedly his reward for helping to scout so many luchadores.) He didn’t have a match. Instead, he had a backstage interview, and a video package that showcased his moves (and his Ultimate Warrior style ring gear). To be fair, to the casual wrestling viewer in the United States in 1996, moves like Konnan’s–high flying spots and visually pleasing, if usually directionless, chain wrestling–were something genuinely new. But wouldn’t a better way to showcase that stuff have been a match? The idea might have been to give just a taste, via the package’s highlights, and then expect people to cough up for the real deal, but the problem with that theory is that I don’t think anyone coughed up for Konnan during any of his WCW run.
Also given the video-package treatment were Dean Malenko and Rey Misterio, Jr.–two cruiserweight talents scouted from Pennsylvania’s Extreme Championship Wrestling, which in 1996 and 1997 seemed to serve an ulterior purpose as way-station between the rest of the wrestling world and WCW. Misterio was a truly unparalleled talent at the time, whose distinctive mask and even more distinctive offense would get him over hugely with the WCW fans–moreso than any other luchador. But that’s all we got of him ’til the Bash, a video package.
On the upside, though, at least we got a World Heavyweight Championship match between The Giant and Scott Norton (future nWo B-Team stalwart and terminal case of “big in Japan”-itis), a match where Lord Steven Regal took on what appeared to be a 12-year-old Billy Kidman, and an extended promo where Jimmy Hart and Big Bubba Rogers went after John Tenta, where Bubba looked like he’d just stepped out of the wackier part of the Castro district and ended the interview by throwing a pair of scissors across the room. I’m sure that if someone did that on WWE TV now, parents’ groups would string them up by the balls.
After a main event of Ric Flair and Arn Anderson taking on Sting and Lex Luger, the big angle, the money angle, developed further. The Giant had come out to interfere in the match, leading to a post-match interview with Mean Gene Okerlund. This somehow led to Bobby Heenan, manager for Flair and Anderson, issuing a barrage of threats to Randy Savage from the announcers’ box. And then, Razor Ramon came in, for the third week in a row, opening his arms as if to give Eric Bischoff a big ol’ hug. Last week, on a Nitro were the announcers kept hyping the phrase “where the big boys play,” Scott Hall (still, theoretically, “Razor Ramon,” his WWF character) reacted to a slap from Sting by promising a big surprise.
ERIC BISCHOFF: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Look. I don’t wanna have any trouble with you. I don’t want any trouble with you here… now… but I do have to point out–you came out here last week–where is it? The big surprise! I mean, I heard a lot of talk–but where’s the walk?
Bischoff finally found the nerve to get in Razor’s face, and Razor responded only by grinning and pointing behind Bischoff, who, in true Eric Bischoff fashion, didn’t seem to get the picture.
EB: What? I’m here! Where is he?
The camera panned out to reveal…
Not just Razor Ramon, but Diesel (government name: Kevin Nash), another of the WWF’s “New Generation” stars–and the man with perhaps the fastest rise to the WWF World Championship in the company’s history. Diesel had, in the early days of his career, been a jobber in WCW, as a purple-mohawked Master Blaster, the wrestling wizard Oz, and Tony-Clifton-at-seven-feet Vinnie Vegas. WWF mega-star Shawn Michaels had seen Vegas on TV during some downtime, and suggested hiring him as a bodyguard for his “Heartbreak Kid” character. Nash claimed that his wife would leave him if he didn’t quit the wrestling business in order to get out of his WCW contract, and signed with the WWF the same day.
Now, pulling back the curtain a bit more, the reason Nash and Hall quit was pretty simple: guaranteed money, and guaranteed time off. In the 1990s, when the wrestling business was in between booms, the WWF was a less than predictable place when it came time to collect your bonuses, and you’d still be on tap to do 19-day tours at a stretch. (WCW was also rather ruthless in its attempts to sabotage the WWF, to the point of giving away results of taped-in-advance WWF shows on live WCW TV. Bischoff, who the “invaders” first targeted, famously gave away the results of a Shawn Michaels-Sid match with “He pins the big guy with three superkicks.”) Hall, who’d been kept off 1996′s Wrestlemania XII due to a failed drug test, decided to make the big jump, and when he told Nash about what kind of contract he was getting, Nash jumped too. The two managed to negotiate a “favored nations” clause where if one got some special perk, the other’s contract had to match it–so Hall begged Nash to try and get as much as he possibly could.
But back to Nitro:
DIESEL: You been sittin’ out here for six months runnin’ your mouth. “This is where the big boys play,” huh? “This is where the big boys play,” huh? Look at the adjective–play. We ain’t here to play. Now he said last week–that he was gonna bring somebody out here. I’m here. You still don’t have your three people. You know why? Because nobody wants to face us. This show’s about as interesting as Marge Schott reading excerpts from Mein Kampf!
EB (off-mic): We don’t want any trouble here tonight… Speak your piece and–
DIESEL: Yeah. No trouble because you know I’ll kick your teeth down your throat.
At this point, it bears noting, a sizable enough portion of the crowd cheered for it to be heard on TV.
DIESEL: Where’s your three guys?! What, you couldn’t get a paleontologist to get a couple of these fossils cleared?! You ain’t got enough guys off a dialysis machine to get a team?!
Hall began taunting Bischoff off-mic, who sputtered and tried to respond.
DIESEL: Yeah, where’s Hogan? Out doing another episode of Blunder in Paradise? Where’s the Macho Man, hah? Doin’ some Slim Jim commercial? Hey, we’re here! You wanna say something?!
EB: Look–I don’t have the authority, right here right now. You want a fight–fight isn’t with me. You want three guys–tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, I’m gonna be in Atlanta, I’ll be in the offices of WCW–I’ll try and get you your fight. And you know what–live, this Sunday, in Baltimore, Great American Bash, you guys wanna show up? You wanna fight? You show up, I’ll see if I can get you your fight.
Nash and Hall exchanged grins.
DIESEL: I don’t know about you, but they love us in Baltimore.
RAZOR RAMON: Hey, big mang–I say me and you, we be at the Bash–maybe these punks wanna fight.
DIESEL: Yeah.
EB: I’ll be there.
DIESEL: Bring what you got! The measuring stick just changed around here, buddy! You’re looking at it.
Nash/Diesel then shoved Eric Bischoff, and the two invaders left, Hall posing for the crowd on the way out.
The real moment of ignition, when this would move from an entertaining side story to all-out WCW war, would come in the next week, at the Bash. But this was the stakes being ratcheted up even higher. In 1996, when the world was a lot less “smartened up” to the business of pro wrestling, people weren’t able to follow hirings and firings and contract renegotiations and releases in real time. A month ago, Nash and Hall had been on WWF TV–and here they were, on WCW now. With suspension of disbelief, it was easy to buy into the idea that maybe WWF was building to an inter-promotional storyline in the most thuggish way possible.
As for why it captured the fans’ imagination, Nash himself commented in one of his many shoot interviews:
“Never in the history of, y’know, wrestling, really, has a guy that top jumped… like, y’know, just showed up on a show. Like, y’know, Luger jumped, but I don’t think he was that… y’know, but, um, with Scott jumping, and then like a couple days later, like, y’know, like me jumping, that was the first time when we were basically two of McMahon’s top five guys.”
The Monday Night Wars would, of course, only get uglier.
-LTZ
STRAIGHT TO HELL #2: June 3, 1996
June 7, 2013
STRAIGHT TO HELL is a week-by-week look back at the dramatic rise and spectacular crash of World Championship Wrestling. It focuses on storylines, memorable moments, and bizarre flukes of history, rather than the standard “match recaps and star ratings” format. Each week’s installment will correspond to one actual week of past WCW television, beginning with Memorial Day 1996 and carrying through till the end.
In the first edition of “Straight to Hell,” I set the scene a bit, describing how WCW had become stagnant and WWF had become pandering, leading to a particularly low-stakes Monday Night Wars. That big moment on Memorial Day 1996, when Scott Hall–then still known as “Razor Ramon,” although certainly not referred to as such on WCW Monday Nitro–interrupted a match and cut the famous “You want a war?” promo, shook the entire episode and made it seem like WCW was the most exciting game in town. Play-by-play announcer Eric Bischoff mentioned the “interruption” every segment for the rest of the show, until the climax, when Razor Ramon entered the announcers’ area to issue further threats.
One would think, then, that this next edition of WCW Monday Nitro would be all about the aftershocks of that event. Not quite. In fact, it doesn’t even come up until the end of the show, which we’ll get to later. On the one hand, this is smart booking, to an extent. The whole innovation of the “invasion” was that it appeared to be an unplanned, “shoot” element in an otherwise pre-determined, “worked” program–an aspect usually credited to Larry Zbyszko, one of WCW’s announcers and bookers. By not bringing up the “interruption” at all, it gave credibility to the notion that it was a shoot, that WCW was just trying to act like it never happened because it shouldn’t have happened to begin with. On the other hand, there was nothing else really going on, and it made for an incredibly boring Nitro.
The main storylines going into The Great American Bash, June’s pay-per-view event, were as follows: 1. The Macho Man, Randy Savage, was banned from appearing on WCW programming because Ric Flair had antagonized him into going nuts. 2. Ric Flair and Arn Anderson, members of the venerable bad-guy gang the Four Horsemen, were feuding with Steve “Mongo” McMichael and Kevin Greene, two slumming NFL players, for whatever reason. 3. The Dungeon of Doom, a group of weirdos, was feuding with ex-member the Shark (Earthquake in the WWF), and Big Bubba Rogers (Big Bossman in the WWF) shaved part of Shark’s hair off. 4. Sting and Lex Luger, the Tag Team Champions, were in a feud with the Steiner Brothers, and this storyline largely consisted of Sting and Luger’s friendship being called into question, which would inevitably result in wild shoving matches between whoever happened to be in the room.
None of this was particularly enthralling. Flair, as usual, had a manic presence that was fun to watch, but that was fleeting. The show opened with a promo from the Shark, still missing half of his hair, as he boomed that he was no longer the Shark, because “I’M A MAN–JOHN TENTA–A 500 POUND MAN!” Perhaps his hair was left half-cut as a means of eliciting sympathy, because in no realm does Tenta look like an underdog, but it didn’t work in any case. The WCW World Heavyweight Championship, which was supposed to be the top of the mountain, the thing that everyone in the promotion wanted, was defended by the Giant in a one-minute match against this man:
The most exciting, unexpected thing about the first two-thirds of Nitro was a ten-minute audio glitch around the end of the first hour that left the commentary as indecipherable buzzing. The most entertaining thing was a promo where Mongo McMichael and Kevin Greene worked on their “game plan” for taking on Flair and Arn, which mostly consisted of jabbering excitedly at each other while making crude scribbles on a whiteboard in a parody of football play charts. Kevin Greene spent the entire thing holding a Slim Jim in the general area of his mouth, and occasionally pantomimed biting into it, as if he couldn’t stomach the idea of actually tasting it. When McMichael and Greene hit on the idea of needing a coach against the Horsemen, they both looked at Greene’s snack and their faces lit up, and in unison, they let out a certain someone’s signature “OOOH YEEEAAAHHH…”
Let’s get to the main event, though. Not the main event match–who cares? The real main event, the thing that kept the ball rolling for the next five years. As noted earlier, there was no real follow-up to Scott Hall / Razor Ramon’s “invasion” the previous week. In an in-ring promo, Kevin Sullivan alluded to it while probably veering off-script: “Y’see, there happens to be two wars going in WCW–let the legal department handle the first one–and the second one, Jimmy [Hart]–this Hulkamania–is not dead!” (Sullivan’s thick Boston accent means that a more accurate transcription would use spellings like “depahtment,” but let it never be said that this site is a bastion of accuracy.)
A more subtle follow-up–or rather, lead-in was the return of the “where the big boys play” slogan, something WCW had used during the early 90s while trying to aggressively smear the WWF. “Where the Big Boys Play” was a segment that would show current WWF stars in their days as WCW jobbers (Scott Hall, for his part, was the Diamond Studd). At the start of the show, Tony Schiavone apologizes for the lack of Vader and Johnny B. Badd, both of whom were advertised for Nitro–”They no longer play where the big boys play.”
During a match between the Faces of Fear (Meng and the Barbarian, Dungeon of Doom members) and High Voltage (a debuting jobber tag team, then billed as Ruckus and Chaos, who would stick around for years afterward–another debut on this Nitro was Prince Iaukea), both Tony and Larry Zbyszko got in on it: Larry dropped a “where the big boys play” in reference to WCW in general, and Tony one-upped him later with “where the big boys not only play, but run and bump into each other all the time.” This phrase would return with a grammatically dubious vengeance the next week.
So the stage was set: Bobby Heenan, color commentator for the second hour of Nitro and legendary manager, would be the “coach” of the Four Horsemen at The Great American Bash, and Randy Savage would be the same for Team NFL. After Sting, Luger, and the Steiner Brothers wrestled to a no-contest, Heenan was pleading for Randy Savage not to show up. Suddenly, Scott Hall (or “Razor Ramon,” as he was still thought of at the time) came out of the crowd and toward the announcers’ station, which made the cowardly Heenan immediately bail. Eric Bischoff, WCW’s chief executive and play-by-play announcer, stood up to try and deal with things, only to be shoved back down into his seat by Razor.
ERIC BISCHOFF: Wait a minute. Not again. Not again. Look. You had– You had–
RAZOR RAMON: Sit down, mang. Just relax, chico. Yo, Ken Doll–I had such a good time last week–that I came back for more.
EB: Look– There’s no reason–
RR: Look, man, look look look. Relax, mang, relax. You started it! You wanna go to war? You got a war. You started it–we gonna finish it.
EB: Whaddayou mean, “WE?” You keep coming up with this “WE” stuff–
RR: You know, man. You know who. Hey. Did Daddy Warbucks, he get his money yet?
At this point, Sting, his facepaint mostly sweated off and still breathing heavily from the match, stormed the announcers’ booth from the other side, staring down a mocking Hall.
EB: Hey! Wait a minute– Wait a minute– Stinger– Wait a minute, Stinger– Not here, not now, look– Don’t even dignify it, man.
STING: You came out here last week–
RR: That’s right.
STING: –and said some really horrible things about WCW. Some real horrible things about the Hulkster–about Macho Man–about the Stinger–somewhere along the way you got lost, because–do you have any idea where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby! This is WCW! That’s right!
Eric Bischoff tried to move the mic away from a fired-up Sting, who grabbed it and pulled it right back.
STING: Hold on! And eeevery week you come out here and say you want three of the best of WC–
Razor grabbed the mic, himself.
RR: That’s right! That’s right, mang! Three of the best, mang!
STING: You want three of the best? I don’t see two with you–all I see is you… and me. So why don’t we just do this one on one–right here–right now!
RR: Yo! Yo! You want a fight, mang?
STING: Yeah!
RR: You want a fight? You got one. Only… Nobody tells me–what to do–and, chico–nobody tells me when to do it.
Hall mugged for a moment, then it happened: the spark that really and truly launched the “war.” He took his signature toothpick out of his mouth, and threw it at Sting’s chest. Stinger responded:
STING: Oh, you think so?
There are other, more justifiably famous moments that people cite as crucial in the “invasion” storyline that would become the nWo, but this was the first actual shot in it, the first time people actually came to blows. Within moments, cops flooded the announcers’ booth to remove Hall / Razor, but he still got the last word:
EB: Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Wait a minute!
RR: Okay! Okay, tough guy! I got a little–NO. I got a BIG surprise for you! …next week.
-LTZ
STRAIGHT TO HELL #1: May 27, 1996
May 31, 2013
STRAIGHT TO HELL is a week-by-week look back at the dramatic rise and spectacular crash of World Championship Wrestling. It focuses on storylines, memorable moments, and bizarre flukes of history, rather than the standard “match recaps and star ratings” format. Each week’s installment will correspond to one actual week of past WCW television, beginning with Memorial Day 1996 and carrying through till the end.
Pro wrestling was only starting to get back on its feet in 1996. The boom years of the late 80s and early 90s–Hulkamania ascendant, brothers–had given way to a stagnant atmosphere. The two big national promotions were Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation, and Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling, which was under the creative stewardship of young executive Eric Bischoff. Bischoff, like McMahon, played the on-screen role of announcer, in order to better control the progress of storylines and make sure the right things were hyped. In a shitty little bingo hall in Philadelphia, Extreme Championship Wrestling had a cult following, enough so that WCW was already using Turner’s deep pockets to raid the talent.
The WWF, which survives today as WWE, had the components it needed for its later transformation into a promotion with “attitude”–charismatic badasses like Stone Cold Steve Austin, Shawn Michaels, and Mankind, not to mention survivors of the glory days like Bret Hart, the British Bulldog, and the Undertaker. Despite this, the WWF has historically never really kept a watchful eye on quality control. Shows were bogged down with silly tag teams–wrestling fitness instructors the Bodydonnas, wrestling homoerotic cowboy brothers the Smokin’ Gunns, wrestling fat hillbillies the Godwinns–and stars who either were well past their prime (Jake “The Snake” Roberts, Yokozuna), or just lacked any significant “it” factor to connect with the fans (Savio Vega).
WCW, meanwhile, had raided the WWF’s biggest names, but were almost worse off for having done so. Big paychecks and relaxed schedules drew in top names like Hulk Hogan and the Macho Man Randy Savage, and with them came just about anyone who had ever set foot in a WWF ring–John “Earthquake” Tenta, repackaged as The Shark, the Big Bossman as Big Bubba Rogers, and Ed “Brutus Beefcake” Leslie as any number of bizarre gimmicks. WCW mainstays like Sting and Ric Flair found themselves often playing second fiddle to Hogan and Savage, or shoved out of the picture entirely. At the most recent Hogan-headlining pay-per-view, Uncensored ’96, Hogan and Savage took on a whole army of bad guys in a “Doomsday Cage Match,” something so baffling and misjudged it almost needs to be seen to be believed.
The WWF had recently lost two of its bigger stars: Kevin Nash, the seven-foot-tall “dude with attitude” known as Diesel, who went from Shawn Michaels’s bodyguard to WWF world champ in record time, and Scott Hall, the faux-Cuban Razor Ramon, who oozed machismo and thuggish menace. They brought in a “fake” Diesel and Razor Ramon, as if out of reflexive spite; they’d already done the same thing when Hogan and Savage left, putting out mean-spirited promos about “Billionaire Ted.”
On May 27, 1996, in Macon, Georgia, WCW broadcast its first-ever live, two-hour edition of Monday Nitro. This was part of the ongoing “Monday Night Wars”–WCW’s Nitro pitted against WWF’s Monday Night Raw–and WCW’s deeper pockets allowed it to have a better-looking set, more pyrotechnics, and two hours of cable airtime a night, compared to Raw’s single hour. It kicked off as you might expect a WCW show from the period to kick off: hype for a Sting vs. Scott Steiner match, hype for the Giant (now WWE’s Big Show, then billed as Andre the Giant’s evil son) in a World Heavyweight Championship match against the Shark, and hype for Arn Anderson and Ric Flair’s upcoming match with NFL players Steve “Mongo” McMichael and Kevin Greene at the Great American Bash pay-per-view. (They show a promo video of Greene and Mongo working out, in which Greene appears to be nothing so much as Rob Riggle’s roided-out uncle.) The dominant faction was the bad-guy group known as the Dungeon of Doom, a gaggle of big guys with silly looks and gimmicks who more or less existed just to be knocked down like bowling pins by the Hulkster.
About half an hour into the show, it happens. During a match between Steve Doll (who looks like an off-brand Mr. Perfect knockoff) and the Mauler (who looks like a guy), the crowd suddenly flips out. If you look in the back left corner, you can see why: emerging through the crowd is Razor Ramon himself, tanned and oiled and dressed in matching jeans and a denim vest, his hair like an oil spill, a toothpick wedged between his molars. He casually strolls over the barricade and demands a microphone, and just like that, Steve Doll and the Mauler are shoved off the stage of history–their match dropped as if it had never even started. Razor Ramon speaks:
“You people… You know who I am. But you don’t… know why… I’m here. Where is Billionaire Ted? Where is the Nacho Man? That punk can’t even get in the building. Me? I go wherever I want… whenever I want. And where, oh where, is Scheme Gene? ‘Cause I… got a scoop… for you. When that Ken doll lookalike… when that weatherman wannabe comes out here later tonight… I got a challenge for him… for Billionaire Ted… for the Nacho Man… and for anybody else in, uh, Dubya-Cee-Dubya, huh-huck-huck. Hey. You wanna go to war? You want a war? You’re gonna get one.”
The crowd reacted with scattered, muted boos. Nothing in the history of national televised wrestling had prepared them for a storyline like this. At no point during the broadcast was Razor Ramon referred to by name, and Bischoff–the “Ken doll lookalike”–acted in keeping with this truly unprecedented occasion. He can be heard saying “Get out of here, get him out of here” during the Television title match between Lex Luger and Maxx, as if Razor was really trying to storm the announcers’ booth. When he spoke about Razor’s promo throughout the show, he did so in tones of awed disbelief: “And in case you just joined us, you may have heard that we were, uh, rudely interrupted here earlier on in the broadcast. Uh, not only am I not going to dignify the interruption by mentioning the individual involved, I certainly don’t want to incur the wrath of any legal teams that are hovering around like vultures anywhere, so we won’t, uh, name names. Everybody knows who he is. And he wants to say his piece. He can do so, but he can do it at the end of this broadcast… not now.”
The interesting thing here is that according to Hall, while WCW — and specifically Eric Bischoff — came up with the “invasion” angle (like the “You want a war?” line), their initial plan was for him to just stroll down the center aisle like any other interview. It was Larry Zbyszko, Hall’s mentor from the National Wrestling Alliance) who pushed for Hall–then still known as “Razor Ramon,” at least in theory–to enter through the crowd and to have the wrestlers in the ring react with confusion to the point of appearing to break character (a “shoot” moment, as opposed to a fake, or “worked” moment). These “worked shoots” would become integral to WCW’s style, and later its downfall.
Lord Steven Regal, who beat Das Wunderkind Alex Wright in a match later on in the show, became the first WCW wrestler to speak out against this seeming invasion, in a post-match promo that began “It’s Memorial Day… my father will be so pleased I beat Junior Adolf there!” After some ranting, he got to Razor Ramon: “Then… we’ve got somebody from another wrestling organization wanting to take a war. Don’t forget who’s in within[?], sunshine, because I’m going nowhere and it’s time I had my bloody say about what’s going on around here!”
Despite the spectre of “the interruption” hanging over the broadcast, the show went on more or less as normal. The Giant and the Shark (a former Dungeon of Doom member who’d been kicked out) had their match and set up a Shark/Dungeon feud. Hardwork Bobby Walker had a match against Brad Armstrong where the crowd cheered most vociferously for the moments when Walker nearly slipped off the top rope and broke his neck (moments, plural). Sting and Scott Steiner had their main event, which descended into a wild brawl between half the roster. Then we cut back to Eric Bischoff and Bobby “the Brain” Heenan in the announcers’s booth, where another interruption took place:
RAZOR RAMON: Hey! Lookie here…
ERIC BISCHOFF: You wanted your say–
RR: Ken doll… you got such a big mouth. And we? We are sick of it.
EB: Whaddayou mean, who’s we–
RR: You know who. Hey. This… is where the big boys play? What a joke. I tell you what. You go tell Billionaire Ted, you tell him… get three of his very, very best. Maybe, uh… maybe the Nacho Man… OOOOOH–No. Hey, maybe, maybe you get the Stinger! Woo-oo-oo. I so scared. You go get anybody you want, because we–
EB: Who do you mean, WE–
RR: WE–ARE TAKING OVER. You wanna go to war? You got one. Only… only… let’s do it right. In the ring, where it matters. Not on no microphones… not in no newspapers… or dirt sheets… let’s do it in the ring… where it matters. If uh, if Billionaire Ted and his big boys, if they got, uh, any guts–
EB: You’re stepping over the line–
RR: Because WE are coming down here–
EB: You’re stepping over the line–
RR: –and like it or not–
EB: Not.
RR: –we are taking over.
Razor then sets down the microphone and flicks his toothpick right at the chest of a stunned, mute Bobby the Brain. As Biscoff tells him, “You’re outta here, you’re outta here,” the invader says, off-mic, just loud enough to be picked up: “See you soon.” There would be fine-tuning along the way–such as “Razor Ramon” defaulting to “Scott Hall” for trademark reasons–but by and large, the next nearly five years of WCW were created in these two promo segments. How could anything else on the shows compare to a spectacle like this? It couldn’t. WCW was about to become the hottest thing in wrestling history… and then shoot itself not just in the foot, but blow its own leg off with a land mine. But that’s not for a while yet. Right now, let them have this moment of triumph. Whatever else they’d done, they at least earned this.
-LTZ
Matt Seneca’s Very Fine Comix
March 5, 2013
Matt Seneca‘s new Very Fine Comix imprint has released its first two products in rapid succession. First, Daredevil 12″ (#56 of 100) is a folded-copy-paper zine-format comic wherein Marvel Comics superheroes Daredevil and the Black Widow have graphic sex for a while, until the story just sort of ends. “Christ it’s cold,” Daredevil murmurs at the beginning, in a nod to his superhuman sensitivity and his Catholicism. “I’ll warm you up,” Black Widow replies, and then it’s off to the races.
I have, in a pile of books to be read, an actual mass market fiction book titled Rule 34. Anyone with Google and sin in their hearts can amass a trove of Daredevil porn to match the libraries of the ancient world in scope. In 1983, or even 1993, Seneca’s Daredevil 12″ would be transgressive in its subversion. Post-internet-porn, the only aggressively esoteric aspect of the material is that it’s printed on paper and he’s charging money for it.
The sex itself in Daredevil 12″ is conventional, which is odd. Why use Big Two superheroes at all unless you’re going to get really weird with it? Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss 2 is still fresh in the comics intelligentsia’s cultural memory. Next to that, the only appropriate reactions to Daredevil 12″ seem to be relief or disappointment, depending on one’s taste for extremity. Seneca only gets playful when he messes with the design of things — aping Paolo Rivera’s innovation of how Daredevil’s powers can be represented visually in some panels, or swimming in the vein of Guido Crepax (who gets called out on a billboard in the background of the two leads sixty-nining). In execution, it comes off more like Guy Peellart in things like The Adventures of Jodelle, minus Peellaert’s flow-like-water psychedelia.
In the end, there’s something plain and xvideos.com-like about Daredevil 12″. It’s two people in silly costumes (well, one — Black Widow is just a naked redhead, whereas Daredevil keeps his longjohns bunched around his hips like a kid at a urinal) having sex, with a minor Satanic outro that honestly isn’t disruptive enough. The only 100% successful part of the book is the cover, this rough-and-ready shot of a sweaty Daredevil in extreme close-up, biting his lower lip in an awkward Gil Kane angle. The rest of the zine doesn’t deliver on that great, ugly image’s promise, nor does it answer the important questions, like how a superhero whose sense of touch is a million times more vivid than the normal person’s would feel about teeth grazing him during a blowjob, or whether he shaves or waxes (bereft as he is of pubic hair), since both of those would probably be hell.
The second Seneca release on Very Fine is Trap: The Magazine About Drugs #1 (#42 of 100), another zine-format comic. Instead of a single narrative, it strings together a bunch of short comics and single-page pinups, mostly about women doing drugs. If nothing else, these sketches — and make no mistake, most of them do feel like sketches and fragments — have more energy than anything in Daredevil 12″, and come off as more lurid and exploitation-movie-esque than his actual sexploitation comic.
If Trap can be compared to anything, it’s Vice Magazine, with its scattered reportage, refusal to take a position, and cherishing of young urban females making questionable-at-best decisions. In his back-cover editorial, “Trap Rap,” Seneca just seems confused about what he’s doing: “[The drug experience] can be good like when you see you needn’t take everything so serious or realize how fun listening to Skrillex on percocet or MDMA is. Or it can be bad like when the .32 in your hand is shaking like the San Andreas fault as you hold it on the dude who is supposed to be your best bro and scream that you need the rest of the yay more than him and you’re eyeing the drawer where his cash is as your septum caves in. … The stories in this magazine are about people who ACT — without anything holding them back.” Those two scenarios he pitches would both make perfectly decent comics. But Trap itself is just a batch of moments: people doing drugs or living the fallout, without context, build-up, consequence, or any of that. The closing story has three panels, and the person who ACTS in it snorts a line of heroin and then hugs her knees to her chest while on the nod. To its credit, Trap really does reflect the drug experience: getting a good idea and then losing half of it on a ray of sunlight, trying to cling to what’s left.
-LTZ
Katie Skelly has the coolest taste in movies in all of comics. That’s a subjective judgment, but this is a blog, so it’s no less absolute. Here is some proof, though, for the people who need it. When a comic book gets tagged with the dreaded “cinematic” adjective, it usually means that it’s ripping off a mass-market CGI summer adventure flick, or that it’s ripping off Bryan Hitch. “Cinematic” dialogue is bad Quentin Tarantino, or worse, Whit Stillman. It’s rare that a comic book reminds me of the movies in a good way, and thus, Katie Skelly is a rare cartoonist.
Skelly calls to mind a figure like the young Leos Carax, when he was making movies like Boy Meets Girl. Like early Carax, Skelly absorbs the influence of films — especially the canonical French New Wave, films still suave in their middle age — and synthesizes their spirit, attitude, and decor. Operation Margarine #1 (self-published, #14 of 150) is the first reel of the badass biker mama movie that Claude Chabrol never quite got around to making in the sixties.
In Operation Margarine, rich girl Margarine gets out of a mental health facility and teams up with tough girl Bon-Bon. They sock a jerk and hit the road on motorcycles. To be continued. It reeks of (to steal an LCD Soundsystem lyric) “borrowed nostalgia” — all of the obvious call-outs are to things from well before her generation. Margarine’s Jean Seberg haircut, the mod fashions, the Easy Rider vibe, girls named “Bon-Bon”… And yet there’s a distinct love for the stuff, shot through with Skelly’s confidence in her own voice. A bad comic would make me wonder why I didn’t just watch a movie; a good one reminds me why I love them, and Operation Margarine is very good indeed.
As a follow-up, Skelly contributed the short comic “A Winter’s Dream” — based on an Arthur Rimbaud poem — to Study Group Comics’ website. “A Winter’s Dream,” even moreso than Operation Margarine, shows why Skelly stands out. It’s not just her taste, or her whimsy: it’s her figures, and what she does with them. She draws noodle people with bobble heads. They all have big doe eyes and noses like pinky fingers. Their skulls are round and maybe soft to the touch. These people are fragile and adorable, which is why the sexual delirium of “A Winter’s Dream,” or the violence of Operation Margarine works: these people are too cute to fuck, too stringy to swing a fist, and yet that’s exactly what they end up doing.
-LTZ
How People Find This Website
March 4, 2013
Bolland’s Teen Titans
March 3, 2013
Presented without comment, since it’s Sunday so get off my back, Brian Bolland’s four covers for Tales of the Teen Titans:
When I sat down to write this, I googled around trying to find an article I wanted to pull a quote from that I hazily half-remember reading: it had compared the music of Hype Williams (A/K/A Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland) to something you’d experience while under the influence of a concussion. I didn’t find it, but some spam result spat out in its summary: “Concussion the spirit molecule.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Hype Williams operate via obfuscation. Everything is referential (to the point of outright appropriation), but none of those references seem to add up to anything. Witness their mixtape The Attitude Era, laden with references to late-1990s World Wrestling Federation gimmicks, and comprised wholly of outtakes. It figures, then, that “Don’t Look Back, That’s Not Where You’re Going” — a three-track vinyl EP prefacing Inga Copeland’s upcoming solo album — comes in a plain white paper sleeve, housed within a black cardboard one. The B-side of the vinyl has a featureless white-label sticker, and the A-side is a photo of a woman who looks a bit like Copeland (but who also looks a bit like someone I went to university with, come to think of it), smiling politely. The record’s most prominent identifying mark is the Nike swoosh on her sweatshirt. So it remains in the labyrinth.
Yet the sound of the thing inches towards an exit. On all three tracks, Inga sings (a potential album title if there ever was one). She uses a girlish, stateless-but-Eurocentric croon that calls to mind a school play about Nico, and she sings elliptical lyrics that skate just short of making a direct point. On the first cut, “So Far So Clean,” she intones (moreso than singing, really) over an unsteady, shivery bed of slow retro synths and what sounds like a bullfrog fucking a broom. The break in the middle is disruptive and overpowering, sounding like a different song entirely cut-and-pasted over the original and trying to dominate it utterly… this is Hype Williams pop, and it’s wonderful.
Not like this is an artist who will let anything get comfortable. “So Far So Clean” leads right into “Speak,” which sounds like a halfway conventional dance tune — easily the most baffling thing Copeland and co. could pull. (The tracks here were produced, apparently, by Martyn and Scratcha DVA, but it’s not like there’s a credits sheet.) Its see-saw synth stabs and loops aren’t enough to distract from the insistence of the bass’s cock pummel posturing, and I found myself utterly confused by a song that you could just flat out dance to, no qualifiers.
The b-side is “A&E,” which finds a spot between the two extremes of the a-side and stays there for five minutes of pulsing, low-key delirium. This is music for when you’re sweaty on a cold day and the furniture is floating up toward the ceiling. Copeland’s voice — “On and on and on and on” — hangs above a smoked-out pirate radio beat that has the theoretical energy of the early 90s but the swampiness of post-historical now, a luscious — or maybe viscous — low end that tugs you downward into it. Music for the back of the brain, for when you’re moving and you don’t even realize it. The only question with Inga Copeland, with the music, with the packaging, with the new World Music label, with Hype Williams: What’s the catch? And will they ever deign to tell us?
Dead Robins on the Side of the Road
March 1, 2013
Robin died. A different Robin than the first one that died — both were bratty punks with a tendency toward murder, but this one, people had come to enjoy a bit. The first time, the comics readership had a choice, and voted to let the little bastard die; this time, he’s just been taken off the game board, no reader participation invited. It’s provoked quite a lot of reactions, largely because it’s a big “important” story, like the time Johnny Storm died, and has been promoted with the same gusto. My favorite of these has been Colin Smith’s call of “why does no one seem to care that we just looked at a ten-year-old getting stabbed in the belly,” once again proving at length that he is troublesomely sane for a comic book fan.
DC Comics has slated a whole month of mourning across the bevy of Batman books, although they’ve again skimped out on reader participation by not polybagging them with black “R”-logo armbands. Then again, I’m not sure anyone would be right to mourn Damian Wayne, our young Robin. For one, within the logic of the story, he’s the grandson of constant death-cheater Ra’s al Ghul, and a dunk in the revivifying Lazarus Pit is a destiny I’d bet money on. For another, even if that’s not how it happens, we’re living in a year when Vibe has his own comic book, and if Vibe of all people won’t stay dead, no one will. For a third, would it even be that great to keep him around?
“Yes,” cry out the fans of Damian Wayne, while also personally insulting me. “He’s a great character and a breath of fresh air and he and Dick have crazy chemistry and blah blah.” Okay, that’s fine, and I hear you on that; I’m no small fan of the Dick-and-Damian Batman and Robin myself. But let’s look at what being a Batman sidekick gets you: a decade or so (give or take forty years in Dick’s case) as the Boy Wonder, and then the sales department dictates a newer, fresher take (or a return to a more classical i.e. guaranteed-appeal take), and then what?
I’m not going to broach the issue of “disrespecting characters” because as it turns out, I’m real and they’re not. As it is, in my imagined future for the Batman books, Damian will end up dead for a minute, dunked in a Lazarus Pit, insane thereafter, and an enemy of the Bat-family until such time as he can be pulled back into the fold as the prodigal “bad boy” (i.e. when Jason “Red Hood” Todd’s appeal no longer translates into sales). Or, he comes back, returns to being Robin, and eventually transitions into a full-time post-Robin gig as Redbird or something (see also Tim “Red Robin” Drake). Or, he comes back and then is written out and in and out and in and out and in until the enduring social profile of the character is the idea that liking them makes you part of a persecuted set (see also Stephanie “Batgirl” Brown and Cassandra “Batgirl” Cain). (Eventually, in any of the above scenarios, Batman presides over a legion of twenty-something-year-old acolytes who were all born in different generations.) Or, he stays dead, and the New 52′s thirst for blood is decried all ’round.
None of these seem like winning propositions to me. Yes, someone could come along and make decent comic books out of them, but someone could also come along and make decent comic books out of Firestorm, so let’s not get crazy here. I mean, it sucks that Damian died, sure. I just dread to find out how badly it could suck if he lives.
-LTZ
DAVID BOWIE’S NEW ALBUM COVER: An Appraisal
January 8, 2013
What I do while ignoring this blog:
me: the cover to the new album rules
Dustin: link??
me: http://thequietus.com/articles/11062-david-bowie-the-next-day-jonathan-barnbrook-cover-artwork
brb work
Sent at 1:05 PM on Tuesday
Dustin: i like it, bowie found ms paint
me: hahahah yes
Sent at 1:14 PM on Tuesday
Dustin: i hope he legitimately did discover it and now it is what he will make all future album artwork with
Sent at 1:21 PM on Tuesday
me: hahahaha
more like
he summons a designer into a kush smoke filled room in his manhattan penthouse at midnight, weird crowleyan artifacts all over
“i’ve made… a discovery” bowie rasps through the smoke, slowly turning his sony vaio toward the designer to show an mspaint screen he drew blotchy stick figures on with the spray can tool, and signed ‘BOWIE’ in letters made from rectangle blocks
“will a million dollars for the new cover be sufficient?” the designer sweats so much he passes out, which bowie takes as a yes
Sent at 1:23 PM on Tuesday
Dustin: hahahahaha
that needs to be posted somewhere
me: on it
Sent at 1:26 PM on Tuesday
