- 2 months ago
Boundaries are built to be pushed, but WCW didn't know when to stop.
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00:00WCW may have died almost 20 years ago, but it lasts long in the memory.
00:05As World Championship Wrestling started to struggle and lost its foothold in the war,
00:08they did what a lot of companies do and panicked. Shock TV sounded like a great idea to try and
00:14turn things around, so they did whatever the hell they thought they could get away with.
00:18Turns out, wasn't such a great concept at all. I'm Simon for WhatCulture,
00:22please make sure you subscribe, and it's times WCW went too far, and the spike heard around
00:28the world. We'll begin with a curveball, as this happened way before WCW was on the verge of
00:32shutting down, and instead occurred in the late 80s. The rule of the day then was that you could
00:37not put blood on television, something Dusty Rhodes had issues with, because man, that guy liked to
00:43bleed. Unlike Jesse Ventura in Predator, he had the time. After Ted Turner had bought Jim Crockett
00:48Promotions and renamed it though, he allowed the American Dream to keep on booking the promotion,
00:53because he knew the man was a genius. The only thing he asked was that, yes, you can't put blood
00:58on TV. Have a guess what Dusty Rhodes did. Deciding he wanted to turn the road warriors into bad guys,
01:04despite the fact they were loved, Rhodes came up with an angle where Animal would stab him in the
01:08eye using their famous shoulder pads. It was all leading to a match at Starcade 88 where the future
01:14Legion of Doom would take on Dusty and Sting, and although Turner was livid, he waited till the event
01:19was done before telling Rhodes that he could go home for good. And yeah, to be fair, this was more
01:23of a case of Dusty going too far as opposed to WCW, but it remains a long-talked-about example of a
01:29company biting itself in the ass. It wasn't massively over, or was something fans were invested in,
01:34and all it did was create controversy, and the finger poke of doom.
01:38The 4th of January 1999 was a night that changed wrestling forever, and not in a good way. Well,
01:43no, from a WWE point of view, it was great, because it was when Mick Foley won the world title for the
01:48first time. But WCW went in a very different direction, and pretty much pissed off their
01:54entire fanbase. These two events clashed as well, because just before we would get this live fiasco,
01:59commentator Tony Schiavone was instructed to tell World Championship Wrestling Nitro viewers that
02:03they shouldn't turn over to the taped Raw show, because all that was happening was mankind was
02:08winning the belt. He then finished that off with, ha, that's gonna put butts in seats, and as soon as he
02:13had finished those words, around 600,000 people changed the channel. Whoops. They made the right
02:19cool mind, because if they had stuck with Nitro, they would have been mortified. WCW had their own
02:24world title contest on this evening, as Kevin Nash, who had just beaten Goldberg's 173-match winning
02:30streak, was taking on longtime friend and now rival Hulk Hogan. Wasn't the worst thing in the world on
02:35paper. What was, is that despite all the build and the flipping story, Hogan poked Nash in the chest,
02:40he went down like he'd been shot, and the NWO had been reformed, which was the last thing anybody
02:46wanted. The audience felt screwed, the competition was having a feel-good moment on the other station,
02:50and if you want to say this is when WCW went into complete freefall, I don't think I'm gonna argue
02:55with you. The Madness with Jeff Jarrett and Hulk Hogan. Wrestling is at its best when it's not
03:00complicated and makes sense. Of course it is. Some trained athletes hate each other and they want to
03:05have a fight. That's it. You don't need to blur the lines to the point of madness. Vince Russo didn't
03:10really agree with that statement. His whole MO was to confuse the fans as much as possible to make
03:16you think that wrestling used to be fake, but maybe now it was real. But the amount of nonsense he
03:20brought to WCW in the year 2000 was something else topped off by what happened at the Bash at the
03:25Beach pay-per-view. I will do my best to explain. Jeff Jarrett was scheduled to defend his WCW
03:31title against Hulk Hogan and was gonna win. Hogan however invoked his creative control clause from
03:36his contract and said he wouldn't lose, leaving Jarrett to actually come out, lay down in the ring
03:41and tell Hulk to just pin him because of all this. So we were taking backstage shenanigans and just
03:47showing it to the audience. For some reason Hogan then cut a promo on Russo saying how awful all this
03:52was, before Vinny himself came out later and said all of that was null and void and Jarrett was gonna
03:57take on Booker T instead. What? The plan was for Hogan to return down the line and have a champion
04:02versus champion feud, but mercifully we never got to that because higher ups in the company
04:07actually saw some sense. This was terrible 20 years ago and it is terrible now. Miss Hancock's
04:13forgotten pregnancy. Okay, brace yourself for this. On the 13th of August 2000, Miss Hancock and Major
04:19Guns, and yes those names are what you think they are, had a fight in some mud. Because why not?
04:24Guns won after kicking Hancock in the stomach and it was heavily implied that she was pregnant
04:29and this kick may have cost her the child. Oh boy. Over the next few months this all became part of
04:35Nitro as onscreen lover David Flair and Hancock went through all the emotions, including adultery,
04:40and naturally the big reveal that David wasn't the father. The narrative then became a case of who
04:44is the dad? He and Buff Bagwell even had a first blood DNA match. Flub off. The spotlight was then
04:52shone on Jeff Jarrett when all of a sudden it just stopped. The story vanished from TV,
04:57as did Hancock, only to return a few months later with Sean Stasiak by his side. To make this worse,
05:03she had a stroller as well and then claimed she made up the pregnancy for attention and that her baby
05:08was actually Stasiak. Kill me. Tank Abbott threatens murder. Towards the end of their life,
05:15WCW loved pole matches. Or Vince Russo did. Every stupid thing found its way onto a pole,
05:20including a mouse by Agra and even Judy Bagwell. I mean, she was on a forklift, but it was the
05:25same damn thing. Another of these treats was when Tank Abbott fought Big Al in a leather jacket on a
05:30pole match. It was just these two punching each other for four minutes until Tank got the jacket
05:34and won. Who cares, right? Exactly. It was afterwards when things picked up. Why? Well, Abbott got a
05:41switchblade and held it to Al's throat, telling him that he was, and I quote,
05:45going to f***ing kill him. Tony Schiavone tried to explain that this meant Tank was going to cut
05:50his beard, but there was one problem. Big Al didn't have a beard. Nobody actually knew what
05:55was going on or how this happened, with the only real takeaway being that an actual murder may be
06:01about to happen. Ladies and gentlemen, WCW. And Terry Funk saves Chris Candido from a horse.
06:07As was the way in the late 90s and early 2000s, you had to have a hardcore title. ECW would start
06:12a trend that everybody jumped on, with both WWF and WCW kind of treating theirs as a joke. You did
06:19see a lot of hard-hitting action though, so I suppose it was fine. In the year 2000, Terry Funk
06:23and Chris Candido were fighting over it on an episode of Thunder when things got out of hand.
06:28The match went all the way to the back, then outside onto a flatbed truck that sped away from
06:33the arena. I mean, what the hell was going on? The pair wound up at a ranch, because of course
06:37they did, and you know what? Funk and Candido actually had a pretty fun fight. Unfortunately,
06:42the nearby horses hadn't been clued up about this, and after Terry had hit Chris with a
06:47pile driver, the nervous steed kicked out, coming way too close to smashing Candido in
06:53the skull. If it had connected with Chris' head, he likely would have died. There's nothing wrong
06:57with this kind of scrapping principle, but just do it away from the damn horse.
07:013. Oklahoma
07:03Everybody was taking potshots during the Monday Night Wars. Some were stupid, most were unnecessary,
07:08but WCW's parody of Jim Ross portrayed by Ed Ferrara known as Oklahoma was straight up
07:13mean-spirited and horrible. Most fans knew that JR had suffered from horrendous bouts of Bell's
07:18palsy throughout his career, and yet WCW thought it'd be fine to take shots at him for his illness.
07:23This is very, very wrong. Eventually, the sheer outlandishness of it was picked up on,
07:28and that part of the character was dropped, but for some reason, Oklahoma continued and was an
07:32integral part of Nitro. He became a super misogynist, and the whole thing hit rock bottom
07:36when the fake JR brought out then-WCW Cruiserweight Champion Medusa so a doctor could lambast her.
07:43I mean, it was awful. It was just awful. The sheer lunacy of this also saw him win that title,
07:48becoming the heaviest champion in history, and this was bad from the start, and it got worse,
07:53worse, and worse, and worse. And what did we do it for? To take the mick out of a guy that was
07:58universally beloved by fans. Great work, you geniuses.
08:01Number two, Canyon and the Kemper Arena. Before we start, I don't think this was on Canyon. In fact,
08:06anytime someone talks about the man, it's nothing but glowing praise. Either way, though, WCW should
08:12never have done this. If you recognize the name Kemper Arena, it's because it's where Owen Hart
08:16tragically fell to his death on the 23rd of May, 1999. Remains one of the worst things to ever
08:22happen within pro wrestling, and 21 years on, it's just as heartbreaking. It never ever should have
08:28gone down. Despite that, however, a little shy of the first anniversary of this, World Championship
08:33Wrestling thought it would be a good idea to have a pay-per-view in the same venue and have a wrestler
08:38take a stupid, needless bump as the announcers sold it like something was seriously wrong. So
08:43essentially aping the Owen Hart situation. What the hell? Teasing death regardless is bad enough,
08:49but to do it like this was unthinkable. Canyon was shot off the top of a cage by Mike Awesome as
08:54everyone sold it as if the worst had happened. What does make it worse is that both guys would
08:59pass away within the same decade, and this is not why we watch wrestling. It is just not.
09:05Number one, the final solution. This one baffles my brain, especially as a Jewish man. What on earth
09:11was anybody thinking? As Hulk Hogan had arrived in WCW, of course the promotion was going to jump on the
09:17whole, what monster will stop him gimmick that had been working for years. Before long,
09:21a stupid group called the Alliance to end Hulkamania had been established, and featured
09:25the likes of Ric Flair, Arn Anderson and Meng. If you want to know who else was in it though,
09:29the final solution. How? The real life Jeep Swenson was given this name, and thankfully after a sea of
09:35complaints, it got changed. It wasn't that great as it was switched to the ultimate solution,
09:39and management's claim that they had no idea around the historical meaning of this was even more
09:43insulting, if you're lying your assholes, and if you're telling the truth, why on earth aren't you
09:48more educated? This really was bottom of the barrel stuff, and if it was done to garner some
09:53kind of attention, it got all the wrong headlines, so nobody benefited anyway. As some interesting
09:58trivia to end this as positively as we can, Swenson actually went on to play Bane in the Batman and
10:03Robin movie, although sadly passed away two months after it was released. Man, oh dear.
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