World Championship Wrestling 4/13/85 THOUGHTS

World Championship Wrestling 4/13/85

PAS: Phil Schneider
LB: Lee Benaka

PAS: Two weeks in a row Buddy Landell takes squash of the week, as he just beats the shit out Sam Houston. I don't remember Landell being stiff, but he is slapping on the cravate, kneeing Houston in the back of the head, and knocking his teeth out with a beautiful dropkick., punches in the temple. Almost a Johnny Valentinish beating which isn't what a remember Budro being about. His post match promo was great too, and you get the sense that if he could keep his nose clean he would have been huge. (How big a snowplow do you have to be to get fired from a promotion with Jimmy Valient and Tully Blanchard?)

LB: Buddy Landell is Fit Finlay, as Phil said while we watched this. This was a great way to build up Landell as a threat to Magnum T.A., as the week before Tully Blanchard had much more trouble putting Sam Houston away than Landell. Houston got no offense whatsoever, and everything from Landell looked crisp and brutal.

PAS: Only two Dusty promos this week. His first promo about families made absolutely no sense, but was really awesome. "The Dog family and the cat family and this family and that family"

LB: The sight of Dusty, Jimmy Valiant, and Buzz Sawyer in the interview booth, with Dusty using the Russians' chain as a leash for Buzz, was impressive.

PAS: Man Baby Doll was looking particularly grotesque this week. She looked like Gollum in drag queen makeup. Tully cuts a great cocksucker interview about how expensive his lifestyle was, with his dilated pupils really hitting home the truth of the statement.

LB: Baby Doll just should never wear a suit. It just doesn't help matters at all. I always love promos when heels complain about how losing a title has resulted in severe financial setbacks for them.

PAS: Ole and Arn demolishing Rocky King and Gene Ligon was just beautiful televised studio squash wrestling. Classic Andersons with both guys ripping and tearing at the arms of King and Ligon. Ole is a fucking killing machine in this, every time one of them gets to their feet he just does an amateur takedown or a leg pick and starts pounding on them. I go back and forth between this and the Landell match, but their was some quality beatings administered on this episode.

LB: The violence in this squash was just breathtaking. Again, neither jobber got any offense in. Ole's top rop knee-to-the-back of the standing Rocky King gave me a backache. I also liked Ole's constant snarling when he was in the ring administering his energetic beatings. This is not the Ole I remembered.

PAS: We luckily get two Andersons promos. It is shocking how bad Arn is at this point, but Ole is kingsized. That calm sadistic asshole, already slipping in some subtle Ole style race baiting "You know Thunderbolt the Anderson we don't pay people like you any mind."

LB: Ole also called Thunderbolt lazy and claimed that he just laid there during Arn's attack on Thunderbolt the week before. Another thing I always like is when a heel provides commentary on a film clip where the narraration has very little relation to what is happening in the ring. Ole also was wearing a blue "demin-look" t-shirt with white stitching and his name ironed on, probably at a shopping mall store where you could get custom-made iron on shirts. The care and craft that went into the shirt makes Ole's demeanor in and out of the ring even more chilling.

PAS: Buzz Sawyer v. Ivan Koloff started out slow, but really built to a very cool match. Ivan worked over the arm which may have been a match placement problem as it followed the Andersons clinic in the previous match. Still it led to a cool second half of the match, where Buzz would go for a grounded bearhug and Ivan would escape by punching the arm. Buxx was also a complete suplex machine in this, and he had great snap on his stuff.

LB: This was a great long match, and the run-in ending almost made you want to see Rhodes/Valiant/Sawyer challenge for the Russians' six-man belt. That is, until you saw the two other Russians' matches in the second hour....

PAS: Second half of the show was really rough. You had a ridicoulously long and meandering Nikta squash, were he just kept doing snap mares and chinlocks. Nikita is being pushed as a killer and he is going long with Josh Stroud. Just total crap. Then we get a KUNG FU SUPERSTAR tag match which at least had Barbarian and Abby at ringsized to distract me. Then a long dull Krusher Kruschev squash and those two squashes really make me not want to see the Dusty/Boogie/Buzz v. Russians match the whole show was setting up.

LB: Goodness, the Nikita match would never end. I'm not sure what they were trying to prove there. I predicted when I saw the jobber in the Nikita match, "This won't last long," but I was very wrong. The Graham/Barbarian tag at least saved us from too much of the sad spectacle that was Superstar Billy Graham at that time. Tony Schiavone was amusing when he speculated that the Barbarian hailed from the jungles of the Amazon. Phil commented that things were veering into serious MMA Bizarro-land between Kung Fu Graham and now the Royce-trained Barbarian. And why have Abby at ringside if he wasn't even going to take a whack at someone? At least the announcers showed proper alarm at his presence, but it's not like Abby was really threatening anyone, except through his presence. And Krusher Kruschev is useless.