Found Footage Friday: WCW in Manchester 1993~!

ER: We get a full 1993 WCW house show from a week long UK tour that had great sounding matches and really big crowds every night. This one is from Manchester and looks great. If there's a new Vader/Cactus match we get to talk about, it really wouldn't matter what the rest of the card looked like, but this is great. Aside from Vader/Cactus, we get something even more valuable, in a different way. We get fully into the handheld spirit of Dad Recording Events With a Camcorder by starting with some incredible man on the street interviews asking Impossibly British people about their favorite wrestlers. This is a professionally shot and assembled show and these interviews are supposedly professional, but it's crazy that they sold 8,000 tickets to a show and seemingly couldn't find more than a couple fans who had ever heard of WCW. This is essential. 

By the third interview they are talking to a shabby bearded man in a stocking cap who looks like Badly Drawn Boy if he had a bad childhood with a really strict loveless father. The man says his favorite wrestlers are Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo, because he saw them live a coupla times and saw them on TV. Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo have not wrestled in over 10 and 20 years, respectively. The man started acting like he was being asked too probing a question about his taste in wrestling. One Brilliant older lady says she loves Marcus Alexander Bagwell and then politely seemed embarrassed to say that she doesn't like Dustin Rhodes! She calls Barry Windham "Big Barry" and asks if he's married, then yells to her friend Barbara. She shows mild disgust at the mention of Big Van Vader. There are numerous kids with Arn Anderson signs. The most British kid in the fucking world wearing a bowtie and talking about how much he loves Sting. 

Johnny B Badd vs. Scotty Flamingo

MD: Good opener. It was obvious almost immediately that Scotty knew exactly what he had with this crowd. I'm not going back to looking at gates around this time but he was probably not in front of a crowd like this often. They were going to react to everything he did, every forced break in the corner, every complaint about a hairpull that didn't happen, ever stop in the action to interact with them, and he milked it to the fullest. Badd was used to these openers by now and stooged Scotty around for a bit before getting dragged down for most of the match. Scotty's stuff was varied and credible and they worked a few believable hope spots in before going to an energetic stretch of Badd coming back with a few inversions, be it Scotty reversing him off of multiple whips into the corner or just ducking the KO Punch. It wasn't until Johnny snuck in a late match headscissors takeover that he got Scotty off balance to hit it. This was exactly what it ought to have been and the crowd responded accordingly. 

ER: Sorry, Scotty Flamingo fucks. When the cameras cut to him in his fringe and his bulge, he looked like a sex god bringing color to a washed out colorless world. He looks like a Happy Mondays concert. Johnny B. Badd's sequined Naval blue and gold jacket, Captain's hat, and lampshade knee fringe is hotter and far gayer than any gear Cassandro ever wore to the ring and I am frankly stunned at how much bedazzled sex they brought to this town. Flamingo knew exactly what kind of heel to be, trying to sneak things in behind the ref's back, bumping comically when needed, while leaving the biggest bumps for babyface Badd. Johnny took a huge bump over the top to the floor and later a fast one through the ropes, and Scotty had this fun way of playing an innocent little guy. Flamingo used the Curt Hennig corner bump effectively, and the way he went down for Badd finally landing the left hand looked good. This crowd was clearly into all of this and I love a crowd who shows up ready to see some wrestling. 

Maxx Payne vs. Michael Hayes

MD: This peaked in the second minute. Not to say anything else they did was wrong, even if Hayes was 34 going on 60 in how he moved, but I liked the shtick the best. Probably not a surprise. It was good shtick too. Hayes came out decked to the nines and knew the crowd was going to be up for it all. Weird, you couldn't really hear the impacts in the ring (even of the nice punches that needed a louder stomp to go with them I guess?) but you could heard the crowd stomping and cavorting. Even just Payne pointing to each side of the ring to boos and Hayes doing it to cheers felt refreshing. Payne leaned on him like you'd expect and it was fine. Hayes came back and it was fine if a half step slow. And then the finish was nice as Payne shrugged off the DDT and dropped him right down with the... what was it? The Paynekiller? I need to look this up. Yep, the Payne Killer Fujiwara Arm Bar. Perfectly ok house show match but I wish they had done even more goofy stuff at the beginning. The crowd was eager to eat it up and Hayes could make it work.

ER: I liked this quite a bit, but mainly because it was worked around a lot of nice punches that hit and missed. Both guys have nice punches and the ways they would weave the misses in with the hits always felt different, like they kept telling the same punch story and ending it in different ways. I like "old man" Michael Hayes (as Matt said, somehow 34 years old here) and I like that nobody in England had ever seen a man move this way before. That moonwalk is something that would have made him a major star had British wrestling not collapsed already. Maxx Payne is a guy who lands with real heft. A super dense guy who isn't fat enough to be a big fat guy and clearly isn't a body guy, but is big and dense enough that the fat guy spots - like falling on Hayes after Hayes can't handle the lift - work well. I loved how he blocked Hayes' DDT attempt but just anchoring his feet to the mat and shoving off. 

Dustin Rhodes/Van Hammer vs. Barry Windham/Rick Rude

MD: This was a blatant lie as Barry took out Dustin with a chair right after he got to ringside (after a brief scuffle) and it turned into just Rude vs Hammer.

Van Hammer vs. Rick Rude

MD: In general, obviously it's a disappointment that we don't get Barry and Dustin in this tag but it did really let us see Rick Rude at the height of his power working a fairly complete match against Hammer. The early parts where he let Hammer show him up again and again with strength bits and comeuppance and bluster that made him look like a fool was all done extremely well, really getting the crowd moving in exactly the right ways at exactly the right times.

When things settled down, it was all a little weird. A lot of these wrestlers aged better than you'd think because the sheets were valuing so much of the wrong things back then but Hammer is an exception. Rude had to call the match against a broomstick; that's the impression I got at least, because he had him do heel spots and have them go wrong on him only for Rude to do the same spots and have Hammer overcome. For instance, the seated chinlock, which Rude liked to do and then miss on a jump onto the back. Hammer did it first and then when Rude tried to repeat, Hammer was able to lift him up. Likewise the leap onto an outstretched foot. Hammer did it first and you don't often see a babyface wipe out like that. Despite all that, it worked, because Rude made it work and the crowd wanted it to work and Hammer... I mean, he did what he did by this point, a few years into his WCW run. Rude hit almost a snap, swinging sort of Rude Awakening which I'm not sure I ever saw him do. So this had value, but not nearly the sort of value the tag would have had.

ER: Yeah that tag match we didn't get sure looked worlds better than a 15+ minute Van Hammer singles match, but you can't deny how over Hammer was. Before the show when Cappetta was running down the card, Hammer got louder cheers than anyone but Davey Boy, which is incredible. And Rick Rude is probably the best person on the roster at getting a good match out of Van Hammer. Rude knows how to sell effectively for guys like Van Hammer and he knows how to keep crowds interested to make up for the babyface skills Hammer lacks. Rude sells his back better than most wrestlers and takes higher backdrops than anyone, gets ragdolled incredibly on a bearhug, limbs swinging and flopping everywhere like he was giving something to the real Bez-heads in the crowd, blows snot rockets on a downed Hammer, and swings his head around so sweat flies off in waves when Hammer stands up out of a camel clutch. The finishing stretch of this is really good. Rude ducking and moving to avoid Hammer punches until Hammer fakes him out and catches him with one. Rude gives the crowd exactly what they want with his duck walk atomic drop sells and getting run over with clotheslines. I imagine the swinging Rude Awakening was to deal with Van Hammer's height, but it looked good for it. 

Davey Boy Smith vs. Vinnie Vegas

MD: What Worked:

- Vinnie Vegas' cutoffs, including a big boot that went over Davey's head and a great slam back into the corner.
- Vegas' lightning bolt tights that feel like they should have been worn by Sasaki.

What Didn't Work:

- Nash having no idea exactly how much to give at any one point (he gets it sometime in the next year; maybe he was just put off by the size of the crowd?)
- Nash's mannerisms in general. None of it seemed organic.It was all cartoony and over the top in a way where if he dialed it back fifteen percent the crowd would have eaten it up more.
- The crowd doing the same Bulldog chant for ten minutes straight. I shut my eyes and can still hear it.

ER: I got too excited for Matt talking about Vinnie Vegas's cutoffs before watching this and now I'm disappointed. I wanted to see leg. That said, I thought Vegas was a good Bulldog opponent here and I thought this all kinda rocked. Nash might have been more Skywalker Nitro here than what he would be in a couple years, but I thought they were great opponents and both looked good. All the early shoulderblocks and Vegas no sells were great. Bulldog threw a perfect dropkick to a large man and he ran very hard in to Vegas with shoulderblocks. They worked through some compelling slow exchanges that the crowd stayed incessantly attached to with a repeated Airhorn Bulldog chant. All the small stuff built to big Bulldog moments: The long test of strength blow job spot, the heavy sleeper that ended with Bulldog powering to his feet to run Vegas multiple times into the buckles, a sleeper that builds to Bulldog throwing clotheslines and slams. I thought it was all great. 

I thought Vegas looked great. He had a lot of good ideas and a good mix of offense. His two big boots had a nice visual look and were well timed, he threw Bulldog far with his bodyslam, and jumped into a good hard connection landing on his elbowdrop. Vegas did something that I loved as much as anything I've seen in a Kevin Nash match - and I'm a guy who loves a lot of Kevin Nash matches - when Vegas blocked a vertical suplex with a quick punch to Bulldog's kidney. It was so badass, caught perfectly on film. His running missed elbow into the turnbuckles to set up the running powerslam was a full speed miss meant to hit. I thought it was a performance that has aged really well. This felt more like a match he put together for Bulldog than a match Bulldog worked him through. 

Big Van Vader vs. Cactus Jack

MD: Race certainly earned his pay on this night between moving the guardrail out of the way when Cactus was having a superhuman run on the outside to being there for a lot of pivotal moments of Vader taking back over by eating Cactus' stuff while he recovered, including on the finish. The middle felt a little flat to me with Cactus kicking out of the two Vader Bombs a little too early in the sequence maybe, even though there was going to be an escalation to Vader coming off the turnbuckles with a splash. Maybe I just don't remember exactly where Vader's offense was here in 93.

On the other hand, watching Cactus taking Vader's punches is a pretty magic, horrific experience. Just gnarly shot after gnarly shot. Cactus' comebacks were all really good too, be it just getting his foot up at the exact right time or throwing a few DDTs or slamming him out on the floor. Vader was so big that Cactus could believably get a sleeper on him by jumping on his back. And when he took out Race once, he had a great heads up standing tall look to him, a hero you could get behind. So this was good overall, if maybe a bit too reliant on Race and a bit off in the middle. We're better off for having it certainly, if only to see those punches land one more time.

ER: I thought this was pretty fantastic; the match that obviously leapt off the page when the show dropped. A new match added to the legendary feud and it has moments just as violent as the best matches they had. The punches were there but sadly obscured; instead we got Vader taking a diving bump off the ring staging across and over a guardrail. It's one of the bigger Vader bumps in their feud and it's crazy to see on this show. It looked no different than a dangerous Cactus bump, but this match was about Vader and Harley Race being the ones taking bumps on concrete and ring edges, not Cactus. Vader was taking big DDT bumps with slick vertical pause, missed a big splash off the middle buckle. Honestly Cactus got out of this one easy. Jack was the one announced to the crowd multiple times as one of the main attractions but the reactions were not there. Nobody was talking about him in the pre-show interviews, nobody seemed to know how to react to him as a man. 

Vader knows how to get reaction and works impressively overtime. This is a match that raises Vader's stock. He was an incredibly hard working mammoth man. He worked 125 matches in 1993 and he's out there playing up to the large crowd, falling hard, swinging harder. In between his big bumps are the big hits. Beyond our obscured sequence of definitely shoot punches, there were straight kicks to the ribs and headbutts; a little kid smile before jumping ass to chest with a bombs away. I thought the Race involvement was hilarious and unnecessary but love that Race is a psycho taking suplexes at 50 and looking 65. Vader is good at being specially vicious taking over after his interference. He mule kicks Cactus so hard in the balls that it felt like a finish. But Vader is an artist. A fan's wrestler. While Jack is selling his balls Vader delivers his biggest hardest swing of the match into the side of his head. 

Cactus/Vader was an excellent feud to get another match from. They always had new ideas, and this one had a structure I hadn't seen from them. 

Sting vs. Paul Orndorff

MD: The good in this was really good. Orndorff looked amazing to start. There's an early sequence where he begins with an awesome grinding headlock and moves into faster rope running than you'd think into almost a snap press slam by Sting and the recoiling that followed and it was all great. I wish we had a little more stooging before he took over, but his offense for the transition was all credible, jabs and a perfectly timed knee cutoff.

The problem was that there was both a lack of motion and a lack of heeling once he did
take over. He mostly ground Sting down as they built to a few hope spots and I get why he might contain him and Sting sold well, but it maybe wasn't the match I would have wanted as a main event. I half get the impression that since the fans were just chanting for Sting over and over, Orndorff felt like he didn't need to do a whole lot to get more heat. They did have a good finish though with Orndorff taking a front bump into the corner and Sting splashing him to the back and then rolling up. I'm not sure I'd seen that in too many Sting matches. So good overall but maybe not rising to the moment.

ER: I thought Orndorff looked incredible here. Sting was a great babyface, I loved all his flying and his comeback punches might have been the best on the show. But I couldn't stop watching Orndorff and his weird arm but mostly his incredible skillset. He was fast, dynamic, bumped everything like he meant it and It mattered. He knew how to use that little arm to throw short sharp elbows to the jaw and pointed elbowdrops straight down to the throat that were exquisitely worked. He took a damn vertical suplex on the floor; his back suplex landed Sting firmly on his shoulders in a way that looked distinctly All Japan. I thought about Paul Orndorff in 90s All Japan as the crispest possible Johnny Ace and thinking about how differently things could have been. Sting/Orndorff is a match I don't think I've ever seen. I don't think of them as guys who feuded. This felt like a NEW new match to me, and they probably could have done more and built to something bigger than the Vader/Cactus match that preceded them. But for guys I don't think about as wrestling each other, Orndorff felt like one of the best to take Sting's offense. This man knew how to draw money wrestling wild eyed babyfaces like he was born to do it.