Godspeed, men of the 2nd Bn, 127th Infantry, 32d "Red Arrow" Brigade, Wisconsin Army National Guard! Victory in Iraq!
Quick review of Disc 1 (2 and 3 are all classic matches):
* LOVED the amount of time they spent on the Jim Crockett Promotions era. Wonder if Vince was choking just a little when he had to acknowledge the NWA.
* They totally skipped over WCW's official withdrawal from the NWA...it just sorta "became" WCW all of a sudden.
* Much less kayfabing of the truth than I'd expect..except for shots of newspaper articles and legal documents (such as Vince suing Ted Turner over Hall and Hash looking/sounding too much like Diesel & Razor) where "WWF" is replaced by "WWE."
* Older interviews by Hogan, Hall, Bischoff are used, so it's not like we don't hear from 'em.
* Michael P.S. Hayes is hilarious. Loved how he called Bill Watts an "a(BLEEP)hole."
* Never-before-seen (at least by me) camera angles of some notable events, including Bash at the Beach '96, Goldberg's Nitro entrances, etc.
* Still using the WWE remake of Goldberg's music, though. C'mon, Jim Johnston, "Exodus" is public domain, fercryinoutloud!
Overall, highly recommended. If you're not gonna order thru Amazon thru The W (The W at Amazon), then go to Best Buy. You get the 2-disc "Rise and Fall of ECW" set for free also.
(EDIT: Thanks to KJames199 for linkifying the where-to-buy link and moving the thread over here!)
I enjoyed the feature for the most part. Wade Keller was spot on in his recent "top 10 things they omitted" post. These included Sting as the top babyface, Bischoff's firings, Bret Hart, adding Thunder and other things. I really think they could have taken a little away from the pre-WCW era to highlight some of those things.
The extras are confusing, really. DDP vs. Goldberg? Sting vs. Vader? Flair vs. Hogan, again? Booker T vs. Lance Storm? Just some strange picks.
I was very delighted to see Malenko/Mysterio and Malenko/Guerrero, though. Dean Malenko is so underrated, and he's such a great performer.
I still think they need more feature time and less random matches. I buy these for the features and get 2 discs of long matches that don't hold my attention. Some of the Flair stuff is good still, and the cruiserweights of course, but I want more of the story.
Plus Tony Schiavone and Mark Madden can only explain so much of what was going on in WCW during the T/Storm match. Yikes.
Originally posted by odessasteps -- tony's over the top cheering for WCW wrestlers vs NWO
What's Fat Tony up to these days?
Originally posted by wikipediaAfter a few years of work with the Braves system including pre-game and post-game radio coverage, and also spot duty as an official scorer for games, he will return to play-by-play duties on radio when the Gwinnett Braves begin their first season in Lawrenceville, Georgia as Atlanta's AAA-level affiliate.
I don't blame Bischoff for not participating, the documentary was horse shit.
They don't even mention the corporate hoops Bischoff had to jump through after the AOL / Time Warner merger, the clamp on creativity. Instead they want to blame individuals, Bischoff, Russo, and Nash.
The only highlight for me was the WWE managing to dig up Dr. Harvey Schiller, a longtime Turner lieutenant. I would have never, ever imagined seeing him on a WWE production.
That documentary needed at least 6 hours. And if they were going to half-ass it, I'd have preferred they not do it at all and just release a "Classic WCW Matches" DVD instead. Bischoff needed to be in charge of the documentary, and if they were unwilling to do that, then they were doing themselves a great disservice to actual 'history'.
And you can't seriously tell me that Scott Hall or DDP would have turned down the chance to speak. The WWE clearly never asked either one. Page would put his face on travel mugs sold by the WWE without getting a penny of residuals if it meant he was getting attention.
The matches are fantastic, ignore the documentary, complete and utter crap.
Originally posted by odessasteps-- tony's over the top cheering for WCW wrestlers vs NWO
I actually liked this aspect of the WCW vs. nWo rivalry. Tony, Tenay, Dusty, Larry Z and the Brain all really pushed the idea that the very company was at stake, especially when Brain even agreed with the face broadcasters for the first time in his career. Tony's "Hulk Hogan, you can go to hell" after Hogan's Bash turn was a truly memorable summation of the evening.
Kirk, crackers are a family food. Happy families. Maybe single people eat crackers, we don't know. Frankly, we don't want to know. It's a market we can do without.
Originally posted by cfgbIBischoff needed to be in charge of the documentary, and if they were unwilling to do that, then they were doing themselves a great disservice to actual 'history'.
Probably would've been slanted just as much the other direction. I wouldn't trust Bischoff to tell the accurate history of the company more than I would WWE.
Originally posted by cfgbIBischoff needed to be in charge of the documentary, and if they were unwilling to do that, then they were doing themselves a great disservice to actual 'history'.
Probably would've been slanted just as much the other direction. I wouldn't trust Bischoff to tell the accurate history of the company more than I would WWE.
It doesn't matter. How is Vince McMahon an authoritarian on what happened in WCW? Or Jim Ross to comment on "the fall". Instead they reached out to the same voices they always have, Chris Jericho, Dean Malenko, and Ric Flair which is FINE, but they had no one else who was THERE. (And even Jericho was gone a good two years before the end.)
They allowed Paul Heyman to spew his nonsense for hours on end on the Rise and Fall of ECW. But they couldn't allow Bischoff to tell the story his way. Bischoff isn't the liar that Heyman is, and appears to me to be very humbled by what transpired in WCW. Yes, it'll be slanted towards Bischoff, but it would have been better than the half-assed job they put together, because at least you'd have history being told by a man who was present for all that went down from start to finish, minus some brief layoffs towards the end.
To anybody who's upset over the main feature: Pick up some books. I'm pretty sure that RD Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez' book The Death of WCW is still in print. It does fill in the majority of the gaps left from this documentary. However, even this book has some near-hateful takes against WCW in general.
I think when you have more than a decade to cover, there's always going to be some things that fall through the cracks. Then on top of that given the very polarizing nature of the subject, it would be near-impossible to any one group to fairly call all history down the middle.
When I heard this DVD was coming out a few weeks ago, I dug out the Death of WCW book and reread it for some perspective, knowing that no WWE produced 90 minute documentary could deliver a fully accurate account of WCW's existence.
I thought the documentary itself was fine. Nothing pissed me off, despite the omissions. I agree the documentary should have been multiple hours. Even two hours devoted to the Nitro era of 1995-1998 when they were at their height wouldn't quite cover all the myriad details of all the things they were doing wrong and right concurrently. The details of how the company operated and died from 1999-2001 are so morbidly entertaining (as in the book) it could have had its own disc devoted to it. Of course, not having Bischoff, Russo and Nash participating to defend themselves hurts the end product.
Thing is, if each of us were given access to the same footage and we were all given the assignment: "Take all the footage you want, interview these people willing to be interviewed, and make the definitive documentary on WCW", we would all turn in wildly different looking documentaries. Details that would be important to you may mean nothing to me as opposed to something else I might have found essential to the WCW story.
Overall, though, I thought it was pretty decent. I was expecting a Vince McMahon-personally approved whitewash.
One thing I wasn't expecting is how great of a guy Goldberg came off as. I was never a Goldberg fan. Ever. But now I think he seems like a terrific guy. I'd like to grab a beer with Bill and talk about the glory days of '97.
Originally posted by cfgbIBischoff needed to be in charge of the documentary, and if they were unwilling to do that, then they were doing themselves a great disservice to actual 'history'.
Probably would've been slanted just as much the other direction. I wouldn't trust Bischoff to tell the accurate history of the company more than I would WWE.
I thought he was surprisingly honest and self depreciating in his book on the things he did wrong that led to WCW's demise.
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
Originally posted by cfgbThey allowed Paul Heyman to spew his nonsense for hours on end on the Rise and Fall of ECW. But they couldn't allow Bischoff to tell the story his way.
He was invited to participate and he turned it down.
Originally posted by OliverA question to those who've seen it: any moments of revisionist history and edited footage that stand out?
Well, Mike Graham presenting himself as the super-genius inventor of everything was pretty obnoxious. But he's been a giant douche in everything I've ever seen him in, so that's no surprise.
I picked this up on a whim today, and, although I watch about 5 hours of wrestling a year these days, I thought this was pretty great.
I think the issue long time fans will have is that it seems much more geared to the "modern" fan who might have heard of WCW, but didn't really watch it or was too young for the Raw-Nitro wars. That's probably why they didn't focus on some of the other headliners (like Sting) who are wrestling for TNA and such. I'm also not so sure that Bischoff could have added with yet another interview on this topic. Frankly, I thought he was treated pretty well compared to Nash, Jarrett and Russo.
Anyway... while I can see where some people might have issues, I really enjoyed it.
Originally posted by odessasteps while watching some of the matches on this, I remembered some of the things I hated WCW for at the time:
-- bickering announcers
-- tony's over the top cheering for WCW wrestlers vs NWO
Yeah, one thing I noticed again was how, during a great match like Malenko/Mysterio, they're constantly talking about the nWo and basically ignoring the match in the ring.
Again, another reason to add to the pile why they just couldn't succeed the way they were doing things.