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/wrestling /guests /Serotkin |
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/wrestling /guests /Serotkin |
| WWF Backlash | Ian Serotkin |
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HEAT REVIEW: WWF BACKLASH April 25, 1999 I'll start out defining the concept of a "Heat Review", since this is the first one in what will hopefully become a regular installment on /Wrestling after each WWF pay-per-view: I've seen a lot of different people rate matches, each with their own style and preferences. One thing, however, remains the same--the ratings are primarily based on workrate. I thought it would be interesting to instead rate some shows based on the heat the performers in the matches actually generate. After all, us "smarts" and workrate fanatics do not represent the majority of the wrestling audience. The product--in any federation--is aimed towards the marks. The ones who probably know that wrestling is fake, but not much beyond that. I watch most of the WWF pay-per-views with a group of friends that pretty much fall into that category, and my ratings will be based primarily on their comments and reactions. I'll also be keeping track of the live crowd's reactions and my own personal opinions, just for the sake of comparison. Once I go back to college, I'll be doing this after the live PPVs, but since I'm stranded at home without a cable box I'll do a couple of retro reviews to keep myself occupied. And a big thank you goes out to CRZ for giving me the opportunity to do this. As opposed to Scott Keith, who never returns my emails. So here we go with BACKLASH, Live from Providence, Rhode Island. Should be interesting, since there were no doubt a lot of students from Brown University there--not your typical trailer park trash crowd :) Match 1: The Acolytes and Mideon vs. The Brood. The Brood are fresh off their face turn at this point after being punked out of the Ministry. Mixed reaction from the crowd. My friends think their entrance rocks, and I agree. The MiniJobbers come down to an extremely lethargic reaction, which stays for most of the match. Crowd pops for one or two of the Brood's complex pinning combinations, but not much else. LOUD "Mideon sucks" chant at the five minute mark. I sang along. Wow, my friends don't even realize he was a Godwinn and they still hate him. Good for them. Ends up with Bradshaw clothesline ---> pin after Viscera ran in. Heat for The MiniJobbers: **, mostly for the "Mideon Sucks" chant. Heat for The Brood: *, they really haven't established themselves as faces yet and the crowd didn't know what to do with them. Heat for the Match: * Actual Workrate: *3/4, really blah match with gratuitous high spots. Match 2: Hardcore Holly vs. Al Snow w/Head for the WWF Hardcore Championship. Nice pop for Al Snow. The "HEAD" cheer is NEVER piped in :) Bob Holly gets booed nicely. He was starting to generate actual heat by now, blowing my mind. Compare this to the crowd reaction two months previous at the St. Valentine's Massacre, and this is noticeably better. Sporting of Snow to blade about three seconds into the match. Crowd boos when Holly and Snow go backstage, with my friends agreeing with the sentiment. The WWF listened, as the next few hardcore matches after this stayed much more in the arena area. Anyway, the crowd noise is turned down big time while they fight backstage. Only time you can really hear them at all is when Holly dumps Snow onto the top of the white car. They eventually meander back to the ring, where Holly superplexes Snow onto the table that good ol' Al set up about three hours ago. "Convenient", my friend says. Granted, it's an inherent flaw that's been discussed to death before, but it's nice to see even the casual fans are getting annoyed with the amount of time it takes to execute the table break. Crowd oooos and ahhhs for it regardless. Head Whack ---> pin gives the title to Al Snow. Cute bit afterward shows Snow arguing with Head, which everyone in the room cracks up about. Heat for Holly: **1/2 Heat for Snow: ** Heat for the Match: ***1/2 while in the ring area, * backstage. Actual Workrate: On the garbage match scale, call it at **1/4 Match 3: Goldust w/Blue Meanie vs. The Godfather w/ho's for the WWF Intercontinental Championship. Goldust comes out to his widescreen entrance and zero heat. This may or may not be the debut of the Godfather-comes-out-without-hos-crowd-boos-gets-hoes-crowd-cheers bit. Crowd seems not to expect it and only starts booing the Godfather for it in the next few weeks, meaning the bit is way too forced and I think it sucks. I personally can't stand the hos at all, because they always look like they're grabbed off the street right before the events. They just stand around during the match looking lost, and you can see Godfather give them little nods to cue them when they're supposed to cheer or do something else. But hey, they're fun to look at :) Anyway, the Meanie does his Sable bit, which the live crowd has little reaction to but my friends chuckle over. Actual match is crap, but in a marginally entertaining way. Cute bit at the end, as Goldust throws powder into his own face and gives Meanie the Shattered Dreams. DVD --> pin lets Godfather retain the IC belt. Heat for Goldust: DUD Heat for Godfather: ** for the ho's, i guess. Heat for the Match: *1/2 for the blindness sequence, was an easy DUD until then. Actual Workrate: 3/4* Match 4: The New Age Outlaws v. Jeff Jarrett & Owen Hart w/Debra, for the right to be the Number One Contenders to the WWF Tag Team Belts. Crowd goes bonkers, as always, for the NAO singalong. Canadian Country comes out to a pop for Debra as opposed to heel heat for themselves, which is bad. Debra sucks as a valet. I mean, she's nice to look at, but a valet is not supposed to WANT to show the other team her tits before getting pulled away by Jarrett. Oh well. Some one in the room notes that Lawler is only in Phase One of his Puppies Addiction here at this point, which is good. Jarrett and Owen continue to excel at not drawing heat for the entire match. Dogg and Gunn draw nicely with their wibbily wobbily woogily antics. Famouser on Owen WHILE he has a Sharpshooter on Road Dogg ---> Pin gives NAO the title shot. NAO pose around in the ring and Gunn shows his ass. These were happier times for the Outlaws. Heat for Canadian Country: DUD for Jarrett, * for Owen (for some Nugget chants), and ***1/2 for Debra. Heat for NAO: ***3/4 Heat for the Match: *** Actual Workrate: **1/2, carried by Owen and Jarrett. Match 5: Mankind vs. Paul Wight in the Boiler Room Brawl. Both guys (especially Mankind) take INSANE bumps during this one. Both guys blade, and Foley's hand injury may be hardaway. I can't even describe some of the props used, it has to be seen. Some big wooden thing falls on Foley at one point, and it may have been partially accidental because Wight rushes over immediately to get it off of him. Big pile of pipes falling on Wight ---> Mankind crawls out of the room for the victory. Big Bossman and Test attack Foley after the match only to be run off by the Big Show. Boys and girls, this is how run-ins on PPV should be done--AFTER the bell. The crowd noise was WAY down for the entire match, so I'm going mostly on the room reaction on this one. Heat for Mankind: ****. He bumped his way to incredible cheers, as usual. Heat for Wight: **. He's a bad mofo, but a tweener at this point due to he and Mankind helping each other out the week previous on Raw. Heat for the match: ****. Same as the Mankind heat, since most of the cheers and talk came from his mindblowing bumps. Actual Workrate: Total brawling, can't really rate it. Match 6: HHH w/Chyna vs. X-Pac. HHH's music here is vastly superior to the ubercrap he started using a few weeks later. He gets booed nicely, and X-Pac draws his usual DX pops form the crowd. JR calls X-Pac "Sean Waltman" at one point, surprising the hell out of me and confusing everyone else in the room. NICE psychological match, with HHH working over Waltman's neck (source of several real-life injuries for him, as JR notes). Massive overbooking, as we have: A ref bump, interference from Chyna, Kane taking his stroll to the ring (JR gets to say "Hellfire and Brimstone") and chokeslamming the heels, and Chyna interfering again to allow the Pedigree ---> Pin for HHH. Not the result the crowd or my friends wanted. X-Pac has COURAGE and GUTS, dammit! Heat for HHH: *** Heat for X-Pac: **1/2. He got his trademark moves in, but not much else. As a result, crowd couldn't really get into him. Heat for the match: ***. Kane's run-in helped. They do need to find a faster way to get him to the ring, though. Actual Workrate: ****1/4. BEAUTIFUL psychological battle by HHH, and X-Pac knows how to get his ass kicked. Match 7: Ken Shamrock vs. The Undertaker. Shamrock is really pissed off. What else is new? UT comes down to his kickin' new remix. I really dug this match, even if no one else did. I've never seen 'Taker try to mat wrestle for this long or this well, making it infinitely better than his normal crap match where he plays the un-powerslammable big zombie. Shamrock, of course, is in his native element as a submission fighter. Crowd is into it for the first 8 minutes or so, but after that the "Boring" chants start up. The room dies down at about the same time, although they appreciated the actual wrestling effort from both men more than the live crowd did. JR keeps calling UT "The Phenom". Wasn't that two character incarnations ago? Weak "We Want Ryan" chant from the crowd. Bradshaw w/baseball bat and Fat Paul Bearer interfere, allowing Tombstone ---> Pin for the 'Taker that leaves the crowd with a bad taste in their mouths. Bradshaw beats up Shamrock after the match with the bat, and helpfully leaves it there so Shamrock can go insane with it the next night on Raw. Heat for UT: **. I think he's alternated between face and heel too much over the past ten years to get good heat out of the crowd, no matter how many sacrifices he performs. Heat for Shamrock: **1/2. He's freshly turned face, and loses some heat because Ryan isn't with him. Heat for the match: Call it at *** for the first seven or eight minutes, *1/2 after that. Actual Workrate: I REALLY dug this submission match, I'm sorry. It seemed controlled and with a purpose, not just as restholds. **** Match 8: The Rock vs. Stone Cold Steve Austin, with Shane MacMahon as the special referee, in a No Holds Barred match for the WWF Championship. If Austin wins, he gets his Smoking Skull belt back. The Rock comes down to a mix of face and heel heat, with the face heat actually coming out on top. I think most of the fans had figured out that Rock was going to be turned face pretty soon, and it shows. The video packages at the top of the show and before the match reinforce this, as they hype it as a "battle between two kindred spirits" not as Evil Rock vs. Good Austin. His heat has instead been transferred over to Shane. Austin comes down to his usual messianic pop. Both wrestlers take some decent bumps, most notably the Rock as he makes a mad charge at Austin and ends up flying over the ropes to the floor. The Breakdown entrance set is destroyed as both wrestlers take Irish whips into it. As per their PPV contractual obligations, both the Spanish and American announcer's tables get trashed. Neat bit as we see through a Rock-commandeered camera, which turns around to see Austin give it the double bird and then give Rock a Stunner on the announcer's table. Endgame starts as Shane refuses to make the three count for Austin (Surprise!), which elicits great boos from the crowd. He starts to leave, only to be confronted by Vince, who has brought the Smoking Skull belt (and "Slow Count" Earl Hebner) back to the ring. Really DUMB shot as Shane makes faces at Vince until Vince clobbers him with the belt. Austin stunner ---> Trademark Hebner Main Event Slow Count ---> Pin, as Austin retains the Championship and Vince throws him his belt back. Heat for Rock: -*. Let me explain. He's supposed to be a heel. His heel heat was about **1/2, and his face heat was about ***1/2. Subtract one from the other, and you get a negative star for heat in the wrong direction. Heat for Austin. ****1/2. He's God, you know. Heat for the Match: ****1/2. Crowd is rabid for just about every move in the last five minutes of the match. Actual Workrate: ***1/4. Nice match, but I'm getting a little tired of the Austin brawls. We then have the shot of Stephanie being abducted by the Undertaker, who is the Evil Limo Driver from Hell. This didn't bother me as much as it did everyone else, probably because I'm watching it four months later. We then cut back to the ring, where Austin is celebrating with beer and MacMahon is oblivious to what just happened to his daughter. In an interesting note, I don't think the footage of the abduction was played in the arena at all, so the entire live crowd has no idea about it either. In the "Titan Video Exclusive Footage" we get little mini-interviews with The Rock and Austin as they walk back to their respective locker rooms after the match. I wouldn't mention this if it weren't for the fact that Austin walks right past HHH and Chyna at one point, who are standing in the hallway chatting. This struck me as dumb, as they don't even acknowledge each other at all. Almost as bad as when one of Public Enemy got abducted by the Ministry (I don't remember which one) and then caught standing around in a backstage shot a few minutes later. A pretty good show. Until next time, I'm Ian Serotkin Jobber-at-Large Mail the Author |
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