Happy 20th anniversary of getting thrown off a steel cage, Mick Foley.

(God, I’m old.)

Right. Think about on the day of HIAC, how ancient Superstar Graham losing the title to Bob Backlund in MSG seemed. HIAC is now that old. FML.

You aren't old you are seasoned.

Nah, I'm old.

(38, so not really, just feels like it.)

https://twitter.com/WWE/status/1013093151815462914

I know it's off topic, but the other day I was watching an episode of VH1 I Love the 80s and I realized for some of the episodes, more time has passed between the show airing (2001) and now than time that passed between the original events and the show being filmed.

https://twitter.com/johnndvorak/stat...496485890?s=21

My favorite movie is Stand By Me. It was released in 1985, and is set in the late 50s. It feels like an impossibly ancient time gone by. But the release of the movie is further in the past now than the events of the movie were at its release. Stuff like this just kills me.

A wrestling one that got me lately was Taker/Mankind HIAC being 20 years old. When I watched that live, Backlund beating Superstar Graham for the belt was 20 years old, which also felt like a relic from an ancient time.

While there's little question that WWF was xenophobic in its presentation of the event at the Intrepid, explicitly tying Yokozuna's challenge to Pearl Harbor, I wonder if any of the success of that angle was actually owing to the fans indulging that same spirit. The Pearl Harbor attack was over 50 years old at that point and I have to think that the majority of the regular WWF audience in 1993 wasn't even alive at that time. Seems difficult to stoke general anti-Japanese sentiment on the basis of an event that anyone only knows about from hearing of it in school.

I know that, as a kid, I was into the Luger push just because the bodyslam moment was cool. I was pretty ambivalent about Yokozuna individually, and the "he's insulting America by holding this challenge on the 4th of July" just made me shrug. I guess on this point I assume that my reaction might be pretty representative of how a lot of fans took it in.

Oh I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy this moment as a kid. Only in hindsight is the absurdity of it all so clear. This actually kicked off a lengthy proto-MAGA angle that culminated in Survivor Series with the All Americans facing off w/Ludvig Borga and the Foreign Fanatics. Borga was a great heel (art imitating life apparently).

I’ll confess this doesn’t feel like 25 years already.

Was that televised or were the highlights shown on RAW sand I’m assuming the syndicated shows the only footage we saw?

I feel pretty confident that we only got highlights. Would guess they particularly wanted to keep control of the final product that aired on TV since a number of non-wrestlers participated (Bill Fralic actually did as well as Crush in getting Yoko slightly off the mat).

Ok that sounds right. And just to follow up, I went back and listened to the Lex episode of Something to Wrestle and unfortunately it was their 3rd episode ever and they weren’t as in-depth as they are. The idea of his face turn coming completely out of nowhere wasn’t brought up.

The only thing brought up about why his face run didn’t work leading up to SS was because Lex didn’t embrace the bus tour. Prichard said that Lex didn’t want to ride the bus and he didn’t want to stop at the small towns and meet people. He claimed that Lex just wanted to fly from one big city to the next, stay at a hotel and only be on the bus when going to the arenas.

With everything that we have heard about Lex over the years, that doesn’t sound all that crazy, but who knows.

The other thing with this angle is that it was only two years removed from the long-term 1991 storyline that capitalized on the tensions in the Middle East that culminated in Desert Storm, and by comparison this Yoko stuff seems pretty tame.

This seems to answer the question of whether the whole thing aired live at the time. Seems it didn't, but that previously unaired footage has been added to the Network:

I think I’m going to dig this up for nostalgia purposes.

Why would you make a tweet about that event on the 5th? The holiday already happened.

I'm guessing that @WWENetworkChron is not a company account and is just someone digging around and passing along the updates they find.

EDIT: confirmed in their description. Not sure why I didn't click through before posting.

I came here to post this very thing. It’s like they knew what we were talking about yesterday.





They always drop new Hidden Gems on Thursdays. It’s their new TBT.

It still blows my mind that anyone likes the fact that WWE for some reason spoiled the Bischoff moment before dropping it. I think the defense for "whose side is he on?!" is more credible.

Haha, I understand why it was bad but watching it from home live was just really exciting for me. All I remember is going to commercial the whole time thinking "WTF is going on". Obviously they missed out on a massive shock pop by not doing it in the arena but it was a different kind of shocking for me and I still kind of like it to this day. I dunno, if they did it again I'd probably hate it but at the time I just remember loving the feeling of anticipation during that commercial break.

I didn't realize that Eric showed up before that segment until the last year or so. It seemed really strange. Suboptimal.

It was strange, sub-optimal and I know my opinion is unpopular but I can't help liking it at the time. It's not something I've gone back and rewatched though because it was a one off feeling that can't be reproduced. In comparison I can re-watch Brock or Rock's returns today and still get pumped up even though I know those returns lead to mostly mediocre runs.

Well, to each their own, we all have our own stuff that isn't all that objectively defensible but that we like anyway.

FWIW I would find it all a lot less bad if we didn't also know we were getting a GM announcement that night, but that was already baked in as well. I could see having a more general "WTF" reaction otherwise, but as it was, it was basically an explicit tease that Bischoff would be the new GM.

(For context of why I randomly dredged up a six-year-old post, I was listening to a TLF episode where they discussed Bischoff going to WWE, it jogged my memory that someone on this board had defended the method of reveal, so it made me curious enough to go search it out.)

For those wondering what Ryback has been up to:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BlbVkhLgycp/