Yeah, it's pretty crazy watching those back. Seemed like he took that bump in every single match too.

I felt it was kind of a rough month for Mid-Atlantic. Any tapering-off of the absolute fixation on the tag team tournament is a good thing, because that fixation was killing the episodes.

The most entertaining thing that happened all month was, after weeks of Roddy Piper refusing to say who his tag team partner would be for the tournament, just showing up one week with a random homeless guy as his partner for an enhancement match. I loved that.

Slaughter continues to be entertaining. The Ole Anderson/Stan Hansen team is also quite enjoyable.

I actually first became acquainted with Austin Idol as an old dude, since he's working these days as a manager in NWA Powerrr, and he's annoying as ****, constantly trying to put himself over even when that's clearly not what the segment's aim is. I also find him annoying here on 1982 Mid-Atlantic, but I'm predisposed to not liking him.

I don't actually mind Mike George myself. Zero personality, but I've found him to be decent in the ring. Of course, it was easier to look decent when working with the likes of Ted DiBiase. Not sure what he'll bring to Mid-Atlantic.

Mid-South, meanwhile, is doing the much stronger work than Mid-Atlantic. Skandor Akbar is quite good. Mr. Olympia has been surprisingly entertaining (though his match with Ed Wiskowski on the last episode of the month was a clunker). Ted DiBiase is an excellent white-meat babyface. Dusty as the commentator on that 2/27 episode was killing it until his physical involvement ended the appearance...but even then, that altercation with Bob Roop and Paul Orndorff was pretty great.

WCCW is the toughest to get through. I feel like it's going to get better, so I'm going to stick with it, but if I didn't have reason to feel like it was going to improve then I would have pulled the plug by now.

Bundy's "turn" seems to have just consisted of showing up one week with a heel manager? Odd way to do it. He's a more capable promo than I remember him being.

Kevin Von Erich is especially rough on the mic at this point. Though he did get some unintentional comedy points when I listened to one of his promos and then went, "Wait...did he basically just cut a promo where all he said was essentially, 'I sure do love banging the hot women who come to the matches'?" Kerry was the more compelling of the two, at least at this point.

Through February '82, it's Mid-South >>>> Mid-Atlantic >> WCCW.

Pretty amusing to see Kurt Angle call Chris Jericho “a washed-up has-been” on a show 22 years ago.

3/12/94 Superstars, I'm almost sure Billy Kidman is in the audience. They panned the audience at the end of a Shawn Michaels squash, and I did a double-take and had to rewind and pause and squint to figure out who the clearly familiar face was.

I see that someone else spotted it too and posted the quick video: https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCirc...ars_taping_in/

Something that's really funny to me, as I spend a lot of time hearing RAW with my eyes closed, is that when the timekeeper is just wailing on the bell, it means there's lots of extracurricular activity going on, and it needs to STOP!

RIP Scott Hall

Cool pic. They're missing a fair few figures too.

Perhaps not since it seems Hasbro exclusive.

Hennig and Dusty definitely seemed like the best ones to put out front. Think those are the dead wrestlers with the closest associations to him.

I can't tell whose head is between Snuka and Crush.

Giant Gonzalez

I was failing to identify that one too.

Giant Gonzalez was pushing 8 feet tall, so I'm not sure he counts as dead, since I'm not sure he ever counted as alive. That's too tall.

Thanks, I considered it. Unalive.

Too weird to live, too rare to die.

Just another freak, in the freak kingdom.

They just casually had The Godfather pin WWF Champion HHH on Smackdown during the run-up to WrestleMania 2000.

Not as bad, but he also got pinned by Brooklyn Brawler later that year

Just sitting here to trying to imagine some scenario where Lesnar or Reigns got pinned by Dominik

When Jose Lothario joined Shawn Michaels for a time in 1996, I thought he was brutally uninteresting and really dragged Michaels down.

Now that I go back to 1982 WCCW and see Lothario as an active competitor...I think he was brutally uninteresting and his matches are a drag on the show. Granted that he was already 48 by this point and could have perhaps been more compelling when he was younger, but I'm pretty convinced that he just didn't ever need to be a thing.

Lothario just came back out to cut an angry promo. He speaks English, albeit broken English since it's clear that it's a second language. Newly minted heel King Kong Bundy picks up the mic and screams at him to "SPEAK ENGLISH," drawing heat from the crowd.

I cringe at the thought that, 40 years later, that type of thing is a lot less likely to draw heel heat from a lot of wrestling crowds. Many things, particularly race-related things, age badly in archived TV and film, but this little bit I actually liked specifically because it seemed well-calculated to be taken in by the audience as shitty behavior without any real question.

This, as opposed to, say, the brutally uncomfortable segment where heel Vince McMahon forces Trish Stratus to strip down to her underwear and bark like a dog, which even in the moment felt like an awful segment because it was 100% predictable that a significant portion of the dudes in the audience would cheer Vince on for doing this.

****ing Too Cool and their tired act sure were ubiquitous on WWE TV in 2000. It doesn't feel like I can fire up a single episode of it without it being infected by those clowns.

Of course you know I was a big Too Cool guy.

I did not know that, and you could have gotten away with not admitting it.

I was 13.


I must say in my recent Raw marathon I did not enjoy them nearly as much.

My friend could do the worm so he was Scotty and I was Grandmaster.

What did being Grandmaster entail? Contorting your face into weird positions and cackling obnoxiously?

I used to take a generous view of the Savage-Crush match from WM X. I just can’t anymore.