Little did WWF know they were giving us what would be a near main event match (or at least half of one) on an early July '81 show.

Hennig teams up with S.D. Jones to take on another enhancement team of Cannon/Bundy and another jobber. S.D. gets the pin on the other jobber, but Patterson mentions how Bundy has gotten a haircut and looks slimmed down. Last time they'll ever say that about him in his career.

Valentine and the Grand Wizard are out, in a strategy huddle.
Vince: That looks like more than a huddle. It looks like an embrace. Haha!
Pat: I wonder which one of them likes it more.

Unknown at the time, both Patterson and the Wizard were gay men. I don't put the joke past Vince, but Patterson chiming in...

Honestly it took me a long while to slog my way through these. Definitely not my favorite of their journeys. Starting into the TNH one now though, I'm optimistic about this.

Far prefer the Mania, Cade, WCCW, AWA journeys over TNH but it's good. It shows how offensively bad Hogan is at acting. It also exposes Bischoff as an insufferable douche from episode one until current. There's only an episode or two left in it and I'm ready to move on to stuff from The Lapsed Era again.

This channel is relatively unknown and in the vein of OSW stuff. I've been bingeing their videos for the past week or so. Here's the first in a series on GAB. I think I enjoy these retrospectives of late 80s and 90s wrestling much more than the actual wrestling these days.

Funny that isnt it

Ive abandoned my modern consecutive shows watch months ago and now find myself rewatching 1987 to 1992 stuff

Gave that a watch and enjoyed it. Had no idea Harley went back to WCW after his King Harley run in WWF. I thought he wrestled at Mania 3 and disappeared afterward.

Yah, I gave AEW a good go. Probably watched every Dynamite/Rampage/PPV for about a year, but the booking is just too all over the place for me, so now I just tune in for PPVs and big TV matches.

That's almost exactly my favorite era as well. I know much more about WWE than WCW so I'm hoping Wrestle Me continues to cover more WCW stuff from that era. Seems like there was a ton of talent in WCW, but they could just never find something that worked until the NWO era.

The only thing I don't like about the channel is that the videos aren't very clearly labeled so you don't know very well which vids are part of a series. If you continue on with the GAB series, the Dutch Mantell episode (4 out of 6 in the series) was also quite good. They raised an excellent point that WCW would always give their super tall guys a super tall manager, which cuts down immensely on how cool and freakish the tall wrestler looks. El Gigante also features. Hilarious that WWE saw this guy and thought they really need a program with him and Undertaker.

I can't particularly criticize the way that Vince used Jim Duggan, because he was wildly over as midcard/upper midcard for years and I do actually suspect he was really part of the reason people bought tickets for a time. I never enjoyed him much even as a little kid, and he grew more annoying to me over time as I began to care more about the actual wrestling that they would do.

However, watching him in Mid-South does give me greater appreciation for him. He was a standout and he could go. And he was a very capable heel, which he never really got to show on a bigger stage; he worked so well as a featured babyface that it would have been crazy to ever turn him during his prime. They did give him a worthless heel turn in WCW well after his peak years, but I don't think its failure was much of a reflection of anything about him.

Even with the people who I never really got attached to on the larger stage, I'm finding it's easy to see how they earned their way into that larger spot. I haven't picked up Mid-Atlantic in a while because their booking was just too directionless, but one of the only things that was keeping me watching for a time was Sgt. Slaughter; he was tremendous. I should probably skip past six months of Mid-Atlantic content from last viewing and see if the creative shape of the company got better, since it's my understanding that it did have a good reputation as one of the best indies.

I've gained that same appreciation for Valentine and Muraco, who were mostly useless in the latter half of the 80s, by watching their earlier career work.

Muraco was another Mid-Atlantic standout in the material that I did watch. Ditto for Piper, who insisted on making me hate him as a younger fan by subjecting me to his career from 1989 forward during a time when I couldn't readily watch the period when he was actually really good. I have a lot more respect for him now.

Big fan of Piper, but only have seen his matches from 2006 and beyond

"You call us dinosaurs? WELL JURASSIC PARK WAS THE HIGHEST-GROSSING MOVIE OF THE YEAR!" -Roddy Piper

(Probably didn't get it right verbatim, but yeah.)

Holy ****, Great American Bash 91 was such an entertaining hot mess. Here's part 1. Lots to unpack here:

1. Starting off the show with a ****ing scaffolding match.
2. First 4 matches contained a ton of future stars (Austin, Hall, Nash, DDP, Simmons, Dustin, etc.)
3. Announce team of Ross/Schiavone is still doing it over 30 years later with AEW.
4. Nash's selling of a drop toe hold has to be seen to be believed. He's unbelievably green here.

A lot of the stuff (well, almost all of it) doesn't hold up from the era I'm watching 40 years ago, but this line by Patterson caught me:

"You have to go by what the ref sees. You don't see baseball or football going to replay, do you?"

It's easy enough to figure out why Albano holds the record for managing tag team champions. There's only one heel team at a time in the company at this era, they were usually the champions and he always managed them. The Moondogs lose the titles back to Martel/Garea and Patterson mentions that Albano whipped them
so hard afterward that we'll never see them again. True enough, they were leaving. The next week, Albano has a new team, Fuji & Saito. I've seen very little of Fuji as an active competitor. He always seemed like one of those guys who was born old.

I'm telling you, it isn't the era, it's specifically the WWF in that era. Mid-South/WCCW/Mid-Atlantic are all a lot better to watch, and I say that while acknowledging that Mid-Atlantic from the time I watched it was mostly pretty weak.

On the replay thing, I remember when they were advertising that they would have Bob Costas be a celeb guest at WrestleMania (VI? VII?) to debate the merits of replay in wrestling, but then that part of the show just stopped being mentioned and it didn't happen. Took until years later to find out that he got offended by Vince McMahon in some way and didn't want to be associated. Costas has always tended to be an unlikable sanctimonious scold, but whatever the rift was, I'm strongly guessing he was right in that case.

Costas makes some of the worst jokes on every show/broadcast he's on, yet whoever is paired with him seems compelled to laugh in reverence to him.

I believe I'm finally coming up to the point (Sept. 81) where they mix in some non-WWE territory stuff on the network. I really wish they hadn't ditched the Hidden Gem stuff. That was some of the best stuff on the network pre-Cock.

Speaking of Costas/McMahon, you can’t forget this classic:

I'm finally into some Mid-Atlantic in '81. Ironic how Sgt. Slaughter makes the switch at the same time I do. It's such a shame that they no longer have the brutal match with Patterson that temporarily "drove him out" of WWF on the network anymore. Boris Zhukov with hair (Jim Nelson) is immediately attention catching. How many fake Russians were there during this era?

The Outlaw Ron Bass as a baby face? I always remember him as the guy who drew blood on the Saturday morning WWE show that they had to censor (was it against Beefcake?).

Was definitely Beefcake, though I don't think I've ever seen it? It got referenced on WM IV (I believe), so I was always aware of it.

It tilts me the way Bob Caudle introduced matches.

"Our opponents"

Whose opponents. You don't have an opponents. You're an announcer.

I did like this exchange with Slaughter.

Slaughter: "You people better show some respect. R-E-S-E....P-E-C-T. You get it."
Caudle: "No, I don't think I do."

I enjoy Caudle. The co-hosts at Lapsed Fan rake him over the coals constantly, but I think he used to set the tone well.

Granted that he was kind of a poor man's Gordon Solie, but there's plenty of room for someone to be worse than Solie and still be good.

Roberto Soto, whom I'd never heard of, is getting some traction on WWE shows in Sept. '81. Googled him to find out that he goes on to become one of the Invaders and was present in the locker room when his tag team partner murdered Bruiser Brody.

As Freddie Blassie, who wears his pants higher than any human, is rattling off the list of bones Killer Khan has broken, I'm starting to wonder if he's an unsafe worker. The injuries are legit, but it turns out that he did not break Andre's ankle. Andre broke his own ankle one morning getting out of bed. It sounds like Khan legitimately broke Rick McGraw's neck on a bad landing though.

Koko B. Ware would like a word.

I raise.

Oct '81 - Tony Atlas & S.D. Jones form a team and mention challenging Fuji & Saito for the championship. The problem is that Martel & Garea are currently the tag champs.

The next week, Vince mentions that Martel/Garea & Fuji/Saito have signed for a series of championship matches and they were lucky enough to have one right on TV this week. So it wasn't mentioned as being pre-taped or anything. Fuji & Saito win the belts on TV a week after Atlas & Jones challenged them for it. Since there can only ever be two tag teams in the area at a time, I'm assuming this is it for Martel & Garea. Generally, teams have disappeared immediately after they lost the belts.

Jesse Ventura and Adrian Adonis arrive. I can't believe how much weight Adonis gains in a relatively short period of time over the next few years.