Unless my mind is bad, I don't remember any blow off match for the earthquake killing Damien angle in 1991.Was there ever suppose to be, or was it just suppose to be a catalyst for Jake going off the deep end and turning heel?
Would YOU have trusted Jake Roberts with a World title at that point? That's a lot of "if" for 91, but I think they would have just kept the belt on Hulk through the Sid feud.
As for the Earthquake feud, they did the house show run after Wrestlemania and then I think WWF just kind of changed their mind and wanted to do the Natural Disasters deal instead.
Shill alert: I actually did a recap of their MSG match (June '91). It's okay -- very basic, but very effective, and it shows you don't need to do fancy moves to tell a story. The recap was in late March if you want to look it up in the Archive.
ReplyDeleteNo thanks
ReplyDeleteOh there are several levels of WRONG, but this one ranks right up there!! Waylon was awesome!
ReplyDeletethe other problem was his turn was so soon. They should have turned him late 94 and fed him some decent faces like Luger, 1-2-3 Kid or maybe even Bret Hart - it was just "hey giant heel wins King of the Ring, let's give him a title shot."
ReplyDeleteI went to a show in late July that year. Jake no showed the event so it was Boss Man with Andre in his corner v. Earthquake.
ReplyDeleteWasn't Dibiase at the 91 Rumble against the Rhodes? And then in the Rumble itself as I recall. So he had to have been back beforehand.
ReplyDeleteI had the sense from the Benoit DVD that he chose to go to WCW rather than the WWF after his tryout matches. The WCW money had to be better at this point.
ReplyDeleteHogan would have never feuded with Jake because I'm convinced the crowd would have double-turned them. Didn't Hogan and Roberts have a brief run in 1987 and the crowd would just chanted "DDT, DDT" during their match?
ReplyDeleteI do know they did some house shows, and one MSG match was televised on MSG network where Jake got the clean pin off a DDT and Lucifer then did the honors crawling over the fallen Quake. That was where it was blown off is my guess.
ReplyDeleteI remember PWI created their own backstory for the feud, saying DiBiase hating Texas becausr his dad died here.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, if someone broke my guitar, I'd probably be pretty broken up about it.
ReplyDeleteI remember the Perfect-Tornado match w/ Dibiase interference - I had it on a video compilation along with Savage/Dibiase from Wrestlemania IV, Piper vs. Martel, British Bulldog/LOD vs. Warlord/Power & Glory and Jim Duggan vs. Haku for the right to be called "King of WWF".
ReplyDeletePretty dreadful video all in all.
Yeah, wait a few weeks until the "With My Baby Tonight" stuff starts up on RAW. I swear they played that video over and over again on every one of their shows--RAW, Action Zone, syndies. It was kinda weird because Jarrett's I-C title reign was going nowhere and I have no idea what they saw in Roadie. But from what I remember at the time, it was going to be huge part of Summerslam. And when Jarrett left, that's when they blew up the card and started over--ladder match II, random guys like the Blus, Bob Holly, Smoking Guns, etc.
ReplyDeleteThey had one in Alberta I think where the crowd was rabid for Jake so they dropped it quickly. Smart move.
ReplyDeleteMaybe that's why Kerry Von Erich kept killing cats. He had pussy forced on him at a young age.
ReplyDeleteBefore that it was "Mason the Mutilator".
ReplyDelete"Vince... why can't I just be Cactus Jack?"
ReplyDeleteI'd watch the shit out of it compared to the current product
ReplyDeleteSo what was in the bag that Earthquake sat on? How bout we just pretend it was a real snake?
ReplyDeleteSausages or something, I remember reading.
ReplyDeleteMid-card feuds in the early 90's not having a TV blowoff weren't exactly an aberration. People just remember that this one happened more than others.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of would-be heel turns, here's a threadjack:
ReplyDeleteI just watched the Raw where Foley won the title. How was that not a total DX heel turn in the second-to-last segment, where they set up Shawn to get jumped by the Corporation? The announcers are all, "Duh, whaa? Did DX know what was going to happen!" Yes, they fucking knew! They locked him out with the wrong key, and when Shawn says "I'll see you guys later," one of them mutters something after he leaves like, "No you won't, what goes around comes around."
And then they're out in the very next segment as huge babyfaces getting Mankind's back, like they didn't just have their former friend (a babyface himself) mauled by their mutual enemy.
Having a feel-good moment at WrestleMania 30 must be a fucking curse.
ReplyDeleteWarrior: dead three days later.
Jake: cancer.
Daniel Bryan: entire upper body in ruins.
Cesaro: multiple jobs to Jack Swagger.
Scott Hall: more health problems.
"Shades of grey."
ReplyDeleteThat's just how things worked. At the time it was not out of the ordinary.
Yeah, it's weird, he did get a lot of screentime when they reintroduced him and he quickly became just another JTTS guy a few weeks later.
ReplyDeleteThe truth always hurts when it comes to Buffalo. :(
ReplyDeleteI know his WCW run was uneventful too, but if Benoit came to the WWF in 95, had a disastrous run and was treated like a JTTS guy before returning to the company again in 2000, WWF/Vince would have just seen him as the same JTTS guy they fired 5 years before.
ReplyDeleteI think a Jake title run would have worked in a world where Flair/Hogan was going to happen at 8. At tthe Rumble, Ric costs Hogan the title against Jake. Savage wins the Rumble. Savage/Jake for the title and Flair/Hogan as a double main event.
ReplyDeleteThe Shield: Dead.
ReplyDeleteshoot, just slide Jake into Undertaker's spot at Survivor Series
ReplyDeleteOn one of the recent wrestling podcasts, Jake revealed that he is terrified of snakes. My admiration for the man went up immensely, because I hate snakes too, and there is not enough money in the world to make me walk around with a fucking python every day.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Wrestlecrap's interview with Quake it was Pantyhose stuffed with Hamburger, plus a little electric motor so it would move around.
ReplyDelete...I'd go with the real snake option.
I was going to start a fantasy hockey league along with the fantasy basketball league but if this person wants to be the GM of the hockey league, I am all for that
ReplyDeleteI hated that Jake all of sudden was part of a survivors series team with quake just 5 months later.
ReplyDeleteI agree that jobbing to Swagger is up there with cancer.
ReplyDeleteJake should have DDT'd Typhoon and turned him into burgers.
ReplyDeleteAnother feud they seemed to be dipping their toes in that summer was Mr. Perfect vs The British Bulldog. I think they did have quite a few TV taping and house show matches, but I do wonder if there was ever a plan to give him the rub over Bret at Summer Slam.
ReplyDeleteWasn't HBK heeling them, so weren't they quasi-getting revenge on a bad guy?
ReplyDelete24-7 had that RAW up for a while and there was a lot that made no sense
Yeah, this was my formative year of watching so I was just then, around that time, learning what face/heel turns were. So I guess I just don't remember it being weird at the time, because at that time it really wasn't.
ReplyDeleteShawn had been fired by Vince a few weeks prior, and then he came back to interrupt Vince's promo at the beginning of the show. Said he had an iron-clad contract as commish and "brought the cavalry with" him, and DX came out to back him up.
ReplyDeleteI feel like Shawn had turned heel and then back face at some point in '98 as commissioner, so you might be right. It'd be an impressive bit of continuity, actually, for them to have done that and keep them babyface through it.
Tecmo Bowl? Where? (still addicted)
ReplyDeleteYeah, Shawn had turned on X-Pac to join the Corporation prior to that.
ReplyDelete90 Fat / 10 Lean Burgers
ReplyDeleteGiven how Kerry was pretty much a mess in '90, even given the push of IC champ, a long feud of any type wouldn't have really been a big option.
ReplyDeleteNash denies the vanilla midget comment.
ReplyDeleteI'll likely finish last but I'm happy to join in and get stomped!
ReplyDeleteWas there really even a valid reason as to why so many of the WWF's biggest names were not on the King Of The Ring PPV at all?
ReplyDeleteWere they running a secret house show at a high school gym in Connecticut the same day as the PPV? Owen Hart, Davey Boy Smith, Lex Luger, Jeff Jarrett and Hakushi not getting booked made no sense on several levels.
Even Man Mountain Rock, King Kong Bundy, Hunter Hearst Helmsley and Mantaur would have been an improvement over the lineup we got.
He could've fed them to the big bossman!
ReplyDeleteI thought about that, but they're at least all doing well individually. Had to end sometime, I just wish we'd gotten a few more months of babyface Shield.
ReplyDeleteAt least. There's treatment for cancer. There's no known cure for jobbing to Swagger.
ReplyDeleteCan't stop laughing at "FUCK ME it’s Tekno Team 2000".
ReplyDeleteI think WWF believed KOTR would be their show to build their future stars on. Unfortunately the stars they choose to build were Mabel, Savio and Roadie.
ReplyDeleteDid they ever reference Damien's demise in Jake's heel turn? Like, he'd lost the one thing which had kept the darkness at bay. Would have added another layer to the character.
ReplyDeleteYeah, focus on one minor botch and not the awesome matches the Skyscrapers had.
ReplyDeleteBuffalo and Ryan Miller had a conference finals run in the mid 2000s, no?
ReplyDeleteWhy the many up votes for this?
ReplyDeleteBecause they all agree, and I was polite about it?
ReplyDeleteHe was also a relatively early casualty of the territories drying up and long-term contracts replacing the nomadic lifestyle of own. In 1983 the guy would have been a legitimate sensation. In '85 he would have been a big-money house show draw against Hogan if brought in straight away as a singles heel.
ReplyDeleteNope, nothing. Pretty disappointing, because Jake would be a guy to pay attention to detail like that.
ReplyDelete'91 Jake is one of my favorite heel runs ever, but there is no way he would have been bought as a challenger to Hulk--none. Hell, the Jake/Savage feud was actually a colossal bomb at house shows. Too much money to be made with Hulk vs. Undertaker not to run it.
ReplyDeleteThey definitely re-started the Von Erich feud afterward. There's an MSG match (and doubtless other house shows) where Kerry faces DiBiase and brings out Virgil to be in his corner.
ReplyDeleteThis was my question, but I have no desire to be GM. I am a fantasy hockey newbie.
ReplyDeleteYea, from what I remember, the character dynamics were really cool with that story. Shawn had been brought in as commish, turned heel on Pac after spending the day hanging out with DX, and then acted as Vince's lackey for awhile. He screwed up or something, so Vince fired him and ate a superkick. Then Shawn came back, called in DX as his "cavalry" and they showed clips of the gang hanging out again (the same as before the Shawn turn), but DX screwed him over as revenge for putting them through hell, which I actually think is a much more realistic response than the silly "okay, we're both faces now, so we're friends routine".
ReplyDeleteFrom what I remember, until Shawn turned on Rock on Smackdown in late 99, I don't think he and DX were ever on screen friends again, despite Shawn playing an on-screen face commish early in the year (he made the Vince-Austin cage match via satelite, as, I think, they had done the parking lot mauling storyline so he could go get back surgery). I like that kind of stuff. X-Pac and Shawn could both be faces but hate each other, and Kane could be a heel but friends with Pac. I think that is the kind of dynamic character work that is needed to run wrestling as an endless syndicated tv program. It is just too bad they could never keep a thought for more than few weeks before going crazy - and there was lots of crap and pointless raunchiness, too. I remember how could it was at Sur Series 2003, when Shawn, despite being a face, was suspected of not wanting to help Austin because he still held a grudge from Wrestlemania XIV. Why can't good character work like that exist anymore?
He wasn't in the Rumble, he was on the undercard in a tag match.
ReplyDeleteUK Rampage '91 at Wembley Arena is one such example.
ReplyDeleteI remember rewinding that parking lot segment on tape later on that night because I saw a flash of red during the beatdown clip and thought it might have been Triple H turning heel after that comment. (He was wearing red tights that night) Turned out it was just Corporate Kane v1.0.
ReplyDeleteClearly never been exposed to an Andy PG article..
ReplyDeleteThey were definitely scheduled for the house shows because they did spend a lot of time building Bulldog up as a challenger on TV. But Perfect's back was so bad that he missed a lot of those dates. I remember the first house show I ever went to in July 1991 had that match advertised but Typhoon took Perfect's place.
ReplyDeleteI remember being pretty surprised when they announced Bret Hart would be challenging for the IC belt on the PPV because Bulldog was getting such a bigger push prior to the announcement.
I am curious why they turned Roberts heel at this point and when the decision was actually made. Roberts had been a huge face for years near the top of the card and there really wasn't much foreshadowing before he turned. Not that every turn back in those days was planned months in advance and well-explained (ha!) but it seemed pretty random at the time. Jake names his new snake Lucifer and then starts talking about the "real" Lucifer in promos...um, okay. I guess you could argue Jake was getting stale as a face by this point but then there's always the classic argument against turning a guy heel--the merchandise sales. I guess they decided they needed to give Warrior a big feud because Undertaker was moving onto Hogan and Jake fit the bill. I would have been curious to see how Jake-Warrior drew at the house shows had Warrior stayed past Summerslam.
ReplyDeleteI'd always thought you were meant to infer that it had been the Trigger for Jake's turn to the Dark Side, but I agree it would have been cool if he'd cut a promo where he mentioned it. Only thing that would have made Heel Jake even better.
ReplyDeleteYou're right, I'd never noticed that before! Even by the Heels vs. Faces dynamic of Kayfabe WWF that's stretching plausibility. "Sorry about killing your snake and serving it to Alfred Hayes, dude." "No worries, water under the bridge..."
ReplyDeleteHe got in the ring, though. One of the major commandments in wrestling is "Fans that jump the rail get seven shades of shit beaten out of them".
ReplyDeleteAnd Lord knows Nash is one of the most honest guys in wrestling todBWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.................I'm sorry, I couldn't. I tried.
ReplyDelete