Thread 18635218

when exactly did their booking become such complete dogshit?

>>18635218 (OP)
in 92 when flair left

>>18635403
he left wcw in 91
he left wwf in 93
my opinion he hurt wwf far more when he left, wwf is dogshit in 93 without flair. i was just watching Superstars episodes from 1993. holy shit was it bad and far worse than i remembered. wcw was way better than wwf and continued to be for years

>>18635218 (OP)
when wasnt it?

>>18635218 (OP)
WCW at its worst is still better than WWE under Paul

>>18635586
The correct answer, and I say that as a fan.
If it had booking that was worth a shit when times were good, it would have had enough homegrown stars that Russo's efforts wouldn't have been necessary.
And Russo was the final coffin nail.

>>18635218 (OP)
It was honestly never good
WCW only peaked for a few years because of the nWo storyline and because they came up with a few good top faces during that time like Crow Sting and Goldberg
Also they had great support with good actual in-ring work in the midcard/cruiserweight division
Once that shit wore off, it was downhill from there due to the shitty booking

When Nash

>>18635218 (OP)

When they brought in DiBiase and Bossman into the nWo


To be fair 90% of WCWs existence was just bad booking covered up by stars and angles people wanted to see

>>18635218 (OP)
Never

I think it would be easier to tell you the times WCW was good.
Early WCW is plagued by the Turner execs trying to take the blood and seriousness out of southern wrestling. And asking for it to be this impossible combination of a sports based presentation and a knock off WWF where there's a bunch of gay gimmick wrestlers for retarded children. This is when you get the shit like the Ding Dongs/Arachnaman, and boring shit like battle bowl. and the Sting vs Flair feud is surprisingly dry and bloodless compared to Flair's earlier work.
92 has it's gems. Flair is gone, but we get the dangerous alliance. Bobby Eaton and Arn Anderson are ring generals, Rick Rude doing the best work of his career, heat magnet Larry Zbyszko and future GOATs Steven Austin and Paul Heyman. Opposed by Sting doing his best work without Flair to carry him, Barry Windham and Steamboat who put on the last great performances of their careers and Dustin Rhodes is more than holding his own. Later in the year you get Vader and some rare American appearances by the Miracle Violence Connection. This only gets better when Flair returns and it just keep getting better in better until March 1994 when Hogan shows up, and Starcade goes from Vader vs Flair, the best American match of the 90s, to Hogan vs his best friend the bootyman. Shit gets gay for a long time.
At some point all the Hogan bullshit is offset by the strong midcard, and the NWO grows to such proportions it can't help but have some decent workers in it. And then it falls off one last time whenever you personally realized that this NWO shit isn't going to have a satisfying conclusion and all the least interesting workers are just shuffling their on screen allegiances to make sure they don't job to anyone but each other.
Personally they were at the point of no return with me when they opened nitro with "All this show is fake, and we hired the fake writer from the promotion you don't like to write storylines for our fake wrestlers."

Didn't people love The Crow?

>>18635218 (OP)
The minute they hired Russo

>>18635849
>t. zoomer who learned everything he knows about wcw from wwe

>>18640252
Wrestling has always been behind on mainstream culture, and now looking back on it as someone who was 15 in the year 2000 it's hilarious how they thought Russo was bringing some sort of youth energy. He was unced to the highest degree. If teens and young adults liked Howard Stern they liked the sociopathic way he lorded himself over people in desperate need of mental health services, they did not like him cause he got to hang out with retards. He never got Stern, he got Beetlejuice and Hank the Drunken Dwarf.
Back then we hated authority, so knowing that all these wrestlers were being written for made it impossible to root for them.
No Tom Green, or Jackass, or Numetal. Out of touch. The closest he came to touching on actual youth culture was 3 count, but even that he had to shit up with Tank Abbot.

>>18640471
>Wrestling has always been behind on mainstream culture
If only we could find out who is druving "mainstream culture", and why

Bischoff-Nash-Russo-Sullivan-Bischoff+Russo is such an unbelievably bad streak of shit bookers

>>18640555
>druving

I've recently started watching all PPVs starting from 1990 and so far my main takeaway is WCW's in ring product is far superior to WWF but WCW can't book for shit. Anytime someone gets involved with Flair they come out looking worse every time. The way they butchered Luger in 1990 was shocking.
I don't know that much about the booking history, but I've gathered that a lot of the crazier shit was from Ole Anderson, which is weird because he doesn't strike me as a bells and whistles type guy

>>18635218 (OP)
January 4th 1999, but really deciding to nit have Goldberg lose clean the night prior was the death knell. The fingerpoke meant
>no blow off to the wolpac/Hollywood feud
>Goldberg lost all aura due to losing to a gimmicked cattleprod for no heat
>Goldberg heat wasn't transfered onto the person who beat him
>no run for baby face nash
Nash was the most popular face in the company, if they would have had him beat Goldberg clean there were places to go. Reforming the original NWO didn't make business or kayfabe sense and it came at a time when WWF was giving away the feel good story of 99 with Foley's win.

>>18643349
It's like I said earlier - I loved WCW and would take it over WWF/E any day but the booking was trash.
They would have had more homegrown stars if they had decent booking. That wasn't the draw. But lack of booking is what bit them in the ass near the end when they needed those homegrown stars. So they brought in Russo, who attempted to bootstrap some talents and, in doing so, turned everything into a garbage fire.

>>18643349
>Superior in ring product
>bafflingly incompetent booking
Hey, wait a minute

>>18644337
Having lived through it I still don't think the superior ring product is true. That cruiserweight division was a joke and did untold damage to the careers of those in it. Having cruiserweights from WCW win top WWF belts was the death knell of the industry

>>18644337
Wow that perfectly describes modern wwe

>>18644337
>Wow that perfectly describes modern wwe

>>18644745
>I still don't think the superior ring product is true
In the late 80s and early 90s, it was 100% true. People always assume you're only talking about the Nitro era when you mention WCW as though the company was founded when Hogan signed

>>18644945
>People always assume you're only talking about the Nitro era
Even then I'll take Fit Finlay over Droz

>>18644874
THAT'S superior in ring product?

WCW was a mismanaged company from the start. It was a $20 million a year company that was losing $10 million a year, and 3 years later it was a $350 million a year company that was making $05 millio a year...and then it got sold for less than $2 million. A month before Turner Broadcasting bought the company, they were in Richmond, VA and they sold out the RIchmond Colloseum with 10'000 people main evented by Ric Flair. And then within a perod of maybe 3 years, they were lucky to be averaging 4-500 people for live events anywhere in the country. The whole thing was a carny/redneck shitshow from start to finish.

>>18644945
In the late new gen era (94-95) wcw had a better ring product. From 97-01 I don't think that was true. 96 was a toss up.

Shit goes off the rails in 99 well before Russo. First they turned DDP who was red hot and then they end up turning Sting. Turning 2 of your hottest faces when you're up against Austin and Rock is crazy work. I'm still enjoying it more than modern stuff but there's definitely some fumbles that are still baffling. I'm watching the first Russo episode after Forbidden Door if I'm still awake. I haven't managed to catch any Thunder as it wasn't included. Have I missed much?

The better man lost

>>18645739
Thunder was so brutal because it was trash but still had bearing on nitro

Best pre-nWo/Nitro periods of WCW:

>1989: pretty much the whole year from Flair-Steamboat 1 at Chi-Town Rumble all the way to Starrcade 89 (which is the weakest show of the year)
>Great American Bash 90
>Starrcade 91: Battle Bowl is comfy
>1992: from Superbrawl II to Great American Bash
>1993: Superbrawl, Slamboree, Beach Blast, *skip Fall Brawl*, Halloween Havoc and Starrcade
>1994: whole year is solid up to Halloween Havoc
>1995: Bash at the Beach

>>18647480
Dungeon of doom angle was peak WCW kino

>>18635849
>WCW was only good when it was good
Thanks mate

>>18635218 (OP)
WCW was doomed the day Austin left. It doesn’t matter how good or bad the booking was, the entire WCW roster together couldn’t match the starpower and charisma of Austin and Rock.

>>18648603
WWE won because it had better memes. I'm dead serious. WWE, at its peak, was early meme culture. WCW never figured this out. RAW was like watching 4chan on tv every week. Only my fellow boomers, or uncs or whatever you kids are calling us, will get this.

>>18635218 (OP)
There main event finishes were terrible from the mid 90s till it died, pipers clean win over hogan is the only wcw main event I can remember that didn't have something fun going

>>18648603
Counterpoint - he obviously didn't have the charisma then or else they might have kept him.
But would he have gone on to develop the charisma if he hadn't felt fucked over by WCW?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlN8-Su7RGs

>>18648603
If it was just austin they would have been ok. It was austin, rock, foley, taker, kane, and whoever else combined that really fucked them over.

>>18635723
This. It was fun to watch through 96-97 period with NWO because it was cool at first and they had good cruiserweight matches. The booking was never really good, there was just some good ideas and money for stars.

They didn't push based Dimesco Inferno enough.

>>18635849
Exactly. Didnt even need to post my comment, you said it.

>>18635218 (OP)
Their booking was only good for like 3 years at the very most

>>18648541
>99% dogshit
>perfect booking for about 5 weeks at the start of nwo
>still 99% dogshit so overall dogshit

>>18648747
You hear all that on some WWE-produced documentary son?

>>18648654
Also true. WCW after 1997-1998 looked like an outdated show while WWF’s presentation looked very modern and in tune with what was popular among teens at the time.

>>18648834
This lmao
All these zoomie cucks who weren't even born before WCW disappeared spouting retarded opinions fed to them by WWE propagandists

>>18635218 (OP)
It always was just carried by the talent and one good idea Bischoff had (or stole I don't really know or care which). You know how people give Tony shit for booking random ass "dream matches"? Not that he doesn't deserve shit for that, but WCW just booked random ass matches every week outside a few storylines. Especially when Nitro became three hours, there's just be some random midcarder against another.

unironically Russo. prior to him it was like anywhere else, some good some bad. but when Russo took over there wasn’t a single good match

>>18635218 (OP)
October 1998 when Nash was given the book.

>>18635218 (OP)
It was always dogshit. They got lucky once with the nWo storyline. Even the Goldberg undefeated streak started off white hot and they found a way to fuck it up. 90% of the rest of WCW was completely fucking stupid and forgettable. That's why nobody has real nostalgia for any of it besides nWo. It was a complete fluke.

>>18651264
LMAO.
Pro-wrestling fell off after WCW died for a reason. Some of us hopped on board with WWF/E but we were the ones who stopped watching that after a few years.
It's always easy to tell the zoomers because you're the ones who all repeat the WWE propaganda line from the past 20 years. Of course they're going to make it sound like WCW sucked.
It absolutely didn't back in the day. The booking wasn't the best in hindsight but it was must watch until WWF got its act together.

>>18651275
Where is all of the nostalgia for factions like Dungeon of Doom, or West Texas Rednecks, or 3 Count? Why does nobody talk about the epic feud between Old Roddy Piper and Old Hulk Hogan? Why doesn't anyone talk about WCW's Hardcore Championship like they do WWF's Hardcore Championship?

Like I said, WCW had one hot period where nWo was popular and the rest of the booking was decent, but beyond that, WCW's booking was mediocre at absolute best. It was a boring ass show outside of the main event storylines for the most part.

>>18651311
I went a bit harsh in my previous comment, and I apologize for that.
I think the nostalgia isn't there because there's no one to really talk up the legacy. It didn't survive, and the company that did spent twenty five years trashing its legacy. That's sort of an impossible situation to push back upon - there was no company talking up the stuff you say no one remembers the same way there's been a company talking up the legacy of WWF at the time. And 25 years is a long time - memories tend to be short and fade, leaving you with a nostalgia for the vibes at the time more than any actual solid memories.
It wasn't boring at all, though. Most people I've talked to who watched at the time like I did remember WCW for having a solid midcard (with blah main events filled with big names) and WWE having a weaker midcard with solid main events.
It was a lot more solid at the time than the stuff WWF talks about having done back then. And it sure as well was a lot more solid than any company is today.

>>18651264
>That's why nobody has real nostalgia for any of it besides nWo
Yeah nobody ever talks fondly about Flair's 1989 run or War Games 1992 in retrospect, definitely not. The company started in 1995

WCW became unsalvagable in late 1999. Streaming the episodes one after another, there is a specific episode of Nitro where like the whole show is worse. From the set to the angles to the matches, and it was just downhill from there.

>>18635218 (OP)
I haven't seen enough but some of the '89 material was slipping and by '90 it was all fucking dusted.
I think the lowest point was when they fired Dustin over bleeding in the back of the truck, but it was a long way down to that point.

Jeff Jarrett as the top heel from late 99 to early 01 killed their ratings.

>>18645205
WCW copied vince's rollup strategy for the cable expansion but over-relied on aging stars. when they got into the business of hiring old wwf guys it was over. the 97 nitro bump was a fluke, their while strategy was trying to wring the last few bucks out of geezers. the bottom spectacularly falling out was inevitable

>>18651264
Goldberg's streak becomes a nightmare itself, once he wins the title what do you do? you can't depower a guy you've built ad an unstoppable monster. WWE had the same problem with Lesnar and Roman, they're still trying to deal with the Roman fallout

>>18648603
why does Rock always get to piggyback onto it? it was just Austin and Austin alone.

it was always kind of shit even in the early 90s.
the schizo booking really started after the NWO stuff started and the crowds loved the run ins and fuck finishes. then it sort of snowballed

>>18651311
You can cherry pick a bunch of shit in an attempt to back your argument but the fact of the matter is; The Dungeon of Doom is looked back on fondly for the cheese factor, it's memorable like the Shockmaster, Robocop, Spin the Wheel Make the Deal (WWE even brought this back), Booker T calling Hogan a nigger or Abdullah riding the lightning at Halloween Havoc 91.

People have nostalgia for Flair and the horsemen, Vader, Surfer Sting, Ricky Steamboat, the Wargames, the cruiserweights and plenty of other stuff that went on before and during the nWo boom.
Sure WCW's booking was a fucking mess most of the time but there's plenty of memorable shit that went down outside of the nWo. Don't be so daft.

>>18651920
just geezers though, WCW couldn't produce any stars they just pumped old guys. fucking dungeon of doom was s segment from 10 years prior

>>18652101
>WCW couldn't produce any stars
No argument there, but as a counterpoint DDP is a hall of famer and had a fucking terrible run in the WWF. His 97 - 98 years in WCW are memorable and highly regarded as he was over as fuck. Sure he was a geezer but a home-grown geezer.

>>18652166
they caught lightning in a bottle with DDP and they squandered it

>>18644745
Watch a WWF ppv from 1998 with The Lod vs DOA or Godwins vs Boriquas and compare it to a WCW undercard and tell me who had the better in ring product. The reality at the time was that WWF had horrendous undercards but awesome main events and WCW had the exact opposite.

>>18653476
This. I watched and loved both, but WWF had a slightly better and bigger feeling show, even before going fully corporate.

>>18640231
Take the wrestling fig out yo bussy, playa

>>18651510
Russo at his finest

>>18635218 (OP)
Bump

I know its cliched, but I've been watching "Reliving The War" and its so true: Starrcade. There wasn't any semblance of competition from WCW prior to Bischoff but once he got the reigns and took over, acquired Hogan and the lot of them, got the NWO over, it was literally a show where it was a make or break moment. It was that one and only time that they literally had WWF against the ropes and by the balls at the same time. Then Starrcade happens where they put a majority of the young and hungry roster in the front fucking row, Nash decides to stay home with Jamal and no-showed the event, the event itself stunk up the place and then the untanned icon Sting finally faced "Hollywood" Hogan for the WCW World title after 18 months of hype and right up the entrances for that match, it was absolutely legendary. And then the bell rang and it was a complete wet fart.
And then the decline from that point was gradual, and when Bischoff left and Russo showed up and took over, it became sudden. Like once that "New Yawk, bro." shit showed up in a mostly Southern/Dixie-centric market, and then Howard Stern's lackeys showed up, Jeff Jarrett running around calling himself the Chosen One, smashing you with a guitar, hitting a very lame shitty finisher and bringing nothing new to the table and is/was and forever will never be anywhere near main event calibre, wasting Mike Awesome and his talents on very shitty gimmicks, the new WCW Nitro set and logo, trying to cash in on the Jerry Springuh/South Park trash and crash TV of absolute nonsense all while being neutered by Turner Standards and Practices, and it just dwindled on and on further and further down the drain. It became so far removed from a wrestling show and making coherent sense and so far up its own ass and so lost in what it was meaning to achieve and accomplish and prove and with the wrestling aspect of the show not even be the driving factor or focal point, it just went to shit.