I’ve got 1995 as easily worse.
In 1995, Road Dogg might have been the best wrestler in the semis. In 1998, he might have been the worst.
Are you counting non-PPV KotRs?
2019 had Chad Gable vs Shane MacMahon as one semifinal and Baron Corbin beating Samoa Joe and Ricochet in the other.
Outside of Shane, every one of those people is a better wrestler than anyone from either 1995 or 1998 not named Kane.
How bad is it when you consider booking plus talent?
All 3 of those years are pretty bad, but 1995 had The Undertaker and Shawn Michaels on the same half of the bracket and they chose to advance Mabel and Nobody. Nothing from any other KOTR can touch that.
Didn’t they also push Mabel into a title program with Nash and then Mabel ends up screwing up Nash’s back? So not only do they push a scrub, he ends up hurting the champ as well.
Yeah. And a few months later he broke Takers orbital bone.
1 Like
Razor vs. Luger or Yoko would’ve been a legit semi on the other side as well. For some reason they decided to go with just about the worst semis possible.
At least the following year we’d get Austin winning KOTR and the famous 3:16 promo.
I had an impulse to counter with Great White North. Then I went and looked that show up and it’s not even close to as bad, despite its atrocity of a Diesel-Bulldog main event (and a Yoko vs. Mabel match in the undercard).
Yep, story checks out, KOTR '95 has to be the worst.
A bonus from this gif is how, despite the fact that it was objectively a high-impact move the likes of which people should at least care about even if it’s super risky, everyone on the hard camera side has zero reaction and doesn’t care even a little bit. Nash - who I should hasten to point out seems like a huge liar, so I don’t take his shoot interviews as gospel - claims that he specifically told Mabel not to do this spot before the match.
At least when Ricky Steamboat took a DDT on the concrete floor, he insisted on doing it over Jake Roberts’s protests, and a generation of fans remembers it forever.
https://twitter.com/EvilUno/status/1368766571083087872
https://twitter.com/AEW/status/1368766804378718210
Surprised WWE didn’t sign Christian to something after the Rumble.
The PPV was pretty good until the ending. I don’t see how that fit past Tony Khan. It had to have been an error right?
In kayfabe they’re going with Omega sucks at making explosions/it was a dud as a joke. (Similar to Joker’s harmless Bang gun)
But it sounds like iin reality it was much much better when they tested it and it was just a dud.
I can’t even figure out what that match stipulation was supposed to be. Hardcore brawl and if you’re incapacitated and can’t make it out of the ring then you’re blown up? Was Vince Russo the special guest booker?
It’s a hardcore brawl in a ring with the ropes wrapped in barbed wire. And if you ouch the barbed wire, not only are there the obvious physical pain from the barbs, but also that somehow sets off an explosion. And after 30 minutes, no matter what happens, there is supposed to be a big explosion. It’s copied from Japanese death matches.
If it’d been the sort of explosion that caused the ring to collapse and set things on fire, it would have worked ok as an ending.
Kenny Omega probably wants to build to an American version of the infamous FMW match between Mr. Gannosuke (the fake Hayabusa) and H (the real Hayabusa).
1 Like