Where Wrestling's Regional History Lives!
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You are here: Home>Tape Reviews>WWF Royal Rumble>Royal Rumble 1988
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Where Wrestling's Regional History Lives! |
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- Scott Keith
· Live (on the USA network) from Hamilton, Ontario. · Your hosts are Vince and Jesse. · Okay, so the story here is thus: The NWA decided to put on a PPV, unopposed this time, in the form of the god-awful Bunkhouse Stampede show. It ended up being so bad that the only remnant of the show on videotape is the actual Bunkhouse finals, which is wedged into the Crockett Cup video for that year. Anyway, just to be an asshole, Vince decided to run a three-hour show on the USA network at the same time, with a cool gimmick and everything. And thus was born the Royal Rumble. · Opening match: Ravishing Rick Rude v. Ricky Steamboat Rude was fairly new to the WWF at this point. Slugfest to start, and Steamboat works the skin-the-cat move in in short order. Test of strength goes Ricky's way, and he works on the arm of Rude. It's his POSING arm, which is reinforced because he later has trouble doing the muscle poses. There's a fan at ringside with a megaphone who gets REALLY annoying REALLY quick, and thankfully some of the security nazis confiscated it after this match. Vince counters Jesse's "thumb to the eye" speech by nothing that "youngsters are watching." AHA! I knew he'd admit it if we went back in time far enough. Still working that there arm. It's Arm-Dragon mode tonight, I see. A criss-cross gone horribly, horribly wrong (Tonight on FOX: When meaningless wrestling sequences GO BAD!) sends Ricky to the floor, where Rude takes over. Chinlock, whoo-hoo! Steamboat screws up and forgets to lift his arm on the third drop, so Hebner ignores it and gives him a fourth try. You KNOW Steamboat is just phoning it in here with that kind of error. They go through a tacked-on wrestling sequence that wakes up the crowd and trade several two-counts. Steamboat goes to the top, but the ref gets bumped. Rude gets the hanging body vice (3rd or 4th stupidest finisher of the '80s) and the ref revives to call for the bell. Could the dastardly Rude have made Steamboat submit? Of course not, it's just a lame DQ win for Steamboat at 17:40. Way too long here. * · And you think TODAY'S RAW segments are a bit on the long side? Up next here, it's the Dino Bravo bench-press record attempt. The WWF TV people later (mercifully) cut it down to the final attempt, but the entire thing runs TWENTY MINUTES, as he goes step-by-step up to 700-and-some odd pounds and then cheats with Jesse Ventura's help to set the "record." See, his gimmick was that he was really, really strong. Yeah, I'm stumped as to why that didn't draw money, too. More...
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