Irrelevant But Awesome

Joel:   It’s hard to go into WrestleMania X8 right after having seen the previous one. X7 after all was the best WrestleMania to date and pretty much defines what a WrestleMania event could be. It’s going to be hard to be compared to that, no matter what kind of card you’ve put together. And if you judge it on its own merit, WrestleMania X8 is still a pretty good show. And they tried to put together a fantastic card. The title is now the undisputed title to add to the gravity of the main event match. And you have Hogan showing up for the first WrestleMania in almost ten years which genuinely felt like a big deal. It doesn’t quite live up to the feeling and the momentum of last years show, but then again, I’m not sure how it could. The biggest complaint I have (other than the number being X8 which is just as stupid as X7 was last year) was not letting Hogan and Rock go on last. That just feels like the epic showdown that’s worthy of being the main event. It’s Icon vs. Icon. A...

Joel:  I’m not going to dance around the fact. WrestleMania IX is pretty much the worst WrestleMania of them all. Most people are eager to credit that to the whole “toga party” theme that ran throughout the show. Don’t get me wrong, that was a bad idea top to bottom. Every single aspect of the whole theme was a dud from changing people’s names to give them more “ancient roman” sounding names to the “hilarious” moment of Bobby Heenan struggling during his entrance. Pretty much everything falls flat. But if that were the main problem of WrestleMania IX, then I could look past that. Themed WrestleManias are dumb and they’ve never tried to lean into a theme as much as they did this one so maybe they learned the lesson. No the problem here is how badly almost every match is booked on this card. Seriously, Doink the Clown has an eight and a half minute match on this card! Razor Ramon’s match was less than half that time. Undertaker has the worst match of his streak on this card...

Joel:  It is perhaps unfair to WrestleMania VIII, but the show often ends up getting to compared to the WrestleMania that could have been. This was without question the moment in history where we should have had a Hogan vs. Flair main event at WrestleMania. It’s the main event we never got from that era that should have happened. It was clearly on the card at one point, but for whatever happened it didn’t come to fruition. It’s a shame that WrestleMania VIII has become known as the one where a match didn’t happen, because it’s actually been one of the best WrestleManias so far, and that is because of the undercard matches. First of all, I subscribe to the theory that their is only one true main event on a show. This whole co-main event thing doesn’t quite work for me. They really tried to make it feel like there were two main events on this card, with having both “main events” featured on the promotional poster and having two different taglines for the show, one for each mat...

Joel:  WrestleMania VII was the proud to be an American one. I know that this was in direct response the Gulf War, which was happening at the time, but watching these things pretty much back to back, makes it feel like they are trying to make up for being in Canada last year by doubling down on all of the America this time around. The ring ropes are red, white, and blue. There are American flags EVERYWHERE! Even the poster of the event was a picture of Hulk Hogan waving an American Flag. (Some promotional posters featured a stare-down between Hogan and Slaughter, but even those had an American flag background. At least this time around it feels like there are two big matches instead of just the one main event match that we’ve had for the past handful of WrestleManias. Obviously the show itself cares the most about the Main Event (after all that’s where all the American patriotism is coming from here). It wasn’t terrible but still felt like a bit of a step back from Hogan a...

Joel:  Like WrestleMania V before it, WrestleMania VI is a show that knows how to build and put on a WrestleMania main event, but pretty much does so at the expense of every other match on the card. So much so that by the middle of the card, I was having to check Wikipedia to remind me of the outcome of matches that had happened earlier in the show. Part of the problem was the fact that there were fourteen different matches on the card. But most of it comes from how little attention seems to be given to any of the matches that aren’t the main event. After years of Andre and Bobby Heenan working together, this was the event where Andre finally snapped and turned against Heenan, but I didn’t remember that until rewatching it. This was also (arguably) the event where Mr. Perfect’s undefeated streak was broken, but there was hardly a mention of that either. No, all the show really cared about was the Main Event, the rest of it was just twiddling thumbs until we got to that point...

Joel:  I have to say, it’s watching WrestleManias like this that make me wonder how more modern WrestleManias are going to look to an audience that is watching them thirty years from now. Yes, by this point they’re really starting to get the “WrestleMania feel” down. The show itself feels like a big deal, but pretty much all of that is centered around one match. The Mega Powers feud is a storyline that has pretty much been a year in the making since Randy Savage won the title at WrestleMania the previous year, but no other match on the card has that kind of feel to it. Instead it simply feels like there was a card to fill so they filled it. It didn’t help that so much time was dedicated to the Morton Downey Jr. segment which felt like a long Raw segment that somehow stumbled its way onto WrestleMania. (I know Raw didn’t exist yet, but you know what I mean.) Looking at this makes me wonder how we’re going to feel looking back at, let’s say WrestleMania 29. With so much buildu...

SideShowBob:  Two things became apparent with this Wrestlemania.  1) As their budget grew, the Wrestlemania hype and packaging crew was starting to show what they were capable of, given the limitations of the time; and 2) ‘One Night Pay Per View Tournaments in WWF/E’ work great on paper but not so well in execution.  This is as good as one of those gets.  Macho Man’s arc was blatant, but he had the crowds support already.  The rest of the tourney matches were crap, with the shock being Hogan or Andre weren’t crowned. Speaking of Hogan Andre 2, the leadup to that was a complete mindfuck to kids of my generation.  You were left wondering how the hell did they do that...  Think I’m alone, go read the excerpt about this from Chris Jericho’s book.  It was madness… Speaking of madness, they couldn’t possibly pass on Savage Steamboat 2 in the same tournament right?  Oh wait, yes they did..  Along with an absolute snoozefest time li...

SideShowBob:  Why does this seem like the first real Wrestlemania as we know it?  I think it’s because it took itself seriously.  The names were by now familiar.  The builds were far better, and are now available on the WWE Network.  That shit alone is worth my $9.99/month (Seriously go watch the old shows).  The visual of the arena is still awe inspiring.  The matches weren’t great, the one obvious exception in Savage/Steamboat.  It had the idea of the defining “Wrestlemania Moment” when Hogan slammed Andre. The rest of the card was what you could expect for its time – the tag teams were the workhorses of live shows.  All in all, this is by far my favorite Wrestlemania for where I was at the time.  This defined how a larger than life show should be done to me.  That said, Bundy is relegated to elbow dropping midgets, the Bulldogs and Tito lost to the Hart Foundation and Dangerous Danny Davis.  Honkytonk beat Jake the S...