From The Vault
MONDAY NIGHT RAW #126
CANTON, OHIO
WWF CHAMPION: DIESEL
INTERCONTINENTAL CHAMPION: SHAWN MICHAELS
TAG TEAM CHAMPIONS: OWEN HART & YOKOZUNA
This week’s episode of RAW starts out with a replay of last week’s main event where the 1-2-3 Kid cost Razor the match by being stupid. Yeah…this feud kind of came out of nowhere. I mean, Razor and Kid really didn’t have any reason to hate each other since last week, which was entirely Kid’s fault. We replay the Kid’s win in 1993, presumably just to piss Razor off further, and hype Dean Douglas vs. Razor for the PPV.
1-2-3 KID vs. RAZOR RAMON
We also recap Razor smacking Dean around at SummerSlam, which shows you pretty much perfectly how competitive this feud is. Kid attacks Razor before the bell to start the match, which…none of the commentators seem to care about. Here’s a pro tip on how to see heel turns coming: someone does a bunch of heel shit out of nowhere and it’s basically ignored by the commentators.
Razor hits a fallaway slam from the top rope, which surprisingly doesn’t immediately get a 3 count. Man, that move is brutal. Razor pretty much just beats the Kid up for a while, Vince talks ad nauseam at ringside about his agility and quickness and, right on cue, Kid starts turning it around.
He also completely kills the quickness and momentum of the match by locking in a sleeper hold. Dude, just flip him forward. Sadly, he doesn’t take my advice, instead he hits a back suplex. Which is also something he could have done at literally any time.
A slugfest leads to Kid jabbing the eye of Razor, which is also ignored. We get probably the worst ref bump I’ve ever seen, Dean Douglas runs out and hits a splash on Razor and Kid takes the free win. Vince complains about Dean Douglas but doesn’t actually mention Kid’s douchebaggery.
We get a weird segment with Dean Douglas where he insults everyone possible. Next up, we get a filler tag match. But hey, at least it’s not jobbers.
TATANKA & KAMA vs. SAVIO VEGA & BOB HOLLY
So yeah, Tatanka is terrible. I can’t believe I’ve never gone on this tangent before on this feature, but when you have to watch every single Tatanka match on every single RAW, you grow to hate him more than anybody else on the roster. At least, I did. Your mileage may vary. Kama is just mediocre at this point, Bob Holly gets maybe a punch’s worth of offense per match, and Savio Vega isn’t really enough to carry something like that. We get some painfully generic tag team offense, and we get a reaffirmation of how important this match is when Jerry Lawler talks about Ted DiBiase getting slopped last week at ringside.
See, that’s the problem with these guys in tag matches, they’re so painfully generic that it’s kind of disgusting. Tatanka, for instance, doesn’t have a unique style of any sort until he hops around and decides to win. We get a bunch of face-in-peril, and Vince actually points out how much of an idiot Holly is for distracting the ref during it. Wow, that’s something I would expect Matt Striker to say, not ultra-kayfabe Vince. Finally, Holly gets the hot tag, because every single conventional tag match in the history of wrestling uses the exact same formula. Holly jumps at Kama from the top rope, which he reverses in probably the nastiest botch I’ve seen in a long time.
Jerry Lawler makes a Jeffrey Dahmer joke at ringside which transitions straight into a Razor Ramon promo. Uh…okay. We get a commercial for a replay of what would be the worst WrestleMania in history had WrestleMania 9 not gone so catastrophically wrong. Jean Pierre LaFitte (one of the Quebecers who decided to turn into a pirate and started stealing a bunch of Bret Hart’s shit) comes to the ring to face a jobber. I love it how from 1993 to 1995 Vince’s only idea for midcard heels was “lackeys of Jerry Lawler with stupid gimmicks”. Bret Hart actually lampshades how stupid this is on the phone, which gives us a bit of extra build-up for the PPV.
Yes, in the past year, Bret Hart (one of the most talented workers in the history of wrestling) has faced great competition like a dentist and a pirate. Ah, the 1990s sure were great. We get some dude re-enforcing the ring for the main event so we don’t get the ring-breaking spot something like 9 years early.
KING MABEL & SIR MO vs. YOKOZUNA & OWEN HART
They show a hilarious replay of a completely dead crowd during Mabel’s coronation at King of the Ring, which pretty much perfectly illustrates every problem with the WWF in the early to mid 1990s. Owen and Mo start the match, and I’m left wondering why Mabel and Mo are still using the stupid gaudy purple Men on a Mission attires. Actually, no, I’m not wondering that. It’s because they’re useless hacks. Sure, Mabel ended up being decent, but still probably wouldn’t have been accepted in the main event.
Speaking of Mabel, he runs face-first into the turnbuckle and we get…face-in-peril(?) spots with Owen. Guys, it’s kind of hard to do believable face-in-peril when everybody involved is a heel, and especially when the guy getting beat up was pretty much a natural heel. For some reason, they insist on keeping Mo in the match instead of just getting it over with and throwing in Yoko and Mabel. We all know that that’s basically the entire point of this match, so why aren’t they just getting on with it?
Seriously, I’m not kidding here, they actually do face-in-peril with everyone’s favorite face, Sir Mo. Yeah, I bet he’s going to get a lot of support from the crowd. Mabel and Mo are barely over as heels at this point, why would you expect them to get any support at all? We finally get Yoko vs. Mabel, which is a lot lamer than expected, mostly because Mabel gets 5 seconds of offense and almost immediately tags in Mo again. Fuck’s sake, dude, you think Mo is going to stand up against Yokozuna? As expected, he immediately gets dropped by Yoko, who tags in Owen for the match-ending spot.
You know, this ironically might have been tolerable as a complete squash match. Like, Yoko fights Mabel for a few minutes with some cool slam spots and then absolutely ruins him. That would have been at least a decent little squash match. But no, instead we get 10 minutes of Mo doing crappy looking suplexes. At the very least we get a nice little Jim Cornette interview to end the painfully mediocre show.