#158 – The SummerSlam 1994
This week Dre and Black Cat go back to 1994 to review the very first event at Chicago’s United Center – The SummerSlam 1994 featuring two big matches. The first is the legendary steel cage between the Hart brothers followed by the night the Undertaker wrestled….THE UNDERTAKER! Please support the show and pick up our new SEASON 4 BOX SET including two unreleased episodes of reviews for the 1987 Jim Crockett Sr. Memorial Cup Tag Team tournament and the documentary “Heroes of World Class Wrestling” available on DVD or for direct download. Please support the Old School Wrestling Podcast by visiting oldschoolwrestlingpodcast.com where you can find links to all of our great products. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you…..at the matches!
Podcast: Download (Duration: 2:33:18 — 130.7MB)
WOW great article and topic of wrestling video games. Christmas of 1997 got N64 that year I got WWF “War Zone” and “WcW World Tour”. It wasn’t till later in ’98 I got the greatest pro wrestling game ever “WCW/NOW Revenge”!!! Yes at this time WWF had “War Zone” & WCW release “World Tour” like a year or two before, but let’s face not even “world Tour” had Mark Curtis counting you out! Also the introducing actual arena’s from Nitro, 1997 Starrcade, Bash at the Bash, Halloween Havoc, etc. The championship mode my god at one time I had Raven holding every belt, but the cruiserweight. Just in case if your where wondering yes he held the tag belt with Saturn in the game. They even had Glacier & Ernest Miller to choose from!!!!!!! It gives the game user options of different outfits for the wrestlers. HELL you could even save the game without needing a card to save it on. I could go on and on how I spent a lot of hours playing this game. I even at one point was playing the game and watching Thunder or Saturday at the same time.
2 quick things:
Another reason to hate Jeff Jarrett – the phrase slapnuts
In the last 2 years I have seen Bruce Hart at Costco and both times he was wearing his wrestling boots that looked like cowboy boots. I think once he was wearing his leather jacket.
Here are a few things came to mind while listening to THE SUMMERSLAM 1994 podcast:
[a] Jeff Jarrett’s Nipple Cage attire: I couldn’t agree more, I don’t know what’s uglier and a disgrace to professional wrestling than the nipple cage attire Jeff Jarrett wore for all those years. Ish.
[b] Jeff Jarrett vs. Razor Ramon – WWF Intercontinental Championship match – WWF Royal Rumble 1995 – The only match that comes to mind that was a great (in my opinion) Jeff Jarrett match. I’m sure a lot of credit goes to Razor Ramon on being Jarrett’s dance partner on that night, but that was one-helluva match. Only Jarrett match that I can think of off hand (only because I rented that PPV on VHS a ton when I was growing up, to see the Shawn Michaels and British Bulldog performance in the Rumble match).
[c] Owen Hart vs. Bret Hart – What better feud is out there that’s technically better than Owen vs. Bret. Also, question that I have to pose – who brings a better match out of Shawn Michaels – Owen or Bret?
[d] Wrestling Video Games – Sorry for the bad mic in this show, but I did a two and a half hour podcast discussing, of all things, the history of wrestling video games! I love you guys discussed it (wrestling video games) on your show the experiences you guys had playing them.
Here’s the link to my show on wrestling video games, if for whatever reason you wanna check it out: http://maineventstatus.com/2015/08/15/special-cast-012-history-of-wrestling-video-games-with-joe-drilling-and-eric-allen-from-what-a-maneuver/
[e] Backstory of the Arenas Discussed on the Show – I really enjoyed hearing the backstory on the arena SummerSlam 1994 was held at. I’d love to hear you guys make that a concrete feature on the show.
I also loved hearing Black Cat talk about the backstory of the PPV from Raw’s he watched leading up to the SummerSlam. Please make that a feature too, if you guys have the time and shows are up on the Network.
Anyways, sorry for a long post, I wanted to share my thoughts on A GREAT PODCAST!! Thinking of it, would Bret call it a “the podcast?”
Hey Guys,
Was listening to the first twenty minutes of the show and came to a complete stop and had to tell a couple of quick stories involving two Chicago institutions: panhandlers and the folks who sell the Streetwise paper.
I’ve had family that’s lived in Chicago for decades and during the summers I would be shipped off to their home to visit my cousins for a couple of weeks. Without giving too much of their location away, because I know people are just clamoring outside their home like the weirdos that were going through C.M. Punk’s trash awhile back, I’ll just say they lived near where the site of the old Riverview amusement park used to be near Lane Tech High School.
One day, my aunt, cousins and I are walking out of Dominick’s and are damn near accosted by a man that smelled like a Long John Silvers and had a dog with him. He starts giving the speech about being a Vietnam Veteran and that he’s trying to raise some money for a bus ticket.
My aunt looks at him and shakes her head, walking away. As we are walking across the street she tells me that the guy was probably telling us a fake story and that she had actually seen that guy at the Jewel next door about a month before with a different dog and a different war he was a veteran of.
About three days later my uncle, cousins and I are parked in the Jewel lot next door when a guy runs up us with a cloth rag and some windex. The bottle had no label so I cannot say for certain that it was actually windex. He starts giving my lifelong Chicago resident uncle his standard speech when Uncle Lou pulls a police billy club out from under his seat. The guy immediately backs away and attempts to “Virgil” the other people in the lot. Most of the cars looked better before he had touched them.
About five minutes later, the Vietnam Vet from earlier that week comes up to the car. Now, I want to admit that this man was terribly brave if not hideously stupid. Walking up to an unfamiliar car in Chicago after dark. Anyway, he had walked up to us with an empty gas can and a grocery bag of tennis balls. Yes, tennis balls.
He starts cutting the same bus ticket promo from a few days earlier, offering to sell us tennis balls in exchange for gas money. My next words changed the tenor of the whole conversation, “hey, where’s your dog?”
My uncle looks back at me, surprised that I knew who the guy was. I tell him that a few days ago that this guy was a Vietnam Vet with a blind dog who was trying to get money for a bus ticket. Out comes the billy club…
Lou then proceeds to tell the guy that there’s somebody across the lot washing windows honing in on his territory. He proceeds to drop the tennis balls, the gas can and makes a blind sprint at the window washing bum and the two get into an argument that looked like the Tazmanian Devil trying to have relations with a tumbleweed.
If I may, what Dre and the Black Cat said about the Streetwise people are completely true. However, I must also add the caveat that around 2000-2001 they apparently also sold copies of The Onion. I know this because I was waiting to take a train to Flint, Michigan and was accosted by one of these folks outside the Chinese restaurant kiosk at the train station. I see that the person is a little down on their luck and it’s near Christmas so I agree, citing that I did need something to read while waiting for my train.
I turn my back to reach to get a couple of singles out of my wallet and I can only describe the Streetwise man’s next move as Virgilesque…He started leaning over my shoulder and looking in my wallet to ask if he can have the twenty instead of the three dollars I was going to give him. I grab the paper, give him the three bucks and told him he was lucky to get that.
So yeah, just about everything that they have said about these captains of industry is absolutely true. Although I am a bit sad, as I never got to see the show where the guy had the hole in his leg.
Keep up the great work,
Dan
Do you guys get the impression that the only joy Stu Hart gets in life is seeing his children batter each other senseless? I’m sure as Helen was crying, he was chuckling to himself, rubbing his hands with delight, satisfied with himself.
So who did Stu Hart cheer for that night? No one. I’m sure ot broke his heart that both Bret and Owen were wearing pink, and thus in his mind, they both deserved a beating for wearing such girly colours.
I loved this show! I attended Summerslam 1994 with 2 of my older brothers when I was only 6 years old, but I remember it clearly.
I loved the Bret/Owen match and was fairly convinced that I had started a “Let’s go, Bret!” chant that I thought gave Bret the strength to win the match. But, without the commentators’ introduction, we were confused who British Bulldog was because he looked so different.
I think I realized the Undertaker vs Underfaker match was a forgone conclusion even then, but it was great to see the spectacle of an Undertaker return in person. Undertaker hadn’t been seen since losing a casket match at Royal Rumble, during which the urn was broken open. In the weeks leading up to Summerslam, they had interviews on Superstars of random people across the country who had reported seeing the real Undertaker, as though he was Bigfoot. There were little clues as to what the Undertaker and Paul Bearer were up to, like people claiming that Bearer was trying to acquire a lot of gold for something. When Bearer came out at Summerslam with a GIANT gold urn that was shooting lasers out, I about lost my goddamn mind.
I’ll also be grateful to my older brother for bringing me there. It was a great experience. Great show, keep it up!
I remember getting Acclaim’s Wrestlemania NES game for a birthday when I was like 9 or 10. When it came time for cake and ice cream, I refused to come out of my room because I was too busy playing the game. I had heard from a friend that the icing on the cake had gone bad and used that as justification for my actions.
When playing the same game a couple months later at a friend’s house, whose dad happened to be my mom’s boss, I was getting destroyed and getting frustrated by another kid. My mom’s boss kept the taunts coming until I screamed out “SHUT UP!” Somewhere in the distance I heard a record scratch and then you could’ve heard a pin drop. My friend said “No one tells my dad to shut up.” I was so embarrassed I forgot to apologize until about 25 some odd years later.
About 10 years ago, in order to move to Chicago I took on a telephone sales job. Being terrible at it and seeing there was no way I would ever hit quota and would definitely be let go, I spent many an hour online playing the old NES Pro Wrestling game and getting squashed by the puma character at the very end. I’m sure the gal in the cubicle next to mine had to have been wondering why I was typing so loud.
Absolutely loved this episode!!! When you mentioned that you were going to discuss old school wrestling video games, Tag Team Wrestling immediately came to mind but I never thought it would be on the list. Imagine my shock when it was the first game mentioned.
I was at the Jersey shore in the early ‘80s with my family when I first played this game. We had rented a house for the week and my step-brother and I discovered the game at a local pizza shop. We played that game the entire week. I vividly remember my dad giving us rolls of quarters and sending us out to play. As a side note, I never considered the ulterior motive my dad probably had in getting us out of the house until Black Cat mentioned it during the episode. And now I’m sick.
Anyway, on the last day of vacation my step-brother and I decided we wanted to play one last time before going home. I wrote a note that said, “Went to say goodbye to Jocko and Spike” and off we went. When we returned my parents were waiting for us in what can only be described as an intervention. “Who are Jocko and Spike?” my step-mother asked. It turned out that they were afraid that Jocko and Spike were the local drug dealers and that we had fallen in with a criminal element. We assured them that they had nothing to worry about, that they were just pretend wrestlers from a video game. The look on my father’s face said that he would have probably preferred drug dealers to “pretend wrestlers” as an explanation. Such is the shame of a wrestling fan, am I right?
Been a while since I’ve been on, but I just wanted to make a couple of comments about this show-
1) I agree with Dre. Jeff Jarrett has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He is a blemish on the asscrack of wrestling history, and has done nothing… NOTHING of any substance, IMO. It was said that Jarrett never drew a dime? I disagree. The son of a bitch never drew a nickel!
2) Mabel was a wonderfully, agile fat person.
3) Lex Luger did indeed have numerous heel-face turns. I wouldn’t trust him in my corner for anything. And what was with his USA gimmick in 1994? It would have worked about 10 years prior during the Cold War when Reagan was President, but as always, Vince is always at least half a decade behind the 8 ball when it comes to cultural relevancy.
4) Owen vs. Bret in the big blue cage is a classic. We all get that. But I miss the hell out of that big blue cage. I always thought it was so cool looking, and loved the idea of having to escape over the top of it to win a match. I think if RAW ever does anymore “Old School” nights, they need to bring back the big blue cage for a one night.
5) Undertaker vs. Undertaker. Don’t remember it. Never gave a shit. I thought it was a goofy angle.
6) Alundra Blaze was hot.
Hey guys, love the show. But I believe Undertaker was originally managed by Brother Love (not Ted DiBiase as mentioned in this episode).