#173 – WrestleMania 7
It’s WrestleMania season and this year we review the night Hulkamania defeated Sgt. Slaughter and Saddam Hussein! 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!
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from listening to this podcast … it’s that the humor and appreciation of old-school wrestling makes it one of my favorite things to listen to.
Just a couple of things:
One, I don’t believe Willie Nelson went to prison for his tax issues, which were caused by a series of bad investments combined with the fact that his hired accountants were not paying his taxes like they should have been. In fact, one of the ways Nelson paid off the multimillion dollar debt was to release a box set of acoustic recordings called “THE IRS TAPES” that were originally sold on TV via a 1-800 number. The IRS eventually reduced the debt, we can only assume because everybody loves Willie Nelson.
Two, Wreslemania 7 has a special place in my memory for a few reasons. I remember it being one of the most talked about events when I was in middle school because all the kids who liked the WWF wanted to see Sgt. Slaughter lose the belt and finally get beat by Hogan. A friend of mine who also loved wrestling let me borrow the VHS tape he’d made from ordering the pay-per-view then taping it, which was pretty hot shit back in the day.
I was so excited to see the show but, wouldn’t you know it – Lightning hit our VCR that weekend with the tape still in it. I believe we eventually were able to retrieve the tape after my parents took the dead VCR to a repair place, which was standard at the time because VCRs were such confusing pieces of technology for just about everybody. Funny to think about that now. If I remember correctly I finally saw the main event when the tape became available at our local video store and, yes, it was all on a single tape.
I grew up watching a lot of the old territories, so it’s always a pleasure to listen to the old-school podcast. I purchased the season 1 and 2 digital box sets, looking forward to the third!
I’m sorry to put on this topic again, but it’s not my fault. Perry Saturn’s Hat was clearly not a bucket hat, but a docker cap. Google it, so all those Saturn-Marks out there can look accurate.
Okay, for me this would always be the ‘forbidden Wrestlemania’.
My older brother was in the Canadian Armed Forces during the Gulf War and he was deployed to Saudi Arabia.
We were both wrestling fans growing up and when he went away into the army, wrestling was one of the major things we talked about when we wrote letters to each other. He wanted to know what was going on in the wrestling world, and he couldn’t always catch Superstars or Wrestling Challenge each week, so he relied on me to keep him up to date, which I did diligently.
My mom and dad always tolerated wrestling (my dad more so; I suspect he was a closet fan but wouldn’t openly admit to it) but when they saw the whole Sgt. Slaughter Iraqi-sympathizer angle being played out, they were highly offended and began to serious disapprove of me watching wrestling. But it was when their first-born son and my older brother shipped out to the Persian Gulf they put their foot down.
“There is no way you are watching this, son… wrestling is banned from this household!”
I was shocked… my 14 year old mouth agape, shaking at the unfairness of it all.
“Bu-but it’s not real mom! You can’t do this!”
“Never mind! Your brother is in a real war, and they are making fun of it! No wrestling!”
So that was that. No wrestling. No wrestling magazines. No wrestling anything. Not even non-WWF wrestling. At least not openly. I went over to friends’ houses to catch video recorded episodes of Superstars so I could fill my brother in to what was going on. He thought it was funny that mom and dad were being so obtuse and even tried to reason with them on my behalf in one of his letters, but to no avail.
It didn’t stop me. I even attended a WWF house show in February, Warrior v Slaughter in a steel cage without their knowledge. I managed to keep up with what was going on and keep my brother in the loop, and all right under Mrs. Von Rashy’s nose (if you’re happening to read this now mom, the cat’s out of the bag and I’m sorry!)
If there’s any mystery as to why the WWF could only sell 15000 instead of 100000 tickets to Wrestlemania, I have a very distinct feeling my mom wasn’t the only one who forbade wrestling in her household for exploiting the Gulf War for cheap storylines.
How did u both miss Warrior grunting , “get off!” over and over to every kid touching him on the way to the ring ?
Gents!
Great show.
This was actually the first Mania event that I really fell in love with and, along with III, was probably the one I spent the most time with as a kid. I wasn’t really bitten by the pro wrasslin’ bug until the fall of ’92 but once I was in, I was all in. Between my local video stores and the taped-off-the-TV collection of a neighbor’s older brother, I was able to sort of piece together most 1985 – 1992 in a mere year or so (ahh, the pre-interweb days). On one of my trips to the local Blockbuster, I happened upon a previously-viewed copy of Wrestlemania VII in the sale bin (those bulky Coliseum Video boxes were wonderfully easy to spot in a crowd). Needless to say, I wore that motherfucker out.
I can absolutely attest to it being a single-tape set with a running time of about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Why? Because they hacked, slashed and edited that thing until it fit. Dropping backstage segments is one thing…but this one included several rather egregious mid-match edits. in addition a severely truncated Bulldog/Warlord match, it featured an edit in the middle of Savage/Warrior that confused the hell out of me as a kid. In the first frame, the Warrior was standing tall and pounding his chest, it then cut to a split-second reaction shot from Sherri, before suddenly cutting back to Savage holding a downed Warrior in resthold while Monsoon bellowed, “don’t turn your back”. It was…awkward. As a kid, I just assumed that something may have been wrong with my tape. It wasn’t until the debut of the Network that I actually took the opportunity to sit down and watch the event in it’s entirety. That Bulldog/Warlord match was shockingly watchable in it’s entirety.