If you have 90 minutes to kill (and you probably do), one of our biggest QUAR recommendations is the Vice series Dark Side Of The Ring, specifically their two-hour Season Two premiere from March 25th, investigating the impact of the life and death of Chris Benoit and his family.
We went back through Season One to look for some earlier episodes on Randy Savage and the Montreal Screwjob. Throughout the past year, we've also grown mildly fascinated with the November 1996 episode of Monday Night Raw Is War that featured the legendary "Pillman's Got A Gun" promos.
We took an educated guess that Brian Pillman, Bret Hart, and possibly a handful of the '80s superstars were featured on the card for "Wrestlemania X." We were wrong about Brian Pillman, who did not premiere in WWF until mid-1996.
Held at Madison Square Garden on March 20, 1994, the 10th annual "Mania" PPV featured many retrospective clips looking back through the '80s and up through '94. While birthday celebrations were somewhat expected, we did not anticipate what might have been the greatest pay-per-view that ever happened.. or at least the best one we've seen so far. (We will not reveal results-spoilers here, despite the image of Bret holding the belt posted above. It's entirely possible that Bret was just holding the belt for fun. If needed, results are listed on Wikipedia.)
#1 The Death Count
This section originated from our review of the '95 VMAs after it started to feel like a bizarro universe that included living versions of Biggy and Left Eye and MJ.
This shouldn't be a huge surprise, but Wrestlemania X has a disturbingly large Death Count considering that the event only took place 26 years ago. For comparison, Day Two of Woodstock '99 has a current Death Count of zero. There's so many dead people in this PPV that we're almost positive we missed a few. (To avoid confusion, we emboldened the dead by placing only their names in bold for this section.)
- Owen Hart faced his brother Bret Hart in the event's opening match. Owen also returned at the very end of the event, scowling from outside the ring after the conclusion of Bret's closing 2nd match facing Yokozuna, who is also now dead. (Yokozuna's manager Mr. Fuji was frequently present throughout the event, who is also now dead.)- "Macho Man" Randy Savage faced Crush. This was the only match of Mania X where both wrestlers are no longer with us.
- Burt Reynolds, then promoting the CBS series Evening Shade, was the ring announcer of the Yokozuna/Hart match. He was accompanied by Jenny Garth, also promoting her series Beverly Hills 90210. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the final episode of Evening Shade aired only 3 days later on March 23rd.)
- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper was the guest referee for the Yokozuna/Hart match.
- Sy Sperling was not only the president of The Hairclub For Men; he was also a client. He addressed the crowd after being introduced by a toupee-wearing Howard Finkle, who died just last week on April 16th 2020. Sy Sperling also recently passed away on February 20th 2020. They introduced the event's 2nd match, featuring a tagteam of Bam Bam Bigelow and Luna Vachon, who are now both dead, facing Doink The Clown and Dink (not dead!).
- Joey Marella, one of the refs, was killed only a few months later after falling asleep at the wheel driving back from a WWF event on July 4, 1994.
- Mabel, one-half of the Men On A Mission tag team, passed away in 2014.
- Mr. Perfect was the guest ref for the Yokozuna/Luger match.
- Earthquake faced Adam Bomb in a match lasting 35 seconds.
- "Gigalo" Jimmy Del Ray, one half of The Heavenly Bodies, wrestled in a dark match prior to the official start of the event.
- Jim "The Anvil" Neidhart and The British Bulldog might have been present at Mania 10, since they were included in the aftermath of the Owen/Bret storyline, but we didn't see them anywhere.
- We were unable to determine whether "Bill Clinton" is dead or alive.
#2 Highlights
- The most legendary and best match of the night is widely debated between Owen and Bret's outstanding event kickoff and a jaw-dropping ladder match between Razor Ramon and Shawn Michaels. (We know it sounds dumb, but we cannot lie. Jaws literally dropped many times.) Days afterwards, some light research alerted us of two noteworthy points:
#1 This was WWF's first ever ladder match.
#2 This was WWF/WWE's first rare Meltzer-approved 5-star match. (Only eleven of these exist, including two apiece from '94 and '97. Their next 5-star match was CM Punk facing John Cena in 2011. The rest are all NXT matches that occurred since 2018.)
- Owen and Bret's match holds a very close 2nd place for the night, although their storyline eventually yielded 1994's other 5-star match at Summerslam '94.- Rivaling the strangest moments of the early-'90s VMAs, Wrestlemania X's bizarre cameo appearances seemed to eclipse any PPV's before or since. While not a true cameo, the recurring check-in's with "Bill Clinton" were among the best of the night. Only 14 months into his administration, Bill watched the event alone from the stands, proclaiming his love for the WWF as he read a copy of the event program. Clinton was undisturbed by the crowd as he sat one row in front of Irwin R. Schyster from the IRS and "Million Dollar Man" Ted Dibiase, who later commended Clinton's presidency while advising him to continue raising taxes.
We didn't try very hard to Google for the true identity of "Bill Clinton," but we're assuming he is alive and well. He also returned on future episodes of Monday Night Raw in a parody of the Lewinsky scandal.
#3 Other Notes
- Randy Savage is The G.O.A.T. Let's be real here.- Little Richard sang the all time greatest version of "America The Beautiful," and we think it would be a crime against humanity to not cast him as a Batman villain before he dies.
- Accompanied by USA Up All Night host Rhonda Shear, NKOTB's very own Donnie Wahlberg laughed off a barrage of boos from the crowd before ring-announcing the Yokozuna/Luger match. He's probably had lots of people unjustly boo him throughout his lifetime. That said, this was a strange booking since March '94 was long after his cultural relevancy had expired -- four years since "Step By Step,"
and three years since he produced Marky Mark's Music For The People. Even so, his presence was hugely appreciated and definitely added to our amazement in the event as a whole.- We're unsure how or why Jenny Garth was chosen to escort Burt Reynolds to the ring, although we're now seeing that he had a cameo on an April '93 episode of 90210. Maybe they used to smoke weed or something.
- Going into the PPV, Jim Cornette and Mr. Fuji were the "heel managers" of WWF's heavyweight champion Yokozuna. In real life, Jim Cornette was a WWF writer who now appears frequently on Dark Side Of The Ring.
His interviews reveal many fascinatingly deep and emotionally violent aspects of the rivalry between Cornette and his arch nemesis, former WWF writer Vince Russo, including proudly and vividly detailed accounts of face-to-face encounters and answering machine messages between the two. Cornette hides no shame in personally blaming Russo for the aftermath of infamous pro-wrestling controversies such as 1997's "Montreal Screwjob" and 1998's "Brawl For All." In all fairness, his arguments are valid and well articulated.Today on Jim's website, you can purchase an autographed copy of Russo's restraining order against Jim Cornette for the low low cost of $10. This was about 7 years after Bleacher Report uncovered details of Cornette's desire to murder Russo. It's one of the more fascinating behind-the-scenes stories we've discovered since the start of QUAR.
As Bray Wyatt seized responsibility to turn up the horrorcore to 11 and usher his re-brand as The Fiend, he realized his previous entrance from The Jesus and Mary Chain would not be easy to follow. Wisely selected, Code Orange surpassed all expectations with bludgeoning grace. But our favorite between these two might be Darby Allin's "I Fell," arguably the best Marilyn Manson jam of the 2010s (fake Manson or otherwise). In the highly unlikely event of Darby and Fiend facing each other in the ring, we'd sadly place 4 to 5 odds in favor of The Fiend, although an upset would not disappoint.
Blood Incantation's "Great Gig In The Sky," the growing meditative mid-LP noise crusher. In Jayson Greene's review, he quotes the band saying it was “improvised 'on psychedelics over a period of several months' [evolving] entirely in unexpected leaps, dissolving into synthesizer washes and backmasked guitars and then plunging ahead, again, stirring up the primordial ooze."
Without hyperbole, our hopes for the Hero follow up were higher than Obama's cocaine blunts on a sunny Sunday 4:20. This means the hopes were very high. Criminally underrated (as was the case with far too many 2010s LPs), Hero is a rare "11 songs 11 singles" record that happened maybe once-per-year in the 2010s. In the meantime, we pretended "The Middle" didn't suck and maintained optimism. Now that she has an actual hit, this could potentially lead to huge crossover jams. We're gonna give Maren benefit of the doubt here. She's talented enough to write another Hero, so it must be the label's fault. "Can you make these songs suck more?" The power ballad title track sadly ended up as Girl's best song, eventually spinning on a 2-3 day loop in our brain-chemical-controlled playlist, so that should count for something. ("The Bones" is also fine and would have placed in the 101-200 range.)
Time once again to reiterate how many years since summer radio drives didn't suck. Since we recall Summer 2013 so fondly, we're guessing it might have been the last decent summer for Top 40. It was the summer of "#Beautiful" and "The Way," Mariah Carey's final summer song and Ariana Grande's breakthrough single. We're guessing Mariah's diva/narcissist tendencies might prevent any officially cosigned "passing of the torch" moment, but Ariana Grande's singles have filled the void ever since, peaking in 2018 with "No Tears Left To Cry." Thank U Next dropped so quickly afterwards, leaving the summer radio landscape wide open. Social House saw their opportunity to capitalize with an obvious "Thank U Next" ripoff, and thank the good lord they did. We needed it.
Hot challenge: Locate the true 3/4 waltzes of chart hits. Apparently, Ed Sheeran had a huge hit about two years ago with a song called "Perfect" that was the 15th biggest song of the decade. We love "Kiss From A Rose" and "Iris." We do not love Edwin McCain or Lifehouse. An old Paramore single called "The Only Exception" came up. 
Fun game: Sing 
Scissor Sisters dude sings this one. We forget which one he is. Pretty sure we liked this better than Like Clockwork or Villians. We're curious to know, what exactly are the 11 or 12 people involved in this project so busy with? What was preventing them from carving out an extra week or two so that the first Desert Sessions record since 2003 didn't have to be 7-and-a-half songs long? Where's the love? Can they do another one of these ASAP?
Maneka has played "Time In The Barrel" live only once, at their album release show last July. Can they bring it back? No one minds that the one little part sounds like "Drain You." In fact, the jam holds up, especially the free noise section in the middle. A Rick and Morty reference regarding cancel-culture may or may not have influenced the song title and lyrics, although we had trouble locating a more specific origin. No disrespect to Jim Croce. Meanwhile, Bojack (the character, not the show) got sentenced to some literal-ass barrel time, with Princess Carolyn erroneously theorizing that "people forget." [Kobe rant redacted.] Yeah anyway... Maneka! Great band! Serious bangers! Open up the pit!
