nWo Japan
In Japan, the quality of what occurs within the wrestling ring is of paramount importance. In the U.S., high quality wrestling can also count for something, but by itself it can also count for precious little.
Every month seems to be a big month in the professional wrestling industry with pay-per-view events and big arena shows. But in the motion picture world, February is a particularly busy month. Recently, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts announced their annual Academy Award nominations. The Academy Awards had to share the spotlight with George Lucas’s 20-year old sci-fi epic Star Wars, which eclipsed ET and became the top grossing picture of all time.
About this time each year, I combine my two loves — motion pictures and pro wrestling — in a seamless look at two different aspects of pop culture. Each time I do this, I run into somebody who asks if I make up all of these quotes and films to fit the wrestling situations. One person even wrote in saying he never heard of any of the films I mentioned.
Each film is real and can be found in a large video store that recognized more of film history than slashing films made since 1985. Some of them are in black and white and have actors who died long before the first chords of rock and roll music were ever heard, but they are well worth viewing. In case you actually want to view any of these films, I’ve given each a star rating.
Part of this year’s “Movie & Wrestling Connection” is a quiz. The first person to e-mail me the correct answer at [email protected] will receive a 34 inch poster advertising the Feb. 20, 1989 Chi-Town Rumble from WCW.
The question is being selected in honor of the excellent one hour women’s wrestling news show on Samurai Fighting TV in Japan. It is fast competing with NYPD Blue as my favorite show. From what film comes the following quote: “Television is not truth. Television is a damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, story tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players.” (The correct answer and the name of the first person to guess the answer will run in my next column.)
What was once the hottest angle in professional wrestling hit the shores of Japan on Jan. 29. It was not the immortal icon Hulk Hogan, or even Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, who invaded Japan, but the members of the NWO B-team, Scott Norton and Marcus Bagwell. Their opponents were Kensuke Sasaki and Satoshi Kojima and the resulting match was fairly forgettable.
Norton was chosen because he is the one NWO personality (outside of Hogan) who has something of a reputation in Japan. Why Bagwell was selected continues to be a mystery. Kensuke Sasaki is a big name New Japan wrestler who is trying to jump from the upper reaches of the second tier to the level of Muto, Chono, and Hashimoto. Kojima is an excitable youth who has great facial expressions and tremendous ring body language making him the perfect foil for the big American team. The bout went 9:09 with Bagwell pinning Kojima. No surprise there.
The big surprise for the crowd in Fukushima was more likely the total lack of excitement that the NWO generated. WCW has at least one TV show in Japan and the NWO has been amply covered by the two major wrestling news magazines. If they wanted to find out what was causing all of this, as Ric Flair is fond of saying, they certainly were not given a clue on that night. They saw nothing unusual beyond the mediocre ring work of Norton and Bagwell and a routine job by the youngster.
Three days later, the NWO made their Korakuen Hall debut before a very different crowd and a very different reception. The Korakuen regulars were out in force and gave Bagwell, Norton, and their Japanese NWO partner Masa Chono a huge ovation. They continued to positively respond to everything throughout the entire match. But their response was not to a great match or even great wrestlers, but was more of a “this is a lot of fun” reaction. Throughout the bout, broad smiles were evident on many of the fans and stayed there even after the finish when Hiro Saito and Hiroyoshi Tenzan joined in the beating of the NWO foes. While the wrestling was better than in Fukushima, it will certainly not make anyone’s list of the best 50 matches in Japan for the year.
Here in the States we know what made the NWO so hot. It was attitude, more attitude, and still more attitude. This was evident the first time Scott Hall climbed over the ring railing in Macon, Ga. on May 27. Clever mic work got them over. Great angles got them over. Hotshotting on Monday nights got them over. And deliberately upstaging every other wrestler in the promotion on a regular basis to the point of heavy overkill got them over. Please note that even though this is called wrestling, and that is what the NWO is supposed to do, it was clearly not wrestling that got them over. In nine months there has yet to be a total of 60 minutes of very good or great actual wrestling from the NWO.
And that is why the NWO will likely have minimal or no impact in Japan. Japanese pro wrestling is built around a rather quaint concept that some American fans find dated and out of place. In Japan, it is the actual wrestling which gets over with the bulk of the fans. There are notable exceptions to that rule, but generally a wrestler needs to have good matches to have an impact. Yes, Atsushi Onita does his tearful ten minute monologue on the mic at the end of his matches and that is a big part of his act that his fans love. But that mic work and tears come after he has first delivered the goods in a taxing main event.
In Japan, the quality of what occurs within the wrestling ring is of paramount importance. In the U.S., high quality wrestling can also count for something, but by itself it can also count for precious little.
The American filmmaker who has given us more memorable lines than anyone else is New York’s Woody Allen. In his Academy Award winning “Annie Hall” (1977, ****1/2), Allen could have been analyzing the NWO’s rise when he said: “Popular? Nixon was popular. Hula hoops were popular. An epidemic of typhus is popular. Quantity does not imply quality.”
And even here in the U.S., the NWO is not as hot as it once was. Just watch the tapes from the Feb. 3 and Feb. 10 Nitros. Count the visible number of black NWO t-shirts compared to the number seen at any two shows in early December. It may not be the scientific equivalent of the Gallup Poll, but it does tell you something.
The various factors that led to this cooling off are many, but perhaps the most notable was the domination of the group by Terry Bollea (a/k/a Hulk Hogan). Hogan’s star turn with the NWO effectively emasculated Nash and Hall. Before Hogan they were the Outsiders and the focus of all the action. Now they are just part of the pack. Hogan was not satisfied being wrestling’s top paid star, he now wants to be an icon. In fact, on many recent WCW broadcasts, the term “icon” was said more often than “wrestling.”
Is Hulk Hogan a true icon? Sure, why not? The man exists in a fantasy world where he wields the power of a tiny god. There is no effective system of checks and balances to control his more egomaniacal impulses. As Warren Williams said to Lon Chaney in “The Wolf Man” (1941, **1/4): “A man lost in the mazes of his mind may imagine he is anything.”
Those with a keen eye were aware of the NWO’s slide before the Christmas season was upon us. Most others finally saw the light courtesy of Eric Bischoff’s public masturbatory fantasy — NWO Souled Out.
We first had Bischoff with a bad case of diarrhea of the mouth. Or, perhaps a more fitting description, came from Dolly Parton in her 1992 “Straight Talk”: “Sometimes my mouth just runs off without checking my brain first.”
If Bischoff were not bad enough, out tender ears were further assaulted by a band from the nether regions of Hell. Obviously they had never heard the line spoken by William Holden in Golden Boy (1939, ***1/4): “Music and fighting don’t mix.”
But wait, there’s still more. We then had the travesty known as the Miss NWO beauty contest. I guess Bischoff must also be a Woody Allen fan. In the 1968 “Take the Money and Run” (***1/2), Allen quips: “Real beauty makes me want to gag.”
Personally, I find real beauty to be charming. What induces my gag reflex was Eric Bischoff sucking face with Miss NWO on national TV.
But long before Souled Out ever polluted the airwaves, the NWO’s ranks had been greatly diminished by increasing its numbers. It is the equivalent of subtraction by addition. For whatever faults they may have in the ring, give Nash and Hall their due. The pair is cool, hip, fresh. When they were The Outsiders, the group was defined by their style and coolness. Every time the NWO was expanded, the coolness quotient went downward. It got to the point where oversized bumpkins like Big Bubba and Scott Norton became members. Neither man has a tenth of the sense of style that Nash and Hall possesses.
In “Round Midnight” (1986, ****), jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon lays out some truth: “You don’t go out and pick a style off a tree one day. The tree is inside you, growing naturally.”
Rest assured there are no stylish trees growing inside of Bubba and Norton.
Eric Bischoff seems to fashion himself as computer literate, a child of modern technology. I hope he was monitoring the internet after the NWO Souled Out event crashed and burned. The messages were delivered in the same way as was delivered to the family of Don Corleone in “The Godfather” (1972, *****) when grizzled character actor Richard Castellano opened up a newspaper to reveal a dead fish. “It’s a Sicilian message — means Luca Brasci sleeps with the fish.”
If that is too subtle, a more direct statement comes courtesy of Jimmy Steward in the best film ever made about U.S. government — “Mr. Smith goes to Washington)” (1939, ****3/4): “I can’t help, but I think there’s been a big mistake made somehow.”
Bischoff likes to toot his own horn proclaiming that he has taken WCW to the top spot in American wrestling. You could probably have a decent debate over which of the American Big Two is actually number one. I tend to believe there is no true dominant Number One. Instead, both groups have achieved a type of parity that is healthy for both groups and their fans. When considering that WCW was a definite runner up for over a decade, that is indeed a long way to have come. But if Bischoff does not remedy a growing problem, he soon may find himself back in his familiar confines looking upwards. In the 1955 mob picture, “The Big Combo” (***1/2), Richard Conte proclaims, “First is first and second is nobody.”
Sometimes adversity presents you with a thin window of opportunity. One of the best World War II films ever made came from director Preston Sturges in 1944’s “Hail the Conquering Hero” (****1/4). In it, marine sergeant William Demarest says: “They say opportunity’s only got one hair on its head and you’ve got to grasp it while it’s going by.”
For Eric Bischoff and the WCW front office, the time to take corrections and repairs to the NWO slide is now. If the slide continues in the present direction, it may be too late by the time even Bischoff will admit it.
