WCW Uncensored, Tupelo, MS
A Ko-fi request. And one of the stupidest matches ever devised that essentially blows off one of the absolute worst angles in wrestling history, Hulk Hogan’s war with the Dungeon of Doom, which was never any good at any single point, but at least had the decency to go out spectacularly and drag in the poor Four Horsemen and others toward the end, too.
This is a Doomsday Cage match — a three-level, four-tier cage. On one side, you have Hulk Hogan and his friend Randy. On the other side, you have the Dungeon of Doom represented by Kevin Sullivan, Meng, The Barbarian, Ze Gangsta (Zeus), and the Ultimate Solution (Jeep Swenson), plus the Four Horsemen represented by Ric Flair and Arn Anderson, and also Lex Luger.
Following this match and a couple appearances on Nitro in April, Hulk Hogan fucked off back to Florida and didn’t appear again until Bash at the Beach in July. I think Hogan knew this whole thing was horrendous; I don’t think he knew it had always been so from the very start in ’95.
They have a lot of firecrackers going off before the Alliance make their entrance. Arn and Flair are up top in the cage, Sullivan and the Faces of Fear and Luger are on the second level down.
Tony wonders where Brian Pillman is; Pillman had been fired after SuperBrawl VI in February for the “bookerman” bit, with Bischoff forever claiming it was a plan he and Pillman had for Brian to go to ECW for a bit and then return, but of course he had the accident and then signed with the WWF. Reportedly, Hogan tried to get Pillman into this match because Pillman had picked up some heat and Hogan wanted to shit on it, but Brian played his own politics of a sort, opting to get an elective surgery on the polyps in his neck, which he got every couple of years but wasn’t necessary at that moment, other than it was because he could get out of doing this dumb match. He didn’t tell anyone and got the surgery and was unavailable, couldn’t come back that quickly.
Michael Buffer calls Randy Savage “240 lbs of action and durability.” Instead of going into several paragraphs about how much I think Michael Buffer sucks, I will simply move on. He does at least say “Hulkamania” instead of “Hulkmania” this time.
They start up top, meaning Flair and Anderson are up first. Flair is in his normal wrestling underpants, while Anderson is in a full black sweatshirt and sweatpants get-up. Savage clumsily goes at Flair and Hogan squares up with Arn, who ponders his career to this point.
“What a great thing for television!” Heenan shouts with a hint of sarcasm. “Only here in WCW!” doesn’t sound any more sincerely excited.
Slow, shitty brawling. I mean they’re doing what they can, honestly, they’re not exactly in a position to pick up the pace. Dusty gets excited when Hulkamania rips his shirt off. (Dusty constantly called the person “Hulkamania.”) Dusty then starts talking in his real voice.
Arn gets a figure four on Hogan, Flair gets one on Savage. The match ends! No. Nobody is that lucky.
Flair drops something down to the next level to Sullivan, who roots around trying to find it. Hogan and Savage find some powder, and that’s how they escape to the next level down. It also wafted down and got Meng and Barbarian a little. Flair and Anderson get taken out by fuckin’ baby powder. Jimmy Hart squealing, “Taskmaster! Taskmaster!” And gives Sullivan something, but Hogan has a lil’ chain and he’s kicking some ass for a moment.
The crowd in Tupelo have basically no reaction to any of this since almost none of them can really see fuck all.
Along with Jimmy Hart, the heels have Woman and Elizabeth cage-side. Eventually, Arn makes it down to level two, but there are separate doors and shit and Hogan locks on, leaving himself, Sullivan, Savage, and Luger, with the Faces of Fear and Anderson locked out, and Flair, too.
Hogan and Sullivan get out on the scaffolding. We tease the idea that Sullivan will take a huge fall from the scaffolding as if the man even takes normal bumps. Eventually the little hobbit punches Hogan in the dick and they make their way down a level. Hogan now teetering over the edge of the scaffolding. Savage and Luger still fighting in the cage. The other guys — Flair, Barbarian, Meng, Arn — just kinda watch them.
We’ve got Hogan and Sullivan down on the arena floor, Luger comes from behind to nail Hogan, and Savage is right behind Luger. And now they go to the regular ring. In a sense, this is all pretty dumb. In another sense, it is actually kind of nice of them to involve the entire audience for a moment.
In the ring, Sullivan eats a face foot. Dusty alerts us to the fact that The Others have broken through and are headed down to the arena floor while Hogan and Sullivan have a bad match in the ring before heading back to the cage. Now the bottom tier of the cage has a wrestling ring in it, just a normal cage match area there, basically.
Hogan switches out and now he’s paired with Luger to go back to the regular ring. Sullivan has a board that he does nothing with before going to the ring. Savage gets the board to chase Sullivan. Tony points out that the others have simply left. “They’ve been eliminated,” he says. This is not an elimination match.
The commentary on this match is funny. Tony and Dusty have no energy in their over-the-top attempts to put this over, and Heenan flits between trying to join them on that level and just clearly being sarcastic about how stupid and terrible this all really is.
It’s not just about the action, it’s that it’s 2-on-8 and everyone on the planet knows the side with two guys will win, at a point where Hogan is colder than he has ever been, the culmination of this excruciatingly bad storyline that took the majority of a full year and had to be re-routed four or five times because they just kept making awful decisions that did not remotely get over.
And then you bring it down to four guys here, basically, and one of them is Kevin Sullivan. Zeus and Jeep Swenson haven’t even appeared, they are to be the last line of defense, the secret weapons, and here they come! I actually was typing that not quite remembering exactly where they came in, but here they are.
Zeus grabs his former SummerSlam tag partner Savage and barks like an idiot and chokes him or whatever. Jeep has Hogan and they’re headed back to the bottom level of the cage. Zeus with more dumb barking. Savage decides he’s done being choked out and just hits Zeus with a double axhandle. Hogan and Swenson try to figure out what to do with each other, and the answer is, “Nothing!”
Arn Anderson returns, Flair behind him. “They were supposed to be eliminated,” Tony says. I don’t think this is true. Arn has shed his sweatpants and sweatshirt. He just did not want to lie down on the chain link fence with his bare skin. Arn Anderson drew a line there. He said, “Fuck that.”
Finally, in 1996, we get to relive the great action of the Hulk Hogan vs Zeus feud. He and Jeep are doing what they are capable of doing. It’s not much, but it’s something. Here comes “The Booty Man”! He gives them frying pans. Dusty insists those are “steel,” but they definitely came from a Dollar General.
And here comes Luger. Luger hits Flair when Savage ducks a shot; like, Luger very blatantly hits Flair after having plenty of time to not. Hogan and Savage leave the cage, then Hogan remembers you’re supposed to pin someone so he sends Savage back in to pin Flair, and they win and run away. The commentary kinda goes over what happened briefly and then desperately move on to hyping Nitro and hopefully forgetting all about this.
Now let me get into this: The loss didn’t actually hurt anyone on the losing side, even though Flair hilariously takes the pin instead of several other choices, including the mercenary outsiders. The Faces of Fear stay who they were, midcard brutes who had been seen for nearly a decade as Hogan/Savage inferiors. Nobody much respects Sullivan as a, like, “competitor” anymore in the first place; if anything, going into the Benoit feud elevates him to a level he hadn’t been in years, and that comes after this. And Flair and Arn are Flair and Arn, and Luger is Luger. They are made men as top players in WCW, Arn not quite at the level of Flair or Luger, and Luger not quite Flair, but a stupid cage match is also not going to ruin their careers, no. They go on to be exactly who they’ve been for a while now, and with Luger, him proving himself to Bischoff’s WCW office winds up giving him a great, albeit short-lived, top babyface run in Sting’s absence in ’97.
So that part of the criticism for this match never held any water with me. Nobody here was “buried,” they just lost to Hogan and Savage the way they pretty much always have done and were expected to do here.
The match hurt one guy, really: Hogan. Savage was just a sidekick for this entire, drawn-out, miserable storyline, and at various times he had a lot more going on on the sides of it. But Hogan took legitimate damage from the entire Dungeon run. WCW fans never totally embraced him when he came in in ’94, but this was a new low, a bottoming out; again, they had to repeatedly scrap major story beats because they were just awful, not getting over, and making it all even worse. And this finally ends it all, basically.
On the flip side, it sucks bad enough that Hogan heads home not long after and calculates. In turn, he decides to go heel with the nWo in the summer. And from about as bad as WCW gets, they whip around and go into the hottest period the company would ever have. So you never know! Sometimes it is good to find a rock bottom and a reset.
This is maybe the most important horrible match and overall story in modern wrestling history. Everyone has to figure out where to go from here. There is literally nowhere to go but up, but frankly, I don’t think anyone expected how far up WCW would go after this, building pieces with a Hogan-less spring that led to better TV and barreled into the summer where Hulk became more truly compelling than he’d been since at least 1987.
Tape Machines Are Rolling 