Jesse the Body is back for a new season of Saturday Night’s main event and the Fashion Watch is real: he is showing off his bald head in all its glory, wearing extra a black jacket with tye-dye trim, extra long earings, and a BUCKHWEAT t-shirt.
This is the beginning of the quick promos pre-show, though in this case everything is on-location: Jake the Snake is in the shower in his underwear with his snake. Mr. Wonderful is posing in front of multiple mirrors. Hulk Hogan is all tanned and jacked in a locker room. And Kamala is with THE WIZARD in front of… house plants and a blank wall.
The hook with this show is that Rowdy Roddy Piper is BACK and he’s ALL pissed off – Piper’s Pit has been replaced with The Flower Shop, Cowboy Bob has left him for Adrian Adonis, and those two and Magnifcient Muraco beat him up so bad he’s not cleared to wrestle. But he doesn’t give a DAMN: “You know what you can do little docta-tori – you can go out and deliver somebody’s baby. I ain’t no baby! Nobody in my entire damn life has every told me what to do! If I wanna wrestle, I’m gonna wrestle!” The Hot Rod is back and he’s a babyface on fire. “There is a difference in the entire world between every wrestler and myself, and thank god for that man…”
The first five minutes of this show are truly an Event: The Body is back, Piper is on a tirade, Hogan is screaming about Orndorff, and Orndorff swaggers through a pair of doors as he prepares to walk through curtains and win the WWF World Heavyweight Title while Heenan shouts, “WONDERFUL! WONDERFUL! WONDERFUL!”
Hulk Hogan then storms past Mean Gene Okerlund on his way to the curtain, and when Gene protests Hogan lifts him up and shouts “GET OUT OF THE WAY, MEAN GENE!” before propping him down out of the way. INCREDIBLE.
1. WWF World Heavyweight Title: Hulk Hogan [c] vs. Paul Orndorff w/ Bobby Heenan
“Look at the size on that man! He looks like a boxcar walking down that aisle!” These two had met previously at The Big Event and about two dozen other times on the road. Mr. Wonderful shakes the ropes VERY aggressively and there is a massive amount of heat for this piece of absolute garbage. The match is pretty simple – punches, clothesline over top, Orndorff slam into the apron, Orndorff beatdown, Hogan comeback. You know. But there’s more. Hogan is a machine. He throws chops and a jumping knee and a standing lariat. He takes a bump into multiple chairs that takes down Mel Phillips, prompting a “Hogan’s trying to pin the timekeeper on the floor!” line that makes me wonder the connotations. Orndorff does the ear cup, Heenan trips Hogan, and COPS arrive and CARRY HEENAN TO THE BACK!! He’s put in a door and demands the officer opens the door as they go to commercial. This is TELEVISION, folks.
They return and Hogan makes The Comeback, Adrian Adonis runs in wearing a full dress and fancy hat for the DQ, and Hogan lays him out – “I can’t believe Hogan just punched a fat old woman!” RODDY PIPER then limps to the ring with a crutch as the crowd… doesn’t go as crazy as you’d expect, considering Rowdy Roddy god damn Piper is saving Hulk god damn Hogan. He fights the baddies off then swings the crutch at Hogan in the melee and they scrap before deciding to stare each other in the eyes instead. Hogan relents on a punch, and Roddy limps off as The Hulkster flexes away. A wonderful dumb match. ***3/4
2. Snake Pit Match: Ricky Steamboat vs. Jake Roberts
Hot feud, hot match. Mean Gene interviews Jake the Snake in the shower before the match, as one is to do, and Jake tells him he oughta go back to selling encyclopedias. “I never sold an encyclopedia!” crows Gene. “You couldn’t even do that neither, huh?” deadpans Jake. They follow it with a terrible, terrible Ricky Steamboat promo.
Match is great though. Classic Steamboat armdrags, classic Steamboat armdrags. Vince is full Saturday Night’s Main Event, which eventually became full mid-90s Vince – when Jake nudges Ricky’s mysterious bag he flips: “Oh, it’s moving – OH HOO HOO!” Oh yeah, they both has bags – Jake obviously has the snake, but what could THE DRAGON have in his bag!? Steamboat tries a top rope splash but Jake puts the knees up, then they both go for their respective bags but Jake stops Steamboat short with a gutbuster. After more selling and fervent crowd love for the Steamer, Ricky wins with a crucifix hold. After the match Jake goes for the snake and Ricky counters with a GOD DAMN KOMODO DRAGON!!! Once again – TELEVISION. Another wonderful dumb match with the added bonus of sweet armdrags. This pairing would go their separate ways after. ***1/2
3. Rowdy Roddy Piper vs. Iron Sheik w/ Slick
First this match is Pedro Morales vs. Iron Sheik but Piper walks down full of intensity and tells Pedro to get the fuck OUT. He spreads his arm wide to scare away Slick too and I feel alive. Sheik kicks the injured leg, then Piper does a rollup with the tights for 3. The Hot Rod is BACK.
Piper lays down a RANT after the match, telling the world that he’s not hurt.
4. 2/3 Falls – WWF World Tag Team Title: The British Bulldogs [c] vs. The Dream Team w/ “Luscious” Johnny Valiant
This is European Rules, which is really just 2/3 Falls, or as Jesse Ventura says after The Dream Team gets the first fall and he thinks they’ve won the champions: “NEW CHAMPS! Aww that’s right, those stupid European rules!” A figure-four taps Dynamite pretty early, and The Dream provides a perfectly adequate throttling before Davey gets the hot tag and the diving headbutt off a reverse fireman’s carry gets the Bulldogs the second fall.
Dynamite’s weak-ass gets worked over again, and as much as this man is a legend it’s pretty incredible looking back and thinking that maybe he was just in the doghouse all the time for being a shit because in every big moment he’s looking like a big dumb dumb. He finally makes a comeback and Davey hits a wild PerfectPlex on Beefcake for the win. The finish is sold as The Dream Team being unable to get a title shot for a while, so they’re in quite the predicament! ***1/4
Around this time, King Curtis Iaukea came in for a brief run as The Wizard, where his gimmick that he was the re-incarnation of infamous WWF manager The Grand Wizard, who had passed a few years before. He took Kamala and the returning Sika on as his weapons of choice and mostly just yelled really loudly while continuing to creep out a generation with the razor blade marks on his forehead. It was pretty cool and probably lasted just as long as it needed to. Mean Gene asks him before the final match for some insight on their strategy, to which he responds: “I’d have to be seven types of fool to give you any information, Gene!”
5. Leaping Lanny Poffo vs. Kamala w/ The Wizard and Kim Chee
Kamala is the new heel on the block but the real lede here is that Leaping Lanny is as tall as him. Anyways – a high energy squash before the inevitable. *3/4
Vince and Jesse sign-off, recounting a packed evening: Orndorff got shots in, Heenan got dragged away, Adonis dressed in drag, Piper helped Hogan, Piper limped around but still wrestled, and The British Bulldogs kept their Tag Team Championships.
Happy Thoughts: A stacked SNME, with the Hogan/Orndorff and Steamboat/Roberts matches getting the show off to a hot start all while Rowdy Roddy Piper stirred up trouble all over the place. Plus a solid Bulldogs/Dream Team tag and KAMALA! No weak spots here. 10/10
