Hey look it’s Smackdown! And it’s Friday! So it must be time for me to deprive myself of a good night’s sleep and watch two hours of this show. After a piss-poor live event last week, let’s see what the good folks in London, England did at this installment. That in itself should be incentive to watch, considering the hot crowd on RAW. There will be no holograms on this show…
Enough. It was kind of neat, but enough.
The following is a repost of A Celebration of Professional Wrestling: Thank you!. We are about to kick things off again this year in celebration of WrestleMania 28, which occurs on April 1st, 2012… unless of course Vince McMahon is secretly planning on the biggest April Fool’s Day joke ever played on wrestling fans.
This post includes all of the content posted at both BoredWrestlingFan.com and Wonderpodonline.com for the week leading up to WrestleMania 27. Click below for all of last year’s content before we begin our online barrage of wrestling-themed content!
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Why “almost” you ask? This stems from the fact that the two involved indeed cut their teeth in the Hart Dungeon, but Stampede Wrestling was inactive at the time of this match.
On February 4th, 1994, Lionheart Chris Jericho would square off against Lance Storm in a ladder match for the Mid-Heavyweight title.
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Its time again for more retro wrestling favorites from Calgary, Alberta, Canada! A few weeks ago I featured a 6 man tag team match featuring the British Bulldogs & Don Moraco. This time, we will take a look at a great match that took place only a few weeks prior to that event. The Stampede International Tag Team champions, the Cuban Commandos, had been fighting off the title hungry British Bulldogs for about a month, doing what ever it took to remain champions.This involved cheating, getting counted out , using foreign objects and being disqualified on numerous occasions. These matches drove the crowd absolutely nuts every time as Stampede fans anticipated their returning heros, and former world Tag Team Champions in the WWF, to win the titles with ease. They did not. These matches were all leading up to, of course, a match where the Commandos were confined to an event with no rules , no where to run and no way to win by cheating. A match inside a solid steel cage! Enjoy the match and I will return with more classic wrestling from the Stampede promotion. Check out more PatMan picks over at www.wonderpodonline.com and also check out our year end videogame podcast ! But, “In the mean time, and in-between time, that’s it. Another edition of Stampede Wrestling”!
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Welcome back to another trip in the Stampede time machine, were we will yet again look back at some classic old school wrestling from some of the legends of the past. This time around , young Bret Hart who is very early in his career gets involved in yet another great inter promotional wrestling match that Stampede was famous for having from time to time. This time its not against any World Champion from one of the big American federations such as the AWA, but a match against an opponent from Japan named Animal Hamaguchi. Animal also went by the name Higo Hamaguchi and was a wrestler in many of the great Japanese wrestling promotions of the time such as Japan Pro, All-Japan and New Japan Wrestling. While most people know that Stampede Wrestling was broadcasting across Canada and also into the northern United States, the show was also syndicated in many other countries across the globe, including Japan. Heck, some middle eastern nations at this time did not have any WWF or NWA wrestling at all on their T.V., yet they were watching Stampede for years. This could help explain Bret’s ultra popularity over there. Worth noting this week is that this is actually a Japanese syndicated version of Stampede Wrestling, so its a pretty unique video to watch. Also worth noting are all the photographers at ringside. Check out www.wonderpodonline.com for more PatMan picks and for episode 90 of our Video Game Podcast! See you all next time!
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Welcome to another episode of Stampede Wrestlings classic moments. This time around I bring you the Magnificent Don Muraco, who had only recently left the WWF and ventured to Calgary. The” Magnificent One” would find great success in the Stampede promotion. He won the Heavyweight Championship by defeating Mike Shaw( Bastian Booger, Norman The Lunatic) in late 1988. He would defend that title against all comers in the territory, only to drop the title against Davey Boy Smith about 5 months later in a series of great matches! Don Muraco’s Tag partners for this match were the legendary British Bulldogs, who had recently returned to their wrestling roots back to Calgary from a tour of Japan, after leaving the WWF. Their opponents for this match were The Cuban Commandos, the constantly cheating team that the Bulldogs had recently defeated for the Stampede tag team belts. Joining that veteran heel tag team was Makhan Singh, who Don Muraco was fighting with for the heavyweight title. Worth noting in this video is the use of the ” yellow cards” which the Stampede referees sometimes used to ” warn” wrestles before they were disqualified with a “red card”. Enjoy the match, its a ” ring – a ding-dong- dandy”! I shall return with more classic wrestling action from Calgary next time!
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What is going on Wrestling fans? This time around Im going with a match that is both unique and special in the history of pro wrestling for 2 reasons. For starters its a WWF title match taking place in Calgary, but its in an official Stampede Wrestling ring featuring one of Stampedes most popular wrestlers of all time. Thats pretty unique. Also, its the celebration of Stu Harts 80 Birthday, and as a consequence, wrestlers from around the world came to the event to both preform and also wish the legend a Happy 80th. This time around we will be enjoying Razor( Scott Hall) VS Owen Hart, for the intercontinental WWF championship. And this joint Stampede/WWF match is called of course by the legendary Ed Whalen, the voice of Stampede Wrestling for many decades. Worth noting at the beginning of the video Owen has a quick segment talking about his father, which is a very nice touch. Owen was playing the role of a heel at the time in the WWF. However, when in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, its pretty hard to have the crowd hate any former Stampede Wrestler as Vince McMahon would soon learn and capatialze on in the future with his Hart Foundation story-line. Also worth noting while watching the video is the top ring rope coming off and being quickly turned into a weapon. You will then notice a quick exit from the ring to draw the attention away from the rope being put back on. Finally worth noting is the “run in” by one of my least favorite wrestlers of all time. Here is a hint as to who he is ” I made a porn Movie with a Man/Woman and lived to tell about it”. Also, if these videos are getting your old school classic wrestling interests up, feel free to download our Stampede podcast .G and myself discuss all things Stampede wrestling including our run ins with the likes of Davey Boy Smith, Bad News Brown, Chris Benoit and Bret Hart when we were just kids! http://wonderpodonline.com/?p=2533 See you all next time !
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Welcome back to another trip down Stampede Wrestling’ memory lane. This week I have a match specially picked out for Halloween viewing! First up its a young “Flying Brian Pillman”, who at this point in his career had only recently started training in the famous “dungeon” of the Hart family. Pillman would, of course, go on to the ECW and he would also later become tag champions with Steve Austin. Perhaps his biggest claim to fame was his WWF run as part of the Hart Foundation. Brian Pillman gained international success everywhere he went. Unfortunately, like so many other Stampede trained wrestlers, he was taken from this earth well before his time. His opponent was Jason The Terrible, a “supernatural” wrestling heel who’s character was based on the frightening Friday the 13th movie monster of the same name. Although intended to be an unstoppable heel, Jason would ironically become a very popular face in the Stampede promotion. No matter how hard promoters wanted this character to be an “evil heel” that the fans would fear and boo when he was in the ring, Jason quickly became a fan favorite. In fact, the crowd soon started to love his horror character and bring in hockey masks of their own to show Jason! Fans started to cheer for the monster more than they did the faces that he wrestled against. In other words, Jason The Terrible would become one of the first true “anti-heros” in the business and as Bruce Hart put it “was well on his way to wrestling stardom”. Jason even became tag partners with one of the terratories biggest faces of all time, Owen Hart. Unfortunately, the original Jason The Terrible was involved in a car accident which injured the man behind the mask and put an end to his career. After the original Jason was forced to stop competing in Stampede, there have been other men who wrestled behind the Jason Mask in other territories, but it is THIS Jason that I will always be fond of. Have a fun Halloween wrestling fans, and dont forget to check out www.wonderpodonline.com for more Patman picks and also wonderpod video game podcast episode 86 !
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Welcome back to another Stampede Wrestling classic encounter as we once again travel back in the pro wrestling time machine and return to Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This time around I have discovered what could very well be the first ever televised ladder match. The ladder match is of course a very popular event made very famous in the WWF. However unlike what some younger pro wrestling fans may think,Vincent Kennedy McMahon did not invent the ladder match. This type of match had been done long before it ever made its way to that big time federation. It was actually Stampede legend Bret Hart himself who suggested the ladder match type should be used in the WWF. So,when was the first ladder match, you ask? The first ever ladder match is up for some minor debate, but most “wrestling historians” strongly suggest that Dan Kroffat, way back in 1972 , invented the first ladder match in Stampede Wrestling. Kendo Nagasaki has also been mentioned, by some, as perhaps inventing the match around that same time but less confedently. In either case, no televised account of either match seems to exist but I do remain hopeful that there is some evidence of the first ladder match somewhere. I do, however, have one of the first ever internationally televised ladder matches. It involves Bert Hart and his opponent Bad News Allen ( Brown), two men who had been feuding for some time in the Stampede territory. Of course in the years to come they would continue this feud in the WWF. Enjoy this classic ladder match, possibly the first on TV, and I will return next time with more Stampede Wrestling classics! If you want more “PatMan picks” or you like video game podcasts, chech out www.wonderpodonline.com !
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