The 80’s Wrestling Review
Hardcore wrestling fans of a certain age are used to hearing someone inevitably say "I used to like wrestling back when it was good, in the 80's." We have a few names for that time period in WWF history, The Hulkamania era, The Rock n' Wrestling Era, The 80's Boom Period, but whatever your preferred name for it, one thing is perfectly clear: 1980's WWF programming set the impression of how pop culture at large perceives professional wrestling. While we remember the colorful red and yellows, the first few Wrestlemanias, and the bodyslam heard around the world, a lot of that era has been largely overlooked or ignored in order to tell a streamlined narrative of the growth of the WWF from regional territory to global entertainment superpower, and while that works when talking about this larger timeline, it was the actual week to week build up, planning, matches, comedy, and moments that really created what the world at large would understand as professional wrestling until the next boom period. This column is going to delve into the heart of 80’s WWF programming and review it with a modern wrestling fan’s eye to examine how well the 80’s boom period of WWF television holds up today.
First a little background on myself: I have been a WWF/E fan for the majority of my life. I was five years old in 1990 when an episode of Wrestling Challenge came on, and on it Mr. Perfect was wrestling The Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase. The context of that match has been completely lost on me in the 26 years since I first saw it, and when I think back to it I wonder why they had a heel vs heel match on a show mainly about enhancement matches, but whatever the larger story of that match, it had pulled me into the world of sports entertainment forever. I was aware of WCW, but since I grew up in Staten Island, NY the WWF had the best timeslot and was on Fox 5 (and since we didn’t have cable at the time, that meant WWF was much easier to access). Before that match I was aware of Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage, and the Ultimate Warrior, mainly because I was in the dead center of what was historically WWF’s territory, and as such no little kid didn’t know who some of the main players were. Still, it was this odd little match between two bad guys that hooked me and made me a lifelong fan to the McMahon product.
With the advent of the WWE Network we now have access to everything from WWF’s original golden age, which allows us to see the foundation of the WWE with a fresh set of eyes. In the decades that have followed that first wrestling match I saw I learned insider terms, watched shoot videos, been to a few shows, and my fandom grew to encompass a more critical eye towards wrestling. I never stopped loving wrestling, but the ways I thought about and appreciated wrestling changed with time and age. It’s with this critical eye that I’m going to look back and review WWF starting with the very first episode of Tuesday Night Titans which aired on May 28th, 1984.
Tuesday Night Titans Episode 1, May 28th, 1984
Introduction: Vince McMahon Really Can’t Help Himself.
The Vince McMahon who opens this show is not the Vince McMahon we’ve all become so accustomed to seeing. For the better part of twenty years Vince McMahon has been this loud, bombastic, sometimes conniving, always manipulative, aggressive, larger than life character, but that Vince McMahon is a long way from being formed, and instead we get to see a Vince McMahon who is much more quiet, shy, and unsure of himself. Vince nervously looks down a lot, maybe showing that having had spent ten years as an off screen commentator that he was not yet confident at being the center of the camera’s attention. Vince tells us from his desk that sits in front of a cardboard cutout of a city skyline -a clear attempt at imitating the backdrops of late night television shows such as The Late Show that had erupted as a cultural force within the two years predating this taping- that this show is going to be a different interpretation of what we have seen so far from the WWF, and “maybe one that will one day produce greatness.” While this shy and humble Vince McMahon is one that is clearly nervous about the prospects of having created a wrestling-themed talk show, the Vince McMahon of legend peeks his head out from deep cover when introducing his co-host, Lord Alfred Hayes, as the WWF’s own answer to Idi Amin.
Whoa, what the hell, Vince?!
Let’s back up here to give you an idea of how incredible dark that joke is by covering who Idi Amin was. The country of Uganda had been ruled as a colony of Britain ever since a bunch of European powers had met in 1885 at the Berlin Conference. Uganda was under British colonial rule until it was granted its independence in 1962. Unfortunately for the Ugandans the British still controlled a lot of economic resources of the country, and wished keep its influence over the government. When Milton Obote declared himself president of Uganda in 1966 and began the “Move to the Left,” a series of socialist economic policy actions, the British government aided in a violent uprising that replaced Obote with Idi Amin, a ruthless iron fisted dictator who would kill and literally eat his political opponents.
I heard the locker room in the 80’s was much more wild than it is today, but had no idea it was so wild that Lord Alfred Hayes was eating jobbers backstage before tapings.
Our Opening Contest: “Mr. Wonderful” Paul Orndorff vs B. Brian Blair; or "Guess Which One of These Guys are in The Hall of Fame"
This is the very first match of the very first episode of Tuesday Night Titans, and they cut to the match already in progress. Before the match Vince McMahon and Alfred Hayes set up the beginning of the match, attempting to establish the wrestlers’ alignments and characters. Hayes describes a heel promo that Orndorff cut before the match, and Vince McMahon explains Orndorff’s entrance itself, which abides by 80’s wrestling rule number 1: Bad guys wear robes (unless your name is Von Eric). What these two try to do is establish that B. Brian Blair is the equal of Orndorff, even coming from the same home town of Tampa Bay, Florida, but that Orndorff has received more high profile wins and has won in more convincing fashions, which has granted Orndorff more opportunity. It’s strange to see this level of exposition leading into a wrestling match. Today we would see commentators telling the story of B. Brian Blair being the underdog with an impressive amateur background during the match and in-ring or backstage promos establishing Orndorff as the arrogant but dominating heel, but back then, maybe due to time constraints, McMahon and Hayes have to literally explain the set up directly to you before cutting to the match itself. It’s one of the small details that shows you how WWE has grown since it started its foray into national television.
You can see by watching this match why Paul Orndorff would go on to main event the first Wrestlemania a year from when this aired. The match starts with Blair getting a hammer lock on Orndorff and then they roll around the ring with the hammerlock still on as Blair tries to force an early pinfall. You don’t see this kind of wrestling anymore, and frankly I’m not sure it would work with today’s audience, but it seemed to work just fine in 1984. They built up such anticipation in the crowd with the hammer lock, that when Blair starts running the ropes for shoulder blocks, the crowd erupts. This crowd is into running shoulder blocks the way a current audience is into hurricanranas. It isn’t so much what they are doing here but how they are doing it. Orndorff obeys a classic rule of late era WWWF 70’s heel wrestling that bled well into the early WWF 80’s scene, which is the heel is the one that is in charge of selling the action with his body language. Orndorff’s non-verbal communication is off the charts here, when he gets in a hammerlock at first he flops on the canvas, when he gets slammed down he really lets you know he took damage. It’s all so over exaggerated, but important, because it’s this over exaggerated movement that allows a live audience to understand what’s happening in the match no matter if they’re in the front row or in the nose bleed sections (which was especially important in this era where there usually wasn’t a screen above the ring to help you see what’s going on if you’re way in the back). It’s a small but incredible detail, and it’s an important element to stage acting that Orndorff, and some of his best colleagues from this era, had incorporated into professional wrestling.
B. Brian Blair, on the other hand, doesn’t need to work on selling so much, because Paul Orndorff beats the ever loving clown shit out of him.
Mr. Wonderful really lays it on the poor future Killer Bee, but seems to be enough of a professional to toss him out of the ring and pose for the crowd to allow Brian a minute to recover. It’s here where Orndorff is establishing his character in contrast to Blair, who is presented as a legitimate wrestler and athlete, where Orndorff is a preening posing bully. It is solid character work made even better by the finish of when Blair finally gets the upper hand and tries to roll up Orndorff, Mr. Wonderful reverses it into a roll up of his own with a handful of tights, gets the win, poses, and bails as B. Brian Blair tries to attack him after the match.
By sheer coincidence this match is a great first match to begin these 80’s wrestling reviews with. Paul Orndorff is the archetypical 80’s heel in just about everything he does, from the bedazzled robes, to the constant poses, the over exaggerated selling of his opponent’s offense, and the constant use of going outside the ring to gain the advantage. Orndorff would later become overshadowed by the undeniable force of personality and insanity that embodied Roddy Piper, and that was because Piper was this unique new thing, and Orndorff was less unique and more everything that other 80’s heels at the time tried to embody, only done so with surgical calculated perfection.
An Interview with Dr. D David Schultz; or "Gene Oakerlund is the Rudest Interviewer Ever."
You know you’re in for a hell of an interview when the wrestler starts it off by waving a wrestling program around and saying how he likes to roll around and get stoned. Dr. D is a bonified crazy person whose most enduring legacy is slapping the hell out of a reporter who asked him if wrestling was fake. There doesn’t seem to be much of a point to this interview as Shultz isn’t actually directing this promo at anyone, but announcing that he once stole your lunch money in the 3rd grade (bastard), and that he is “looking for a man… to give him a fight.” Gene Oakerlund tries to interrupt him, as Gene Oakerlund always did to everyone, but Shultz just ignores him and keeps going until he is cut off by Oakerlund who abruptly ends the rambling interview. These interviews were really meant to establish a character for the wrestlers, but this one didn’t have a whole lot of direction and was demolished before it even started when Lord Alfred Hayes, of all people, said while introducing it that he thought Shultz “talked funny.”
As a side note, I always thought that that Dr. D looked like Bob Ross’ illiterate, backwoods, cousin humping, evil mirror universe twin.
Second Match of the Evening: Dr. D. David Shultz Mutilates Billy Travis
Dr. D. David Shultz is unlikable in a visceral and instinctive way that doesn’t seem to play as well to a wrestling crowd as well as it would to the audience of America’s Most Wanted. Here’s this guy who is dressed like Jerry Lawler going on a combat stealth mission, and he mauls this poor paunchy mulletted jobber Billy Travis. The match is joined “already in progress,” and we see Shultz throw stiff forearms before suplexing this poor kid all around the ring and dropping a flying elbow on him for the win. It’s actually a pretty good showing for Dr. D. David Shultz, the guy seems pretty talented on offense, but the crowd simply wants nothing to do with them. Somewhere toward the end of the match they start chanting “we want Hulk” and “boring.” It might be because Shultz doesn’t give the crowd the character work that they expect from the villains that they love to watch get beat up. Whereas Orndorff had these exaggerated movements and often pauses to play to the crowd, Shultz is primarily interested in winning the gold medal in the Olympic Jobber Toss. The crowd doesn’t even care about his finishing move, which surprisingly enough is a spinning elbow drop from the second rope.
The Shultz match might be a great example of how in 1984 as WWF was expanding to a national audience, wrestlers learned which style worked best in the territory they performed in the most, and that didn’t always work as well in the other territories they worked. Shultz wrestles great for a Memphis territory wrestler, where heels don’t give the faces much at all, it’s up to the face to sell and garner sympathy before coming back and getting the win. We see this in matches like Jerry Lawler vs Kamala in 1983 where Kamala no-sells all of the King’s offense and hurls Lawler around the arena until Lawler pulls out a miracle win. It can be a fun style to watch, but not the one that WWF audiences had grown accustomed to since the first title reign of Superstar Billy Graham in 1977, where the heels sell in an exaggerated fashion until they can gain the upper hand by fighting dirty.
Another side note on style: There are exceptions to the rule about the over exaggerated stage movements being a WWF heel thing, most notably Ric Flair and Terry Funk in NWA. This kind of stuff, matched with their exceptional promo ability, made them stand outs in the NWA, but in WWF even Iron Mike Sharp did the kind of cartoonish selling that made Funk and Flair so much fun to watch in the ring.
A House Call with Dr. D. David Shultz; or "The Scene Thirty Minutes Before Someone is Arrested on Cops."
If you thought that dedicating twenty minutes of the opening of Raw to getting Seth Rollins over was an invention of the modern age of wrestling, I invite you to note how much time they dedicated to Dr. D. David Shultz on the very first episode of Tuesday Night Titans. They gave him a one-on-one interview with Mean Gene Oakerlund, they then showed him beat up local jobber Billy Travis so badly that I thought he was going to tear his soul out of his body like Shang T’Sung from Mortal Kombat, and now he gets a skit where they visit him at his “home.”
The skit is another attempt to establish Dr. D. David Shultz as a despicable redneck, but it does so in such a weird, low-budget way that I’m not a hundred percent certain that it’s not going to turn out to be a porno. For some reason despite living in Nashville, Tennessee, which is a pretty large city, Dr. D. David Shultz lives in a two-floor log cabin with a cow in the front yard. Shultz greets the cameraman at the door with his trademark blonde perm, a tank top, and tiny silver shorts which was basically the 80’s male porn star casual Friday outfit. We meet his kids and his surprisingly hot wife, who in order to reiterate that they’re poor country bumpkins is wearing a rope belt. Shultz then cuts this weird improv promo about how his home life is private and how he really wishes he could beat his wife and kids.
The skit continues with Shultz yelling at his wife for serving what has to be the best dinner of all time: fried chicken, pizza, mashed potatoes and peanut butter sandwiches. The dinner goes so badly that he threatens his wife and kids some more, yells about how he is “tired of the chicken and the pizza,” and then throws the camera crew out of his house. It’s such a bizarre and beautiful trainwreck, but it really does establish Shultz as this weird redneck jerk. If they did this sketch today with Titus O’Neil he’d be main eventing PPVs in a month.
Tonight’s First Guest: The Most Electrifying Man in Sports Entertainment Today, Tito Santana
Tito Santana joins the program looking like a cross between John Denver and the principal from The Breakfast Club, and gives an interview with all of the excitement you would normally reserve for eating microwaved oatmeal for lunch. Vince McMahon hand-holds Santana through an interview about how a kid from Scranton won a contest to have lunch with his favorite wrestler and he chose Tito Santana. Think about this for a second, this kid could have chosen Hulk Hogan, or went binge drinking with Andre the Giant, but instead wanted to have lunch at the Hilton with the guy with the sombrero on his trunks? I call shenanigans. It’s made even better by the pictures they show of the kid with Santana where he looks like he is being held for ransom.
Third Match of the Evening: Intercontinental Champion Tito Santana vs Adrian Adonis
Adrian Adonis wrestles like someone made Terry Funk and John Belushi switch bodies. Adonis, who had the wherewithal to wear boots with the Yankees logo on them while wrestling Tito Santana in the old Boston Garden, stalks Santana the whole time, kicking him, stomping at him, tossing him outside the ring, and then making crazy eyed faces at the crowd. It’s wonderful and it really makes the crowd get behind Santana, who for some unexplained reason is ridiculously beloved in Boston. When Tito gets the upper hand, Adonis uses every part of the ring he can find to illustrate that Santana is walloping him, leaning on the ropes, the corner, and flopping around the mat. The match ends when Adonis tries to get up on the top rope, which the ref tries to stop him from doing for some reason which gives Tito enough time to recover and crotch him on the top rope, Adonis then jumps like six feet in the air and flies out to the floor in a ridiculously athletic display, which coincidentally happens just as the match time runs out and causes a draw. Adrian Adonis, who has the body of an angry Brooklyn cab driver from the 1960’s, is somehow way more athletically impressive than the jacked 20-something Intercontinental champion. Eventually in the years to come they reward Adonis for his amazing ability by having him dress in drag and hit on Roddy Piper.
Mail Bag: Vince McMahon really wanted to hire the Road Warriors
Reading fan mail on the air is not a new invention by 1984, in fact it had already reached trope-like status on most children’s television programs two decades beforehand with legendary children’s show host Soupy Sales, and then in the 70’s by Captain Kangaroo. What is strange about this letter segment is that this is the very first episode of Tuesday Night Titans, meaning that the letters are more than likely fakes written by staffers. The first one is a letter asking Vince McMahon if he was ever a wrestler himself, the future Royal Rumble winner, WWE Champion, and ECW Champion states that he was never “Big enough, and not bad enough” to be a professional wrestler. It’s a pretty mean question when you take Vince McMahon’s real life history into account. When Vince was a child it was his dream to be a professional wrestler, but his father Vince Sr. forbid him from ever getting involved in the ring. One of the greatest characters that Vince McMahon ever came up with, the Million Dollar Man, was a character that he himself wanted to portray, but never could because he felt his father would black ball him from the territory. Vince McMahon would later wrestle for the better part of two years in a program against Stone Cold Steve Austin during wrestling’s popularity resurgence of the late 1990’s and become one of the greatest wrestling villains ever. In a 2015 interview with Stone Cold Steve Austin he would publically thank Austin for participating in that feud and “allowing him to finally live out his dream.” Keeping that in mind, the question that was more than likely proposed by a staffer, seems unnecessarily cruel.
The second letter “comes from Chicago” and talks about how on other wrestling programs some of the wrestlers wear colorful facepaint, asking if that was illegal in WWF. This is pretty clearly a direct reference to Hawk and Animal, The Road Warriors. The Road Warriors were working for the NWA in 1984 and were slowly becoming one of the most popular tag teams in the history of professional wrestling. Vince McMahon talks about how wrestlers often wear things for “intimidation purposes,” and we can expect to see that sort of thing soon in a WWF ring. This seems like a fairly open invitation to the Road Warriors to negotiate a WWF run, which would have been a huge win for the WWF at the time. Unfortunately the Road Warriors didn’t end up signing with WWF until 1990 missing out on a score of amazing feud opportunities with the Hart Foundation, The Killer Bees, and The British Bulldogs.
Fourth Match of the Evening: “The Golden Boy” Arnold Skaaland vs Joe Turko; or “Lord Alfred Hayes isn’t Impressed.”
This match is from the archives, and while the specific date isn’t given, the video quality looks like it was around the late 1960’s. Arnold Skaaland is starting to get up there in years, having hit his 40’s, and Joe Turko doesn’t look that far behind him. The match itself is mainly head locks, punches, and forearms. The single best part of the match is Lord Alfred Hayes crapping all over them any chance he gets. Vince McMahon tries his best to talk up Arnold Skaaland, a former business partner of both him and his father, but Alfred Hayes just shuts it down with “I didn’t follow Skaaland’s career. Neither of these men were world champion.” The brutal takedown by Alfred Hayes continues when they start talking about how far wrestling has come since then, and Hayes basically says how the guys back then were a bunch of out of shape womanizing drunks.
Cooking with The Wild Samoans
I have to confess that I’m in love with the idea of a Wild Samoans cooking show. Basically Afa and Sika have no idea what they’re doing, and throw a fish head, some leeks, and some cherry tomatoes in a pot, and then Vince McMahon forces a very reluctant Lord Alfred Hayes to eat raw fish guts on some aloe leaves. Thirty years later this would make the best Instagram account ever. Some people say that the evil Mr. McMahon character was created by the Montreal Screwjob of 1997, but I’d argue that he was created to force a polite British man to wear an ill-fitting purple 70’s wedding singer tux and eat raw fish guts for a paycheck.
Fifth Match of the Evening: WWF World Tag Team Champions The Wild Samoans vs Rocky Johnson and Tony Atlas; or "Bruno Sammartino is the Proto-Internet Wrestling Smark."
We join yet another match already in progress, and while it isn’t a bad match from a wrestling standpoint, it’s hilarious because no one remembers the rules of the match except Bruno Sammartino who’s on commentary. It is supposed to be a no disqualification match for the WWF Tag Team Championships, but everyone involved is wrestling like it’s a regular match. When we join the match Afa is stomping on Johnson like he owes him rent money, and Atlas is hanging out in his corner with his hand outstretched waiting for the tag when Bruno says “since it’s a no disqualification match Tony Atlas could just come in and help out Johnson, but he isn’t.” Ouch. Bruno further stomps all over the match when Captain Lou Albano almost interferes and hits Rocky, but backs off because the ref can see him, eliciting Bruno to say something like “Captain Lou can do whatever he wants, it’s no disqualification.” Vince McMahon actually gets noticeably annoyed with Bruno and has to save the match by saying that the no DQ stipulation was only for the title changing hands, and doesn’t take the time to explain what that even means. I never thought that Bruno Sammartino would be the voice of the jaded wrestling fan, but I suppose the WWE Network is full of surprises.
Aside for my love of Bruno Sammartino paying more attention to the match than anyone else involved in it, this is an important moment in wrestling history. While they never say it after the finish, or even when they cut back to the Tuesday Night Titans set, by winning this match Tony Atlas and Rocky Johnson become the first African Americans to ever hold a professional wrestling championship.
An Interview with Captain Lou Albano
Vince McMahon tries to start some trouble between the Wild Samoans and Captain Lou Albano. Captain Lou accidentally hit Afa with a wooden chair and caused the Samoans to lose the tag belts. The whole premise of the segment is that Lou Albano denies taking any responsibility for the chair shot.
None of that matters to me, because what’s really important is that Captain Lou Albano is wearing a Hawaiian shirt with kittens all over it. Between the kitten shirts and the bowling shirts with his face and name on the back of it, I feel that Lou Albano’s wardrobe should be separately inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.
The World of Wrestling: Quick, try everything at once!
The final few minutes of the program is rapid fire clips of various matches, the first one is an Andrew the Giant match from the late 70’s where he disinterestedly mauls three people at the same time like a brown bear with ADHD, then Hulk Hogan gets headbutted a bunch of times by The Masked Superstar, Greg Valentine crotches Jimmy Snuka on the steel guard rail outside the ring, and the Iron Sheik colonizes what would one day become Suplex City on two jobbers. None of these clips really serve much purpose except to fill time and end show.
A Final Word
This was the inaugural edition of Tuesday Night Titans, and it was a bold first step toward establishing the WWF’s style of sports entertainment. While the show is awkward and dependent entirely too much on the improvisational skills of the wrestlers and its hosts, it really did seek to create more fleshed out personalities for the wrestlers in the company who were lower on the card. Before this episode the Wild Samoans were interchangeable, archaic, fairly racist, savage stereotypes, and while this show didn’t change that, what it did do was differentiate them from any other tag team who were attempting a similar gimmick at the time (of which there were plenty). The show spent an awful lot of time with Dr. D. David Shultz, and establishing him as a character that would not work today, but without that background he is just another southern wrestler that no one would have any reason to care about one way or another. These moments of character exploration and the willingness to explore ways of presenting them is woefully lacking in today’s formulaic safer wrestling program. These were the days where Vince McMahon had a ton of competition from a variety of territories and promoters including the NWA and the AWA, and he needed to create a way that made his product and wrestlers different from the ones being presented there, so he took a format of television that was popular at the time (and still popular today) and satirized it with wrestling characters in a way that other promoters simply lacked the vision or courage to do. While the show is goofy, it’s incredibly fun, and most importantly and almost contradictory, it is a revolutionary step towards three dimensional wrestling characters that we would soon to grow to expect in later eras.