The first year of WCW Monday Nitro is a textbook for how to book a weekly episodic wrestling program. EVERYTHING about the writing and pace is as close to perfect as wrestling can get. It starts out focusing on the old guard of Hogan/Flair/Savage/Sting/Luger, and continues this until the appearance of the nWo in late may 1996.
In these pre-nWo episodes, we are focused strongly on the company's top stars, and why shouldn't we be? They only have ~45 minutes of air time per week to put their product over, mid-card wrestlers can be the focus of the 2nd tier show (in this case, WCW Saturday Night). Not that the mid-card is missing from Nitro, but it's very subtle. Mid-carders appear and vanish with elegance. You never ask yourself "where is (wrestler x)" when he isn't on a show for a few weeks, because he was never a focal point.
The best illustration I can choose for this is the 1996 run of the Rock 'n Roll Express. They show up maybe once a month on Nitro, and are always in a higher profile match (v. Flair/Anderson, v. Harlem Heat, etc.), but then they are gone and you don't give it a second thought. They are used as under card talent should be, to fill a void, not to share the focus of the story.
There are plenty of quirks in this year of Nitro. The evolution (or devolution) of The Dungeon of Doom is a fun watch. They start out as the "mystical" force of monster heels bent on destroying Hulkamania, the early episodes features favourites like Kamala, King Curtis, and The Yeti. They form a loose alliance with The Four Horsemen in early 1996, from which spawns two great feuds for Kevin Sullivan (the first being with Brian Pillman, and then Chris Benoit). When the nWo angle begins, they are feuding with The Horsemen, and eventually that feud dissipates, as the focus of the show turns to "defending WCW". After this the Dungeon enters a really fledgling state of existence. When the nWo appears, The Giant has the world championship, but loses it as quickly as possible, to Hogan at Hog Wild in early August. After this The Giant takes flack for a couple weeks for having "dropped the ball", before turning on WCW. This leaves The Dungeon with no major players, but still existing and being featured on Nitro regularly.
The use of the cruiserweight division is excellent. They feel perfectly weighted in the show. When I was young and watched this show weekly, I loved the cruiserweight matches, and they were always exactly what they should have been, their own unique portion of the show, which was exciting to watch and never pulled you away from the main stories. Often these matches had no "stories", either someone wanted the cruiserweight belt or it was just a match. Simple, entertaining and effective.
The pre-nWo angle with Sting and Luger being a tag team is REALLY great and original. Since Luger's return on the debut episode of Nitro, his "alliances" seem to be torn, you can't really tell if he is a face or a heel (kind of like the Luger/DiBiase angle from WWF), but Sting trusts that Luger is his friend regardless, and Luger is loyal to Sting. This creates a really interesting tension between the two. Luger and Sting capture the WCW tag titles, with Luger cheating for the victory and Sting having no idea. This is how they pick up a few wins until people start pointing it out to Sting, and tension grows between the two, great execution. Sadly there's no payoff for this, which is sad because this is probably the second best angle of the year, trailing behind the nWo. With the nWo's arrival, Sting and Luger are both needed as top guys to defend the honour of WCW, their problems mysteriously vanish, and even Randy Savage seems to trust and accept Luger. To top this off, they unceremoniously drop the title to Harlem Heat during a title defense where the nWo ran in and distracted everybody.
This sets up a rather funny match a couple months later, where Harlem Heat are defending the titles against Public Enemy. Upon entering, the announce team is talking about how Harlem Heat is one of the best team in the sport, and the best champions to keep the tag belts away from the nWo camp. Harlem Heat then lose that very match to Public Enemy on a VERY good call by controversial referee Nick Patrick. If you watch the finish of this match (1,2), you can see how clearly and perfectly Patrick called this match, he actually resets his count and positioning when the weight of the small package changes!
Plenty more to write about. To be continued.
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