Worst Characters Ever!: Disco Inferno

“He’s so cocky, he’s so cool, he’s just a disco dancing fool”

I’ve not mentioned it until now, but to mark the 15th anniversary of the start of WCW Nitro earlier this month, I decided to watch it from the beginning (I'm up to Januaey 1996). I’ve read a few books on WCW, and some wrestling biographies, so had a sense of all the backstage bullshit, but I realised that I hadn’t watched it until it had gone past saving.

I’ve been watching it with an open mind and, comparing it with Raw in ’95, WCW were actually putting out a half-decent show. The main-events were mostly bullshit, with the belt being passed every other episode between Hogan, Flair, Savage and Luger, but some of the mid-card stuff was genuinely excellent. With stars like Sabu, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Jushin Liger, Dean Malenko, Psychosis, Alex Wright, Konan and (the very underrated) Johnny B. Badd, appearing most weeks and putting on some stellar matches, it is actually worth watching. This is WCW pre-nWo, pre-Outsiders, pre-Bischoff as character; the show had momentum and energy and the formula can still be seen today in the better episodes of Impact. The commentary was pretty dire. Bobby Heenan made for an obvious heel colour commentator, Bischoff was the play-by-play guy and Steve “Mongo” McMichael also as a colour commentator. Steve McMichael is plain awful; during every show he sits with some ugly dog called Pepe and bickers with Bobby the Brain. In a match between Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit, Eddie hits a Tornado DDT, Mongo comes out with the line: “Wow that move has never been done on this planet and if you think you've seen it before you have more rocks in your head than Heenan.” Hmm...

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. WCW also had some terrible characters, and the one I want to share with you today is Disco Inferno. Disco Inferno is basically a wrestler based on John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever, well, kind of. Mr Inferno would come to the ring dressed in disco garb, and do a weird wiggly dance whist pointing his hands and the most lacklustre way imaginable. Was he meant to be shit? Was that his gimmick? I would have loved to have been at the meeting when someone came up with this character. “How about a wrestler who’s a disco dancer?”, “I love it, let’s put him on TV”. Take a look at the clips and try and understand how the hell this guy lasted for 6 years in WCW, and won a few titles? The mind boggles, it really does.

TNA: The whole F'ing Show - predictions revisited.

A few days ago I made my predictions for The Whole F’ing Show. Let’s see how I did:

Kurt Angle vs AJ Styles
“With the career stip, this match is pointless. I don’t care, this angle would have been much better had Angle worked through the ranks, had a few bumps along the way. I’ve said it before, they’re just a bunch of elaborate squash matches. Angle to win.”

I enjoyed this match, AJ and Angle always put on a great match together. But because of the career stip on all of Angle’s matches the result was obvious and therefore there was no drama. This could have been an awesome angle if they had done it right, idiots.
I’d give this match **** if it were not for the fact that all of these matches are positions for an Angle win, therefore: ***.
That’s 1/1 on the predictions...

Madison Rayne vs Angelina Love Knockout's Title
“If it’s not Angelina I’ll be pissed. Rayne is shit. I assume that TNA will swerve revealing the mysterious biker, though I’m pretty convinced it’s either Tara or Alyssa Flash (I would prefer the latter, that bitch is mean).”

Talk about being on the money. We got Angelina for the win and TNA swerved revealing the biker (though the crowd were chanting ‘Tara’ when she arrived).
**½, not a bad match, but the biker angle is starting to wear a bit thin.
2/2

Mr. Anderson vs Matt Morgan vs The Pope
“Pope really needs the win here, but this is TNA so I’m gonna go with Matt Morgan.”

Pope really needed this win, but because it’s TNA the winner was fan *ahem* favourite, Matt Morgan. The build-up to this match sucked, the match was pretty poor and the winner just struck me as retarded.
**
3/3 woop woop!

Jeff Hardy's Open Challenge
“I think that this will probably be either the debut of an ex-WWEer such as Shelton Benjamin, or more likely (this is TNA remember) they’ll get some crap undercard guy, maybe Shannon Moore or Suicide. Either way, Jeff to win.”

For fuck’s sake, I was joking about Shannon Moore. That was my nomination for worst case scenario. Let’s step back and look at this. I’m going to cut and paste the roster from Wikipedia and leave the ones who could have done this instead of Moore.


Amazing Red
Brian Kendrick
Desmond Wolfe
Douglas illiams
Eric Young
Hernandez
Homicide
y Lethal
Jeremy Buck
Jesse Neal
Kazarian
Kevin Nash
Magnus
Max Buck
Orlando Jordan
Rob Terry
Samoa Joe
Shark Boy
Sting
Suicide


Looking at the list, the only people who I’d rather see Shannon Moore versus Hardy more than is Rob Terroid, Kevin Nash and maybe Orlando Jordan... No wonder they didn’t reveal it beforehand, no one would have watched it.
Piss poor match, loads of their spots looked really contrived, they were out of time, and they just weren’t very convincing. Still, at least I was right about Jeff Hardy winning.
*
4/4

MCMG versus Beer Money
“Guns have got to win this and I think it will be one of the best matches of the night, if not the year.”

I was right, this was an excellent match and the the Guns retained the strap. This match proved why the Briscoes and the Kings of Wrestling need to go to TNA: TNA do tag-team better than anyone else at the moment.
****½
5/5 – holy shitting Christ, almost a full house... let’s see how I do in the main event.


Rob Van Dam vs Abyss Stairway To Janice Match for the TNA Heavyweight Title
“This match will be shit and RVD will hold on to the strap.”
Wow, TNA perhaps made the most obviously booked PPV (though not really a PPV) ever! This match was shit and RVD kept the strap and there was absolutely no point in Bischoff being ref...
**
6/6 – bang bang! I am Vince Russo!

The ending to The Whole F’ing Show looked pretty promising, with what can only be described as a reverse-invasion angle. Fortune plus Doug Williams and Morgan came in the ring and went to town on the old ECW guys. When I was watching the promo with Dreamer, my mate was saying, “switch it off, this is shit, or at least fast forward” – then the lights went out... “Sting? Sandman?” I’ll admit, this took me by surprise and was pretty entertaining. Hopefully RVD’s injuries are so serious that he will never be in TNA again, hopefully Sabu will stick around and kick some ass (though I didn’t like the fact he ‘broke character’ to do a promo).

Overall, this was an entertaining show. The Angle/AJ and Beer Money/MCMG stopped it from being shit.

*** overall

Next: Summerslam....

Clown Says: TNA's ECW invasion

EDIT: Everything in this post is bullshit. On this week's iMPACT, they revealed that it's not going to be an invasion angle, but instead they're doing a hardcore PPV as booked by Tommy Dreamer & Co.

This was written before that announcement, on the false premise that an invasion angle was going to occur. People reporting made up rumours and conjecture as news, I guess. Anyway, I'll leave it up for the sake of posterity or whatever, but it's about future events that never actually occurred so don't take it too seriously.

It looks like we have some new blood here at Socko's. Hi and welcome to the new guys. Sadly, they all seem to be writing about WWE so I don't have a clue what they're on about, but I'm sure it's all very astute commentary. Or something.

So. ECW invasion. I don't like the idea for two reasons:

1. I'm an ECW fan.
2. I'm a TNA fan.

Let's look at them in order.

ECW was the best wrestling promotion I've ever seen. It was revolutionary, it changed the face of pro wrestling forever, it was a genuine alternative to the corporate-approved 'sports entertainment' nonsense that is so pervasive today. That said, ECW is dead. ECW has been dead for nine years. No amount of corpse-humping is going to bring ECW back.

Most people seem to misunderstand why ECW was so great. They think it was just hardcore matches, blood and barbed wire. That was a part of it, sure, but that's not the reason it was so popular. The real reason is that it was the only wrestling show (and to this day, still is) that didn't patronise it's fans. We all know wrestling is an act. So to keep using the same old tropes - that only exist because back in the day people thought it was real - week in, week out, is ridiculous.

Take ref bumps. When have you ever seen one man bumping into another knock him out for four minutes? Never. It doesn't happen. If someone gets bowled over, they stand back up again. In any kind of sports event, if the referee goes down the match stops. Can you imagine a game of football where the ref is knocked out by an accidental collision, one team scores a goal but it doesn't count because the ref didn't see it? It would absolutely never happen, and it shouldn't ever happen in wrestling again because it's so ridiculous and staged that any legitimacy the match had goes right out the window.

The same goes for the ref getting distracted by an attractive woman at ringside, blinded with beer, etc.

ECW did away with all that, by making everything legal. People want to see chair shots, people going through tables, run-ins etc, and ECW gave it to them, but it didn't patronise them with the 'oh the ref's down' nonsense that ruins so many otherwise enjoyable matches. If you want to use a chair, just fucking use it.

It's not the chair shots that were great, it's the fact they didn't insult us in order to work them into the match.

Another great thing about ECW was that the wrestlers were allowed to develop an in-ring personality. Not a goofy gimmick that they could show off in promos, but a personality that comes across with the moves they choose to use. Not, 'Oh, I'm a pimp', 'Oh I'm a gangster', 'Oh, I'm whatever whatever', or fake crap like that. In ECW they were all just wrestlers, their personality came across during matches, not via their gimmicks. Of course there were gimmicks, the FBI, Roadkill, etc. but you didn't need a gimmick to have a character. Look at Sabu - never said a fucking word, yet is one of the most recognisable and unique wrestlers of all time, as far as his wrestling style goes.

TNA is not going to stop patronising the fans. Just look at the stupid double-pin-restart-match ending to the MCMG v Beer Money match at the last PPV. TNA loves to take the piss out of it's fanbase.

TNA is not going to stop using gimmicks and catchphrases. Ever. Pope is pimping. I'm an asshole. That's why I'm the blueprint. Styling and profiling. Whoooooooo!

TNA is not going to throw the rulebook out the window.

ECW is dead.

I also don't think the angle will be good for TNA.

The X-Division is seemingly dead - who is left now? Doug, Red, Kendrick...I think that might be it. Homicide is 'injured' at the hands of Matt Morgan. MCMG and Gen Me are tag teams (even though they fill in as X-Division to make up the numbers), AJ, Joe, Kaz, Pope and Jay Lethal are all heavyweights now, Daniels is gone, Petey Williams has been gone for a long time, god knows what the deal with Eric Young is...hell, even Shark Boy has been gone for ages.

The X-Division is the jewel in TNA's crown, or at least it used to be. Hungry, talented young wrestlers giving every match everything they have because they desperately want to make a career in wrestling and this is their one big chance to get noticed. It is the reason I became a TNA fan.

There are too many distractions now for the X-Division to be a big deal. The heavyweights roster is unbelievably bloated, and the Knockouts which is now just the Beautiful People past & present, Taylor, and Sarita, but still gets more airtime than the X-Division on a weekly basis. Plus now the bookers (Hogan and Bischoff) want face time, as well as Dixie, Flair...and now the ECW invasion angle is going to push what was once TNA's main selling point even further down the ladder.

Also, TNA have proven that bringing in big names does not equal more fans. They brought in Hogan, Bischoff, RVD, Jeff Hardy and Mr Anderson - ratings plummeted and they're only now starting to return to the level they were at before. Except now, TNA is spending a fuckton more money, and are having to let people go to afford all these names. Who were detrimental not only to the product, but also to the ratings.

Why the fuck TNA think that bringing in MORE famous names is a good idea is beyond me. All ECW fans know that ECW is dead, and only ECW fans would care about an ECW invasion angle...so the only people who would possibly be interested in this, are not interested in this.

Not to mention that WWE did THE EXACT SAME FUCKING ANGLE NINE FUCKING YEARS AGO.

Some people have theorised that this is all intended to lure Heyman to TNA...I hope this is true, Heyman is a visionary and everything he touches turns to gold. But Heyman + Hogan, Bischoff, and Russo is not the same as just Heyman. If they do manage to get him, they need to instigate a 'scorched earth' policy on the current booking team, otherwise all they're doing is adding yet another big expense on their payroll with no guarantee of any return.

Maybe I'm wrong and worrying over nothing, and the invasion will be great. I hope so, I really do. Time will tell.

I hope, at the very least, we get an RVD heel turn.