Memphis Wrestling (2.25.1984) Review

-Originally aired February 25, 1984.

-Your hosts are Lance Russell & Dave Brown. Lance says that Jimmy Hart has promised a big announcement for this week, which was also how Lance opened the show last week and there was no payoff. Fool me once, Lance…

-We open up with a montage of area radio disc jockeys interrupting regular scheduled programming to read a breaking news report: Jimmy Hart is now the manager of Randy “Macho Man” Savage. GREAT segment, hammering home the point that Savage was something unique and different in wrestling, and Memphis recognized it.

-Randy Savage and Angelo Poffo enter the building. They weren’t on the show last week at all, so I’m instantly POSITIVE that this was supposed to be announced last week and Savage wasn’t able to get to the TV studio for some reason, so Jimmy just came out and cut his time-killing promo about Rick Rude instead.

-Randy Savage says that he knows Lance Russell doesn’t actually want him here, but that’s too bad, because THE ENTIRE WORLD is Macho Man Country. He goes where he wants. The greatest athlete of all time has been blackballed and shut out because of Eddie Marlin’s politics, and now he’s impossible to ignore, and MACHO-MANIA is here! Seriously, how did no promotion on Earth want to hire this guy until now?

RANDY “Macho Man” SAVAGE (with Angelo Poffo) vs. KEN RAPER
-Curiously, it’s Angelo at ringside and Jimmy Hart is nowhere to be seen live in the studio after the pre-tape announcing that he’s the new manager of Randy Savage.

-Raper gets one lucky move early on and Savage goes out to the floor and gets in the commentators’ faces before going back into the ring and taking over with a choke and a punch. Savage flings Raper out to the concrete, and with the referee distracted by Angelo, Savage does the axehandle off the top rope onto Raper. Savage pretends to get back in the ring but just crawls around the referee, slithers onto the floor, and runs over and punts Raper. Poffo distracts the referee again, and Savage comes off the top rope ILLEGALLY with the flying elbow for three.

-Austin Idol is here. Idol always records his televised matches and watches them later to see what he did right and what needs improvement. He knows that Angel was eyeballing him a few weeks ago. He has a “special dedication” to Angel, since he knows that she’s watching right now. With that, we go to an Austin Idol music video set to “I Need a Hero” with lots of clips of Idol working out. Okay, there’s a detail here that Joel Watts would have thought of. They didn’t bother clearing the gym or at least picking their camera angles carefully, so every shot of Idol in the gym has guys milling around in the background, gathering their stuff, coming in, leaving, doing their own workout. Austin looks like some Instagram asshole that you try to ignore when you’re working out. Joel would have made sure he was the only one here.

-Rick Rude and Angel storm out here and Rick is offended that Austin is comparing himself to Rick Rude by showing himself at a gym. Rick doesn’t even GO TO THE GYM! He was born with this body, and his hair color is his natural hair color, he’ll have you know! Austin Idol says he’s down for a wrestling match right now, and Rick Rude is just a complete wuss here. In an instant, he expresses his admiration for Idol, and explains that Idol misunderstood how much Rude just wants to be like him and do more working out and training to be a star like Idol. Austin is absolutely disgusted at how readily Rick Rude backed down from him and slaps him across the face, and Rude leaves with his tail between his legs. That’s pretty different for the kind of character that Rude evolved into, as he’s just absolutely GUTLESS and collapsed the moment he was asked to back up anything he said.

-Austin Idol takes off, and Rick Rude storms back in, and since Lance Russell isn’t a badass like Austin Idol, Rude is IMMEDIATELY a tough guy again, and demands an apology from Idol. And he won’t wrestle in Memphis again until he gets it!

BLACK NINJA vs. ROBERT REED
-Ninja takes a shot at Reed’s throat and backdrops him. Ninja does something new, kicking one leg in the air and flinging Reed in the style of a backdrop, and there’s a reason you don’t see that often because from the wrong angle, it just looks like Reed tripped over him. Ninja finishes with the Vulcan nerve pinch, of all finishers, just grabbing Reed’s neck and giving it a quick squeeze, and Reed collapses on the mat and compels the referee to stop the match.

-Dirty Rhodes & Harley Davidson are here. They set a Guinness World Record for number of uses of the word “baby” in one minute.

SCOTT SHANNON, DIRTY RHODES, & HARLEY DAVIDSON vs. MAD DOG, BIG LOU WINSTON, & PINK PANTHER
-Scott Shannon is making his debut in the territory, and he’s so fired up, you’d think there’s a tree on his house. Uppercuts and chops on Big Lou, and in comes Dirty Rhodes. We have a new camera angle this week, as the camera for most of this match is on a platform overlooking the ring, at a 75-degree angle from the camera angle that Memphis usually uses.

-Mad Dog tags in and Scott Shannon, looking about as charged up as a battery car, dropkicks him and enlists Dirty’s help for a double backdrop. A big elbow finishes. Shannon would go onto form a successful tag team with Todd Pettingill before they split up and Shannon turned out to be the Shawn of that pair.

-We head off to the Mid-South Coliseum for highlights of…

-Okay, hold on, we’re taking a detour here. As a kid growing up in West Virginia, I was aware that Todd Pettingill was also a radio DJ in New York while he was with the WWF, but like most of the WWF fans of that time, that the absolute limit of what I knew about Todd Pettingill. A few months ago, I got to wondering if there was any audio of Todd as a DJ floating around out there and I was suddenly curious to hear what he was actually like as a DJ, and I ended up in the DEEP DIVE of all possible deep dives about his career.

-Todd got his start in radio in upstate New York and then hits the big time in the early 1990s, getting paired up with Scott Shannon to be the morning drive DJ team for WPLJ in New York. They’re pretty successful, ranking #8, which is pretty good for the biggest market in the country and pretty good considering that they existed at the same time as Howard Stern. But as successful as Scott & Todd were, their ratings were also considered weird, because they had a huge audience among a specific demographic, something like “women in their 40s in New Jersey,” and also, they had a big audience, but every other DJ and every other time on WPLJ got roughly the same ratings. Basically, the ratings sheet looked like WPLJ’s audience was people who forgot their radios were on or just used it as background noise while they worked, they weren’t actively listening.

-Scott was the “straight man” of the team while Todd fancied himself an entertainer’s entertainer. His contributions were a song parody absolutely every day (if you’re a fan of Weird Al, or even if you’re not, try to imagine the quality of Weird Al’s work if Weird Al committed himself to writing and recording a new song 260 days per year) and “phone scams.”

-Phone scams were Todd’s name for prank phone calls, and Todd’s prank phone calls are frankly bizarre because if you actually actively listen to them, there’s something off about all of them. There are times where the victim’s words don’t seem to mesh with what Todd just said to them, and Todd also uses names like “Richie Dorklewad” or “Cloppy Schnubshnort.” His fake names don’t even sound like names, and if somebody called you and said they were Cloppy Schnubshnort, you would immediately think “prank call” and hang up, so it was kind of odd that anybody was staying on the phone with him for these calls. Well, it turned out that Todd was hiring freelance voice actors and giving them a script for being the “victim” of his prank phone calls, but without revealing who he was or what the actors were even being hired for, and the script wouldn’t even have his end of the dialogue. Voice actors everywhere are recording these weird scripts for phone calls, having no idea of the context or understanding what they were responding to, and then Todd would splice their recordings with his hilarious shenanigans that he’d record in the studio.

-Early in 2014, Scott and Todd go on the air one morning, and Scott abruptly announces, “By the way, this is my last day.” Todd had been angling to slide Scott out of WPLJ, and WPLJ even set up a separate office where a team of people were preparing for “The Todd Show” minus Scott without Scott being aware of it. When Scott found out that this was happening behind his back, he just declared “This is my last day” so he could leave on his own terms, and he IMMEDIATELY lands on his feet, getting hired to do mornings at WCBS in New York.

-Todd relaunches WPLJ’s morning show as The Todd Show with an absolutely embarrassing opening-day introduction in which he kisses his own ass for for providing entertainment to mothers who have been up all night with sick children, and fathers coming home from their overnight shifts at their second jobs because they just need a laugh. But the core thing in this introduction is that he’s explaining this mission statement that radio should be live, and local; community-driven programming from people who are actively involved in the area where they’re on the air. Within a year, WPLJ gives Todd a mandatory co-host; it’s The Todd and Jayde Show and WPLJ has handed down a mandate to play more music every hour. In other words, the station changed the format of the show to minimize the actual amount of Todd that you hear per show.

-Listeners can sense that Todd & Jayde don’t get along, so it attracts a bit of a “trainwreck” following, but WPLJ’s ratings COLLAPSE while Scott Shannon hits #3 in the New York market. Todd checks out so hard that he quietly moves to Texas, setting up a studio in his home so he can still do the WPLJ morning show from his new house 1,700 miles away from New York. And in fact, they put so much effort into hiding this that with WPLJ having webcams in the studio, Todd sets up webcams in his home, where he’s made one wall look like the studio, and they strategically set up speakers in the studio to the left of Jayde, and in Todd’s house to the right of Todd, so that when somebody talks, the other person will instinctively react to the audio coming from their speakers, and it will look correct on the webcams. By 2019, Todd is out of a job because WPLJ gets sold to a non-profit organization that turns it into a Christian rock station.

-Todd them turns to podcasting, launching a subscription-model daily podcast for $9.55 a month, with a format mimicking the radio show that he’s been doing for 30 years. He gets caught phoning that in in the most hilarious way possible, with another DJ going to Todd’s website and finding future episodes that Todd has banked for uploading, so on December 22, this DJ plays audio of Todd talking about how great the football games were on New Year’s Day and how he just stayed home and watched Ryan Seacrest instead of going to Times Square in person. The podcast quietly goes away within a year, with Todd blaming it on the pandemic while everyone else says, “Why would anyone pay $9.55 for this in the first place?”

-Scott, meanwhile, stayed close to the top with his WCBS show and he ended up retiring just a few years ago after an absolute victory lap of a decade at that station.

-So anyway, The Zambuie Express is battling Austin Idol & Jerry Lawler in the Coliseum. Action spills to the floor, where Lawler gets a table-assisted ass-kicking and Idol gets rammed into the post repeatedly. The strap comes down…but King Konga attacks Lawler, abruptly ending the match.

-Jerry Lawler and Austin Idol are out here now. King Konga and the Zambuie Express were a bit much for the two of them, so they’re bringing a friend to Memphis for a six-man tag: Tommy Rich is back in Memphis.

-We get more mailed-in words from JJ Dillon. The Zambuie Express and King Konga are going to humiliate Jerry Lawler, Austin Idol, and Tommy Rich, and JJ Dillon will be damned if he’s going to let a bunch of fans see an ass-kicking on TV for free. He’s demanding a lights-out match that will not be televised…

-And they just cut off the tape there, with Jerry Lawler saying (and I don’t think he’s kidding) that JJ talked so long that they just finally decided to end it once he said the important part. This is all SUCH a weird angle. JJ and the Zambuies don’t have characters that mesh, and that’s only exacerbated by JJ never, ever being there, so his segments never feel like they’re actually part of the show and the Zambuies have just kind of been doing their own thing the entire time. They don’t need JJ. Not a knock on JJ, but for whatever reason that they made these choices for this story, his segments are adding nothing to the show.

-But we have another videotape cued up. It’s Jimmy Hart, who sounds damn near humble and cuts just a straight babyface promo wishing the King and his friends good luck, because if they can get the Zambuie Express and King Konga out of the territory, they’re actually doing Jimmy a huge favor. So he pledges that if the faces win, all Jimmy will do is offer them a heartfelt round of applause.

-The Zambuies and Konga have a rebuttal. Nobody’s wishing them luck because they already have talent.

ZAMBUIE EXPRESS & KING KONGA vs. KEITH ERIC, DON DONOVAN, & JIM JAMISON
-I have a feeling that two of the three jobber names were creations of the same guy.

-The heels attack and pretty much have this much already won at the outset before the bell. Big fat splash gets a big fat win.

-UPDATE: It’s 39 degrees in Evansville on the day that this is airing.

-Lance & Dave say that they’ve been getting questions from a lot of fans who have observed that the Fabulous Ones just suddenly…disappeared? They haven’t been on TV for weeks. What happened? Well, here to explain what happened is Jackie Fargo.

-A year ago, Jackie recruited two young, bright, talented wrestlers to be a tag team for him. And they were the best that he could have asked for, and they did a damn good job. But lately, they weren’t doing what Jackie told them and they wouldn’t take the bookings that Jackie was giving them. The Fabulous Ones got to thinking they were too good to wrestle in the south; they only want to wrestle in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. So Jackie told them to go, but he wasn’t going with them. The Fabulous Ones forgot that the fans made them stars. Wherever they go now, they’ll be Stan & Steve…but they won’t be FABULOUS anymore. So Jackie says that in the next few weeks, he’ll be here to unleash a new tag team for us.

-Joe Le Duc rejoices. The Fabs are gone, and Joe Le Duc warns everyone who’s left that you get thunder before you see a rainbow. No episode of Thunder is worth waiting for a rainbow.

HANDICAP MATCH: JOE LE DUC vs. JIM JAMISON & KEITH ERIC
-It’d be kind of funny if these guys didn’t even bother leaving the ring after the last match. Just recover as much as they could while Jackie talked, and then take their next ass-kicking. Backbreaker on Eric. Clothesline on Jamison. Jamison stacked on top of Eric for the quick three-count.

6.4

The final score: review Average

The 411

Randy Savage is the MVP this week.