Down With The Brown: From The Vault – Shawn Michaels (2003)

Sorry for my absence again, the funny thing is, I’ve been watching a LOT of recent DVDs as of late, but for one reason or another, I preferred to just watch them as opposed to watch AND review, but this is one where I need to speak my mind on it, especially with the release of the Chris Benoit retrospective that if I didn’t have too much stuff going on as it was, I’d have bought a copy by now.

But hopefully, in the next few weeks, I’ll have a bunch of new stuff for you.

We’re reverting to the What Works/What Doesn’t format with this one, and in all honesty, I’m becoming more comfortable with that format. I mean, really, do you guys really want to read about EVERY single hold performed? Even *I* don’t read my reviews (or anybody else’s) with that degree of interest anymore. It’s like if I saw The Bourne Supremacy and then revealed every plot point for you. (Which by the way I liked, but to steal a David Spade line, I liked it even more when it was called The Fugitive. And the director has proven that ANYBODY can shoot a fight scene. Just put two guys in a room, shake the camera like a maniac, and voila! A great fight scene!)

And don’t even start me on the kindly people whose review of The Village pretty much spoiled any incentive I had of going.

(By the way, I know you guys are a bunch of movie buffs like me, and I’m ashamed to admit, while I have seen most of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I never actually FINISHED 2001 until this past week. I have read a few essays about the film as a whole, but I’m not necessarily sure if I’m satisfied with how they define the ending as meaning. If any of you have your own theory on what the hell was going on in the last fifteen minutes, I’d be glad to hear it.)

That said, here we go:

The Matches:

-The infamous AWA Midnight Rockers vs. Buddy Rose & Doug Somers Bloodbath where three of the guys compete to see who can blade the deepest. (No guesses as to who stays dry. An off-the-charts crowd, you’d think this was Dallas and they were Shawn and Marty Von Erich.)

-The WMX Shawn Michaels vs. Razor Ramon Ladder match (If you’ve never seen it or have only recent seen it, it’s hard to view it the way older fans did. Kinda like playing Vice City first, and not fully appreciating GTA III. But at the time, it was a damn near mind-blowing match to watch.)

-The Shawn Micheals vs. Bret Hart Iron Man match from WMXII. (A 0-0 tie is what KILLED this match. Call it one of the all-time greats, but about thirty minutes in, you knew where it was headed. A great match for sure, but it’s not a 5 Star epic.)

-The deeply underrated Shawn Michaels vs. Diesel “No Holds Barred” match from 1996. (Possibly the single greatest use of a foreign object in WWE history.)

-Shawn Michaels vs. Mankind from Mind Games (A decent ending may have made this one of the best of the decade.)

-The original Hell in the Cell with Shawn Michaels vs. The Undertaker. (Obviously Foley made the HITC match his own and that one tends to overshadow this one, but this still stands as one of the most intense cage matches I’ve seen.)

-Shawn Michaels vs. HHH from SummerSlam 2002. (What can you say about a match where I hated both participants and STILL thought it was one of the best matches of 2002?)

-Plus all the events leading up to the matches, early promos, and the breakup of the Rockers as Shawn throws Jannetty through the Barbershop window

What works:

-Well, first and foremost, look at that lineup. How awesome is it that there is NO match that goes under ***Ѕ on this comp? (And this may be the most controversial thing I ever say, but the AWA bloodbath is just a tad overrated. The crowd and the blood make this match WAY more than anything the four wrestlers do. It’s a straightforward punch and kick match with a TON of resting.) This DVD’s release may have at one time had the greatest line-up of matches the WWE had ever put out. (Flair’s DVD of course ended that.)

-The inclusion of the No Holds Barred bout with Diesel. One of the very few wrestling matches that just FEELS real. Everyone knew that Kevin Nash was headed to WCW, and that gave the bout an “anything can happen” feel. One of those times where you actually believed that two guys actually wanted to kill each other. And this one had it all. The most blatant ref bump in wrestling history, one of the first table bumps in WWE history, a legit hanging, and a prosthetic leg all make for one of the great brawls that nobody ever saw. Until now. (And kudos to McMahon for letting a guy who was about to head to the competition look like a complete badass on his farewell show.)

-The promos. It’s pretty cool to see an early (God-awful) AWA promo and then see him evolve from the Rockers breakup to his heel days to his championship days. And you wanna know something really pathetic? They actually make me kinda miss Todd Pettengill. I never realized that he actually asked decent questions and set up the guys rather nicely as opposed to the people today who just stand around waiting to be threatened by the heels or faces. Yes, he was a dork, but he really was a pretty good straight man.

-Two era-changing matches shown in their entirety. I’m talking about the WMX Ladder match which pretty much inaugurated the spotfest match into the WWF vocabulary, and the first HITC match which debuted arguably the last great gimmick concept in the WWF. And both of these matches would have been dead in the water without Shawn’s participation. I’m not saying Bret wouldn’t have had great bouts, but while Bret was the better wrestler, Shawn was the better performer, and these types of bouts put performance over technical ability. In a way, both of these matches changed what defines a great wrestling match.

What doesn’t work:

-Too few AWA moments. In fact, that’s the only Rockers match on the whole set, and they had a ton of great matches in their WWF days (any Rougeaus or BrainBusters match would have been great.) The extras only include two AWA promos, and one of them isn’t even of Shawn. It’s Greg Gagne talking about Shawn.

-And as awesome a lineup as this is, the fact remains, you most likely have seen these all before. The IYH matches were pretty rare only in that Coliseum Video continued to offered those shows at a ridiculous $60 price tag. But the Mankind match can be found on Foley’s Hard Knocks and Cheap Pops DVD (a steal on Half.com by the way) and the WrestleMania matches you guys should know by heart. It just would have been nice to see maybe a few rarer matches put here (Michaels I-C title win over the Bulldog, Ladder Match II, or even the RAW series against Marty Jannetty for starters.)

-A disappointing audio commentary. HBK and Nash offer their thoughts on their IYH match, but neither guy really seems to have a lot of input. It says a lot when I’d rather listen to Sgt. Slaughter and Pat Patterson talk than Michaels and Nash.

The Verdict:

-It’s amazing to see the progression of wrestling even over only ten years. In 1986, Marty Jannetty gets hit in the ribs with a chair, he sells it the rest of the match. In 1996, Shawn Michaels breaks a wooden table with his back, and he’s back up in two minutes. That further suspension of disbelief if anything shows why careers are being shortened, and more and more talent were becoming addicted to painkillers back in the day.

Michaels himself admits he was never the most popular guy in the dressing room, but in my opinion, if you can get the job done, it doesn’t matter how big of a prick you are. (You can respect someone and still hate them.) And Shawn consistently had some of the best matches in the WWF from 92 through 98. Yeah, the WWF was in the toilet during this period, but Shawn and Bret were two of the brightest spots of the “New Generation” era, and the WWF sank more despite them, then because of them. (And let’s not start a whole “The Clique killed the WWF debate” right now, I’m talking match-wise.) So while I’ve never been a huge fan of his, I’ll still give him his due.

This is an awesome set, and I wouldn’t hesitate picking it up. I will admit the $25-$28 price tag is a tad steep (especially when you consider both DVDs could have easily been put on a single), but if you can find a good deal on it (as I did), by all means, pick up a copy.

Thumbs up, highly recommended, A-.

-Sydney Brown