Recently on The Shooters, I repeated some comments that I'd made about Fantasia on some animation newsgroups a while back.  I upset a lot of people when I stated that the legendary film was "masturbatory".  Out of a sense of fairness, I decided to watch Fantasia again to see if the opinion I first developed as a five-year-old stood. Well, it did stand.  Fantasia is a bunch of pretentiousness, but it had two magnificent sequences to close the film:  "Dance of the Hours" (yeah, the one with the hippos doing ballet) and "Night On Bald Mountain".  Hey, I was a pretty smart five-year-old.  And just to show you that nothing changes, Fantasia 2000 tried the same trick with "Firebird", but my mind was too saturated by flying whales and flamingos playing with yo-yos to notice.

(Speaking of "Dance of the Hours", I defy you to watch it and not start singing to yourself "Hello, Muddah, hello, Faddah, here I am at Camp Granada".  Thank you, Allan Sherman, for fucking up what was a wonderful sequence.)

All these animation fans regard Fantasia as a masterpiece, visually stimulating and a pinnacle of classic animation.  So why the hell am I so bored when watching it?  Why do I thank God for DVDs so I can watch "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", "Dance of the Hours", and "Night on Bald Mountain" at my leisure instead of having to sit through the rest of that cack?  And what does this have to do with wrestling?  Well, it has everything to do with wrestling, specifically about the monthly phenomemon known as the Pay-Per-View.

One thing that's a regular of my Tuesday news columns at The Shooters is a round-up of reactions to Pay-Per-Views.  Sometimes, reading what other columnists write about the latest Sunday night offerings from the majors amazes me.  A PPV that I thought was bad-verging-on-decent would be praised to all corners of the Electronic Universe, and I wondered why.  Thanks to reactions about Survivor Series and Mayhem, I think I may have found a reason why this is so.  It's a triumph of marketing, pure and simple.

PPVs are hyped heavily.  Nothing on a PPV is hyped more heavily than the main event.  If the main event is great, it may obscure the fact that the rest of the card was, at best, filler, and at worst, garbage.  The main event is what's designed to stick out, especially when the mists of time obscure the remainder of the PPV.  When everyone thinks about Fantasia, they remember those three sequences I cited above, but forget about the rest of it, including the criminal misuse of Bach at the beginning.  When everyone thinks about a PPV, they remember the main event above all else.

Does a great main event color our memories about the rest of a PPV?  I've decided to take a look at this in greater detail.  There's some consensus of opinion about certain PPVs being good and having memorable main events, so I've decided to take a trip into the past.  Some refreshing of my own memory was done courtesy of the archives of one Mister Scott Keith, archived at this very site under "Tape Reviews".  Thanks again, boss.

In Your House:  Mind Games:  Of course, everyone remembers the phenomenal Michaels/Foley match that ended the show (No arguments about the ***** rating on that one from anybody, really).  But, in fact, that's all anyone remembers of Mind Games.  Anyone who says "Mind Games was great!" has obviously blocked out memories of such stellar wrestling moments as Jerry Lawler versus Mark Henry and Jim Cornette versus Jose Lothario.  They also forgot that the hottest tag match the WWF could have had in this period was the Smoking Gunns (with Sytch at her hottest, before the crack took hold) versus Owen Hart and Davey Boy Smith, and they pissed it away in a heatless contest that did no one any favors.  This is the prototype of the Bad PPV Saved By A Main Event.

Wrestlemania XIII:  If Scott can be biased about Canadian Stampede, I can be biased about the only WM that took place completely in my hometown.  Maybe I think of it better than other people, but this is a great example of the reverse syndrome:  a PPV that is denigrated because of its main event.  This is the WM that had that phenomenal Bret/Austin submission match that resulted in the Greatest Double-Turn Of All Time. People just look at the fact that the Legion of Doom, Ahmed Johnson, Ron Simmons, Brian Adams, and Savio Vega were involved in a Street Fight together, think of how they were and are, and write the match off as being a bomb, when in fact it turned out pretty well.  This one's colored by the oozing pus of a boil that is Undertaker versus Sid in the main.  Throw that in the mix, and it's regarded as the second-worst WM of them all (I can't justify WM9 either, so I'm not going to bring that up).

Halloween Havoc 1993:  Again, a loss of memory occurs when some people call this the best Havoc that WCW's ever done.  This is the one with the Vader/Foley Texas Death Match, a match that those two were born to have, and one that Foley wishes he could do again because of Dusty's imbecilic booking for the ending.  It's definitely a match that stands up to anything in either's North American work, and it's one that I'd like to see again.  But it's overshadowing a card that definitely doesn't show off the good state that WCW was in before Hogan's arrival.  Rude/Flair should have been a lot better than it was.  Sting/Sid had way too much Sid in it.  And we can only wish that some opponents could have been changed so that we could have had Austin/Regal instead of Austin/Dustin and Regal/Bulldog.  Come to think of it, this may have been the best Havoc they've ever done.  People bitch and moan about every Uncensored and Souled Out being horrid, but there's not much complaining in the same vein about Havoc.

Starrcade 1993:  Another from WCW's "good" period that's been overrated by the passing of time.  Flair/Vader was a terrific choice for a main, since both were at the top of their games at that point.  But good as it was, it still can't disguse the fact that Mick Foley was working against the Godwinns and that there was no chemistry between Steve Austin and Dustin Rhodes (so why do a repeat of the Havoc match between them?).  That and the missed opportunity that was Regal/Steamboat makes for an immediate downgrade.

Wrestlemania VI:  The Hogan/Warrior match has gone through about six phases of critical reevaluation due to us finding out exactly what went on behind the scenes to make it.  Right now, I think the consensus is that it was damn great considering who was involved. The rest of the card was mind-numbingly dull and imbecilic, with Randy Savage relegated to a mixed tag with Elizabeth against FatDust and the late, lamented Sapphire, and Roberts and DiBiase demonstrating exactly what cocaine does to the human body (as if Michael and Jannetty already didn't do that for this show).  Yet the whole PPV is carried pretty close to the top of the Favorite Wrestlemania List because of Hogan and Warrior, and it's for the same reason that Test/Shane came in third in Match of the Year voting last year in the RSPWs:  no one expected it to be as good as it was.

Chi-Town Rumble 1989:  Hoo boy, am I going to get spanked for this one by all the NWA partisans out there.  I didn't watch this one for years afterward because instead of being in Chicago for it, I was off serving my goddamn country over in Germany, you commie hippie freaks.  Flair/Steamboat dominates the ganglia, as it rightly should, because nothing else from this show was too memorable.  Luger/Windham didn't have to try hard to be the best match between them (and is overrated by most people).  Rick Steiner/Mike Rotunda is a sad reminder of what they became, because the fact is that they weren't that great to begin with when working together.  Road Warriors/Varsity Club was supposed to blow the roof off considering the level of pushes they had at the time, and failed miserably.  And Butch Reed and Sting for twenty minutes?

And last but not least, the PPV whose comments I made about them on Delphi made me the most hated man on there for a while.  It was my first bit of notoriety among Net fans, and I'll always be grateful to it for existing.  Without it, I wouldn't be here today:

Royal Rumble 2000:  Everyone who's read me knows about how I feel about this one, so I'll quickly summarize.  The Rock was the wrong choice to win the Rumble, especially in the manner he did, destroying TBS's and Kane's heat.  I preferred Hell In A Cell to the Street Fight (Foley plus chain link equals magic in my book).  Dudz/Hardyz Tables has been overshadowed by the TLC match and the match at WM.  And, in retrospect, it was a bad intro for Tazz, not to mention the fact that it set Kurt Angle off on the wrong track for a bit.

So what's the point of all of this?  Simple.  We have to pay for these things.  Feds know this, and want to drum up repeat business. They're using an old trick that I learned a long time ago during my days as an actor:  make your exits something special, since it's the last thing the audience sees of you.  If you go out with a bang, you're going to be seen in a better light than if you just fade away.  But the fact is that it's only a trick.  A person who is savvy to it is bound to feel disappointed by the two hours of crap served up before you get to the main event.  If viewed as a whole, these PPVs wouldn't have the same effect on a viewer.  Yet the old carny mentality is still there among wrestling promoters:  give 'em a hot ending, and they'll be coming back for another helping.

This fact is why Rick Scaia can say that Mayhem was terrific.  He fell in love with the Steiner/Booker match and let the rest roll off of him like spring dew on a bush (In a way, this phenomenon is also coloring what our memories are going to look like of the Gore/Bush election.  The ending's so hot that you're not going to remember anything of what was, in retrospect, a pretty uninspiring campaign).  Before you buy your next PPV, look at the whole package.  See what you're going to be getting.  Then and only then, make the choice on whether to buy it.  Think of why Titanic made all that money:  everyone knew the ending, but they were sure entertained by what brought them there.  Maybe we as fans can let the feds know that we're not going to pay for filler anymore.