By "Net.cop" Scott Keith

Greetings.

Every once in a long while, there occurs an online event so earth-shattering and mind-blowing that one is forced to completely re-evaluate their place in the world. As of last week, such an event has touched my life. Because I’ve spent the past 6 years or so doing obviously biased reports with ratings that don’t reflect the true talents of the participants, my writing has grown stale and uninteresting to YOU, the viewing public, and someone has finally called me on it. Indeed, I have seen the future, and it is RANT HEAVEN, at http://roleover.homestead.com/rant.html. You might want to bookmark that site, because it’s truly the future of ranting on the internet. Even though he only has one PPV event up and one column, already I can tell that this unnamed person is the breath of fresh air that RS.com, and indeed the entire online world, has been sorely lacking for months now. And the criticism about the Hot Pokers hit about as close to home as anything anyone has written about me. I can’t possibly hope to match the wit and insight offered by RANT HEAVEN, so indeed why should I even try? If my Starrcade 97 rant "doesn’t even come close to matching" his, what’s the point of even living, I ask you? So effective immediately, I’m turning over my stake in RS.com to this guy and committing suicide, possibly by watching a continuous loop of 1997 ECW and 1990 Sid matches. Thank you.

Onto more important matters…

• For those of you who feel the need to follow my stuff obsessively, I have a new column over at www.markmadden.com called Sex, Lies and PPV, detailing my own quasi-moral internal struggle over the smut that the WWF peddles in the name of making money.  
• On January 24th, I'll be a guest on The Edge, an internet radio show running courtesy of www.wrestlearena.com on www.liveonthenet.com.  I don't know the details, but fellow WrestleLine guy Jeremy Botter will be there, and you should be, too!
• Man, that Meltzer chat on Yahoo the other night sucked.  I did manage to get one question past the moderator -- a clarification from his Meltzerness on the Raven lawsuit that ECW was planning to file in 1997.  It went nowhere, as I suspected.  I also e-mailed Dave for his Wednesday show and got ANOTHER Raven question answered on-air, this one about why the WWF signed Mr. Levy and then didn't use him for two years.  The answer?  Well, I thought it was because of contract problems, but it turns out it's just because Vince thought he was too small and thus wouldn't push him as a wrestler.  Huh.  
• Thanks for the feedback and ideas on my feedback to WCW for their videos as of late.  Cross my fingers, but hopefully I can break into the biz for real with some sort of employment through Mandalay, which is cool, because what background production and the like is what I've really wanted to do all along.  Hey, we all gotta sell out sometime. In my case, several times. Hey, have you visited the RS.com Forum yet or the RS.com store?

Onto the idea that The Rick blatantly lifted from me…answering reader mail.

Rant Crew semi-regular HITMAN383 asks…

"Why is the NWO theme called porno music?"

Well, Hitman383, for two reasons:

1. As most of the 18-34 males who read this site can tell you, the nWo theme bears an uncanny resemblance to the general stock music used in most porno movies.
2. As an inside joke relating to that a couple of years ago, Scott Hall introduced the rest of the nWo by yelling "Cue the porno music" after that very topic came up on RSPW.

 ISportsFan (what is WITH all the AOL correspondence this week?) asks:

"What was the 1992 iron man match between Flair and B. Hart? You mentioned it in the Re-rant of Souled Out 1998."

That would be an exceedingly rare homemade videotape of a one-hour iron-man match between, you guessed it, Ric Flair and Bret Hart. Flair called it his best match in the WWF, and most people (myself included) gave it ***** without much hesitation. The video quality pretty much sucks, but it’s well worth it to hunt down a copy. Had there been a December PPV back then, it probably would have been on it.

RockRulz85 (c’mon, another AOL address?) asks:

"Hey I saw your reviews on the WWF tapes from the 90s and I was wondeirng if you needed someone to do Royal Rumble 1994, since its not there..."

Geez, talk about a softball question…I feel like Vince Russo on WCW Live.

Fear not, uh, RockRulz, because the ever-elusive Royal Rumble Concept Rant will begin THIS WEEK on RS.com (and later on WrestleLine) with the ever-elusive Royal Rumble 88, seen only on the USA Network, and progressing through to last year’s god-awful show. BE THERE!

I feel so dirty using that poor guy as a springboard for my self-promotional frenzy. Oh well.

Sugarman (well, at least it’s not AOL) writes to say…

For the WWF:

http://us.imdb.com/Credits?0185103

For WCW:

http://us.imdb.com/Credits?0185130"

No real question there, but it’s really funny to check it out, and I just wanted to work it in.

Rant Crew regular EvFain asks…

"I'm curious to know if you caught the All Japan Nippon Budokan (10/30/1999) show. I recently saw that tape and it was an awesome event, with Vader/Misawa being a great match (some people are calling it an easy MOTYC). If you did see Vader/Misawa, how many stars (if any) would you give it?"

No, Evan, I didn’t see it, because I really dislike All-Japan much of the time outside of Kenta Kobashi and Misawa. I thought that was pretty common knowledge by now, but if not, consider yourselves educated. That’s all.

Patrick O’ Connor (who is apparently the host of that radio show I’m doing on the 24^th) writes:

"Nice article on Ric Flair. What form of resources do you use other then natural knowledge, any sites in particular?"

Not sure which one you mean, Patrick. If you mean the most recent, that one was a review of a Flair video released by WCW. If you mean the "Brief History of Flair" rant from ages ago, most of that was culled from old Observers and Herb Kunze’s "Wrestling Tidbits" site.

Niilo Mikkola asks something that I specifically asked people to bug The Rick about, just because it would annoy him:

"What exactly was the Reviving Elbow?"

How quickly they forget.

See, in 1995 Hulk Hogan not only had the knack for killing his opponent’s finishers by kicking out of them, but at a remarkably bad Clash of Champions, he moved up to killing his partners’ finishers. The situation was Hogan, Savage and Sting facing Kevin Sullivan, The Avalanche & Brutus Beefcake. Sting got injured, however, leaving a 3-on-2. Hogan absorbed a huge beating, and a desperate Savage had no way to wake him up…so he dropped the big elbow on him. Hogan hulked up, and got the pin. From then on, that move was noted with disdain by the online community as the Reviving Elbow and never talked about again.

Francis Barragan asks:

bad copying..."

First of all, the term is "grand-daddy of them all".

Second, I can’t really recall the WWF calling WM that, but I wouldn’t put it past them.

Third, the NWA (and later WCW) was calling Starrcade by that term back in 1985, so it’s safe to assume they had Vince and Co. beat by a good 10 years at least.

KalimahM first has umbrage with my rating of HHH-Vince from Armageddon, then gets down to brass tacks and asks…

"Why did the WWF get rid of Coliseum home Video?"

Answer: Money. Deniro. Moolah. Long green. Cash. Hard currency. Benjamins. You get the idea.

Basically, Coliseum was owned by a different company, and Vince saw that if he distributed his videos within Titan Sports Inc. (and recorded them in EP to boot) then he’d get to keep all the profits, of which there was a lot. He also wanted to market directly to the home video crowd ($15 or less), whereas Coliseum only sold to video stores ($99 or more) and thus they parted ways in 1997 for good, and it seems to have worked out far better for the WWF than Coliseum.

And on that note, I’d like to bid you farewell for another week. Next time out, look for me to start on a NEW section for RS.com, featuring my templates for Wrestlemania 2000, including Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Randy Savage, Hulk Hogan, Ricky Steamboat, Ric Flair, Scott Steiner, Ahmed Johnson, Sid Vicious and a shitload of others!

Until next time, MAKE MINE NETCOP!

- "Netcop" Scott Keith