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  • 4 weeks later...

Jim Cornette and the Heavenly Bodies come through the crowd of Center Stage and call out Bill Watts.

 

Cornette is awesome talking about leaving WCW because they tried to make the MX look like idiots. He demands a public apology from Watts for showing footage of the Rock & Rolls beating the Bodies.

 

"You oughta have the Rock & Roll Express arrested for coming out here and killing your ratings."

 

I can't possibly capture everything great about this here.

 

The Rock & Rolls point out that the ring is neutral ground and tells them they should go to the ring and settle this. So we have an impromptu match!

 

The match is really high-energy and has tons of heat. Eaton runs in for the DQ.

 

Great, crazy segment. I would have liked to have seen where this would have gone if Watts stuck around.

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Jim Cornette and the Heavenly Bodies come through the crowd of Center Stage and call out Bill Watts.

 

Cornette is awesome talking about leaving WCW because they tried to make the MX look like idiots. He demands a public apology from Watts for showing footage of the Rock & Rolls beating the Bodies.

 

"You oughta have the Rock & Roll Express arrested for coming out here and killing your ratings."

 

I can't possibly capture everything great about this here.

 

The Rock & Rolls point out that the ring is neutral ground and tells them they should go to the ring and settle this. So we have an impromptu match!

 

The match is really high-energy and has tons of heat. Eaton runs in for the DQ.

 

Great, crazy segment. I would have liked to have seen where this would have gone if Watts stuck around.

Which version made the set, the version from WCW TV or the version that aired on SMW TV? Supposedly, this was heavily edited on WCW TV, as TBS executives were squeamish about some of the things that were said in the promo (including Bill Watts insinuating that Jim Cornette had AIDS) but the whole thing aired on SMW TV unedited.

 

EDIT: Never mind, I see the unedited version from SMW TV was also included.

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  • 3 months later...

"Look, he's so tall the top of his head is sticking out through his hair."

 

Cornette was amazing here. I mean, shit, everybody was great, but Cornette especially. Then we get a "greatest hits" impromptu match that rules hard on top of everything else.

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  • 1 year later...

Graet segment. Cornette showing up on WCW TV and trashing the company is awesome, but they blipped some stuff about Jim Herd and such. Nice inpromptu match in zubaz. This is some interpromotionnal wrestling TV there. Too bad it got squashed before it could get really good. The Bodies in WWF never amounted to anything, but in WCW as outsiders they would have been awesome.

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  • 9 months later...

Jim Cornette and the Heavenly Bodies in WCW!! I think it is nice that Cornette and the Bodies showed up in both WCW and WWF in 93. Watts response is great as he ain’t much for talking and would rather just see a match against the Rock N’ Roll Express. Nobody is wearing their wrestling gear but still ends up being a fun match.

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  • 3 months later...

Every promotion on the planet is at war with the other! Cornette and the Heavenly Bodies come out of the crowd and demand to see Bill Watts, who isn't returning Jim's phone calls. This is badly censored at points, like Cornette taking a shot at Jim Herd--I believe these are the first, ugly fingerprints of Eric Bischoff to appear on WCW programming. Can't have things getting too intense. Cornette is incensed that WCW television showed the Rock 'n Roll Express beating the Heavenly Bodies, and demands a public apology from Watts, lest he sue Ted Turner and reduce Watts to scrubbing bathrooms at CNN Center. Watts' crack about having to have his blood tested because of Cornette's presence gets left in, naturally.

 

"I'll tell ya who you oughta to put in jail: you ought to have the Rock 'n Roll Express arrested for murder, they came out here last week and killed your ratings!"

 

Watts shuts everybody up and gives them the opportunity to settle their dispute in the ring. Both teams are in street clothes, but are ready to wrestle anyway--somewhere Vince McMahon is horrified. The match is on and the crowd is electric, about the loudest you'll ever get in the antiseptic Center Stage environment. This could have been a perfunctory sprint, but they work in some great spots in here--cool reversals between Gibson and Lane, and Morton getting slingshot over the top rope to the floor. Lane is ON here--for a guy who'd been on the verge of quitting wrestling for years and would actually do it soon, you wouldn't be able to tell from his in-ring performances in '93. Weird to say but I have new respect for Sweet Stan as a worker. Bobby Eaton breaks up a pin after the double dropkick, which ends the match but not the fight. Veg-o-Matic with the tennis racket across Morton's throat! Cornette whacking referees and jobbers with the tennis racket never gets old.

 

The Main Event follow-up to this is awesome as well. Watts and Bob Armstrong, making the most badass team of bureaucrats since the York Foundation, call Cornette & the Bodies out, and Watts ends up swapping them into SuperBrawl in place of the Wrecking Crew to face the Rock 'n Roll Express. Cornette laughs it off, saying he doesn't work for WCW, until Armstrong threatens to double the fine already levied on them and strip them of the tag titles. Cornette barely has time to get a tantrum in before Watts adds that the third Heavenly Body will be barred from ringside. That leads to the Bodies creating chaos during an "Underdog Challenge" match, laying waste to Joey Maggs and Mustafa Saed with Cornette ranting on the mic that there's nothing WCW can do--they don't work for them! More referees and jobbers get picked off with the racket and the scene legitimately feels like a proto-NWO invasion.

 

I don't know where this ultimately was going--right as this television was airing, Watts and Ross were being booted from power. Part of me is hoping for a WCW vs. SMW WarGames, but another part of me is actually happy that Cornette and the Bodies ended up with a run in the WWF. This stuff was surreal, but that was on a whole other level--but I'm getting ahead of myself. Still, in a way, that did more to legitimize Smoky Mountain Wrestling, at least temporarily.

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  • 3 months later...

Cornette & all three Bodies are out to interrupt Jim Ross. Cornette calls out Watts and pretty soon the RNR come out, Watts says they can settle it now in the ring and they start wrestling in their awful sweatpants, which has a really minor league feel to it. Fortunately, the match we get is a pretty damn good version of Bodies vs. RNR, held back only by the time it was given. Its more exciting than the one from SMW TV earlier in the week and has a hot studio crowd before a DQ finish with Eaton's interference. Would love more of this from them.

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  • 10 months later...

The unease that is going on with all the promotions going after one another has made this stuff a blast to watch transpire. This was great as the bodies come in wreaking havoc with Cornette as the ring leader like he can only be. Cornette takes a run at Watts and I would have loved to have seen how this would have been played out.

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  • 1 year later...

Which version made the set, the version from WCW TV or the version that aired on SMW TV? Supposedly, this was heavily edited on WCW TV, as TBS executives were squeamish about some of the things that were said in the promo (including Bill Watts insinuating that Jim Cornette had AIDS) but the whole thing aired on SMW TV unedited.

 

EDIT: Never mind, I see the unedited version from SMW TV was also included.

As for TBS, the AIDS joke stays, but what gets censored is Cornette saying "I'll sue you, I'll sue (a bunch of unintelligible names)."

 

The AIDS joke, senseless in 1993 and just a lead balloon 23 years later, is the only thing not to like about this segment. Well, maybe the fact that in their pajama pants, they all look a bit like my dad in the ring. Save Gibson who is dressed in classic street fight attire.

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  • 3 months later...

I really can't judge the confrontation between Corny and Watts because so much of it was bleeped/faded. It doesn't really matter if it was Bischoff's fault for wanting to bury a feud he didn't book or if it was the Turner lawyers' fault for being afraid of lawsuits: If so much of Corny's rant wasn't going to make the air, they shouldn't have bothered airing the segment. It's not like they needed Rock 'n' Roll and the Bodies to heat up the tag division; this was simply Watts trying to get a little more exposure for his protégé Corny and a few of his wrestlers with whom the TBS audience would already be familiar. That's probably why the Studs weren't involved; even though Fuller and Golden would come to Atlanta soon (under different gimmicks), they hadn't been TBS regulars at any point in their careers yet.

 

The match was just all right by the standards of what we've seen from SMW, but the Atlanta crowd went absolutely nuts for it. Could that have been part of the reason Bischoff didn't continue with it? Rock 'n' Roll were still way more over than Steamer and Douglas despite being gone for over two years, and as great as the Blonds were becoming, they didn't have Corny to guarantee their heat and stir up trouble like the Bodies did. It simply wouldn't have done to have the two "outsider" teams be more over than the hometown boys, and there was no way that the Bodies were close to being WCW World tag title material over Steamer and Douglas, especially since Lane would retire in just a few months. Rock 'n' Roll challenging the Blonds once they got the belts was a different story, but I highly doubt that Corny and Bischoff would have been able to work together in peace for that long.

 

I loved Larry putting both teams over so enthusiastically. He's not too far behind Jesse on the commentating totem pole, and if it wasn't for Jesse's bigger name and contract, he'd probably be doing pay-per-views by now. I also think this series is going to miss something without JR calling it, regardless of Tony's past association with Rock 'n' Roll and Corny.

 

Seeing Watts in what was probably his final on-camera appearance reminds me that he tried to work for Vince for a while in '95, but quit once he realized that he'd have almost no power. What I'm wondering is: Why didn't Vince at least contact him about the WWF's on-screen presidency once they got rid of Jack Tunney? He'd have been a hell of a lot better at it than his former tag partner Gino, whose health was going downhill rapidly by that point.

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They still had a PPV match commitment to hype and an angle to continue, so I don't think they could just edit it off entirely. SuperBrawl was still a Watts show pretty much all the way.

 

As for the WWF Presidency, I'm guessing a.) Watts wasn't interested in any role where he didn't have absolute power, and b.) bringing in Watts would have defeated the purpose of cutting costs, which is why Tunney was let go in the first place.

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  • GSR changed the title to [1993-02-06-WCW-Saturday Night] Rock & Roll Express vs Heavenly Bodies

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