[1993-12-11-USWA-TV] Interview: Eddie & Doug Gilbert & Toni Adams

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Toni Adams can cut a promo! In less than two minutes, she insults multiple individual fans in the studio, professes her history of winning beauty pageants, and even points out that other men fantasize about her when having sex with their wives! The "each and every one of you" stuff and overly cutesy lines would have me swearing this was scripted by Stephanie McMahon's writing team if I didn't know better.

 

In the middle, they show a Brian Christopher video to EMF's "Unbelievable", which Toni picks apart, and shows what a real video is like, so we get a montage of her to Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy".

 

It's a shame Doug Gilbert has to ruin all this by talking. Eventually, Eddie joins them to a significant studio pop and does his best to turn himself heel with a really good interview.

[Kevin Ridge]

Toni Adams! I feel like I'm back in 1990. Toni talks about how all the men fantasize about her when they are with their wives. Dave Brown not having that. I like the Toni Adams video. Yes.

[PeteF3]

Great to see Toni make an appearance on the Yearbook. From reading the Observers, it seems the Brian Christopher/Chris Adams feud was one of the best non-WWF-involvement parts of 1993 USWA. Toni's changed quite a bit from her time in Texas--she's a bitter grouchy heel sporting a neck brace. She brags about all the beauty pageants she won as a child--I could see Honey Boo Boo growing up into this. Toni despite getting heel heat from the crowd, points out that if she had a dog that looked like one of the studio fans, she'd shave its rear end and make it walk backwards. That line gets a HUGE pop from the crowd that was just booing her.

 

Toni is into self-improvement so she's been studying video, and asks that they play a Brian Christopher music video. We get a few seconds of Christopher action set to "Unbelievable," and Toni asks to contrast with a video of her. She's TOTALLY channelling Jeannie Clark in this, as if it wasn't somewhat obvious to start with. Toni reveals she's found a new partner for Doug Gilbert, and a stunned Dave Brown sees that it's a returning Eddie Gilbert. The WMC studio is happy to see him. Doug blows the Cool Hand Luke line. Eddie is incensed about how Lawler & Christopher teamed up on his brother and then gave Toni a piledriver. Gilbert closes with a VERY eerie-in-retrospect line about death.

 

An intense promo where Eddie came close to being the Hot Stuff of old, and he certainly had an effect on the crowd. That said--and this may be the sour taste of the King of Philadelphia run still being there--each return to Memphis seems to bring about diminishing returns both for Eddie personally and the promotion as a whole. This must be the 4th or 5th re-appearance since 1990 alone.

[garretta]

I've often wondered if Toni and Jeannie had become good friends during their time in Dallas, and I have my answer now. Toni does Jeannie now better than Jeannie did three years before, mostly because she has the experience that Jeannie lacked then. The only problem is that Dave doesn't play along with the gimmick very well, and by playing along I mean shutting up. Maybe an eye roll or an "Aw, come on" would have worked, but "Let's talk about wrestling" in a stern schoolteacher voice certainly didn't. Toni's next line should have been "No lousy stinkin' weatherman tells me what to talk about, you hear me?" (I guess Dave was so venerable by then that he was next to untouchable verbally as well as physically; I haven't heard anyone really sass him during the Yearbooks, at least not like Jimmy Hart did when he regularly referred to Dave as "Dave Brown the Weather Clown".)

 

Anyway, Toni was very good, but the Gilbert brothers didn't match her, either of them. Doug's never really been a talker, and Pete's absolutely right about Eddie losing steam the more often he comes back to Memphis. How many times can a guy threaten to take Lawler down and fail before he's all washed up in Memphis? Even though Lawler always comes out on top in the end, anyone who deserves to be called a true Memphis legend has taken him down and kept him down for a significant period of time, or in Dundee's case even run him out of town for a while. Eddie hasn't come close to doing that the last five or six times he's tried, and there's no reason to believe that he'll come close to doing it now. Doug's proven in the past to be insufficient backup, and people like Toni have never given the King any sleepless nights. That may be why Toni's focusing on Brian instead of Pops.

 

My Line of the Segment was the aforementioned crack about the shaved dog walking backwards. That would be a pretty clever line regardless of who said it, but coming from a relative mic novice like Toni, it's exceptional.

 

Where was Chris? If this was his feud originally, and he and Toni were still supposed to be married onscreen, how did Doug get into the picture, and how did Toni end up his onscreen girlfriend?

[soup23]

Toni was great here. Really riles up the crowd and she does look good in the I'm Too Sexy video. I don't know if her being with someone scuzzy like DOug is part of the gimmick but he drags the ensemble down IMO. Eddie coming back is getting old but this was one of his better promos of the year in a year of a lot of shaky stuff from him.