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[1995-01-21-WCW-Saturday Night] Up Close w/ Brian Pillman


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  • 4 weeks later...

BRIAN PILLMAN'S HAIR. This is half really good, half really strange. Pillman talks about his history of throat operations and explains his football background, which is good. This is also about remaking Flyin' Brian as California Brian, which is strange. He talks about his guest spot on Baywatch and how he has gained strength from seeing how Californians have responded to floods, which is why he has the new name. He also talks about winning the cruiserweight title tournament. Whaaaaa? That belt didn't debut until 1996, but there was an on-screen graphic for it and everything. Someone has to explain this to me.

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They were hyping up the Cruiserweight title tournament for a long time before it happened. At least a year, but I didn't know it was this early.

 

I was searching a while back for match footage of Pillman as California Brian but never found any. Did he ever actually use the Baywatch Brian name? He was back to Flyin' Brian by April at the latest.

 

Re: his hair, is this when he had the curly hair on top with the long straight extensions in back?

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He also talks about winning the cruiserweight title tournament. Whaaaaa? That belt didn't debut until 1996, but there was an on-screen graphic for it and everything. Someone has to explain this to me.

Pillman won the WCW light heavy weight title tournament in 91 and the belt got abandoned in 92. Entirely diffrent then the Cruiserweight title but some whear along the way they retroactively combined to two lineages into 1.

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I looked through the Torch archives but since they're barely searchable, it was hard to find much info. I do see that they were hyping the division as early as November '94, and that early plans called for it to include Koko B. Ware and Tito Santana, who would have been the "AAA representative." Also they wanted Sabu for the division but he only wanted to wrestle as a heavyweight.

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From looking up what little info I could find the entire thing seems to have been a horrible mess with the Ohtani/Benoit match to crown the champ happening before the tournament took place on WCW tv, the tournament itself having no brackets or rules or set amount of competitors with matches hapening at random, and Ohtani losing the belt to Malenko days before they finally got around to announcing he'd won it to begin with.

 

Do have to say though, that watching at the time, having no internet and knowing nothing of the backstage stuff/international results or things being taped ahead it didn't come across as bad as it reads atleast. Honestly my only memories of it are a few of the matches they promoted being a part of it and being 99% sure that Johnny B Badd was either in the tournament or hyped as being in the tournament shortly before he left for WWF.

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Yeah I remember reading in Powerslam (which probably got the info from the Observer or the Torch) that WCW wanted to re-establish a Light heavyweight/Cruiserweight division as late back as late 1994. In fact it kind of became a running joke in that mag over the next year as each month was supposed to be the start of the tournament and it never got going.

 

Kind of weird looking back on it now as the only people WCW had at the time were Pillman and Wright. And although they had the talent agreement with New Japan and had promoted the WWC PPV, which means that Bischoff had to be aware of Eddy, Benoit, Malenko and Rey. It still took him a year to 18 months to bring them in.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 11 months later...

This guy has been around for nearly 6 years, busting his ass, regularly being one of their best worker, and here he is in a goofy vignette talking about his football days like he's a newcomer. Feel the frustration building, no wonder the guy snapped. But the most striking stuff here are :

 

THE HAIR !!! WHAT THE FUCK ??? Übermullet from hell.

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  • 1 year later...

Oh my God. Curls on top, straight hair in the back down past the shoulders. Still, with Pillman having been in total limbo for a full 12 months it's good to see him back doing something...anything. Pillman talks about his football career, complete with footage from Miami game action and Bengals practice. Then talk about his throat operations, a mere 4 and a half years after the right time to drop that little nugget. More talk about the Blonds split, which should NOT be talked about at this point. I'm a fan of invoking history both recent and past, but the Blonds needed to be dead and buried at this point. Pillman plugs the "hottest show on TV today," Baywatch! Maybe the next-hottest after Thunder in Paradise. Not all of this makes a great deal of sense, to put it mildly, but as I said I'm happy that they have any plans at all for Pillman.

 

And yeah, the new Cruiserweight title was teased FOREVER, between TV hype and talk in the sheets, though the fact that it went even this far back surprises me.

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  • 1 year later...
  • GSR changed the title to [1995-01-21-WCW-Saturday Night] Up Close w/ Brian Pillman

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