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[1990-05-19-NWA-Capital Combat] Sting, Robocop and the Four Horsemen


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  • 1 month later...

Gordon Solie is forced to call Robocop's arrival. I'm sure he died a little inside. Sting is out. Robocop is on his way out when the Horsemen ambush Sting and lock him in Cornette's cage. Robocop makes a slow entrance and pulls the doors completely off the hings to get Sting out of the cage. The Horsemen completely back away. This could have been worse -- the Horsemen could have bumped for Robocop, which was what the movie company wanted. The bookers were insistent that this would not happen.

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Gordon called some goofy shit in Florida but this might top it. He sells it as best he can, though. Cappetta's ridiculous over-the-top editorializing in his intro of Sting might actually top THAT. This...goes about as well as it possibly could have, to be honest. It definitely had a "Let's get this shit over with" feel to it which I'm just fine with.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

Robocop shows up as Solie is backstage. Gordon must have loved doing this.

 

Sting some how gets himself locked up in Cornette’s cage ringside by the Horsemen. And here’s Robocop to save Sting. So much for all of Sid’s talk as he backs off easily. I was hoping for an Arn Anderson spinebuster on Robocop.

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  • 5 weeks later...

I think the best thing you can say about this segment is that the crowd does not completely shit all over it, even though they really should, since it's embarrassingly bad. Jim Ross having to sell Sting and RoboCop as being friends is pretty funny, though, since you know he had to hate every minute of it, even moreso than Solie.

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This could have been worse -- the Horsemen could have bumped for Robocop, which was what the movie company wanted. The bookers were insistent that this would not happen.

As bad as this is, I actually think this is the wrong call. There were probably people who bought this PPV expecting RoboCop to mix it up with the heels, and his name was all over the advertising of the show as "The Return of RoboCop." As lame as it likely would have been, his participation on this show does feel pretty light considering what they advertised, and surely somebody could have taken a bump for RoboCop. I mean, Arn Anderson has a success rate of coming off the top rope of approximately 0%, you're going to tell me he would have looked ridiculous bumping for a movie character?
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  • 10 months later...

Anyone else catch Robocop almost eating shit when walking out from the entrance to confront the Horseman? That would have been glorious and nobody would be talking about the Shockmaster twenty years later. Sting was telling him what to do the whole time.

 

Fun for what it was, but I agree all the advertising for Robocop just for a 90 second appearance.

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  • 11 months later...

And that's it. Weeks of hype for not even a minute of action, not even anything close to a real confrontation between Robocop and the Horsemen. If that's all they wanted to do, couldn't they have debuted Gigante here? If I was someone who bought the pay-per-view at least in part to see how Robocop fared against the Horsemen, I would have been seriously disappointed. If the guy in the costume wasn't mobile enough to mix it up or the wrestlers didn't want to bump for an actor, rent the suit and the rights to the character for one night and stick a wrestler into it. Surely Arn or Sid would have bumped for George South or Tommy Angel or Zan Panzer.

 

I wouldn't say that this was the biggest ripoff in wrestling history, but it definitely makes the top ten.

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It wasn't so much that they had problems bumping for an actor. It was that they were being asked to bump for a fictional entity in a setting where everything was being presented as real. Your top heels bump for a movie character and you've bluntly told your audience your top heels are fake. Even if fans know that to be true, you're pointing it out to them by doing something like that. I realize that the WWF pulled it off with Hulk Hogan and Zeus, but the NWA's calling card was that they were "real wrestling" and were above that sort of thing. Even doing a Robocop cross promotion in the first place was something forced on them by Turner executives.

 

I think there was a philosophical element at play here. Vince openly admitted that his show was a traveling circus and embraced the idea that wrestling was entertainment because he thought it could draw. WCW wanted to draw too, but on their own terms -- I think even this late, the people who ran WCW felt like their vision of what pro wrestling was supposed to be was the right one, and that they could win out if they could just get their house in order. We'll never know if pro wrestling could be as big as sports entertainment, because we have never really seen a Bill Watts-style product with a Vince McMahon budget, marketing savvy, organizational skills and merchandising vision. Sadly, we probably never will.

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  • 1 year later...
  • 8 months later...

Gordon Solie is backstage waiting for Sting and Robocop. They arrive, flanked by security, and Solie tells the Horsemen to watch out and we then ‘lose’ the transmission signal. Gary Michael Cappetta gives the introduction of all introductions to Sting, and then Robocop, but while the camera is focussed on the aisle, the Horsemen jump Sting and lock him in the penalty cage that was used for the previous match. Robocop slowly makes his way down, pulls the steel door off the cage freeing Sting and the Horsemen all back off and want no part of him.

 

Ridiculous! After all the Horsemen’s pre-Capital Combat talk about Robocop and then having the three of them (Ole, Arn and Sid) act all scared and afraid of him. I had never heard about the movie company wanting the wrestlers to bump for Robocop so praise be for small mercies. Still dreadful though!

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  • 1 month later...
  • GSR changed the title to [1990-05-19-NWA-Capital Combat] Sting, Robocop and the Four Horsemen

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