[1991-11-28-WWF-Survivor Series] Interview: Jake Roberts / Interview: Randy Savage / Interview: The Undertaker

[Loss]

Talk about it here.

[Loss]

Jake's promo is too good for words. He hypes the match with the newly reinstated Randy Savage at This Tuesday In Texas. Savage delivers an appropriately awesome response himself.

 

Then, as far as Undertaker and Paul Bearer are concerned, Hulkamania died at Survivor Series, but they are holding over the body to This Tuesday In Texas.

 

"For the death of me, I can't figure out why Jack Tunney would make a rematch." -- Paul Bearer

 

The WWF is hot right now.

[Kevin Ridge]

Macho has been reinstated. Both him and Roberts deliver excellent promos. They have done a great job building up Savage’s return and now we get to see them go one on one.

[PeteF3]

Jake is as chilling as usual, expanding on the difference between the snake in the bag and the real dangerous snake. Savage responds and is more intense than even his usual standards.

 

Bearer's falsetto is getting higher and higher and I feel the annoyance factor is going to rise with it. Still another strong promo from these two, who are on quite a hot interview streak of their own.

[soup23]

Jake using him not bringing a snake to Tuesday in Texas and revealing that he is the real snake was a thing of beauty. He said he has took our souls. This is a creepy ass man

 

Macho responds directly with a great serious promo for him vowing revenge.

 

Taker and Bearer again do a good insert promo giving a message they still have after gaining the title. Taker wants Hogan's soul.

[garretta]

The more I see of Percy as Paul Bearer, the more I think Vince missed a golden opportunity to get rid of him at SummerSlam and put Jake in Taker's corner as his manager. The man isn't scary at all; in fact, he draws attention to just how fake the Undertaker gimmick is despite Taker's efforts to present it as completely real. Calloway sounds for all the world like a zombie would if he was to somehow be reanimated, and I can only imagine how a verbal master like Jake would present him. "For the death of me" my foot.

 

Percy should have cone in as Percy and managed guys like the Beverly Brothers (sorry, Lanny) and maybe the Repo Man or another midcard singles guy. It's not a question of him playing Paul Bearer badly; I have no doubt that he was executing the role exactly as Vince envisioned it. It's that the Paul Bearer gimmick itself was, ahem, dead weight from day one.

 

If ever you wanted a sixty-second master class in what it means to be a heel, check out Jake's promo. He lays it all out step-by-step; manipulation is the key, making people laugh and cry whenever you want them to, distracting them with objects such as the snake in the bag to take their attention away from the most dangerous snake of all. I love him rhythmically slapping the glove on his bare hand back and forth at the beginning to gain the viewer's attention, and when he tells Tunney that he'll abide by the order not to bring the snake to ringside, you know he's got an extra-special big one just for the occasion.

 

Randy's so intense here that he actually drops the verbal tics of the Macho Man gimmick. No "OHHHHH YEAH!", no sending Jake to the danger zone, no "Freak out, freak out". This isn't Macho Man Savage, wrestler; this is Randy Poffo, husband, only slightly altered for storyline purposes. He's just as chilling as Jake in his own way, which fits because he was the number one crazy bastard in the WWF for a long while before Jake's current run, and not even Jake actually tried to kill an opponent with a ring bell.

 

These two were so good verbally that this didn't deserve to be the only pay-per-view match between them. This feud should have gone all the way to Mania, and it might have if Liz's family hadn't insisted on Randy beating Jake decisively before then to (supposedly) defend her honor. Whather they were tired of seeing her have to play the terrorized damsel in distress, or whether they weren't smartened up and actually believed that she'd been traumatized for real by the cobra, this feud deserved a Mania blowoff, most likely in a no-DQ "snake pit" (Texas Death) match. By the way, in this world Flair takes on Hogan for the last time and Sid is back in Atlanta after Vince deliberately reneges on his promised Mania main event and substitutes a pair of matches the fans actually want to see.

[dawho5]

Jake and Savage deliver amazing, intense promos and I'm pretty sure people who have never watched wrestling would want to see this match. I actually agree that Calloway could have pulled this off himself. He's good enough talking so far that we don't need Percy doing his talking for him.