WRESTLING Gold is a unique beast. As a
brand, you may have seen it in videotape form on store shelves
in the eighties and early nineties with an in-your-faaaaaace
drawing of a popular wrestler on the cover. I recall seeing a Macho
Man-themed cover at a gas station down the road, and the
match-listings on the back made it seem like some hidden gem
supertape featuring all sorts of cool dreammatches. The highlight of
the Macho Man tape was a cagematch between he and Jerry Lawler, which
on a lot of levels was very mind-blowing stuff to find out existed in
1994. It was as if you'd stumbled into some sick pro-wres samizdat,
real Man in the High Castle stuff that told of alternate universes
where King Kong Bundy and Rick Rude were a dominant tag team and
Bobby Heenan managed villainous cowboys in a war against a pair of relatively nondescript middle-aged blond guys.
In reality, the matches overwhelmingly
tended to be TV matches from a time when wrestling TV functioned as a promotional tool for non-televised live shows where the real money was made. There's lots
of great action, but a lot of ultimately unsatisfied angle-building
and screw jobs; c'est le vie, the atmosphere is what it's all about.
Best I can tell, the Wrestling Gold library seems to be licensed
matches from Joe Blanchard's Southwest Championship Wrestling, Paul
Boesch's Houston NWA affiliate, Dick the Bruiser's AWA satellite
territory, the Sheik's Big Time Wrestling and whatever Jerry
Jarrett's Memphis territory happened to call itself at any given
moment. Plus a lot of cool miscellaneous stuff.
Whatever licensing deal was made it must have been a good one because at the height of the wrestling boom 10+ years later the matches were re-released on DVD as a box set with the coolest bonus feature yet devised on any digitized vidya collection: commentary by Jim Cornette and Dave Meltzer. In 2001 these two had claim to the most encyclopedic minds for wrestling facts on the planet, and they dig deep to provide even the jabroniest of contests with lots of context that you couldn't quite get anywhere else in the Web 1.0 days. There's a lot more coverage and knowledge of the territories now in the era on-demand tape library cash-ins (that probably comes off as more cynical than I mean it to, it's very good that this stuff is streaming) but at the time this was a crash-course in an era of wrestling that had not only been ignored, but had been deliberately suppressed by the majors who tended to think it somehow benefited their product if people didn't remember anything older than three months back. In fairness, WWF was much more guilty of this than WCW, who tended to occasionally honor history whenever they felt like establishing a sacred hundred-year continuity that they were heir to, but WCW was so schizophrenic a genuine appreciation for history rarely stuck in between the various wrestling robots from the future and high-finance-themed heel stables. Hence a kid like me could pick up one of the early PWI Almanacs with the foolishly-removed-in-later-editions "History of Professional Wrestling" section and be shocked to learn that around the time he was born, flash-in-the-pain Intercontinental Champ Texas Tornado was one of the biggest stars in wrestling and was setting the world on fire in a feud with annoying WWF Mania co-host Dok Hendrix.
Whatever licensing deal was made it must have been a good one because at the height of the wrestling boom 10+ years later the matches were re-released on DVD as a box set with the coolest bonus feature yet devised on any digitized vidya collection: commentary by Jim Cornette and Dave Meltzer. In 2001 these two had claim to the most encyclopedic minds for wrestling facts on the planet, and they dig deep to provide even the jabroniest of contests with lots of context that you couldn't quite get anywhere else in the Web 1.0 days. There's a lot more coverage and knowledge of the territories now in the era on-demand tape library cash-ins (that probably comes off as more cynical than I mean it to, it's very good that this stuff is streaming) but at the time this was a crash-course in an era of wrestling that had not only been ignored, but had been deliberately suppressed by the majors who tended to think it somehow benefited their product if people didn't remember anything older than three months back. In fairness, WWF was much more guilty of this than WCW, who tended to occasionally honor history whenever they felt like establishing a sacred hundred-year continuity that they were heir to, but WCW was so schizophrenic a genuine appreciation for history rarely stuck in between the various wrestling robots from the future and high-finance-themed heel stables. Hence a kid like me could pick up one of the early PWI Almanacs with the foolishly-removed-in-later-editions "History of Professional Wrestling" section and be shocked to learn that around the time he was born, flash-in-the-pain Intercontinental Champ Texas Tornado was one of the biggest stars in wrestling and was setting the world on fire in a feud with annoying WWF Mania co-host Dok Hendrix.
Such, such are the joys and revelations await the viewer of Wrestling Gold. It's not the most cohesive set -- the matches seemingly placed randomly without regard for chronology, promotion, or theme -- but for all its faults it's an incredibly generous look at a lost era.
