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SHOWNOTES

00:00-Show Intro
03:55-Drunk Dials
10:12-Mailbag
17:52:Discussion Segment: 1980 WWF
56:02-Beer Talk: Deschutes Inversion IPA
59:17-Retro Review: Hard Drivin (GEN)
1:04:03-Lightning Round
1:26:28=The Last Shot
1:27:06-Show Close

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DGR: 05.30.2011

ESPN 30:30 Box Set - ESPN has been running this incredibly awesome series of thirty sports documentaries this year to celebrate 30 years on the air. ESPN reached out to some of Hollywood’s top directors to create these films that celebrate some of the most talked about and under-appreciated moments in sports. The first box set just went on sale last week, and it collects the first fifteen films of the series. This collection covers such memorable spectacles as the OJ Simpson car chase on June 17, 1994, the rise and fall of the USFL, the Wayne Gretzky trade to LA and the tragic death of Len Bias.

No more Lost - I had a very strong love/hate relationship with Lost. For every good episode that saw a major plot development or great moments, it was usually followed with an episode that killed off one of your favorite characters or added yet another unneeded question to keep the WTF balance in check for the series. With Lost finally ending after six seasons in 2010, I am grateful that I will no longer have to anticipate any more episodes of this bizarre program that sent me on a whirlwind of emotions like no other show before it. I promise to never waste another moment on this show again…unless ABC will somehow manage to re-release the entire series in chronological order.

The Book of Basketball - This was actually released in 2009, but the paperback edition just hit shelves a couple weeks ago and it includes all kinds of bonus content! I finally finished the hardcover edition of this book a few months ago, and even only being a casual hoops fan I found it to be an extremely informative and entertaining read. Bill Simmons knows his hoops, and his humorous writing style features all sorts of imperative footnotes that makes catching up on basketball history fun for everyone!

Season Two of The Tester & WCG Ultimate Gamer - As much as it pains me to lay this out there, I love both of these shows. Say what you will about reality television and the usual hi jinx that it contains, but I was entertained by second seasons of The Tester and WCG Ultimate Gamer this year. Both shows are eight episodes and features video game themed challenges where the goal is to win to become either the next PlayStation game tester (yes, really), or for a one year roster spot on WCG USA. There are a few characters and moments on each show that are pretty groan inducing I will admit, but that is par for the course with almost any reality show. If you can manage to stomach that, than you will be in for a fun ride that brought back memories of old video game contest shows like Video Power and Nick Arcade.

Heavy Rain, Alan Wake & Red Dead Redemption - If you happen to remember my article half a year ago here ranking the top 10 games for the first half of the year, you may recall that it was a particularly strong first half of the year for games. Rest assured, now with 2010 nearly in the bag, I can say without a doubt that 2010 is the first year where the first half year of releases easily outclassed the second half. It outweighed it so much so that my top three from the first half of the year are my top three for my overall game of the year. And I hold all three of these games on a high pedestal with not much ground separating them in my rankings. Pardon the cheap plug, but to hear my final top 10 rankings, please subscribe to my podcast where we will be having our game of the year episode within a few weeks.

Pinball FX2/Marvel Pinball - Hats off to Zen Studios for their consistency at pumping out nonstop awesome video game pinball tables! Almost every time I sit down to play games, I tend to warm up with a couple of runs on a pinball game made by Zen Studios. Whether it was them supporting Pinball FX and Zen Pinball with frequent DLC tables throughout most of 2010, and then proceeding to blow us away with Pinball FX 2 and its amazing evolution of table design and leaderboard upgrades. They did not stop at Pinball FX 2, because just a couple months after that fine release, they pump out Marvel Pinball, with four more addicting tables themed after some of the best superheroes in the Marvel Universe…and Blade. I dare you to download a table or two and not get hooked to the amount of sheer fun each table provides and the addictive nature of score chasing everyone on your friends list.

Miz as WWE Champ - This just would not be a “stuff of the year” list from me without a couple wrestling mentions. Mike “The Miz” Mizannin had quite an interesting journey to becoming the current WWE champion. From debuting in the entertainment world ten years ago on The Real World, to riding the MTV reality circuit for a few years until finally debuting in WWE in 2004 on its Tough Enough competition. Being one of the few Miz fans from his early beginnings in WWE when no one thought he would last a year in the company, I nearly lost it when he finally proved all the doubters wrong and  won the WWE championship.

The Nexus John Cena Beatdown - Just one more wrestling moment to add to this list. If you used to be a wrestling fan, odds are you watched during the WCW/WWF Monday Night Wars when each company was raising the bar each and every Monday to get you to flip the channel. With no real competition, WWE has become complacent with its storytelling and features less and less must see moments each year. In 2010 they managed to capture some of that old fire with the debut of the Nexus stable. Here they made an impact with an 8-on-1 beatdown on John Cena and literally tore apart the ring and beat up the entire ringside staff in a moment completely unprecedented. The Nexus has since become one of the most interesting stables of wrestlers in quite a few years.

On a recent episode of Drunken Gamers Radio, John stated they could not get enough of my wrestling articles. So I figured it was about time to write a new one. Today, I will review one on the newly-released DVDs chronicling the career of one of my all time favorite wrestlers, Chris Jericho, with WWE Home Video’s Breaking the Code: Behind the Walls of Chris Jericho. This three-disc DVD features a near two hour documentary on the career of Chris Jericho on disc one, and nineteen of his best matches, handpicked by Jericho himself, on the final two discs.

The documentary starts off like most previous WWE produced efforts, highlighting Jericho’s childhood years where he aspired to be a wrestler and rock star. The feature does a modest job at describing his early years in wrestling, from breaking into the business with Lance Storm at the Hart Family Dungeon to his days of being an international superstar in Mexico and Germany and getting his first break in the USA in ECW. I was hoping for a little more expansive look at this stage in his career since his autobiography, A Lion’s Tale, put a lot more emphasis on it, but the DVD does a decent job at covering a couple of his standout moments that he learned from. It is worth noting here that Jericho’s book is also the place to find his interactions and memories of Chris Benoit, who served as a big influence on Jericho’s career, but is understandably erased from WWE history (and is nowhere to be found on this DVD) after the double murder-suicide tragedy from 2007.

His exposure in ECW eventually landed him a job in WCW. During the infamous “Monday Night Wars” between WWE’s RAW and WCW’s Nitro from 1995-2001, one of the reasons I would usually tune into WCW was because of the high-flying action its Cruiserweight division delivered. I was more of a RAW fan, but Nitro usually started an hour before RAW, and that happened to be the hour most of its Cruiserweight matches took place so I got into the habit of seeing tons of incredibly athletic matches from classic Cruiserweights like Rey Mysterio Jr., Psycosis, Ultimo Dragon, Juventud Guerrera, Eddie Guerrero and Dean Malenko, to name a few. The DVD gives an accurate account on how WCW’s powers that be viewed the Cruiserweight division as nothing more than a preliminary attraction. If a wrestler was a Cruiserweight, than they may as well kiss any chance to climb their way up the ladder into the main event scene goodbye.

One of the few stars that escaped that stigma was Chris Jericho. After a couple years as just another faceless Cruiserweight, he took his opportunity to emerge out of the pool of high-flyers. Jericho talks about how he took every chance he got to cut a promo and develop his new bad-guy personality. The DVD goes into depth on two of his breakout feuds in WCW with Dean Malenko and Bill Goldberg. WWE used its archive interview footage with Goldberg and former WCW President Eric Bishoff to help flesh out a lot of his WCW years, and give their side of the story on why they held back Jericho from reaching true superstardom in WCW, which resulted in Jericho leaving the sinking WCW ship for higher ground into WWE in 1999.
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I was not the most hardcore WCW fan until the great Monday night wars started in 1995.I stumbled across a couple episodes throughout the years on television, but for the most part, all I knew WCW for was being the home for one of the greatest wrestlers of all time in the “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, and the man that had the bleach blond hair and all types of various face paint patterns, aka Sting. Then when WCW decided to start having its own Monday night telecast, Nitro to compete directly with WWE’s RAW show at the exact same timeslot, I could not help but flip to it during commercials in favor of watching the same Karate Fighters commercial for the umpteenth time. Slowly but surely over the months, I became a fan of the WCW, especially when a lot of my favorite WWE mainstays like Razor Ramon and Diesel defected over to form the phenomenon that bumped pro wrestling into the mainstream in the mid-to-late 90s, the nWo.

Now all the highs and lows of WCW are chronicled into a fantastic documentary (albeit with WWE’s version of history, needless to say they took a few liberties), titled “The Rise and Fall of WCW.” WWE has done a tremendous job putting together documentaries based on other promotions they have put out of business over the years like ECW, AWA and WCCW. For newer fans of wrestling this is a great cliff notes version of the southern promotion, though avid fans of the squared circle will be bummed that they only covered so much ground in the 100 minutes this documentary runs (compared to WWE’s ECW DVD, which was based on a company that was around for a far shorter time that lasted over three hours).

For fans like myself who were not into WCW before the 90s, there is a great summary of the roots of WCW when it was the major player of the NWA (a group of wrestling territories from around the country) and was going by names of Jim Crockett promotions and Mid-Atlantic Wrestling. It covers a lot of ground from how WCW was one of the first promotions to get featured on a coveted cable timeslot, to its tumultuous management problems throughout the 80s that led to the company getting sold to Time Warner which led to another rotating door of management problems until Eric Bishoff came in and getting the promotion on the right track.

The DVD dedicates a fair amount of material to recapping the Monday Night Wars and how ruthless Bishoff was competing with RAW by making Nitro live every week and taking advantage of that and giving away RAW’s results at the top of the show (back when RAW was mostly taped several days before hand). The whole Monday Night War portion of the documentary is the most interesting since I was the most familiar with it and it does a an outstanding job at covering what drove WCW to new highs in the 90s (namely the explosive Cruiserweight division, Goldberg and the mega-popular nWo). I would have liked more detail on the demise of WCW, especially since they paid barely any attention to a couple pivotal moments of the Monday Night Wars that helped propel the downward spiral of WCW – the mishandling of Bret Hart and complete mess of a payoff to the year and a half build up to Sting vs. Hulk Hogan at Starrcade ’97.

I can see some reasons to why Sting is not highlighted (other than briefly seeing him in montages throughout the feature), mostly because he is currently one of the main acts on WWE’s competition, TNA Wrestling. If that were the case however, than why does this DVD take the time to bury two other key TNA figures in Kevin Nash and Jeff Jarrett? Speaking of non-WWE employees, I was surprised that WWE tracked down several figures of WCW past to get comments from in the feature like former WCW executives Jim Crockett, JJ Dillon, Harvey Schiller and even the man, Bill Goldberg himself. Eric Bishoff oddly refused to be interviewed for this documentary, but WWE had enough archival footage of Eric’s past interviews from older WWE documentaries to make his comments relevant in this release.

Rounding out this package is the usual wealthy amount of bonus matches WWE includes with every DVD release. There are 20 bonus matches, most notable are the excellent Chi-Town Rumble bout between Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat, Hulk Hogan’s WCW debut against Ric Flair and Goldberg vs. DDP at Halloween Havoc ‘98. While this is not the most fully detailed history of WCW it could have been, it does cover a lot of ground in a short period of time. WWE also released a couple other DVDs that would be terrific supplemental viewing to The Rise and Fall of WCW, so if you want to know more about WCW after watching this than I highly recommend tracking down “Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen” for a detailed look at WCW in the 80s and 90s, and “The Monday Night Wars” for a extensive look at one of the most exciting times in wrestling.

I’ll admit it, I’m a wrestling nerd. If there’s one thing I’m mindlessly addicted to, it’s trying to catch as much of the seven hours of prime time programming each and every week. Then there’s the backlog of DVDs I have to catch up on, and as much of the WWE 24/7 On Demand programming I can stomach in my free time. Some of my favorite times of the year are when I throw a WWE Pay-Per-View party for some of the WWE’s top events of the year. Last night I had some friends over for WWE’s annual summer spectacular, Summerslam.

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