Movies Of My Life # 31: Wrestlemania III
An occasional series here at Off The Tracks celebrating the movies that I love and have thought about most often throughout my life.
Okay, this is stretching the definition of a “movie”, if anything this is a TV special, but I’m including it - I first saw it on videotape, and after on DVD; it was delivered to me in much the same way as I’ve watched most of the movies in my life. And everyone loves pointing out that wrestling is fake, is fictional. You know, like in Hollywood…
Anyway, I’ve come to see Wrestlemania III as the peak - the ultimate. It first screened in 1987. I did not see it then. I didn’t even know what pro-wrestling was then - sometime that year I would see my first match, but it was months after Wrestlemania.
I saw Wrestlemania IV though. And I was a huge fan straight away - and for a few years after. Wrestling was everywhere at school - and then, almost overnight, it wasn’t. Until, a couple of years after I’d last watched it, a friend in my class talked about having a bootleg VHS tape of Wrestlemania III. For some reason, I’d never seen this - I’d seen the first two from my local video store, but not the third. Maybe someone never returned it?
This scratchy bootleg tape of WM3 was like secret gold. Passed around, and treasured. And it was my first hit of wrestling nostalgia.
It was like watching something on the TV screen through a thick layer of porridge. But that didn’t matter, the commentators did a lot of the work for me - and it just felt like a treat, like I was seriously sneaking something. Comical now, in a world of too many legal options and infinite ‘illegal’ options for watching…
But that’ s not where the world was at when I saw it.
And it remains my favourite Wrestlemania, I’ve watched it a bunch of times - I used to own it on DVD, and somewhat regret not having it any longer. Some days it’s the action film and comedy movie you need, all rolled into one. Great “hangover” watching - not that that’s a thing for me any longer. But it definitely was at one point in my life.
I can watch the first few Wrestlemanias now - a good decade or more since I last really kept up with wrestling (and that was a ‘comeback’ after a decade or more away from it) and still get swept up in the pageantry. I still watch it like it’s real to me. Damnit. I still wince at some of the bumps taken, still get excited by the key players winning; still love watching the entrance routines and the music.
Wrestlemania III is the one that lets me feel like a kid again, allows me to. It’s also a nearly immaculate set of matches with everything both good and bad about pro wrestling. There are celebrity cameos, there are little people (referred to as “midgets” in the parlance of these times) and there are double-crosses as good guys become bad, and bad become good.
This was the one where the idea fully cemented itself. The first Wrestlemania had been a charming attempt, the second a silly overreach - there wouldn’t have been a fourth or fifth and most recently a 39th and soon a 40th were it not for Wrestlemania III.
And look, I’m a fairweather fan at best when it comes to pro-wrestling. But I’m a huge fan of pop-culture. And this is the peak of when 80s pro-wrestling was establishing itself as something that crossed all the way over from the fringes.
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