Remembering Superstars of Wrestling

Monday is Movies. Or TV. Today it's Wrestling. Specifically a classic wrestling TV Show.

Superstars of Wrestling (back when the WWE was known as the WWF) started in 1986. It ran through until the early 1990s when a name-change to RAW (still the name) saw the turn to a new kind of product. Yes, yes, we’re talking pro-wrestling. I was a fan. Er, am a fan. Well, I’m not really…not now, not currently, but I dipped my toe back in the water. More than that, I went for the full belly flop, a splash from the top rope. I dived on back into wrestling in my mid-20s. Met a couple of the big names, talked to a few more on the phone. Did a weekly wrap-up, wrote reviews of the pay-per-view events, took in a live event – watched thousands of hours of the TV shows, got right back into it.

And it was all in a bid to reclaim that magical time when WWF’s Superstars of Wrestling was appointment viewing.

I first saw pro-wrestling on a family holiday to Australia. I remember seeing The Junkyard Dog. I was hooked. A year or so later it’s on TV here – and we were watching sneaky bootlegged video tapes of the earliest Wrestlemania shows between times; trading cassette tapes in exchange (Motley Crue, Gunners) all for the chance to catch up on these events where Andre The Giant would win a body slam contest or battle royal, where Hulk Hogan would then pick up the giant and slam him.

Superstars of Wrestling was on late at night – it started off mid-week, then moved to Fridays, and then back to Thursdays (even Wednesdays at one point I think) and it was about an hour long. It was a reason to live. You collected the posters in The Truth and TV Guide, bought the bubble gum trading cards, and practiced the moves in the school yard at lunchtime. We had a couple of full school assemblies warning us against performing wrestling moves. No child ended up brain damaged or paralyzed – but given the warnings against lunch time battles only intensified the practice, it’s one of life’s mysteries how no one ever lost the use of a limb, and we seemed to retain full faculties.

Wrestling was everything.

And the days that made up the rest of the week were fucking miserable. Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad, there was music and sport – weekend cricket and hockey. There were bike-rides and you could go to the arcade to play the WWF Superstars video game. But it was a long wait each week. And if you hadn’t set the VCR timer properly you could miss half the show, meaning the repeated watches across the week didn’t gather the same steam.

The brilliant thing about Superstars – compared with Smackdown and RAW and the modern shows – was that it was the classic good-buy/bad-guy thing. The face (good guy) vs. the heel (bad guy). More than that though it was full blown cartoon character stuff – and you always knew who was going to win because it was the big name player against some weekly jobber. So Jake “The Snake” Roberts would take on Paul Roma. Or it would be Greg “The Hammer” Valentine against Billy Kidman. Guys with names like Paul and Glen had to fight against people with names like Bad News Brown and The Ultimate Warrior. There was The One Man Gang – he was, as you might guess from that name, enormous. And there was my favorite, George “The Animal” Steele. He had a green tongue and made Robin Williams look like someone with Alopecia. He grunted and said only the word “mine”. But in The Truth and TV Guide you’d read, via the weekly updates, that he was actually a university lecturer.

Superstars of Wrestling consisted of the aforementioned “Squash Matches” where the big name would defeat the nobody-guy in 90 seconds or so. But the real action was often the other big-name player coming to the ring to start a fight or to needle away in an ongoing feud. You would have to wait for these to be resolved in the quarterly pay-per-view events. Even longer when you lived in New Zealand – you might wait an extra couple of months for the video store to track it. Until the local TV station started playing the PPV events at midnight and you’d have sleeping-bag parties with a handful of friends, maybe watch A Nightmare on Elm Street or Hellraiser first, a few bounces on the trampoline and some sort of takeaway dinner. Then popcorn and the main event! You might even fall asleep before the actual Main Event so you’d rewind it the next morning.

The other brilliant thing about all of this was the commentators. I could never get that excited about seeing the live event because I loved the commentary. Jesse “The Body” Ventura was a former wrestler. He would go on to be a governor and crackpot conspiracy theorist. But he was so cool. He popped up in a couple of movies too. And his straight-man was Vince McMahon. We didn’t know then but we’d find out that he actually owned the company. He would go on to think he owned the world and is a different kind of crackpot theorist. But they were such a great team when they did the weekly show.

When I got back into watching wrestling, and writing about it – and catching up on the nearly decade and a half I had happily missed (I rented so many VHS tapes and DVDs in such a short space of time) – it was mostly some strange nostalgia buzz. I saw the DVD cover of Wrestlemania 19 – and I wanted to see it. A pang. An instant hit. I hadn’t watched one since Wrestlemania 5. 

I did all of the catching up – because I was offered a few chances to interview a few of the big names. And because I found it all rather fascinating. With time I even got to talk to Ric Flair and also Bret “The Hitman” Hart. These were two of my favourite interviews. As good as any of the chats with authors or film directors or musicians. Talking to Bret Hart for two hours and hearing him softly crying as he talked down the line from his home let me know that any “that stuff is fake” comment isn’t really the right way to look at it. It’s totally valid if you’re not a fan, but it’s still not quite right. And it never will be. Just as watching pro-wrestling isn’t really right.

That was always part of the fun of it.

Still, there wasn’t anything quite like Superstars of Wrestling. So over the top, so stupid and wonderful. Such a thrill.

Wrestling has always been at its best when celebrating its stupidity, its absurdity, its circus origins, its carnival nature, its utterly surreal and baffling brand of nearly-magic.

WWF Superstars of Wrestling was the greatest TV show I ever saw. At least for a while there. Way back then.

Were you ever a fan of the WWF Superstars of Wrestling show?

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I still watch the DVDs that turn up in the mail and review them over at Off The Tracks. Hundreds of reviews there. But I don’t really follow the storylines, I don’t watch the weekly shows. But from about 2006 to 2012 I was more focussed on it than I had been in the late 80s. I wanted to write essays about it. I did of course. But I never quite wrote the one I wanted to. I did however put the very best of my wrestling writing together in an e-Book. Probably a hard-sell, but if you are interested it’s just $0.99. And I was most proud of the cover, a photo I took from when the WWE toured Wellington.