Following my most recent induction, I’ve been flooded with requests to do more in-depth music video reviews from the legendary Piledriver VHS.
I hate you guys.
No no, I kid. I actually kinda dug doing that, so yes, we will be going back to them throughout the remainder of 2017. But honestly, this week, I needed a little break. So this week? I decided to go in a different direction.
A deader direction.
That’s right, kids – it’s time for another Deadsite induction! Blatantly stolen from my pal Matt over at Dinosaur Dracula, the idea is for us to go back to the very early days of the world wide interwebs, dusting off the mothballs to see what that dial-up connection of yours would give you in the form of wrestling news and entertainment. There was no YouTube back then, no Facebook, no Twitter, none of that fancy stuff. The sites were basic to the extreme, with very minimal graphics. Audio clips were rare, video clips rarer still, and those that existed were roughly the size of your thumbnail and took a half hour to load.
We’ve done this twice before, once here and once here. Go back, read, enjoy, we’ll wait for you. This one tonight is somewhat unique, a bit of a double dip, as we will be looking at a movie I inducted many years ago, the legendarily awful Ready to Rumble. You can access that through the archives by clicking here if you have signed up, and if not, sign up over here and help us all out. Think of this induction as an infinity mirror of awfulness.
For the uninitiated, Ready to Rumble stars David Arquette as…wait, what am I doing? Why am I giving a synopsis? Why am I talking about who’s in it?
Isn’t that the website’s job?
There we go, this site delivering just what I asked for in delightfully Flash-y glory. What’s funny is that due to my source material, I had to convert that to an animated GIF, and my new file has to be 10000000x larger than what was being run back then. Which is kinda the story of computing in general – no matter how fast we make computers, we always wind up giving them way larger files and more needlessly complex programs thus the true speed gains we should see are never realized.
MAN. And here I am the one that used to mock others for being “geeks, nerds, and poindexters.”
Anyway, I love that line about “Gordie and Sean come face to face with a drunken, bitter Jimmy King.” That may be a description of all of us before this induction is over.
Especially when we get to see this, the site’s menu! It feature’s the back of a man’s head, and in the middle of his noggin, you get to choose your options. Before we go through these one by one (get a drink, this is going to take a while), let me remind you of how this film has been promoted on this here website so far:
– It features wrestling fans who live in a trailer park
– The hero is a bitter drunk
– The main menu is a bald man’s head
This is how someone, who was probably paid a lot of money, decided to get folks to part with their hard-earned cash. And here you and I have to go to work every day. There’s something very wrong about that.
The “Faces and Heels” section goes over the cast of the film, with David Arquette getting top billing. Reading that text not only brings back memories of when Arquette was a major box office draw (really, he was!), but more how every site promoting anything in the early 2000’s was virtually identical, giving you a gazillion details about the folks involved.
I can’t say this tactic was ineffective. I mean, I got to the end of the text in the image above and legit wanted to know more about the “stray dog that turns out to be a refugee from the Witness Protection Program.” I was unaware canines would be covered by such an agency.
Turns out the untitled film wound up being See Spot Run, and according to Rotten Tomatoes, it has “all the elements children enjoy in a movie”, including LOTS OF DOG POOP!
How did it only garner a 23% approval rating then, RottenTomatoes?
Are children completely unrepresented on your lousy site?
My favorite part of the casting page is when a wrestler is listed it lists his real name and his character’s name in parenthesis. So here, the part of Diamond Dallas Page is played by a man named Diamond Dallas Page. That’s too bad, as Kanyon had a gooftastic run as a DDP impersonator and I bet would have done just as well in this film. Probably cheaper too. That said, Kanyon likely wouldn’t have had Page’s love for Satchmo, nor his “Trojan work ethic.”
Wait, what? Trojan work ethic?
Yeah, me either kid. I’d say you could ask the girl behind you, but I hear she’s in (a hopefully non-Pubjabi) prison these days.
Won’t lie – I sped read that first sentence and all I got from it was Page and Kimblery and Banging.
If any of you were around during Kimberly’s run, be honest – you likely did the same thing. She was quite lovely.
Anyone else dying to know what was in that box labeled “Crap”? I’m betting it was hundreds of unsold Kimberly Page heads.
The Bookers section is just like Faces and Heels, except this time we are zeroing on the true villains of the film: the people who actually made it. I won’t go through them one by one, as the text in this section is absolutely never-ending. Even I can show mercy sometimes.
In lieu of that, I will play a brief game with you. I am going to list 10 movies below. How many of the films below had someone who helped make Ready to Rumble involved?
Batman Returns
Chinatown
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Mortal Kombat
The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
Back to the Future
Jingle All the Way
Dirty Dancing
sex, lies, and videotape
Godfather: Part II
The answer: ALL OF THEM.
Yes, someone who was in the saga of the Corleones slummed down to Ready to Rumble. So the next time you see a guy who was a star in the WWF working an indy show in your hometown in front of 50 people, keep that in mind. It happens in every profession.
The Angle contains the synopsis of the movie, along with some of the logic behind the making of the film.
Wait, did I just use the word “logic” in conjunction with Ready to Rumble?
I could go to town about how apparently watching wrestling on TV is somehow flat (how on earth did geometry come into play?), but there is a far bigger, more important question here:
Nitro had a breakfast cereal?
WHAT?
That can’t possibly be true, can it?
If so, how on earth am I just learning about this now?
Mrs. Deal, get that guy from WCW Worldwide on the phone right now! I’m getting my Jethro bowl at the ready!
Ok, stop, time out.
So to get this movie made, these two guys filmed their kids and pitched it with “if you don’t green light this, you’re an idiot.” A studio then granted them a budget of $24,000,000.
Why have I not moved to Hollywood? I can call people idiots too! Pay me twenty-four large!
So this movie, which is not about wrestling, is described using the word “wrestling” approximately 47 times in an 80 word span.
I…don’t…even…know…how…to…finish…this…sentence.
So instead we will jump to the next section, Hit the Music. Sadly, the RealAudio clips (a format which I used on WrestleCrap.com til like a month ago), no longer function.
On second thought, that’s not sad at all. That Bif Naked version of We’re Not Gonna Take Itabsolutely sucked!
Just like that, the entire site redeems itself by listing a bunch of popular websites from back in the day! Wrestleline! eYada! SCOOPS!!!!
So many memories.
Al Isaacs, why have you gone into hiding when the wrestling world needs you?
So as I look at this, I realize something I kinda wish I hadn’t, that being the fact this movie came out in 2000. WrestleCrap existed in 2000. Why weren’t we on there? Seriously, we had to have been bigger than wrestlingplanet, which I have absolutely zero memory of!
I bet this blacklisting had something to do with that time Merle got into it with Jeremy Borash…hmmm…
The Souvenir Stand has nothing to do with merchandise, but rather is a game!
Or was a game. Sadly, and this time I actually can use that term, father time has rendered the code unusable. Now I will never know if I will be partay-ing with the big boys in Vegas or pooping in Peoria.
If I had to put money on it, I’d guess it would have been the latter.
Finally, we get Roll the Footage, which are a series of video clips that are long gone. Don’t worry, though, they all sound pretty darn boring. I mean, sure, there may be some campy value of “WCW stars deliver some of Hollywood’s most famous movie lines”, but I’m guessing whatever you are imagining in your head is better. For the record, I am envisioning Glacier asking his papa for hushpuppies, just like Sheriff Buford T. Justice’s son Junior did in Smokey and the Bandit.
I guarantee my version is better.
What you should bemoan is the internet has swallowed whole the Exclusive area, which was not even on the main page of the site. Apparently this was a pop up window that granted you access to a couple more sections, featuring merchandise (just a Warner Bros auction site) as well as more videos, this time footage shot backstage at a Valentine’s Day Nitro.
I mean, we don’t get to hear how Billy Kidman wanted a bigger part.
I mean, sure, we all do, right? We’re men!
(Except for you three ladies who frequent the site. Thank you for visiting. Although you probably want your men to have a bigger part too.)
And Chae…she was going to tell us what the wrestlers were like on the set.
Hmmm…I bet they were just like they are at Nitro!
And finally, we will sadly never know what Mean Gene’s favorite thing about wrestling is.
Eh, on second thought, I think we probably do.
But if you don’t?
Then I would advise you join me in a couple weeks when I post my next new induction…to which I can only say, lordy mama, light my fuse.