People are already buzzing about RD’s next book venture. A future masterpiece covering the rise and fall of WCW. Now in my opinion, one of the biggest problems they had was simply too much of the NWO. By the time Bischoff had reeled off the first NWO only pay-per-view Souled Out, as well as a shitbomb episode of NWO Monday Nitro, you didn’t need psychic abilities to sense a terminal and fatal virus had infected Turnerland.
Today, I’m gonna take you back to a time when the deadly NWO overexposure symptoms first started to appear. The day the NWO faced this week’s Jobbers Of The Week – the infamous Starbuck Twins.
Back in October 1996, it was just another ho hum WCW Saturday Night episode as usual. Fans who hadn’t gone comatose from seeing Harlem Heat face the Nasty Boys for the 897th time would be in for a surprise. TBS cut from the regular arena telecast and went to da-dumb. . . NWO Saturday Night. Alright I say, lets give it a try.
NWO Saturday Night announcer the Giant informs the people at home and in attendance (all three of them) that the next match will be a “NWO Invitational Tag-team Tournament match featuring the Outsiders vs. a famous team from Stanford, Ct. (Gotta love that inside humor, huh) Supposedly 14 time “Eastern Seaboard” tag champs, the hideously overmatched Starbuck Twins.
At first I was exited thinking I might see Lt. Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica aka Dirk Benedict make his return to the ring. On second thought, after making the horrendous Body Slam:The Movie, Benedict should not be allowed anywhere near a wrestling ring again. As the twins make their way to the ring, I notice something funny. By golly they’re not identical twins. Oh sweet irony!!
One is white and the other is black. Oh ho ho, how funny is that. Here they are, Joe Joe and Rocket Starbuck, masters of the “toxic splash” and the “rocket right” respectfully. As Hall and Nash made their way to the ring thats when things really got bad. The screen would all of a sudden go black and white, the colors of the NWO. How neat is that.
Joe Joe and Rocket would give each other a good luck hug and five of the most painful minutes of my life would begin. During the match, in addition to the pleasure of hearing Nash call the action from a mike in the corner, conventional camera techniques went out the window and were replaced by something much “hipper and cool.” While the NWO squashed the Twins, you would see replays boxes in the middle of the screen. Migraine inducing multi-image effects of Rocket getting creamed. Hell, one time Nash rammed Joe Joe into the corner and it looked like the arena had just gone into a thermonuclear melt down.
And poor Mama Starbuck. The only bit of offense her boys had in the whole match, an arm bar, was censored by the NWO cameras. Anyone lucky enough to not have suffered a seizure from those groundbreaking tv effects would see a masked Nick Patrick mercifully give the 3 count victory to the Outsiders.
Sadly, Joe Joe and Rocket Starbuck would never be seen again. But the terribly unfunny squashfest known as NWO Saturday Night would go on for a few months, before Bischoff and the NWO moved on to bigger and ahem…better things like Souled Out, NWO Late Night, NWO Nascar race cars, etc. I could go on about it forever.
Thankfully, the overexposed NWO didn’t go on forever.