Welcome to another eWrestlingNews Question of the Day!
On this day, back on October 29, 1995, WCW Halloween Havoc took place and featured one of the most infamously WTF matches of all time with Hulk Hogan and The Giant in a Sumo Monster Truck Match, followed by a regular match where Hogan lost his title by disqualification before being bear-hug/humped by The Giant and The Yeti (aka The Yet-tay)
It’s bonkers. It’s terrible. It’s a great exhibition of how stupid pro wrestling can be and why this era struggled in the ratings.
It’s also something that is very hard to defend. So….give it a shot!
My question for you today is “Play devil’s advocate. Try to make the argument that this booking was a good idea and see if you can convince anyone of it!”
Remember to answer with your response in the comments below.
As far as my answer…
Oh damn, why do I set myself up for some questions like this knowing full well I don’t have an actual answer? Let’s see what I can come up with.
Okay, obviously, I need to make some tweaks here right out of the gate, because pretty much everything about what they did was so stupid that I can’t really defend it much. But I do think that MAYBE there are SOME elements that COULD work….POSSIBLY…with some adjustments.
In theory, the idea of bringing in a monster truck thing to draw some viewers isn’t bad. Monster trucks were randomly very popular around this time frame, for some reason. And it wasn’t just popular with the southern crowd that would normally be into things like NASCAR and would be the target audience for WCW Hog Wild / Road Wild and all. I grew up in New Jersey and I can’t tell you how many times I saw commercials for Grave Digger and things like demolition derby shows and the like. I even had some toy of something that looked like a shark or a dinosaur or whatever version of a monster truck with teeth. Apparently, it was called Attack Pack from Hot Wheels. I took the time to look these things up.
Doing something to bring in another type of audience isn’t a bad idea in theory, only in practice. At the time, I’m sure there were people who watched this event because of that far more than anything else. That in and of itself leads to my first tweak, in that I think the biggest flaw here wasn’t that they did this, but that they did it on a pay-per-view.
I was always a WWF kid more than a WCW one, but I know that my family didn’t have the money to buy pay-per-views outside of a few very rare instances. We never would have spent the money on WCW Halloween Havoc 1995, even if we were more into monster trucks (which we weren’t). I’m sure a lot of other families were like that, too, and even if they were super hyped for this, they just didn’t have the funds.
So that is my first tweak: I think this should have been the main event of Monday Nitro leading into the pay-per-view, rather than on the event itself. If this page of WCW buy rates is to be trusted, this got 37,776 more purchases than the previous event, Fall Brawl 1995. How much of that can be attributed to the monster truck angle and how much of it could be just the rest of the card or the idea of seeing The Giant in action in general? Unknown. But given how the angle went down, with The Giant falling off the roof of the Cobo Arena, that screams to me the finale of Nitro that would lead people into wanting to know how the cliffhanger (quite literally) would be resolved.
Maybe if this had been on Nitro instead of the event, it would have preserved some of its lunacy by making it not as strange that they would scramble and The Giant would be able to wrestle in a few days, and it might have enticed people to tune in to the television show for free/cheaper than the pay-per-view, and THEN hooked them into buying the event for just the fallout of that.
WWE has done plenty weird angles like that in the past. I think if this had just been a segment on Nitro, it wouldn’t have been as big of a problem in wrestling history lore. But being on a pay-per-view and leading rather quickly into the title match, which had the whole thing with The Yeti, just makes it so much worse.
And I’m struggling to find any way to justify The Yeti. At least, I can’t justify it as it was done.
At most, they should have looked at that costume and said “This isn’t working” and written it off with one segment on television, having the character attack Hulk Hogan and that’s about it. But YIKES that costume was stupid. Ron Reis at least got to be Reese in Raven’s Flock, and I get that they saw his height and figured they could do something with that as a monster for Hogan to fight, but this is definitely WCW’s Giant Gonzalez moment.
Again, I see where they would say “big man = big monster = Hogan opponent = money”, but they just happened to have their blinders on to the actual execution of all of it. Had they gone with a different type of character than The Yeti, and not made him for some reason also look more like a mummy than a Yeti (seriously, how much cocaine did they take when brainstorming this?), and just had Ron Reis be some tough guy One Man Gang type of person, maybe that would have worked better—but they absolutely could not have, under any circumstances, done that stupid bear hug thing. I simply cannot defend that no matter how hard I try.
What do you think? Drop your thoughts below!
