I spent all of last week fighting off a cold, and it put me a little under the weather over the weekend. It didn't put me in bed, but I wasn't exactly in the mood to work either. As a result, I'll be playing a little bit of catch up to start February - good thing the month has an extra day this year!
So, Friday Night Pizza and WCW: This is a long-standing tradition that occurs when my family members stay out of town with extended family. My dinner break from work that Friday consists of a guilty pleasure Little Caeser's pizza and an episode of late-era WCW television programming. This doesn't happen very often, but I used to post on other social media about it, and I figured this was another example of cutting that out and making properly-archived features about the experience.
Friday's pizza was the stuffed crust pepperoni pizza, and the WCW episode on tap was the Feb. 7, 2001, edition of WCW Thunder. I wanted a 2001 episode to watch, I was feeling in a Thunder mood after playing a lot of the PlayStation video game in January, and this was the first such episode from February of that year.
WCW programming as a separate entity folded on March 26, 2001, and the company had really run off the rails over the prior year or so. This should be a train wreck of a show, right?
It's probably because the previous Friday Night Pizza and WCW featured an episode during the "New Blood" era that I had a trepidation of a terrible episode lingering in my mind. This Feb. 7, 2001, episode, though - it was actually alright overall.
The highlights for me include an opening match featuring Shane Helms, who is really starting to highlight his vertebreaker finishing move, a David-versus-Goliath matchup in Rey Mysterio Jr. versus The Wall that exceeded my expectations and seeing Lance Storm enlist the talents of "Prime Time" Elix Skipper.
This episode was part of the leadup to WCW's final SuperBrawl event: SuperBrawl Revenge. By 2001, I had stopped watching the WCW broadcasts but still followed along a little with internet reports. Current-day attitudes of late WCW usually spring images of "dumpster fire" to mind, but, knowing only what is shown through this episode, I thought the storylines on this show were mostly well connected.
Maybe what took me by the most surprise was not one match on this episode had a DQ finish. Sure, there was interference in cases so not every decision was "clean," but I was convinced going in that there was going to be multiple unresolved decisions. Again, I'm probably used to the period of time that featured certain bookers and writers.
Overall, this was a by-the-book television program for its time, but that actually resulted in me being semi-engaged with the show. The matches provided finishes, made sense as it pertained to the upcoming pay per view and I would even consider a couple of them to be solid matches. I was expecting the "car crash" style of episode prominent in the late 1990s and into 2000, and what I actually got exceeded my expectations.
In a vacuum, the Feb. 7, 2001, episode of WCW Thunder gets a passing grade from me. I won't tell you it's some amazing must-see episode, but it surpassed what I was envisioning going into the show.
Oh, and the pizza was fine as well. They didn't over-season it this time and it was less greasy than normal. This seems to be the rare Friday Night Pizza and WCW that led to a win-win.
