But speaking of the nWo... how weird is it to see the "This advertisement paid for by..." clips on WWF TV? Even weirder to see stuff from WCW shows on there. This is how the WCW Invasion should have been run, but I digress...
It’s just plain weird to see stuff like the spray-painting of the belt, the ‘Finger Poke Of Doom’ by Hogan (incidentally, the finest piece of selling by Nash in his career) and just plain old nWo wackiness again. Hell, even Hogan looks in good shape.
Problem is, the nWo are starting to look cool... like a breath of fresh air on WWF TV - which isn’t the point, as they are supposed to be ‘a lethal dose of poison’ according to Vincent K. They need to make an entrance that is suitably heelish, something they passed up on last week on Smackdown. It would maybe have had them on TV too soon, but if the nWo had beaten down the Rock instead of the Undertaker... that would have been a nice way to introduce themselves.
They wouldn’t even need to have been on TV - just have a dazed and confused Rock (Yes, I know... not a great stretch for him) lying on the ground, on his stomach... first person there gets to him, rolls him over, and spray painted on his stomach, the three letters that we’re all dreading... that would have got the nWo over as heels before they set foot on TV.
Of course, you just know they’re going to run-in on a match - it’s the nWo style, something else that needs to be addressed by Vince. The nWo angle ran out of steam in WCW after it was watered down week after week. It’s all very well having nWo Black and White, Wolfpac, Red, Hollywood, Japan, Cuba, Argentina, Peru, Outer Mongolia, Timbuktu and whatever else evolved out of it, but that multitude of teams just waters down the initial impact.
This incarnation of the nWo should be seen as elite - a third group, not just a refuge for every heel - that didn’t work with the Alliance, so I see no reason why it’d work now. Have some heels try to join, but get beat down - it’ll put across how bad the nWo are, that they are elite. Whatever happens, though, no heel vs. heel matches - they just stink the place out
Maybe Flair could bring in (or rebuild) his own team to combat the nWo - a Horsemen revival perhaps? Maybe not - the Horsemen always worked better as heels, and for a WWF Horsemen to take off, they’d need someone of Benoit’s style to be present (an ideal WWF Horsemen for me would be Benoit, Storm, Hennig, and someone like Test or Rhyno as ‘the enforcer’ of the team... pair it up with Flair as the mouthpiece, and that’s cool for me).
I thought I’d hate the incoming of the nWo... maybe it’s just because they haven’t worked a match yet, maybe it’s just the ‘dumb mark’ in me, but so far, it’s looking to be pretty cool. No Way Out is shaping up to be the PPV Invasion should (and could) have been. It’s also intriguing to see that so far, Trips hasn’t said anything or reacted to the nWo - possibly the reason for the Steph pregnancy angle, to keep him separate?
And on to that... it’s going to boil down to one of two options - Steph’s either lying her guts out to get Trips back on her side, or the baby is someone else’s - with the smart money on it being Angle or Jericho’s. One things for sure, just like a soap opera, these things never work out.
Either way, it’s looking more and more like Austin vs. Trips at Wrestlemania, so any developments in the baby angle will either have to be dealt with quickly, or left to fester until after ‘Mania. If pushed, I would say that Steph is going to lose the ‘baby’ and Jericho will turn out to be the father... or Scott Hall after one too many at WWF New York.
As long as the nWo doesn’t take over the storylines completely, then things could well be OK. Whether you like Hogan or not, you can’t deny the thought of him working with the Rock at Wrestlemania does stir up some nice publicity for the WWF, and even some sparks of nostalgia. As long as it stops with Hogan, and doesn’t extend to the Ult’mat Woyah we’ll be fine.
Like I said before, maybe if the WCW invasion had been held off until some of these bigger names were available, it might have been something special. Let’s hope they don’t mess up the nWo angle, too... Vince is running out of chances. Until next time, have fun, go mad.
