Wrestling and Pop Culture: 1988
January 1988
MicroLeague WWF Wrestling
*from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MicroLeague WWF Wrestling is a professional wrestling simulation video game. The first video game based on the World Wrestling Federation, it was released in 1987 for the Commodore 64 and Atari ST and in 1989 for the Amiga and DOS. It was developed by Micro League Sports Association and published by Micro League Multimedia Inc. The game is part of the company’s MicroLeague sports series, which included games such as
MicroLeague Baseball. [1]
In contrast to most action-oriented wrestling games, the gameplay in
MicroLeague WWF Wrestling involves a turn-based strategy. Players select one of several pre-set matches and choose their wrestler’s actions via a menu. Wrestlers are depicted using digitized photographs from actual matches.
Gameplay
The game uses a turn-based strategy, as players choose a move from their wrestler’s arsenal as their opponent (either a second player or the computer) does the same, and depending on the situation, one move will successfully be executed. Each wrestler has five “basic” moves (which cause two damage points), four “major” moves (which cause four damage points), and one “super” move (which causes six damage points, and is the only way to attempt to pin the opponent). Each wrestler also has a “block” option, which if done successfully will remove two of their own damage points. In addition, babyface wrestlers can attempt a special move in which they rally the crowd to gain momentum and recover some of their damage. Heel wrestlers can attempt special cheating tactics, but this runs the risk of disqualification if they are caught by the referee. Later expansions with tag team matches feature a “tag” option where the wrestler can tag their partner, but at the cost of one turn. [2]
The moves and scenes in the game’s matches are accompanied by digitized images of them occurring from each specific match. The original
MicroLeague WWF Wrestling disc, released in 1987, features Ricky “the Dragon” Steamboat vs. Hulk Hogan on one side and Ricky Steamboat vs. Dynamite Kid on the other. [3] In 1988, two expansion discs were released, known as the “Superstar Series”. The first of these features Randy “Macho Man” Savage vs. The Honky Tonk Man and The Hart Foundation (Bret “the Hitman” Hart & Jim “the Anvil” Neidhart) vs. Demolition (Ax & Hammer). The second disc features Ricky Steamboat vs. Randy Savage and Jake “The Snake” Roberts vs. “Ravishing” Rick Rude. [4] The Amiga and DOS versions, released in 1989, feature Ricky Steamboat vs. Randy Savage and Ricky Steamboat vs. Ted DiBiase. [5] There were no expansions released for this version, as the WWF ceased production of the game soon afterward to focus on console games.
Before the matches, “Mean” Gene Okerlund interviews each participant. Howard Finkel does ring introductions. During the matches, text-based commentary is provided by Vince McMahon and Jesse “the Body” Ventura. The expansion discs, as well as the later versions of the game, also feature the team of McMahon and Ventura, as well as Gorilla Monsoon with Bobby “the Brain” Heenan. [6]
See also
List of fighting games
List of wrestling games
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April 9, 1988
Well now, let’s answer that question about professional wrestlers having hit records. Scott from Portland, Maine wants to know if, besides the WWF wrestlers’ version of “Land of 1,000 Dances” back a couple of years ago, if any pro wrestler ever had a Billboard Hot 100 hit. Well, Scott, the short answer is no—besides all the WWF superstars on “Land of 1,000 Dances”, no other wrestler has had a song make the Billboard Hot 100. However, one almost did it—one of the men who sang on “Land of 1,000 Dances”. Listen… (
Plays a clip from “Land of 1,000 Dances” of Freddie Blassie shouting “I’ll rap you with my cane, you pencil neck geek!”) That man is former wrestling champion “Classy” Freddie Blassie. He’s retired from the wrestling business now, but at the peak of his popularity in the 70’s, Blassie recorded a novelty record that sounded like this… (
Plays a clip of ”Pencil Neck Geek”) From 1977, that’s “Classy” Freddie Blassie with “Pencil Neck Geek”. Although the song never charted, this makes Freddie Blassie, other than the WWF superstars on “Land of 1,000 Dances”, the only professional wrestler to ever have a recorded single. [7] Good question, Scott—and one that made us dig pretty deep, too. Thanks a lot for asking. Now, on with the countdown!
-
Casey Kasem, from
American Top 40, initially broadcast on April 9th, 1988
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September 18, 1988
Learning the Ropes
*from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
Learning the Ropes is a Canadian-produced sitcom that aired on CTV in Canada and in syndication in the United States from September 1988 to March 1989. The series starred Lyle Alzado as Robert Randall, a teacher who worked as a professional wrestler in the evenings. Although his children knew about Randall’s double life, the family was forced to keep it secret in public and at school. The series featured guest appearances by many wrestlers of the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA). [8]
Contents
1. Synopsis
2. Cast
3. DVD release
Synopsis
Learning the Ropes follows single father Robert Randall (played by retired NFL defensive lineman Lyle Alzado) who works as a private schoolteacher and vice principal, and also moonlights as a professional wrestler. Randall would balance day-to-day problems with his students and with his children, Ellen (played by Nicole Stoffman) and Mark (portrayed by Yannick Bisson). Randall’s ex-wife was enrolled in law school in England, leaving him to raise their children by himself. He worked as a wrestler to help pay his bills, but was forced by his school’s principal to keep his second job a secret. However, Randall’s children and the people he worked with at the wrestling shows knew about his teaching job, along with his friend Dr. Jerry Larson. The show also featured a relationship between Randall and Carol Dixon, one of his fellow teachers. Dixon, who was the principal’s niece, was attracted to Randall, and frequently pursued him.
Each episode featured several minutes of footage of National Wrestling Alliance (later “Nonstop Wrestling Action”) wrestlers competing in the ring, including Ric Flair, Magnum T.A., Tully Blanchard, Arn Anderson, Barry Windham, Mike Rotunda, and The Road Warriors. In wrestling segments filmed for the show, Randall’s character (known as the heel “Masked Maniac”) was played by real-life wrestler and former NWA Heavyweight Champion Magnum T.A. [9] Real-life NWA wrestler Steve “Dr. Death” Williams made appearances in many episodes as Randall’s trainer and confidant. [10] Randall was only a moderately successful wrestler, often competing as a “jobber” (i.e., losing to wrestlers who were bigger stars).
The show premiered in September 1988 and ran for one season, totaling 26 episodes. The show’s connection to the NWA allowed for cross-promotion, and Alzado appeared on the NWA’s
Clash of the Champions II event in 1988 to discuss and promote the sitcom. Alzado also assisted Magnum T.A. in retaining his NWA World Championship during the event.
Cast
Lyle Alzado … Robert Randall
Magnum T.A. … Himself / “The Masked Maniac”
Steve Williams … Himself (as Steve “Dr. Death” Williams)
Jimmy Valiant … Himself (as “Boogie Woogie Man” Jimmy Valiant) [11]
Yannick Bisson … Mark Randall
Nicole Stoffman … Ellen Randall
Cheryl Wilson … Carol Dixon
Richard Farrell … Principal Whitcomb Mallory
Barry Stevens … Dr. Jerry Larson
Jacqueline Mahon … Beth
Gordon Michael Woolvett … Brad
Grant Cowan … Bertie Baxter
The show also featured cameos from other wrestlers from the National Wrestling Alliance. Each episode featured matches with such wrestling stars as Lex Luger, Ric Flair, The Road Warriors (Animal & Hawk), Dick Murdoch, Nikita Koloff, Barry Windham, Mike Rotunda, Venom and many more.
DVD release
To date, the show has not been released on DVD in Canada or the United States. [12]
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November 4, 1988
They Live
*from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
They Live is a 1988 American satirical action horror film written and directed by John Carpenter. The film stars Roddy Piper, Keith David, and Meg Foster. It follows drifter John Nada (played by Piper), who discovers the ruling class are in fact aliens concealing their appearance and manipulating people to spend money, breed, and accept the status quo with subliminal messages in mass media.
The film opened on November 4, 1988 and debuted at #1 at the North American box office, grossing $5.4 million during its opening weekend. The film spent three weeks in the top ten, but sales soon suffered. The film had a total domestic gross of $18,220,190. [13]
The film was nominated for two Saturn Awards, and has since garnered a large cult following, having had a lasting impact on street art (particularly that of Shepard Fairey), and its quotations and fight scenes have since entered pop culture as some of the most memorable in film. [14]
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CLASSIC FILM ANALYSIS: “THEY LIVE”
by Jeff Cherry Scott
July 3, 2016 [15]
“There ain’t no countries anymore,” a rebel leader tells John Nada and Keith David, the two heroes of John Carpenter’s
They Live. It's a sentiment that echoes the second-most famous monologue from Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet’s 1976 media satire
Network, from the scene where Ned Beatty tries to scare prophet-of-the-airwaves Howard Beale into toeing the line. “You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples,” he says. “There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars!”
That’s what Roddy Piper’s unemployed drifter character John Nada learns in
They Live after he puts on a pair of sunglasses created by revolutionaries who are trying to wake up the unwashed masses to the reality of the holistic system of systems, the multinational—in reality,
extraterrestrial—dominion, which is run by interplanetary colonizers who look like bug-eyed, skinless human skeletons. What he's really seeing is the desperate underbelly of Ronald Reagan’s vision of “Morning in America”—a post-Vietnam, happy-gas exhortation quoted by one of the aliens in
They Live. The rich get richer. The middle class is increasingly unemployed and stressed out. The jobless, poor and ailing are out in the streets, or else stuck in a “Hooverville”-type camp—like the one Nada settles in, and that is destroyed by police tactical units and bulldozers once authorities realize there are revolutionaries hiding among the displaced. “They're free enterprise,” says Gilbert (played by Peter Jason), the same guy warns Nada and his pal Frank Armitage (played by Keith David) about the conspiracy. “To them we’re just another developing planet…their Third World.” Billboards, magazine ads and TV commercials that seem to be selling specific products or services instead bear subliminal messages—simple black font lettering on liquid-paper white backgrounds, ordering us to “Obey”, “Consume”, “Marry and Reproduce”, and “Watch TV”. Paper money bears the ominous words “This is Your God”.
Nada, who relocated to Los Angeles after the economy in his hometown of Denver collapsed, never considered the possibility that there might actually be an organized conspiracy to exploit working people, numb their brains with tabloid culture and mindless, repetitive TV programs, and systematically rob them of their postwar standard of living, all while promulgating the “level playing field” and “up by your own bootstraps” messages drilled into Americans from birth and repeated by their politics and culture. But those sunglasses reveal the truth—and how appropriate that the film would portray this hidden, horrible reality in black-and-white. There is no subtlety in the movie, no gradations of “color” in its message. It's the ultimate tinfoil hat film; not since
Close Encounters had an American studio picture so enthusiastically validated the notion that a seemingly insane hero might be seeing a reality that others either cannot see or have chosen to embrace.
Most of the cops in the film are human; some are aware of the conspiracy and most aren’t, but they’re all part of it. And there are Vichy-type collaborators everywhere, people who have decided to walk that “white line” that Frank Armitage speaks of. This character—named for the screenwriter, who is really Carpenter working under a pen name—is one of the “Good Americans” who just wants to keep his head down and get paid. It’s him that Nada concentrates on converting, perhaps remembering an early conversation where Frank talks about how the system is rigged against guys like him and Nada, because “he who has the gold makes the rules”. Nada succeeds in the film's most famous scene, and the funniest thing in the movie besides the hero’s final bird-flip: an action-packed ten-minute brawl in an alley that finds Frank pounding Nada into submission, then stumbling away without having donned the glasses, only to have his bloody and battered adversary come crawling or staggering after him, gasping, “Put. The glasses. ON!” [16]
Carpenter typically presents evil as quiet, implacable and vague, and has it shamble or walk slowly rather than run, as if it knows you can’t get away no matter how hard you try. Think of Michael Myers in
Halloween, the vengeful ghosts in
The Fog or the Satanically attuned masses drawn to skid row in
Prince of Darkness—in
They Live, it’s the police who are portrayed that way. Carpenter films them in what amounts to an inversion of the way he photographed the rotting lepers inching through blue mist in
The Fog. The police move towards revolutionaries and bystanders in a human wall formation. They’re shrouded in fog from the tear gas around them. The lighting is hellish red.
Carpenter based
They Live on a mid-’80s comic-book version of a 1968 short story by Ray Nelson, “Eight O’Clock in the Morning.” He says that the political satire wasn’t there in the original; Carpenter added it as a response to the way American politics and culture changed in the ‘80s, becoming more openly acquisitive and hateful under Reagan, who broke the backs of the unions and rolled back a lot of the economic reforms put in place by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Carpenter always had counterculture leanings, but they weren’t expressed as obviously as in films by his friend George Romero (both of whom are name-checked in the “Hey, what's wrong, baby?” gag). Here he made what may be the most unabashedly counterculture-left studio picture of the ‘80s not directed by Oliver Stone. The movie is propaganda—or to be more accurate,
counter-propaganda. Carpenter later said he hoped it would influence the 1988 presidential election, but even if it had been released earlier (
They Live came out on November 4th, the election was November 8th) it might not have had any impact. Voters elected another Republican, George Bush, the 41st President of the United States.
They Live is one of Carpenter’s strangest and most distinctive works, not just because of its overt political messages or the fact that it’s basically a dark comedy, but because it simultaneously invokes a tradition of more realistic social problem-driven fable movies, like
Sullivan’s Travels and
The Grapes of Wrath. As his name suggests, John Nada (his full name is only spoken once, near the end of the movie [17]) is very much an iconic blank slate everyman. But he doesn’t suffer silently or lash out impotently; he just gets himself a shotgun, walks into a bank, and announces that he's here to “have a sandwich and kick ass, and I just finished my sandwich”. [18]
If you show this film to young viewers, you might have to explain “Morning in America” and “trickle-down economics” to get across exactly what made this film so surprising at the time. You might also laugh out loud at how “primitive” some aspects of 1988 American life now seem. There’s no internet, no cellular phones, and the police (aided by tiny hovering camera-bots) have to look hard to find their prey. Television is portrayed as a monolithic, bland evil, as it tended to be in ‘70s and ‘80s films; today, the idea of entirely disabling an enemy’s ability to broadcast mind-controlling propaganda by taking out one TV transmitter seems quaint and nonsensical.
But these and other culture-technological details aren’t really important, ultimately. Look at the police marching ominously forward, reminiscent of how cops break up riots today. Listen to the rants about how we’re all just cattle, ready to be bred and slaughtered by the elites, and about how there is really no government anymore, only “owners”, and you’ll feel like you’re posting comments online. In all the superficial ways, this is a dated movie. But put the sunglasses on, and you realize that nothing has really changed.
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[1] All this is as OTL, except that the game is known IOTL as simply
MicroLeague Wrestling—curiously, no “WWF” in sight.
[2] No tag team matches were featured in OTL’s
Microleague Wrestling.
[3] The OTL game features Hulk Hogan vs. Randy Savage on one side and Hogan vs. Paul Orndorff on the other.
[4] IOTL, the first “Superstar Series” disc also has Savage vs. Honky, but has Jim Duggan vs. Harley Race as its second featured match instead. The second disc features Roberts vs. Rude, as well as Hulk Hogan vs. Ted DiBiase.
[5] These versions feature Hogan vs. Savage and Hogan vs. DiBiase IOTL. You couldn’t get away from Hogan back in ’89—even by playing video games!
[6] OTL’s games also feature commentary from Bruno Sammartino (he sometimes randomly replaces Jesse Ventura) or Lord Alfred Hayes (randomly shows up instead of Heenan). ITTL, there are only two commentary teams for each game, allowing for more room on the disc, hence the tag team matches’ inclusions.
[7] Since it all predates the POD, Freddie Blassie’s record is totally as OTL. Sometimes, truth really
is stranger than fiction!
[8] The “Reality is Unrealistic” trope doesn’t get any stronger than this one…there
really was a Canadian sitcom featuring NWA wrestlers in the late 1980’s. Given wrestling’s slightly greater prominence ITTL, of
course the show still exists.
[9] “The Masked Maniac” was portrayed by Steve “Dr. Death” Williams IOTL, who was actually slightly shorter and 30 pounds heavier than Alzado. During filming of the pilot, Williams suffered a knee injury and a cut that required several stitches. Williams claimed it was “the most painful $2,000 (he) ever earned in (his) lifetime”. ITTL, due to his higher profile, the fact that he’s the World Champion, and because he’s closer to Alzado’s body structure, Magnum T.A. is chosen instead, and doesn’t suffer any serious injuries.
[10] Alzado and Williams were friends in real life (Alzado even gave away the homecoming queen at Williams’ high school prom!), and Williams was hand-picked by Alzado to be his stunt double on
Learning the Ropes. Here, even though Dr. Death doesn’t get the part of “The Masked Maniac”, he does feature prominently on the show in another way.
[11] IOTL, relatively unknown Canadian actors Jefferson Mappin and Kevin Rushton were cast as Robert Randall’s wrestler buddies “Cheetah” and “Q-Ball”. Here, real-life wrestlers Williams and Valiant fill those roles. The only question is whether or not this butterflies away Mappin’s appearance as “Fatty Rossiter” in the 1992 Clint Eastwood classic
Unforgiven.
[12] As OTL, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depending on how you look at it). However, a few clips of the show do exist on YouTube, including
these juicy nuggets, as well as
the intro, which reeks of 80’s cheese.
[13] As opposed to OTL, where it only spent two weeks in the Top 10, and grossed just over $13 million.
[14] All as OTL.
[15] The article above is based off
this article by Mr. Matt Zoller Seitz, a television critic for
New York Magazine and chief editor on Rogerebert.com.
[16] IOTL, the fight scene between Piper and David lasts about six minutes.
[17] IOTL, Piper’s character Nada never has his name spoken throughout
They Live—his name is only shown in the credits. ITTL, the police helicopter at the end of the film announces his name just before telling him to “Drop your weapon”.
[18] The line IOTL was, of course, "
I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum". Piper ad-libbed the line, having just spit out gum he was chewing before filming the scene. ITTL, he's doing something else, and ad-libs something very similar, yet very different.
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Another look at a year's worth of wrestling-related pop culture completed! Thank you all for being patient with this latest update. They will be coming faster in the future if all goes well.
As for my convention: it was amazing. I got to meet and get autographs from Ric Flair and of COURSE, Ricky Steamboat! They were both very nice, down-to-earth guys, and Flair especially had a great sense of humor. I told them both about getting Piper's autograph several years ago, and they had nothing but good things to say about the Rowdy one. I also attended the Q&A session with Flair, but didn't really ask any questions. And even though I didn't get their autographs, I briefly walked past Kevin Nash and Scott Hall's table. Nash stood up when I passed by, and SWEET JESUS, he is tall. Needless to say, I was on cloud nine for a
long time afterward. The autographed pictures I got of both Flair and
especially Steamboat are displayed prominently on the wall above my desk, and I'm looking at them as I type this. Definitely a great time!
Up next:
let's get ready to Rumble!
I couldn't be more excited to have the opportunity to meet one of my favorite wrestlers, and the focus of my humble little timeline. I'm a bit too modest to mention Rise of the Dragon to him, but I do plan on getting the man's autograph, picture, and perhaps even shooting the breeze about how things were back in the Golden Era. The one thing I would love to be able to do is attend one of the Q&A sessions they usually have with their guests, but sadly, there isn't one scheduled for Steamboat (seriously, Leah Thompson gets one this year while Steamboat doesn't?! Come on! 
