10 Ridiculous Things You Learn Binge-Watching WCW's Worst Year Ever
Hello darkness my old friend! It's WCW in 2000, and it's...some of the best wrestling you'll see?!
Everyone knows the drill by now: WCW was a sham of a pro wrestling company, and it produced some of the dirt worst content you'll ever clap eyes on. Well, yeah, but revisiting the creative and financial disaster that was 2000 is some laugh 23 years on.
In fact, sometimes, it's even more fun than anything you'll see on WWE or AEW TV today. Honestly, boot up pretty much any episode of Nitro or Thunder (or a pay-per-view if you fancy a general snapshot of WCW booking) between January-December 2000 and prepare to be entertained.
It's a quite fascinating case study of insanity.
Wrestlers ripped the living sh*t out of the folks paying their wages, WCW's braintrust thought parodying the WWF's best ideas (and doing so badly) was a solid plan, and Vince Russo gets most of the blame for everything even though 2000 wasn't all his doing.
David Arquette, Russo, heel Goldberg, GI Bro, worked shoots, "Caged Heat" - it's all here and then some. Here's everything learned when punishing oneself with endless hours of WCW content from the group's final full year of existence.
10. 2000 Started With A WWF Ripoff
"It's me, it's me. It's that B-U-Double-Z!".
Doesn't sound right, does it?
In late-1999/early-2000, Brad Armstrong poked fun at his brother's Road Dogg gimmick over in the WWF by working a lame knockoff called Buzzkill on WCW telly. Believe it or not, this character is the first thing fans saw when Nitro's 2000 kicked off.
Sure, it was probs supposed to be deliberately hammy, but it's ridiculous that World Championship Wrestling chiefs thought this garbage was the right way to jump start the new millennium. Hey, nothing says 'welcome to the new year' like WCW parodying successful characters from the competition and making everyone think about changing the channel.
This was a gift to yours truly - this writer couldn't believe his eyes when Buzzkill was the first wrestler through the curtain on the 3 January Nitro. That'd be like Triple H starting the first Raw of the year with a wrestler called Ron Noxley and expecting ratings to skyrocket for the quarter hour.