So by the end, WCW was an absolute mess, which actually isn't true. It was just finding his feet again.

It was the year 2000 when it was totally terrible. Sure. Just when people like, oh my gosh,

maybe World Championship Wrestling can climb the ladder. Well, it went and died. That's why today I,

Simon Miller, can sit down with you, even though I am standing up and give you 25 times,

WCW did something and made everybody stop and go, what the flub are we doing? But 25, the referees don't call for disqualifications. So yes, WCW 2000 is what I'm going to talk about a lot in this video, and how stupid it was. And take the April 17th, 2000 episode of Nitro, even lead commentator Tony Chivani was like, I don't think I can handle this.

Because we were basically promised to start of a new era and how WCW is going to hit reset

on a lot of things. To the point, man, we have to make it clear that winners matter and losers

matter. To the point, disqualifications are out the window. Who cares about DQs? Because that way,

we're always going to get a one, two, three, we're always going to get a submission, and then wrestler A, they can go on to do something fantastic, but the other guy who just got their ass kicked, well, now they've got to go figure it out. So stories and results, that's what we're going to do. And then a bunch of people went and got DQed. Now, I started with Michael Orson versus DDP, and yes, that ended in disqualification. Shane Douglas and Lex Luger then thought and you've liked a hazard to guess how that one ended. Well, you're right. It ended in a DQ. Finally was Jeff Jarrett versus Scott Steiner and it's all same together. It finished with a disqualification. So right after telling us this, WCW went and did it three times. Now listen, maybe this was rage bait before rage bait because WCW loved winding up its own audience and its own wrestlers, but it never works when you piss off the fans. They don't want to be the joke, they want to be in on the joke. It's a surprise, surprise. People did get annoyed and they stopped watching WCW, and it just broke the trust, because how now can we believe anything you're going to say? Number 24, WCW did make Ray Mysterio masks. One year after Ray Mysterio had stopped wearing his mask.

This is actually quite the story, because when WCW did unmasked Ray Mysterio in 1999, he absolutely

did not want to do this, because of course the mask down in Mexico has crazy heritages to it,

so you don't just lose it in a random match on American soil, American TV, and actually, before he put

the mask back on when he went to WWE, he had to go get proper sanction this, I suppose, to say, I didn't mean to do it, they didn't make me, and thankfully, they did allow Ray Mysterio to do it, but the best part of this story is how WCW treated it. I mean, actually during this, they also turned Ray Mysterio Heel when he was part of the filthy young animals, whatever the flub they were called,

which was a terrible idea because nobody ever wanted to boo Ray Mysterio. But yeah, when he was knee-deep of doing this, and we had seen his face, all of a sudden, WCW went, oh boy, do you want to buy a Ray Mysterio mask? Well, now you can purchase them, and I would imagine millions of people, wild exaggeration,

were like, well, why didn't you ask me to buy Ray Mysterio mask, well, now you can purchase them. And I would imagine millions of people, wild exaggeration, were like, well, why didn't you ask me to buy this when I could see Ray's mask on TV every single week? I don't know what's going on. But it really is just fantastic. And listen, I understand the production line for this kind of stuff must be super difficult to sort out. But if you knew eventually within 12 months, you weren't going to be selling the masks, here's an idea and call me crazy, don't unmask him. Number 23 money for nine. I'm sure you may have heard this story before, but I still think it's wonderful to talk about because yes, when the matchman Randy Savage decided he would leave the WWF to sign with WCW, he had a couple of requests, one of which was, well, I really would like you to hire my brother, Lanny Poffo, of course you may remember as the genius in the World Wrestling Federation, and WCW is that you know what macho? That sounds great, let's bring him on board. This was 1995 and apparently Randy Savage had huge plans for this, because he even went out there and bought the rights to Gorgeous George,

which is the character he wanted Lano Pofford to play. So I can only imagine that WCW had agreed,

when they decided over years and years of him being under contract, they would use him twice.

Now listen, I did my research. Even one of those matches get debated on the internet, which means we can say with a degree of certainty, he definitely got used once. So he was under contract, apparently on $150,000 a year, which was loads back in the mid-90s. He had one match, and that's all WCW decided to do. They didn't even bring him to TV, right? Lanny Pover just sat home and I guess wrote some of his poems. I mean, what a way to live. I think Lanny even died his hair during all of this because again, he thought he was going to become gorgeous, George. And the first part is, you can go and listen to some of the interviews that some WCW executives did cut. Apparently, they didn't even know this was a thing. That's right. His name was on a sheet somewhere, but nobody saw that sheet. Maybe it was a ghost sheet and and everybody was like, oh my God. We can't go near the ghost sheet because maybe we'll die, and very much doubt that happened. Number 22 Thursday, Slambery Thursday. But it became clear that the Monday Night War battle was done. People in WCW very smartly went, listen, let's just stop worrying about the World Wrestling Federation. It is 1999. We were having a good year all of 12 months ago. We can get back on track. So now we're just going to focus on us.

This was even more obvious when they did a tour of St. Louis and only draw 13,000 fans to the building. And actually today, that sounds amazing. 13,000 fans.

The problem being, the last time they went to this venue, WCW drew 30,000.

I'm not very good at maths, but I can tell you that's quite the drop. And one of the reasons could be how WCW liked to advertise their television shows, because during this episode of Thunder, A graphic came up at the bottom of the screen.

It was like, oh my gosh, tomorrow night, live on pay-per-view at 8pm, it's Slambury.

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