Tag: wwf

Top 5: Royal Rumble Memories

With this year’s Royal Rumble coming up this weekend, I thought it would be a good time to think back on some of my favorite Royal Rumble memories and share them with you. And what better way to do that than in this week’s Friday Five. Without further ado, here are five of my favorite Royal Rumble memories.

Royal Rumble ’88 – The First One

Back in late 1987 when the first Royal Rumble was announced as being broadcast on the USA Network, I was pumped. I had gotten to go to a friend’s house to watch Starrcade ’87, but had yet to be allowed to order a wrestling pay-per-view. So when I found out this event was going to be free and I would get to watch it, I was bouncing off the walls.

The first Royal Rumble didn’t disappoint either. One of my favorites at the time, Ricky Steamboat, had a match with Rick Rude, and there was the contract signing between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant for their rematch at the upcoming Wrestlemania IV. But the big draw was their new concept in battle royals, the Royal Rumble itself. Just the concept was enough to get me to watch the show without all the other matches.

This first one was probably the hardest to peg who was going to win. Once they added the stipulation that the winner would get a title shot made it pretty easy to guess who was going to win each year. But this one lacked all the real big stars and was made up of mid-card guys, making it really hard to figure out. “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan came out on top, and I had a hell of a time watching my first “big event” live.

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by The Retro Rambler

Top 5: Wrestling Action Figure Lines

This month, my buddy Chad is running Slam Fest over at his blog, HorrorMovieBBQ, and I thought I would jump on the train for this Friday Five and highlight five of my favorite wrestling toys from through the years. To begin with, I’ve got to start where it kind of began for a lot of people…LJN WWF Superstars figures!

LJN WWF Superstars

This was the wrestling action figure line that most folks would say was their first. It kind of was for me, but I never had a truly great experience with it. I first saw them when a neighbor kid at my grandmother’s house brought over his Hulk Hogan, Big John Studd, and Andre the Giant figures. I was mesmerized. I told my Mom about them, and that I wanted some. For Christmas, I got a Nikolai Volkoff figure, and a Mean Gene Okerlund. Now I love Mean Gene, but what the hell was I going to do with his figure? Have him interview Volkoff over and over again? This was not a good start. A while later, I got a Junkyard Dog figure, but by then, the bloom was off the rose for me as far as these figures went. In the meantime, I had played with them a couple of times at my cousin Tim’s house. He had the ring to go with the figures, so it was really cool. I still love these figures, but I never owned enough of them myself to put it really high on my all-time list of favorite toys.

WWF Thumb Wrestlers

Sticking with the WWF, these Thumb Wrestlers were my consolation to not having the LJN figures. I was actually able to pick up several packs of these with my weekly allowance, and that gave me enough variety to really enjoy having these. I had Hulk Hogan, JYD, Hillbilly Jim, Iron Sheik, Nikolai Volkoff, and Big John Studd. Like I said, enough variety to play around with and have some matches.

Now, these things weren’t great as what they were designed to be. They were too cumbersome to put on your thumb and have actual thumb-wrestling matches. I tried taking them to school to do that very thing with but failed miserably. They were great for just playing with and having them do moves to each other with though.

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by The Retro Rambler

Wax Pack Flashback: WWF WrestleMania 3 Cards (1987)

Here is the latest Wax Pack Flashback video I did for The Retro Network. It features yours truly breaking open a pack of WWF cards featuring WrestleMania 3 from 1987. I love old wrestling, and these cards really take me back. Hopefully, you get some old nostalgic memories flowing from watching.

by The Retro Rambler

Pro Wrestling Illustrated’s Supercards ’87

Growing up in the mid-late ’80s, one of my greatest joys would come when I would go to the grocery store with my Mom and be able to pick up a new wrestling magazine. It never mattered to me which one I got as long as I got one. If you know anything at all about the glory days of the Apter magazines, you know that the Cadillac of wrestling magazines was Pro Wrestling Illustrated. One reason it was considered the best was because of its full-color coverage of various events. One of the things I really looked forward to each year was their coverage of the spring super cards like Wrestlemania.

Well, I recently picked up some old wrestling magazines from eBay, and one of them was the Pro Wrestling Illustrated with coverage of Supercards ’87! After salivating over the 19 pages of greatness multiple times, I thought I would share them with the world so others who used to enjoy this stuff could relive how great it was. So what follows is all 19 pages of PWI’s coverage of Wrestlemania 3, Crockett Cup ’87, Parade of Champions ’87, and UWF Super Blast. Enjoy!

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by The Retro Rambler

Retro Comic Book Ads From 1989

Old comic books often act as a time capsule. They’re full of advertisements of products from long ago, and can tell us a lot about the culture of the time in which they were printed. Some of those products are still with us, while others are not. I often like to crack open the pages of a long forgotten comic book and just browse the advertisements found inside with which to take a trip back in time to another era. Let’s open one of those time capsules here today and see what we find….

This week’s time capsule is Superman #30 from DC Comics, that came out in 1989. The Superman titles have always one of my favorite books to read, but this is from the era just before I started to read his stories on a regular basis. I picked up in the summer of 1990, and read consistently up until about 1998. Let’s see what old advertising goodness is hidden behind this cover.

How appropriate this is to find an ad for Morning Funnies Cereal since I just did a post detailing my love for the cereal a short while ago. You can check out the full article here, but I’ll add to it and say that it was a great idea to spend advertising dollars on it to run in a comic book since the whole gimmick to the cereal is that the box is covered with comic strips. Makes perfect sense.

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