WRESTLEMANIA V: It’ll Be a Great Night in the Barnyard

WrestleMania V (1989) – Trump Plaza/Boardwalk Hall (Atlantic City, NJ) – Main Event: The WWF Championship: Randy “Macho Man” Savage vs. Hulk Hogan.

WRESTLEMANIA V reveals the WWF as a company in transition.

Transition has both positive and negative consequences in WRESTLEMANIA V, resulting in an uneven show that goes on too long and delivers a few too few thrills. On the positive side of the ledger, however, we witness the emergence of several superstars who will play a huge role in the next two decades of professional wrestling in the United States, both with the WWF/WWE and in other promotions. Making their WrestleMania debuts in 1989 are such future luminaries as Shawn Michaels, Curt Hennig, Owen Hart, and the Big Boss Man. On the other side, we see a curious, disconnected mix of wrestlers symbolizing how the WWF doesn’t know what it wants to be. There’s a toxic mix between the live-action cartoons (guys like the Bushwhackers, Ultimate Warrior, Hogan) and old school grinders (Dino Bravo, Ronnie Garvin, Arn Anderson, Tully Blanchard, Jake Roberts, and the like), and you can see that the most appealing wrestlers are the guys who can take the best of both styles and merge them together (Savage, Michaels, Hennig, the Hart Foundation, Rude).

Companies want a mix of styles, of course, but as the matches progress through WRESTLEMANIA V, it’s like the soul of the company is on the line with each match. Vince McMahon and all of his creative staff are smart folks, of course, but there’s too many boring wrestlers (and I include their personalities in that damnation) who are being propped up by weak gimmicks.

Looking the event historically, WRESTLEMANIA V is fascinating. Watching as a fan is a bit uneven, but it builds to big finish.

Our opening match features two competent wrestlers who have been given a soft gimmick to help get them over. The difference between Hercules and Haku is that Hercules is nearer the end of his run and Haku is nearer the start. I think Hercules Hernandez has been a solid contributor to the first five WrestleManias. He’s muscle-bound and lacking personality, but with the right opponent he can put on a good match. The bulk of his personality, though, seems to be contained in the big chains he brings to the ring with him. Here, he’s in the midst of the dreaded, long-time-coming face turn. When you’re big and have a tough guy gimmick (He’s Hercules! Son of Zeus!) and you don’t have a personality, the face turn is the equivalent of a long-running sitcom with sagging ratings adding a child to the show.

It’s almost over.

WRESTLEMANIA V is a nice reward for all of Hercules’ hard work (for the WWF, not for cleaning stables or anything) over the years. He’s been a solid pro who occasionally puts on really good matches but can’t advance past the midcard. If he was around in today’s WWE, he might get a run as the United States Champ. Or if Vince took a shining to him, he’d be Ryback, inexplicably booked higher than your talent and contributions seem to suggest as being possible. It’s clear that Hercules is on the way out and Haku is on the rise, evident by the addition of his status as “King,” taking over the title from an injured Harley Race. Hercules has split with his manager, Bobby Heenan, and it’s a nice reward for him to get the win here.

The second match is a tag match between The Twin Towers (Akeem and the Big Boss Man) against the Rockers (Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty). This is a pretty good match, but it’s pretty obvious right away that it’s the Boss Man and Michaels that are the stars. Akeem – the former One Man Gang who became Akeem when he decided to embrace his “African roots – is a big plodder and Jannetty is a very solid tag partner with little individual charisma. Boss Man is a heavy dude but he’s got a great ring presence: aggressive, mean, confident. He’s a perfect example of a gimmick that works to his strengths, as it plays to the idea of a prison guard being a tough, mean S.O.B. who’s not a body builder. If the WWF had given this identity to Hercules or Akeem, it would not have worked, but it’s perfect for Ray Traylor.

As for Michaels, the man who will go on to gain the nickname “Mr. WrestleMania,” doesn’t get the win in this match but he does put on a heck of a show, pulling Jannetty to a higher level and properly selling Boss Man as a proper heel. These two teams show the difference in assembling a proper tag team and a weak one. Michaels and Jannetty are fantastic together while Boss Man and Akeem just stand in the same corner and tag each other in intermittently.

Four of the next five matches are all sorts of blah, but the one exception is the second-best match of the night, and the best from a technical standpoint.

Brutus Beefcake and Ted DiBiase put on a decent match that ends in a double countout, then the Bushwhackers and Rougeaus come out for a completely forgettable tag match. These two matches are an interesting look at the transitional period the WWF finds itself in here in 1989. The Barber and the Million Dollar Man are solid identities in that they are simple, sellable ideas. When I was a kid, I never believed Beefcake was actually a barber, but I always believed DiBiase was a multimillionaire who also happened to wrestle, yet both ideas work to the strengths of the performers. The Bushwhackers had a nice little run as a popular face tag team but they’re cartoon characters and putting them in the ring against the Rougeaus, who are decent technical wrestlers with a really weak gimmick (They’re French-Canadian! And now they’re heels because they live in Memphis!) and the match never goes anywhere. The Buschwhackers get the win, seemingly because it’s the faces turn to win a match.

The second best match of the night is next, but it also highlights the transitional phase WWF is in as it seeks an identity as a company. Curt Hennig has been cast as “Mr. Perfect,” a highly technical heel. He’s a prime example of giving a wrestler an identity that matches perfect with their skill set. On the other hand, we’ve got Owen Hart stuffed inside the ridiculous Blue Blazer superhero gimmick. There’s nothing wrong with the idea of masked wrestlers and it’s nice to have some characters who are less serious than the rest of the locker room, but it’s hard not to look at the Blue Blazer and see it as not fully taking advantage of Owen’s abilities. Hennig gets the win but the two men do a great job putting on a solid match for the crowd.

The WWF Tag Team Championship is next, and The Powers of Pain (Warlord and Barbarian) with Mr. Fuji drop the belts to Demolition (Ax and Smash). Zzzzzzzzz.

Next is Dino Bravo vs. Ronnie Garvin. Zzzzzzzzz.

Then the Brain Busters vs. Strike Force. Almost Zzzzzzzzz. It’s pretty routine until the end, when things take a decided upturn. First, Rick Martel gets all pissy at Tito Santana and bails on him, setting up a feud that will continue after WrestleMania. Then the Busters deliver their finishing move, the Spike Piledriver on Santana. In this move, Anderson holds Santana up and Blanchard jumps off the top rope to drive Tito’s legs downward. It’s an incredibly awkward and dangerous move.

Look, I like Arn Anderson and Tully Blanchard and they are a solid tag team, but you just can’t give them a manager and a silly name like Brain Busters and expect them to get over. They’re two guys with similar skill sets doing similar things. Put them in a feud with younger, “new school” wrestlers and their old school approach would work much better than it does here. One only needs to look at the Rockers to see what’s wrong with all of these tag teams in the late ’80s. Where the Rockers get over because of their ability to blend wrestling with their flash, these other groups are similarly paired gimmicks: Demolition, Powers of Pain, Brain Busters, Strike Force, Bushwhackers, Rougeaus … it’s like someone in creative decided if a gimmick isn’t good enough to get one wrestler over, that must mean it’ll work fine getting two wrestlers over.

Right. Because I know when I was a kid and didn’t want to eat pork chops because pork chops are disgusting, I suddenly loved them when forced to eat two chops at the same time.

Jesse Ventura doesn’t often add the most insightful commentary (his job wasn’t to be insightful but to prop up the heels) but he’s dead solid perfect when we get to the Hart Foundation vs. Honky Tonk Man and Greg Valentine match later on and he says the best tag teams feature partners who compliment each other – like both of those teams manage to do. That match is everything the other tag matches lack – two solid teams with solid wrestlers who understand the difference between singles action and tag action. Hitman, Anvil, Honky Tonk, and Hammer all provide excellent work, and even though the Harts win (by stealing Jimmy Hart’s megaphone and bashing it over Honky Tonk’s head), all four men come out for the better.

In between the Brain Busters match, we get a silly Piper’s Pit between a returning Rowdy Roddy Pipper, Brother Love, and Morton Downey, Jr. Piper is one of my all-time favorites but this bit is painful to watch.

After that there’s a match between Andre the Giant and Jake “the Snake” Roberts. Here’s how this match works: Andre abuses Roberts for much of the match, then Roberts takes Damien out of the bag, which sends Andre running because he’s afraid of snakes. Storytelling wise, it’s fine, but it’s an obvious result played out in an obvious manner.

Next up is a decent match between Rick Rude and the Ultimate Warrior, which sees Rude winning the Intercontinental Belt and giving Warrior his first pinfall. It’s not a bad match. Both guys have distinct identities and even though I can’t stand the Ultimate Warrior, his cartoonish approach works for the crowd.

At this point, you may be asking yourself if there’s really more coming. Yup. Hacksaw Jim Duggan and Bad News Brown put on a snoozer that ends in a double DQ, and then the Red Rooster defeats Bobby Heenan in an actual match. That’s right, kids. The last two matches before the WWF Championship feature Duggan, Brown, the Red Rooster, and Bobby Heenan.

Wrestling, y’all. Wrestling.

This is silly and I genuinely liked the Red Rooster when I was younger. I dug that there was a guy whose gimmick was that he named himself Red Rooster, and had a red spike of hair on his head and clucked. Terry Taylor sold it, too, but that doesn’t mean we needed two palate cleansers between the Hart Foundation and the WWF Championship.

Finally, we make it to the main event, and really, it’s a great main event. At WRESTLEMANIA IV, it was the Macho Man who won the WWF Championship. In the year since, he and Hogan formed the Mega Powers and tore through the WWF. Nothing could stop them … except for themselves. The WWF built one of their all-time great storylines with Hogan and Savage slowly coming apart, with Miss Elizabeth the wedge between them. It wasn’t that Miss Elizabeth was doing anything untoward, but Savage’s jealousy over actions he didn’t understand brought out his dark side.

The key to putting on a good match with Hulk Hogan – and this is a great match – is that the opponent has to sell hard for Hogan because of the Hulkster’s limited repertoire and cartoonish superheroics. The more you can sell knocking Hogan down, the greater his inevitable rise will play. You can say the same thing today about John Cena. Put Cena in a match with the Rock (as they did at WRESTLEMANIA 28 and 29) and you’re going to get a dull match. Pair him up with CM Punk and you’re going to get an exciting match.

That’s what happens here. Randy Savage sells Hulk Hogan better than anyone. First, he expertly works the crowd over by avoiding a fight, then ramps them up by not only fighting, but kicking the crap out of Hogan. Watching the Savage vs. Hogan match it’s hard not to draw the Punk/Cena comparisons. When I was younger, Savage was my favorite wrestler but I didn’t understand the business like I do know. I just knew he was awesome, and he’s totally awesome here. Last year, Gorilla Monsoon proclaimed, “This is Macho Man’s finest hour!,” but he’s even better as the jealous heel who loses than he was the year before as the triumphant face who won the title.

WRESTLEMANIA V is too dull to be a great WrestleMania, but there are real quality moments here: the debuts of Shawn Michaels and Big Boss Man, the excellent match between Mr. Perfect and the Blue Blaze, the excellent tag team match between the Hart Foundation and Honky Tonk and the Hammer, and then the main event, which shows why Savage and Hogan – though not for exactly the same reasons – sat the top of the WWF Mountain in 1989.

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MATCH OF THE NIGHT: The WWF Championship: Randy Savage vs. Hulk Hogan. Hate on Hogan all you want but just listen to the crowd when he performs. He might have limited skills but he knows how to work a crowd as well as anyone. Plus, with Savage doing most of the heavy lifting, it’s just an excellent match.

STAR OF THE NIGHT: Randy Savage. No one ever sold Hulk Hogan better than Macho Man does at WRESTLEMANIA V.

MOMENT OF THE NIGHT: Savage pointing at Elizabeth, blaming her for something or other, and then referee Dave Hebner sending her back to the locker room.

QUOTE OF THE NIGHT: Jesse “the Body” Ventura, on Savage: “He don’t want no friends. He don’t need no friends.” Gorilla Monsoon: “He doesn’t have any friends.”

RUNNER-UP QUOTE #1: “It’ll be a great time in the barnyard tonight!” – Red Rooster, to Mean Gene Okerlund, before his bout with Bobby Heenan.

RUNNER-UP QUOTE #2: “Mere words cannot describe what it feels like to be licked by a Bushwhacker.” – Sean Mooney

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When he’s not reviewing WrestleManias, Mark Bousquet is doing some writing himself. He is the author of multiple novels and collections, including the recently released The Haunting of Kraken Moor, Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, and Adventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitled Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.

WRESTLEMANIA IV: This is Macho Man’s Finest Hour

WrestleMania IV (1988) – Trump Plaza/Boardwalk Hall (Atlantic City, NJ) – Main Event: WWF Championship: Randy “Macho Man” Savage vs. Ted “Million Dollar Man” DiBiase.

Wrestling tournaments are outstanding in theory and awful in practice.

It sounds like a great idea, of course, to put fourteen of your best wrestlers into a big tournament and let them go on and on all night. Who wouldn’t want to see Hulk Hogan or Randy Savage or Andre the Giant or Ricky Steamboat wrestle two or three or even four times in a night? If I’m paying for a ticket to the event or the PPV at home, and you’re telling me I don’t have to wait until the third hour to see the biggest names in the company wrestle, and that I might see them again and again, I’m psyched.

But whenever I watch a tournament, I’m usually disappointed. I think it’s a bad idea to have your wrestlers compete, then sit around, then compete again, then sit around and so on. It takes them out of their rhythm and it robs the event, to a certain degree, of unexpected outcomes. You know two of the bigger stars are going to make it to the final, because there’s no way midcarders like Jim Duggan and Butch Reed are going to main event WrestleMania. Maybe – maybe – one of them gets through but I think tournaments limit, rather than expand, storytelling options.

Tournaments can work – especially if you fill it with wrestlers from the same card position, but otherwise they usually leave me cold.

Such is the case with WRESTLEMANIA IV, which stuffs the event with short matches (eleven matches in all and only one goes over ten minutes while seven of them clock out at under six minutes, eight seconds) and almost obliterates three of the company’s biggest talents: Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, and Ricky Steamboat. When you factor in wasting most of their tag teams in a pointless Battle Royal (easily one of the dumbest gimmick matches there is) and an unappealing Tag Team Championship between Demolition and Strike Force that lasts an interminable twelve minutes, WRESTLEMANIA IV is a disappointing event that nonetheless ends with one of WrestleMania’s signature moments, as the Macho Man wins the WWF Championship, hands the belt to Miss Elizabeth, and then hoists her onto his shoulders to bask in the crowd’s adulation.

I don’t know if this is, as Gorilla Monsoon exclaims, “Macho Man’s finest hour!,” but there’s no question that Macho Man was the star of the night and became a deserving champion.

WRESTLEMANIA IV kicks off with a twenty-man Battle Royal. I really hate Battle Royals because when you have a mass of bodies in the ring there’s no room for anyone to operate. I do love the Royal Rumble version where you start with two wrestlers and then continue to add a new man in every so-many seconds, because it builds drama and eventually works to a full ring, allowing wrestlers a chance to catch their breath before winnowing out the numbers for a dramatic finish, but when you start with twenty men in the ring … ugh.

The participants are largely made up of tag teams and forgettables: Bad News Brown, The Bolsheviks (Nikolai Volkoff and Boris Zhukov), The Hart Foundation (Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart), The Killer Bees (B. Brian Blair and Jim Brunzell), Danny Davis, George Steele, Harley Race, Hillbilly Jim, The Rougeau Brothers (Jacques and Raymond), The Young Stallions (Paul Roma and Jim Powers), Junkyard Dog, Ken Patera, Ron Bass, Sam Houston, and Sika. Brown wins the match by defeating the Hitman and it’s all kinda lame. I like that Brown won, but he wins by “turning” on Hitman after the two men team up to eliminate the JYD. Brown then “betrays” Hitman, as if sharing the trophy was ever gonna happen. It’s a lame match and Hart throwing a hissy fit and destroying the ridiculously tall trophy just emphasizes the silliness of that stupid trophy.

Six first round WWF Championship Tournament matches follow. Hogan and Andre get first round byes, and while that’s understandable for Andre (his age and size had been severely limiting his in-ring abilities for awhile), but there’s no reason Hogan couldn’t have come out for a short squash match with someone. I’m normally opposed to squash matches but can you imagine the buzz that would have been generated by having Hogan wrestle in the second match of the event? It would have built the anticipation for his second round match with Andre just a bit more, and sold the ending of that match better by refuting the common perception that Hogan was going to wrestle three or four times on the night.

There’s not a whole lot of memories contained in these opening matches. The Million Dollar Man takes out Hacksaw in five minutes, which is followed by the Rock (Muraco, not Johnson) getting a victory over a DQ’d Dino Bravo in five minutes. The best match of the opening round comes next, when Steamboat and Greg “the Hammer” Valentine go for a very solid nine minutes, and delivers an upset as the Hammer gets the win over the Dragon, who seems dangerously close to going heel a couple times in the match. The match’s most memorable moment, however, might well be Steamboat coming to the ring with his infant song, the “Little Dragon,” and while an upset is a good to result to foil audience expectations, it also removes one of your biggest wrestlers from the event early in the night.

Let’s not forget, either, that if Steamboat had won, he’d have been booked in a second round match against the Macho Man, which would have been a rematch of their epic WRESTLEMANIA III match. Upsets are fine and all, but there had to have been a lot of disappointed fans in the arena and at home.

Heck, it’s 25 years later, I know the result, I’m a grown-ass man, and I’m still disappointed. If the WWF really wanted to make this “Macho Man’s Finest Hour,” they would have given him a second round victory over Steamboat and had the two men shake hands afterwards. That would have sent the crowd into a frenzy and catapulted Macho Man into the PPV’s second half as the night’s true crowd favorite. Can you imagine how much traction Monsoon and Jesse Ventura could have gotten out of repeating, “And he’s still got two matches to go!” The two announcers spend a massive amount of time talking about the physical wear and tear as it is, but I think it could have been used even more effectively.

Instead, we get the Hammer’s upset and a face vs. heel match, which seems to be what the WWF wanted to set up as much as possible.

After the Hammer upset there’s a solid Savage vs. Butch Reed match that would have benefited from some extra time, a 3-minute One Man Gang vs. Bam Bam Bigelow waste of time where Gang wins by countout, and a timed-out fifteen-minute draw that saw Jake “the Snake” Roberts and “Ravishing” Rick Rude both eliminated. It’s all oddly paced and ineffectively rendered. The matches are only so-so and there’s no momentum being built for the event because of all the quick matches interspersed with some longer, less exciting action.

Rick Rude and Jake Roberts are solid pros but they shouldn’t get the longest match of the night, especially if it ends in a draw.

The Ultimate Warrior makes his WrestleMania debut in a quick match with Hercules (having dropped the Hernandez). If you like the Warrior, you’ll like the match. If you find his gimmick irritating, this match will do nothing to change your mind. I feel a bit bad for Hercules, who’s had a decent WrestleMania run and deserves better than to come out and help get the Warrior over.

Three Round 2 tournament matches follows. The most disappointing is the Hogan vs. Andre match. It’s five minutes and the result is a double disqualification because both men hit each other with a chair. There was almost zero chance this match would surpass their WRESTLEMANIA III match, but this outing is little more than a lead balloon in the center of the event. Anything would have been better than a double DQ, as it eliminates your two biggest stars at the event’s mid-point.

One thing that WRESTLEMANIA IV does very well, however, is the use of extended storytelling. As much as it sucks to lose Andre from the tournament, they fold this into the larger story of Ted DiBiase’s quest to buy the WWF Championship. The other extended story involves Bob Uecker, who’s back for his second Mania. I love Uecker because he’s willing to poke fun at himself, and he’s completely comfortable interacting with Ventura and the wrestlers. They even use him to conduct a few interviews, and this leads to one of the night’s best moments when he’s interviewing Andre and the Giant yells at him, “Don’t worry about Vanna White!”

Ah, only WrestleMania.

Uecker’s comfort with being here, however, only makes Vanna White’s lack of comfort more obvious. Repeating a favored WrestleMania tradition of acting a non-fan to break down matches, Vanna gets a couple of segments with Gene Okerlund where she’s asked her opinions on the tournament. What kind of expert analysis does Miss White provide?

“I like Hulk.”

“I like Elizabeth.”

And her best line, explaining why she doesn’t like the Million Dollar Man: “I don’t like anybody buying anything for anything. You have to work for it. I don’t like people trying to dish out money to win something.” Says Vanna White, a woman who makes her living on a FREAKING GAME SHOW where you win things by guessing partially-spelled words, and buy things based on the random spin of a wheel. Y_s, work for w_at you want, Am_rica. D_finit_ly do not tak_ s_ort cuts.

The rest of the Quarterfinals are largely forgettable: DiBiase over the Rock (Muraco, not Johnson), Savage over Valentine, and the One Man Gang in a bye thanks to the draw between Roberts and Rude. This whole middle segment of the show just sort of sits there – it doesn’t pay anything off or build anything up. It just is. No different, in hindsight, than what the middle third of the three-hour Raw has too-often become.

The Intercontinental Championship was next, pitting Brutus “the Barber” Beefcake against the Honky Tonk Man, which is noteworthy because it features one of my least favorite identities of this era (a barber) with one of my favorites (wrestling Elvis). Beefcake and HTM put on a pretty good match that doesn’t need the presence of Jimmy Hart and Peggy Sue (Sensational Sherri in a blonde wig) or a bogus DQ ending. Hart hit the ref with his megaphone, which gave Beefcake the match but allowed HTM to keep the title because a champ can’t lose his title by disqualification – a rule that is one of, if not the biggest single wrestling plot contrivance of them all.

A pointless six-man tag match is next between the British Bulldogs and Koko B. Ware against the Islanders (Haku and Tama) and Bobby Heenan. This match is most notable for the inclusion of animals, not for the Brain helping the Islanders to get the win. Poor Matilda the Bulldog has a look on her face that screams, “Somebody please adopt me. Please. Please adopt me. Please take me away from these screaming British men. The match itself is solid but the takeaway memory is the pre-match interview, in which Dynamite Kid says, with a straight face, “Matilda’s been through some special training. Vigorous training,” and Davey Boy, with an equally straight face, says, “She’s the only certifiable weasel dog in the world.”

Thanks to the Hogan/Andre double DQ, the only Semifinal match sees Savage winning by DQ over One Man Gang, who had enough time to walk a ring around the Earth between his two matches. If you’re counting along, that’s six matches that are won by DQ, draw, or count out, which always makes for exciting television …

The penultimate match of the night is the WWF Tag Team Championship, and Demolition and Strike Force come out and do stuff. They try to put on a good match and there’s some decent action but none of the four wrestlers involved (Ax, Smash, Rick Martel, and Tito Santana) have any real personality, and we’re already over three hours into the event AND these guys go for twelve minutes. When you have match after match and then you give us twelve minutes of Tag Team action that seems to go on just because they need to give Savage as much time as possible to recuperate to put on a decent finishing match, it just weights the whole program down. At this point in the night, I just want it to be over.

The WWF Championship match ends the night and we’ve got an exhausted Macho Man against an over-matched Ted DiBiase. Look, I love the Million Dollar Man, but his strengths are all outside the ring and not inside. He’s a decent wrestler with a great gimmick and his desire to buy the WWF Championship is an engaging thread that runs through the night. I wish they’d given it more time.

The match itself isn’t anything special, except that Macho Man wins thanks to Hogan’s interference. It’s bogus. As much as the night could have used more Hogan, it didn’t need any Hogan here. Full credit to Hogan and WWF creative for giving Macho Man the push tonight, but with Hogan coming out and interfering with the matched and then never leaving the ring, it feels more like the Hulkster trying to steal some glory for himself rather than giving Macho Man his due. To give Hogan the benefit of the doubt, he is congratulatory towards Savage, but there are also rumors that Hogan took the championship belt from Robin Leach (yes, that Robin Leach) and gave it to Savage himself instead of having Mr. Champagne Wishes do it, as scripted.

It’s actually better that Hogan gives Savage the belt, but then he shoulda done the right thing and got out of the ring to let Savage and Miss Elizabeth have their moment.

As it is, though, even with Hogan in the ring, he can’t distract too much from the moment. When Savage gives Miss Elizabeth the belt and hoists her up on his shoulder, it’s a magical moment. If you don’t feel something when she’s crying at their championship moment, you just ain’t human.

WRESTLEMANIA IV is not a good event, but Macho Man did have a legendary night. There was no singularly great match that compares to his work at the previous WrestleMania, but his ascension to champion is well-deserved, and his celebration is much less about winning the night as it is about finally reaching the top of the WWF mountain.

Oooooh, yeah.

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MATCH OF THE NIGHT: Not a great night for individual matches, but the Intercontinental Championship Match: Brutus “the Barber” Beefcake vs. the Honky Tonk Man.

STAR OF THE NIGHT: Randy Savage. This is the Macho Man’s night.

MOMENT OF THE NIGHT: Savage giving the WWF Championship belt to Miss Elizabeth and then hoisting her up on his shoulder.

RUNNER-UP MOMENT OF THE NIGHT: Andre the Giant choking Bob Uecker. Is it a cheeseball moment? Yeah, but it’s the perfect intersection of WrestleMania the wrestling event with WrestleMania the spectacle.

QUOTE OF THE NIGHT: “This is Macho Man’s finest hour!” – Gorilla Monsoon.

RUNNER-UP QUOTE #1: “When money’s involved, there ain’t no friends.” – Jesse “the Body” Ventura.

RUNNER-UP QUOTE #2:  ”He’s got short arms and big pockets.” Gorilla Monsoon on Bobby “the Brain” Heenan.

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Mark Bousquet is the author of several novels and collections, including The Haunting of Kraken Moor, Gunfighter Gothic, Stuffed Animals for Hire, Dreamer’s Syndrome, Harpsichord and the Wormhole Witches, and Adventures of the Five. He has also published a review collection entitled Marvel Comics on Film, which covers every cinematic and TV movie based on a superhero from the House of Ideas. A complete listing of all his work can be found at his Amazon author page.

SPIDER-MAN: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Spider-Man (2002) – Directed by Sam Raimi – Starring Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Cliff Robertson, Rosemary Harris, J.K. Simmons, Elizabeth Banks, Macho Man Randy Savage, Joe Manganiello, Bill Nunn, Bruce Campbell, and Stan Lee.

There is not a better made superhero movie that I enjoy watching less than Sam Raimi’s wonderful SPIDER-MAN. I would almost go so far as to say that there is nothing I would change about the film, except of course, there’s that awful (minus the mask) Green Goblin costume. Beyond that, however, SPIDER-MAN is an earnest, honest, well-meaning superhero film about good people put into extraordinary circumstances. When it came out in 2002, I broke my rule about seeing movies on opening weekend to sneak out for the 11 AM showing and absolutely loved it. As I told anyone who would listen at the time, SPIDER-MAN thrilled the kid in me without offending the adult. Even now, when Peter walks away from MJ at the end of the movie and we hear him say in narration, “With great power comes great responsibility,” I get choked up.

So why don’t I enjoy watching it more?

In large part, it’s because SPIDER-MAN did it’s job so well that superhero films have grown beyond it’s two hours of cinematic goodness. For me, Spider-Man has the single greatest origin in all of supeherodom and Raimi’s film wonderfully lays it out for us in live action. The problem is that I’ve read and re-read and re-read Spidey’s origin so many times that tuning in to a movie to watch it all again …

I don’t get a whole lot out of it anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled it exists, and if I ever have kids, I’ll gladly pop them down in front of the big screen TV top watch it over and over again. But for now, watching the film once every five years or so is enough.

Raimi’s film is the perfect superhero movie to transition the genre out of Batman’s darkness and into the light. The influence of Burton and Schumacher’s franchise is all over Raimi’s film, of course, and if there’s one quibble I have with Raimi’s direction is that Raimi chameleons himself inside the Schumacher mold to such a degree that he loses himself. Raimi delivers a very professional directing job in SPIDER-MAN, but like Chris Colombus in the first Harry Potter film, Raimi’s approach has seemingly been designed to not mess things up more than deliver a unique, powerful vision.

More Schumacher than Burton though it may be, Raimi’s approach absolutely works. SPIDER-MAN raked in over $800 mil at the international box office back in 2002, and it’s completely deserving of every dollar. You can see strains of where Raimi overplays his hand – he sometimes mistakes melodrama for real emotion, and most damningly, he just won’t let Peter have a moment’s rest, won’t let life give him a break. I understand that bad luck and hard times are part of the Peter Parker stock and trade, but Spidey is a jokester, too, always ready with the quip while inside his suit, but there’s not a whole lot of that in SPIDER-MAN.

A pre-9/11 SPIDER-MAN teaser poster featuring the Twin Towers reflected on Spidey’s goggles.

In fact, the best one-liners come during his wrestling match with Bonesaw McGraw (Macho Man Randy Savage Oooh Yeah), because in the rest of the film there’s not a whole lot of room to joke around. Post-wrestling match, of course, after Peter gets stiffed on his payment, he lets a burglar run past him that ends up killing Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson).

Cliff Robertson’s Uncle Ben and Rosemary Harris’ Aunt May are the emotional backbone of the film, and both veteran actors deliver pitch-perfect performances. Robertson has one of the toughest jobs in all of superhero films; he’s got to deliver an absolutely spot-on performance in limited screen time and he hits every single scene with the right mix of fight and emotion. When he’s worried enough about what’s going on in Peter’s life that he forces Pete to ride with him into the city, he gives May a little flash of victory behind Peter’s back. Then when they get to the library, he tries to have a heart-to-heart with Peter about what he’s going through and Pete rejects him, tells him to back off, and slams Ben for not being his father. It’s a brutal scene, totally undeserved, and Maguire and Robertson deliver it as well as any scene in any superhero film.

As for the structure of the film, the first half concentrates on the origin story and the second half delivers the Spidey vs. Goblin. SPIDER-MAN does a very solid job weaving all of its characters through both halves of the film and making each of them feel like real people. Whenever Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) comes back into the narrative, there’s a genuine sense of the life she’s lived in between these moments. I’m not a huge fan of Dunst, but she’s really good here at playing the suburban version of white trash. She’s had a hard childhood and can’t wait to get out of her house and into the city post-high school graduation. It’s not an easy life as she tries to make it as an actress, but she’s not afraid to work menial jobs to make ends meet.

There’s a tragic feeling to everything MJ does; life has been hard on her and that sadness comes through around Peter, who gets to see the private MJ (and not just when he’s peeping into her bedroom window) while others get the public, happy-go-lucky Mary Jane. The famous “upside down Spidey” kissing scene, when paired with the funeral kissing scene, brings these two halves of both Mary and Peter’s personas together in a really touching way.

Tobey Maguire is very good at playing the sheepish Peter Parker, even if he does go the wide-eyed, stand and stare dumbly route a bit too often, just as Willem Dafoe is very good at playing the mentally unhinged Norman Osborn, even if he does go the bug-eyed, cackle maniacally route a bit too often. James Franco is solid as Harry Osborn, J.K. Simmons is outstanding as J. Jonah Jameson (even drawn incredibly cartoonishly), and Elizabeth Banks has a “is that who I think it is?” cameo as Betty Brant.

The action is very good and very bright, which the film needs to balance of the dark emotion of Ben getting murdered and Peter being partly responsible, of the Goblin kidnapping both Aunt May and Mary Jane, and then accidentally killing himself.

It’s all professionally done and SPIDER-MAN was exactly the right film at the right time for the superhero genre. While Bryan Singer’s X-Men beat Spidey to the screen by two years and deserves credit for being the post-Burton/Schumacher Batman opening act, SPIDER-MAN’s $800 mil rake at the international box office (compared to X-Men‘s $300 mil), Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN felt like the start of something new. Did they play it safe? Absolutely, but in playing it safe, Raimi and Maguire also didn’t screw it up and simply let Spidey and the Goblin go at it over the course of two hours. The film definitively put “with great power comes great responsibility” into the mainstream lexicon and it finally put the core of the Marvel Universe onto the big screens in a way that the X-Men could not, given the whole “hated and feared” thing. Spidey is Marvel’s most important and popular character and its box office performance broke new ground for superhero films (at the international box office, SPIDER-MAN bested Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman and Robin COMBINED).

SPIDER-MAN is an excellent movie, both for what it puts on the screen and how it helped to get the ball rolling on all sorts of superhero movies, but I don’t find it a highly re-watchable movie. I know that makes me a bit of a jerk because why wouldn’t you want to watch something done this well, but I’m kinda burned out on origin stories.

Once every five years or so, however, SPIDER-MAN can still bring me along for a heck of a ride.