When Bruce Prichard left the then-World Wrestling Federation and his Brother Love persona behind, he had gone to Global Championship Wrestling, which had a TV deal with ESPN. However, as Global was slowly tanking, Prichard fled and returned to the WWF.
Instead of resuming his Brother Love role, Prichard was asked to create a parody of Dusty Rhodes as a talk show host. The end result was Reo's Roundup, which was a clear case of Vince McMahon scraping from the bottom of the barrel, since Roddy Piper, Jesse Ventura, and Jake Roberts, some of his best talkers, were all gone, although Piper would return.
Prichard's mimic of Dusty was so blatant, it isn't a surprise viewers turned away. In this installment from the fall of 1993, Reo's guests are Shawn Michaels and Razor Ramon.
Rating: D.
3 comments:
The most compelling people in this clip are clearly Razor and Shawn, whose Intercontinental Title feud had been raging all summer and still had a bit of life heading into the fall. Reo Rodgers, on the other hand? I'll grant that the Dusty lisp and some of the mannerisms are on point, but Pritchard has shockingly little charisma in this persona, an especially weird occurrence given Brother Love is still one of the most beloved, or at least widely known, talk segment presenters in Federation history. It might as well have been a cardboard cutout holding the mike here while two of the better promo men of the era delivered the goods. The segment might be a D, but I'd give the guests' performances a B, and likely tune in the following weeks to see where this rivalry went.
The feud culminated, of course, at Wrestlemania in the 1st ladder match on PPV.
That WM10 bout has long been a personal favorite, even more than the SummerSlam '95 rematch. A darn near perfect illustration of how the ladder could affect the action and heighten the stakes just as much as any "normal" match (Bret/Owen on the same night, for instance). I could swear it hasn't aged a day!
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