Memphis Wrestling WMC TV (October 19, 1985)

Ah, yeah. Memphis 'rasslin time. The homemade meat sauce of late 20th century entertainment. Savory and thoroughly bad for me. Likely to leave a stain. Delicious.

And this one is gonna be good.

We open with match previews set to St Elmo's Fire, and is there anything better? Spoiler: No. There is nothing better.

Then it is commercial time and I am forced to see an ad for tasty malt liquor while I am at work and cannot partake. I am reminded of back in the day when I worked in a box plant putting boxes into boxes and my girl Shannon used to bring cans of Olde English 800 and leave them in my car. Serves me right for doing this in the office. What would I do if my boss walked in and I'm sitting here slamming Schlitz and watching a rasslin' show from 1985? They'd probably call security and I'd have to Bullet Bob my way out of here.

We're back and Jerry "The King" Lawler and Bill Dundee are talking. They are ruling the tag team rankings! And Bill Dundee is wearing a jacket with no pants! He's clearly coked up out of his head talking trash about every other team on Earth. He's a volitile little shit, and Lawler is amused by his diminutive Australian buddy's bravado. They can whoop 'em all! Including The Fabulous Ones! Sure, buddy.

And here come The Sheepherders, who are legitmately from New Zealand and putting across the idea that they are mad savages who may or may not be cannibals. They talk about Rugby as though it is a mysterious tribal rite. They are doing a Rugby Scrum! I am no expert, but I do not think elbow strikes to the face are legal in rugby. This does not seem like a legitimate sport. They are building up a feud based on the merits of American Football vs. Rugby.

COMMERCIAL! Every Monday is Senior Day at Amvets Thrift Store!

We're back with the Fabulous Ones, and there has never been a more unintentionally homoerotic gimmick in the history of wrestling. How many young Southern 'rasslin fans experienced a funny feeling in their hearts when they watching Stan and Steve strut to the ring wearing Zebra print briefs? It is amusing to see two muscle men bare chested and oily in jaunty little bowties calling some other guys "Panty Waists." It is also amusing that there is a Non-Zero chance that "Sweet" Stan Lane (dude on the left in the picture above) is Lauren Boebert's biological father. It seems plausible. Google it!

Here's where the shit goes down. All because Billy Dundee will not stop talking. He's the only guy on stage without a championship belt and he feels small. He also feels small because he is roughly 5'1" He is little man syndrome personified and he is incapable of shutting up. Lawler is running out of patience with his partner and trying to play peacemaker like he's his fraternity's designated driver. Dundee is losing his mind, because he's the only person who wants to fight and nobody's taking him seriously. So he starts hitting people. He's tearing the studio apart like a malevolent, sawed off Conway Twitty! The Lawler/Dundee team is finished! FINISHED! LAWLER'S GONNA FIGHT DUNDEE! It's kind of like Superman vs. Batman but also like your two favorite uncles getting drunk and coming to blows at the cookout.

Christ, I'm already spent. But I do love that they took the time to make sure that everyone stayed true to their characters for all this. There's a reason this is a classic storyline. Ask a true wrestling fan about Lawler and Dundee. I guess you could also ask the Memphis Vice Squad about them, but those stories probably wouldn't be as flattering.

COMMERICAL! These Toyota Celicas look kind of sweet to be honest. I wonder if Bill Dundee scored a free Celica as part of their sponsorship deal. I can see him cruising Elvis Presley Blvd with the wind blowing through his immobile hair. Maybe he's got some B.T.O. takin' care of business on the 8-track.

Back in the studio, Dundee is back for more hollerin' and broad gestures of rage. It is notable that no actual wrestling has taken place on this show up to this point. Dundee offers up his "$25,000 Sports Car" if Lawler will accept his challenge. Wonder if it's the Celica?

Lawler comes out and Dundee's ensuing rant is solid gold. "You couldn't even afford the paint job on a car like that!"

Lawler's insistence on pronouncing "Dundee" as "Dundy" to further needle the angry little man is also hillarious. He's not interested in Dundee's car, so now Billy puts his beautiful mane of black hair on the line as well! If Lawler can pin Dundee on television right now, then Dundee will hand over his car and shave his head bald.

Lawler, of course, accepts. So they fight. You aren't going to get a much better punch n' kick style brawl then with these two. They are both gifted at delivering and selling fake punches. The fans are way into this, of course. If Dundee loses and shaves his head, he may literally explode with rage like a water balloon filled with Wild Turkey. Unfortunately, Dundee has a chain hidden in his lavender man-panties. He wraps it around his Lilliputian fist and clonks Lawler in the skull for the cheap win! Dundee is the new Southern Heavyweight Champion!

Post-Match, the scope of Dundee's plot becomes clear. The Southern Heavyweight Champion gets a shot at Ric Flair and the WORLD Heavyweight Title once per year, and this year's title shot is coming up next month! The little fucker orchestrated all of this in order to steal a chance at fortune and glory and Flair's big gold belt! Kind of brilliant, really. Lawler wants a rematch and Dundee refuses on the grounds that he doesn't have to defend the title for 30 days, which gives him all the time he needs to beat Ric Flair and become world champ. "After that, I won't just give you a match, Lawler! I'll hand you this belt, because I'll be the world's champion! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Then he does an obnoxious little dance. Wonderful.

SHUFFLIN ALONG

HALF SISTER by PROTOMARTYR - I used to know this guy named Roach. He started showing up to our D&D and VHS Anime nights toward the end of high school, but I'm not exactly sure how he was connected to us or who invited him. We were living in that amiable "what's mine is yours" headspace that I think a lot of poor kids live in. Like, nobody really batted an eye when this dude showed up in our clubhouse. But these days, if some fucker named Roach just turned up at my house then I would probably have a problem with it. The thing that I remember most about Ol' Roach is that he wore the same pair of shredded jeans every time I saw him, and these jeans were covered in band logos that he'd drawn with a sharpie marker.

DIE AND GET OUT OF THE WAY by AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED - These weren't the cool bands of the day, mind you. Roach wasn't repping Nine Inch Nails or White Zombie. Roach was all about Motley Crue and Whitesnake and Cinderella. Which, in hindsight, was kinda weird. Was Roach truly into the hair metal bands of yesteryear? Did listening to songs like "Girls Girls Girls" inspire him to scribble on his pants and show the world that he related to the sentiment and timbre of a scene 15 years dead? Did he sit down one night and just draw the logos of every band he knew?

GARBAGE by TYLER THE CREATOR - Perhaps the jeans were passed down to him by an uncle or an older brother along with some well-worn tapes and a taste for motorcycles and cold Coors Light. Whatever the case may be, I think about Roach quite a lot. I think I admire the guy in some ways. I mean, it's hard to imagine Roach getting anxious about the future or sitting at a desk blogging about dumb shit when he should be working on something else. I didn't really know that guy, but I'm comfortable saying that he never spent a single second in a 9 to 5. Guys like Roach never do much of anything that they don't want to do unless forced by some authority figure.

SCREAM by TAPE DECK MOUNTAIN - Another thing about Ol' Roach is that everything was always "bitchin." He never played D&D with us that I can recall, but seemed content sitting in a folding chair and telling us all how bitchin we all were. I think we could all use that kind of positivity in our lives. We all have those mental voices of people in our past encouraging us or telling us where we fucked up. The truth is that sometimes, when I'm struggling, the Roach in my memory will lean forward and tell me that I'm bitchin.

HEIST by LINDSEY STIRLING - Roach is frozen in amber. He's perfectly preserved in my mind's eye as a ratty-headed weirdo pinching his namesake between thumb and forefinger in an eternal attic of geeks. I don't want to think about adult Roach. His name is probably Carl or Donnie or something like that. I don't want to think about balding Carl cussing his tax forms or mowing his backyard. No Carls. Only Roach.

TUBI TIME / Dipshit Book Club - New Year changes nothing edition(s)

I was washing down my antidepressants with a can of white Monster in the drive-thru line at Taco Bell and thinking about my New Year's Resolutions the other day when it struck me that we really do live in a dystopia. The holidays are fun, but also difficult. Like, if you think that navigating the usual barrage of Christmas-based nostalgia, guilt, and despair is tough on your own; imagine doing it when you're responsible for making sure your kids have a good time too. Anyway, here are some things I have watched and/or read recently.

ZOMBIE 3 (1988) - This is a confusingly titled Lucio Fulci joint that fits somewhere within the bizarre anything-goes continuity of Italian DAWN OF THE DEAD copycats/spin offs/sequels. Its Fulci's movie, but multiple scenes were directed by Bruno Mattei after Fulci suffered a stroke. None of that matters to us. We simply seek entertainment. And this is one of those goofy Italian zombie movies that make you feel vaguely sweaty and feverish when you watch them. There are a lot of humorous and charming things to enjoy here, including a flying zombie head and some highly dubious firearms safety on display. It's not a must see cult classic, and it never goes quite as crazy as you think it should. With that in mind, it's a fine example of its type. Like, if you were organizing a nonstop zombie movie marathon in order from best to worst, you probably wouldn't get to ZOMBIE 3 until day 4 or so. Perfectly respectable but nothing outstanding.

THE RITUAL by ADAM NEVILL - Nevill is one of the relatively few contemporary horror authors with a distinctive voice. It seems to me that after Stephen King did ON WRITING, we got a big crop of horror authors slicing their prose to ribbons and writing in this bare-bones pulp magazine style. That's all fine and good, but it means that a lot of horror stories blend together into a shapeless blob of paranormal investigators making clever neckbeard cultural references. Nevill doesn't really go for that. He can really get down and wallow in dirty details, and you can tell he's not one of your standard Weird Tales fetishists. This plot concerns a group of buddies who go on a camping trip that goes terribly wrong. There's nothing revolutionary happening plot-wise. The meat is in Nevill's prose and descriptive powers. He's got a way about describing terror and discomfort that lends itself well to the grueling "I guess now THIS wound is infected" surivialist grist throughout. For example: there is a monster doing monster shit in this book, but the most horrible horror parts are about starving hikers chafing in wet jeans. My only complaints are that the book felt overlong to me and there's a plot twist about halfway through that left me unsure if I was still reading the same story. I legitimtely thought somebody had spliced two different books together with scotch tape as a prank. The first half is this "macho survival-of-the-fittest" stuff mixed in with some "is it good or bad that modern man has lost touch with his savage past" stuff and some "married men with office jobs are weak compared to single party dudes" type rhetoric. Which is bullshit, but OK. It's sort of like British Deliverance. The 2nd half is...something different. It was weird and jarring; as though Nevill was driving me to Dairy Queen and took a sharp, unannounced left turn to a hot dog stand. Like, the hot dogs are good too but I thought we were getting ice cream and now my neck hurts.

THE TOLL by CHERIE PRIEST - Cherie Priest writes a lot of fun stuff in a number of genres. I read a couple of her award-winning steampunk adventure books years ago and grew fond of them. I got a pleasant surprise out of seeing that she has some southern gothic/horror books out there as well. THE TOLL is an intriguing tale about a Silent Hill-esque backwater town, a monster under a bridge, and two spinster auntie badasses who play out sort of like a Faulkner short story directed by Sam Raimi. There's a lot to like about THE TOLL, but I found myself getting frustrated before the end. There are a number of interesting bits left dangling and unresolved in the plot. What is the deal with the "Doll House?" Why do the storefront dummies move around at night? What is the fucking deal with the magic these people seem to be able to do? These small frustrations aside, I enjoyed THE TOLL. It doesn't overstay its welcome and I dig the ideas within. Cherie Priest remains cool.