Joseph and Colette Discuss Hollywood Blonds vs. Steamboat & Douglas

Somewhere on the world wide web, I referred to watching the opening frame of our WCW retrospective as eating your vegetables. Yes, vegetables are delicious, especially when well-prepared, but even so, they can feel rote: you need to eat 'em, they're always there on the plate, what more can you say?

This being BIG EGG, plenty. Blonds/Steamboat & Douglas is a match you've been told over and over again is very good, especially for a TV match, especially for a Shane Douglas match, etc., and you know what? It's for a damn good reason! Steve Austin! Ricky Steamboat! Incredible propwork! The delightful WCW crowd! It's all here! You should watch it, then marvel at the sturdiness of the BIG EGG MASTERLIST, which is all gems and minor bangers until it's not!

THE OFFICIAL BIG EGG MASTERLIST

EVERY BIG EGG MATCH RANKED.

BIG EGGColette Arrand

BIG EGG AND ELSEWHERE

• BIG EGG Tier Subscribers: Two new essays went up in a bonus feature format I've been toying with, the first looking at three matches between Kensuke Sasaki and Yoshihiro Takayama, and the second finding Terry Funk in action against three rookies: Dustin Rhodes, Eddy Guerrero, and Mark Henry.
• WCW MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST: There's been two new editions of this, as well! The first takes a look at the 8/26/96 episode of Nitro, featuring Jim Duggan vs. The Giant, and the second dives into the good match-laden 1/25/99 edition, which has Bret Hart vs. Booker T and Goldberg vs. Scott Norton. 24 episodes and 174 matches down, y'all!
• Joseph posted Part 1 and Part 2 of his GWE Ballot videos. Fun stuff, but what those and his writing in late April and mid-May revealed to me, before the GWE discourse dissipated, was that I don't wanna write about my ballot. Y'all know how dumb I am. How much more ammo do you need?
• Patron Saints of Sick Sons of Bitches: Episode 2, which wraps our deep dive into the greatness of Goldberg, is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Next episode is about John Cena. Buckle up.

Up Next

WCW Month charges headlong into what may qualify as the true end of the pre-Hogan notion of what WCW was. Dustin Rhodes offered up his innocence to Arn Anderson and was paid back in scorn, so it's up to old spindly-legged Dusty Rhodes and the Nasty Boys to ride alongside The Natural into WarGames against Anderson, Terry Funk, Bunkhouse Buck, and Col. Rob Parker. This is, spoiler alert, one of my favorite angles in wrestling history, containing, among other things, what I think may be the greatest promo ever, but it's been years since I've gone back and actually watched the match. I hope my view of it never changes, baby, but you never know.

Joseph Montecillo
I fucking love tag team matches, man. It might be one of the most pro wrestling ass pro wrestling stipulations of all time, the kind of match that has a built in story to tell, often a similar formula, and just sort of illustrates all the things that I love about the medium. We're dropping in here at an interesting period for WCW and the tag team match. WCW is a company in a sort of transition period here, well past the glory days of its 80s JCP lineage and not quite finding its footing til the Nitro and NWO era quite yet either. The same can sort of be said for tag team wrestling. We're pretty well past the days of MX and RNRX putting on their classics and while it's still treated with seriousness in WCW for the most part, I don't think American tag team wrestling will take center stage again til the turn of the century with the Dudleys, Hardys, and E&C. What about this particular pair of teams fascinated you, especially given we might have dipped in a little earlier to see Austin and Steamboat in the Dangerous Alliance for example?

Ricky Steamboat & Shane Douglas vs. The Hollywood Blondes Riff on the WCW Tag

I like to joke whenever a tag match has multiple heat segments that it’s a Collision tag. Given the proclivity early AEW Collision had for big, lengthy multiman tags, and the need to use multiple control segments to extend the runtime, I’ve just mentally associated that particular structure

BIG EGGJoseph Montecillo

Colette Arrand
Well, I knew I wanted to do an Austin/Steamboat match. I think that feud, reiterates itself for three different WCW Championships (TV, Tag Team, and US) is a foundational WCW text, and a cornerstone of both men's careers. It's such clever work, putting an obvious future megastar in the ring with the company's biggest babyface shy of Sting or Dusty, and if memory serves, it's Steamboat who eventually wises Austin up to the fact that he'll have to leave WCW to achieve his potential — makes sense considering Steamer's own sense of wanderlust. Going with the Blondes made sense to me because I was trying to hit eras of WCW you were perhaps less familiar with, I wanted to do a straight up tag team match, and the Austin/Pillman combo, short lived as it is, might be the last truly great team the company produced. None of it had to do with Shane Douglas, except that this feud, even with the Dos Hombres bit that happens as a result of his departure, is the Blondes on top, seen correctly as a blue chip asset in a promotion that desperately needed those. They were way ahead of their time, but they were also a classic, canonical tag team.

Hollywood Blonds vs. Steamboat & Douglas Works In Any Era

A match you could run with no changes that would rip in any era.

BIG EGGColette Arrand