Taking La Parka Very, Very Lightly | WCW Monday Nitro 7/7/97
DDP in disguise! Los Guerreros & Vicious and Delicious deliver a Nitro Classic! Lots of tag wrestling! A great Nitro!
Last week, WCW Monday Nitro coughed up four of the WCW MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST’s current bottom five matches. This week, a wild swing in quality, as two matches land in the top three, with a new #1 match being crowned. The MASTERLIST is long enough now that big swings like this require discourse, especially given how different those matches are from each other. That’ll be way down at the bottom.
If you’ve read any of my work, you know how much I love 1997 WCW, specifically the summer of 1997, otherwise known as the Summer of Lex. After months of Sting baffling them, the nWo finally began to show cracks in their armor, which led to the assent of Diamond Dallas Page, an exceptional face turn by The Giant, and the Luger title win. All three of these stories share DNA in that their principal figures were arrogant heels who had done some cartoonishly evil shit, but the nWo basically killed the notion of the cartoonish heel dead — even Kevin Sullivan’s Dungeon of Doom was forced into a more realistic paradigm — and forced those three to see the light. Luger and Giant in particular were basically the last gasp of the white meat babyface for a while, and it ruled because that’s exactly the kind of person you wanted to see whoop some nWo ass.
It’s a great time to dip in on if you’re somehow uninitiated with WCW. This episode in particular features one of the most famous moments in Nitro history, the La Parka vs. Randy Savage match that is actually Randy Savage vs. Diamond Dallas Page. It’s so good that it has me wanting to revisit Samoa Joe vs. the Golden Vampire, so I will be doing that. There’s also mention here of Buff Bagwell’s spot in the 1997 G1 Climax. That sadly isn’t on NJPW World, but Vicious & Delicious vs. Kensuke Sasaki & Satoshi Kojima is, so I’ll write that one up, too. Those little extras will be free to all subscribers, but to get to the rest of this post you’ve got to pay the man, brother.
UP NEXT: It’s the summer of 1996 and the nWo has no weaknesses. The August 19, 1996 edition of WCW Monday Nitro emanates from the Von Braun Civic Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Episode 49! Damn, I wonder what that Wernher von Braun fella did to get a whole-ass civic center named after him? Oh! Not great! Potentially great, though, is a singles match between Dean Malenko and Lord Steven Regal, and there’s no way Hacksaw Duggan/VK Wallstreet is worse than anything Wernher von Braun did!
Colette Arrand