WCW Monday Nitro Gets Off to a Surprisingly Great Start

This year will mark the 30th anniversary of the first episode of WCW Monday Nitro. A lot has been written about the show — its rise and fall, the various industry-wide revolutions it sparked (whether invented or borrowed), how brilliant it was, how stupid it was, how it beat Vince McMahon for 83 weeks, how it spoiled one too many Raw results and paid the price — and while a lot of that has a degree of truth to it, it's also, frankly, a very boring way of talking about a wrestling show. Come September 4, there'll be a dozen articles covering these aspects of Nitro. Me, I'll be a couple of weeks into this project, the WCW Monday Nitro Masterlist, which will eventually be a complete, accurate accounting of every match that ever aired on the show, all 288 episodes.

I have no idea what I'm in for. Like, I know what I'm in for, I guess, in the sense that I grew up with Nitro and have returned to it plenty in my life as a wrestling fan, but there are eras of it, whole universes borne from one bad decision or another, that I've never seen, and others that I've mostly utilized as background noise. 1995, for instance, is an incredible background noise era for pro wrestling. It's the 90s at their worst — look up from whatever you're doing during a WCW match during this time and there's a pretty good chance that Kamala or the Zodiac is going to spoil your evening.

But here I am, paying attention, and something that pops out immediately is how much early Nitro feels like early Dynamite, a complete reckoning of what WCW had to offer, from the Hogan-run madhouse of the Dungeon of Doom to exciting international matchups to cutting edge talent like Scott Norton and Sabu. It's wild, and frankly pretty goddamn good.

I'm kicking things off this week by covering episodes one and two of Nitro, but to keep myself from going mad I'll be rolling a 288-sided die to determine what's next, 288-sided die being a completely real thing. There will be a dedicated Nitro Masterlist page, same as the BIG EGG MASTERLIST, once it starts getting a bit unwieldy attaching the list to the end of the post. The first roll of the 288-sided dice lands me on episode 166, which features Juventud Guerrera vs. Kidman, Bret Hart vs. Chris Benoit, and a Sonny Onoo singles match. See you next week, or behind the paywall. Let's go!