The Legacy of Stone Cold Steve Austin DVD Review

He's been called many things in his career - Stunning Steve, Texas Rattlesnake, and Bionic Redneck among them - but you know him best as 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin. tonight we're going to take a look at "The Legacy of Stone Cold Steve Austin" and see whether this three-disc set can pay proper tribute to one of the most popular wrestlers to ever step inside the squared circle. If not Austin's gonna have to drink a few Steveweisers, stomp a mudhole in WWE Home Video's ass and walk it dry.

As is usually the case with WWE DVD's the first disc opens with a ton of commercials for their other products. This time though I feel like an ad for The Triumph and Tragedy of World Class Championship Wrestling is an appropriate way to start things off since Austin trained with 'Gentleman' Chris Adams and got his start as a professional wrestler in 1989 during the promotion's dying days. Sadly the main menu opens with one of my least favorite Austin theme songs, "Oh Hell Yeah." I appreciate they were trying to something a little different than just shattering glass to hard guitars but considering that sounds is so closely identified as Austin's perhaps the classic theme would have been best. I also don't know why every TV show AND home video has to open with "Yes sir we promised you a great match" all the way through to J.R. drawling "The entire world is watching!" Do it on television to brand your product if you must but on DVD it's just overkill, even WITH Austin's "gimme a hell yeah" in there.

"I'm gonna tell you a story about a man named Stone Cold Steve Austin." Those words in Austin's own voice open the presentation before we get a montage of clips from his days in WCW, ECW and of course WWE. Depending on how long you've been a WWE fan and how many other Austin DVD's you own (this is far from the first) you may or may not be well familiar with the Austin story, but the man himself narrates the opening footage and tells it again. Born in Austin, parents got divorced and he lived Victoria for a bit, then the family moved closer to Houston and wound up in a little town named Edna. Austin and his brothers grew up there, went to high school there, played sports there and his parents still live there. As a kid he saw wrestling on TV but football was his first passion, and he excelled at it enough to get scholarships both in junior college and at North Texas State. NTSU was only 30 miles from Dallas, so he was able to get to WCCW's famed Sportatorium on Friday nights to watch the Von Erichs and the Freebirds fight. Austin says that upon learning Chris Adams would train wrestlers at his school in Dallas he enrolled, but doesn't put over what he learned from Adams as any good. In fact he outright buries Adams by saying he got "five months [of] mediocre training at best" before his first match, and that he was both "brutally bad" and "extremely green" when he got in the ring.

Fortunately Austin was a quick study and after paying some dues and getting his butt whipped a lot Jerry Jarrett (who had bought out WCCW and renamed it USWA) sent Austin to Memphis, and during his time in Memphis tapes of Austin's wrestling got noticed by WCW. He interviewed with Dusty Rhodes, the booker at that time, and Steve got a spot. For those who only know the cue ball shaved head and facial hair, seeing the early days of 'Stunning' Steve Austin are quite the revelation as he had long flowing blonde hair at the time. Dusty offered him $75,000 a year and in Austin's own words "it sounded pretty damn good at the time" because he had been used to $20-$40 payoffs working shows up to that point. Austin was given the gimmick of being from Hollywood, and he won the television title from 'Beautiful' Bobby Eaton, slowly but surely working his way up through the ranks. Austin found his singles push derailed though when Dusty put him in a tag team with Brian Pillman, which Austin was not happy about at first. Austin says that as time went on and they drove down the road together working shows "things started to click" and that they enjoyed making each other laugh. Pillman eventually decided they should be called the Hollywood Blonds and the name stuck. This leads to our first wrestling match of the whole DVD set.

* Hollywood Blonds {C} vs. Dos Hombres (WCW Tag Team Championship steel cage match)

This match is from WCW's Slamboree PPV on May 23rd, 1993. I don't know if Dos Hombres always wrestled under a mask but it's to WCW's benefit here as they had to fool people into thinking Ricky Steamboat and Shane Douglas were the challengers. Douglas had been fired before the PPV though so Tom Zenk took his place under the mask. Tony Schiavone and Larry Zbyszko even argue they don't know who is Douglas and who is Steamboat due to the masks during the match, and it's all a little absurd because Schiavone then contradicts this by saying he can tell Steamboat is the one wrestling Austin because of his knife-edge chops. The Blonds were a good team and the wrestling here is just fine but I'm not convinced this is the best example of Austin's tag team days they could have included. I do like some of the spots in the match, such as Austin being from the top of the cage like a tree of woe, but manages to escape just before his opponent rams into the fence. Another good spot is when Steamboat takes his mask off just before going to the top of the cage where he does a flying crossbody onto both Austin and Pillman. The Blonds retain when Austin pins Zenk off a Stun Gun and in the words of 'Super Chico' Bryan Alvarez, "This was fine." WINNERS AND STILL WCW TAG TEAM CHAMPS: THE HOLLYWOOD BLONDS.

Personally I think I would have preferred if they had put the career bio and the matches in seperate places, but I realize that probably would have been too much like other Austin releases such as "The Stone Cold Story." Austin talks about how much fun he and Pillman were having together and how over they got with their antics. Unfortunately in the whacky world of pro wrestling "getting over" is often the OPPOSITE of what a promoter wants you to do. Instead of being happy that you were successful in connecting with the crowd the promoter gets upset that a "mid-card act" or "filler team" is more popular than the established veterans or the guys at the top of the card. As a result WCW forced Austin and Pillman to split up, which meant they had to have a feud once the team ended.

* Stunning Steve Austin (with Col. Parker) vs. Flyin' Brian Pillman

This match hails from Clash of the Champions on November 10th, 1993. Austin is working heel and Pillman is working babyface, so naturally it's no surprise that Colonel Parker takes any chance he can get to help Austin or interfere on his behalf. at first I was tempoted to say this match had some of the most irritating commentary I've ever heard, given Tony Schiavone doing play-by-play all by himself, but unlike Don West and Mike Tenay he'll shut up for long periods of time and let the action speak for itself. Austin distracts the ref with an argument and when Pillman tries to come off the ropes the Colonel grabs a leg, slowing him down enough for Austin to turn around and spike Pillman on his head and cover for three. WINNER: STUNNING STEVE AUSTIN. Another decent match.

By Austin's own admission his career started to stall out after this in WCW. He got a little bit of a push, but not much, never getting further than the United States Heavyweight Championship and losing it to both Ricky Steamboat and Hacksaw Jim Duggan in a short period of time. In fact the match where he lost it to Steamboat is the next one featured on this DVD, but to recap it I'd just end up saying "another fine match" because that's exactly what it is. Steamboat is good, Austin is good, and they work well together here. It's far more interesting that Austin relates going to Steamboat and asking what he needs to add to his wrestling ability to advance further, only to have Steamboat tell him he doesn't know what Austin can add because he already has all the tools he needs. Austin thus describes his lack of progress in WCW as him lacking the "it" factor which seperates utility guys from superstars.

Ironically it was being fired by WCW which helped Austin find "it." He was only a few weeks away from being healed from a triceps injury when Bischoff gave him the axe, which was explained to him as financial based on how much they were paying him versus how much he had been incapacitated. In reality Austin knew it was all political at WCW and that there were people in management who didn't think he was "marketable" as a top star. Paul Heyman called Austin after he had been let go and Austin was frank with him that he wasn't ready yet to wrestle again. Heyman's response was hey, we've got a show, you've got a grievance, come down to our TV and you can cut promos - talk about anything you want. Not surprisingly the next cutaway is to one of Austin's famous ECW segments where he's wearing a "Stevamania" shirt and pretending to be Hulk Hogan, going so far as to refer to Joey Styles as Mean Joey a la Mean Gene Okerlund. It's funny stuff especially if you've never seen it before but for me I've seen it so many times it's fast forward material. His promo from October 10, 1995 is next, and this one is even better - this is the one where he shoots on WCW, ECW and Dusty Rhodes, even doing hilarious impressions of Dusty in the process. Even though I've seen it before it's definitely NOT fast forward material.

"There's no Hogans here, there no Flairs here, there's not a Dusty Rhodes, and there damn sure isn't an Eric Bischoff here. There's no one that can hold back Steve Austin now. ECW's gonna find out first hand what Steve Austin can do. And I'm gonna show everybody here, what a true superstar is supposed to do - what a true superstar is supposed to be! No one here can hold me back - not Tod Gordon, not Hulk Hogan, not Eric Bischoff, nobody. I'm going to be the superstar I always knew I could be, because there's no one, NO ONE in ECW that can stop me."

* Mikey Whipwreck {C} v. Steve Austin v. The Sandman (ECW Championship)

On December 9th, 1995 Austin had a chance to prove his point in a triangle match for the ECW Championship with Mikey Whipwreck and Sandman. The first time I saw this match I was able to enjoy it without having my thoughts clouded but seeing Woman/Nancy Benoit come out with Sandman is a little bitter in 2008. The champion Whipwreck is eliminated by Austin with a Stun Gun halfway through the match, but since it's a triangle match Austin has to pin Sandman too to win. Once it's down to these two they fight outside the ring - Austin clonking Sandman with a chair, Sandman dumping Austin over the guardrail into the crowd, Sandman even throwing the timekeeper's table over the railing after him. It's not really wrestling at this point - just a violent, brutal. beautiful brawl. Unfortunately since Austin is the better technician and Sandman is the better brawler, it works out better for Sandman when he wins with the brass knux shot (even though Austin had a foot on the ropes at the time). WINNER AND NEW ECW CHAMPION: THE SANDMAN. Woman gets in the ring to celebrate with her man and even light the post-match celebratory cigarette.

Shortly after this WWF calls to invite him to come in as The Ringmaster, working as the protege of the 'Million Dollar Man' Ted DiBiase. Austin thought the gimmick was absurd, "something that wasn't any good" in his own words, although Austin was happy to be getting a sizeable paycheck again and plying his trade in front of a large audience. His biggest feud in these early days may have been Savio Vega, and the second of two strap matches they had on PPV is included on the first disc.

* 'The Ringmaster' Steve Austin v. Savio Vega (Carribean Strap Match)

The date is May 28, 1996 and the place is Charleston, SC. Two nights before they had tried to do this match on PPV when the lights went out due to a lightning strike, so in the rematch on the makeup PPV Ted DiBiase added the shocking stipulation that he would retire if his protege lost, whereas if Savio Vega lost he would have to become DiBiase's personal chaffeur. If you've never seen a Carribean strap match it's no different from a four corners bullrope match - both men are tied together and one man has to touch all corner turnbuckles of the ring in succession to win. The strap enables you to yank your opponent off his feet before he can reach them all, and can also be used as a weapon to whip or even choke your foe, which Austin delights in doing to Vega during this match. Mr. Perfect and Jim Ross debate on commentary over whether there is any time limit, and Ross says no. Vega and Austin counter each other back and forth into suplexes and piledrivers before spilling outside and choking each other with the strap (reminiscent of recent events between JBL and Y2J). After a long match that's for better or worse another brawl for Austin as opposed to a scientific match, Vega and Austin both go for the fourth turnbuckle at the same time and Austin accidentally gives Vega the win by yanking on the strap so hard his opponent goes flying into it. WINNER: SAVIO VEGA (DIBIASE RETIRES).

Austin then notes he lucked into his spot in King of the Ring because Vince McMahon had to discipline a few wrestlers who caused problems. Unfortunately Austin doesn't explain who, what or why - and given this is a three-disc set and there's plenty of time to do so that's pretty inexcusable. That can only mean he either did and it was cut, or he didn't because Vince told him not to. Since Austin won't say it I will, since it's one of the great ironies of pro wrestling history that Austin would have been held down AGAIN and the man to do it would have been none other than HUNTER HEARST HELMSLEY better known as Triple H. Trips was a member of the Kliq that got in trouble for all giving each other a hug in the ring at Madison Square Garden when both Scott Hall and Kevin Nash were leaving WWF to go to WCW, breaking the kayfabe hatred of faces and heels that McMahon was still trying to protect. Since Nash and Hall were both gone and couldn't be punished, and HBK was their top star at the time and couldn't be punished, Triple H took the brunt of Vince's wrath and not only taken out of the King of the Ring (which he would have won) but forced to wrestle Aldo Montoya (later better known as Justin Credible) in a dark match the same night.

I can't help but ponder how the world of wrestling would have been different had the 'Kliq Hug' not taken place - Austin would have never won KOTR 96, cut his famous "Austin 3:16" promo on Jake Roberts afterwards, and subsequently rocketed to stardom in the Attitude Era of pro wrestling. Of course Triple H would still go on to hold down every other potential wrestling superstar first through backstage politics and then through marrying into the family, but Triple H should thank his lucky stars Austin got the push that night instead of him because Austin's popularity is what helped turn the tide in WWF's war with WCW. His punishment not only gave Austin the chance to break through the glass ceiling but may have even saved his own job and career. It's even more ironic that Austin nearly lost that shot thanks to a kick by Marc Mero during the PPV tournament that sent him to the hospital to get stitches. When he got back in time to finish the tournament Michael Hayes told him backstage that Roberts had cut a religious promo on Austin while he was gone, which gave birth to the promo and catchphrase which sold a million t-shirts when the match with Roberts was done: "Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!" He even ended the promo with his other now legendary trademark: "And that's the bottom line, because Stone Cold said so!"

* Stone Cold Steve Austin v. Bret Hart

This match is from the 1996 Survivor Series, and even though Austin was still acting like a heel and facing the long-time popular 'Hitman' Austin was already getting pops for his backstage promos and a superstar reaction when he came out to the ring. This is not only the best match on the first disc, it's the LAST match on the first disc, and this is the match that helped put the ever accelerating Austin on an even faster track to stardom. It's amusing to not only hear Vince McMahon on commentary in this match when he was still playing the babyface announcer, before he even got into his feud with Stone Cold, but to hear Jim Ross talking with him about how it always seems to be the poor unfortunate spanish broadcasters who get their announce table wrecked. Ross also notes all the "Austin 3:16" signs in the crowd but says that Stone Cold "could care less" whether the fans like him or not. Stone Cold tries and tries to make Bret Hart submit, and nearly gets DQ'd when he tries to do it using the ropes, and when referee Tim White orders him to break Austin flips him the signature double bird. Hart hits Austin with a Stun Gun afterwards and nearly gets the pin. A piledriver also leads to a near fall. Backbreaker by Hart leads him to go top rope to finish Austin, but he cuts Hart off and connects with a superplex. Back and forth Hart and Austin go with big moves and near falls. Hart even kicks out of the Stunner, which leaves Austin in total disbelief, and he locks in the Texas cloverleaf, but Hart crawls inch by inch to the ropes and gets another break. Austin injured the ribs and back with the steel ringpost but can't make Bret submit. Bret goes for the sharpshooter but Austin gets to the ropes. Austin tries to get a sleeper hold with the Million Dollar Dream but as he hangs on Hart pulls him to his back and since he didn't let go of the hold Austin's shoulders go down for three. WINNER: BRET 'THE HITMAN' HART. You can say the same thing now you could have said during Survivor Series back then - the purchase price was worth it for this match alone.

THANKFULLY DISC TWO STARTS WITH THE RIGHT MUSIC - the glass shatters and the big Kool-Aid smile hits my face. For better or worse though I know every match on disc two and three by heart. If I didn't see them live the first time, I've seen them since in every form imaginable - old tapes I bought, DVD compilations released by WWE, replays on WWE 24/7, you name it. I started catching up on the parts of Austin's career dating all the way back to around the time WCW went out of business, and by the time Stone Cold wrestled Scott Hall at WrestleMania X8 I was as big an Austin fan as any wrestling mark out there. With each subsequent recycling of his matches since 2002 I've become more and more intimately familiar with them, but the catch-22 is that as much as I enjoy them I really DON'T NEED THIS DVD SET BECAUSE I OWN ALL THESE MATCHES ALREADY. In fact in anything that's included after WrestleMania 14 has all instances of the WWE "scratch logo" blurred out, which unfortunately due to the limitations of the technology even today means that the wrestlers themselves and even fans in the crowd end up blurred instead of just the logo itself. Personally I find this so irritating I'd rather watch my old PPV tapes and the WWF DVD's released before they lost to the World Wildlife Fund (fucking panda bears). I saw all of Austin's matches the right way before they were forced to have all the logos blurred for bullshit legal reasons, so all the set can do is irritate me from here on.

Fortunately there's still a large part of disc two that's logo-blur free because of the use of the old WWF "block logo." It's odd that they didn't include the match between Austin and Hart from WrestleMania 13, the one where Hart and Austin reversed heel and face roles when Austin refused to quit and passed out rather than submit even as he was bleeding from the head. This match would be completely uncensored if included, but since it was already on Bret Hart's DVD set and in the WrestleMania Anthology, this may be one of the few times WWE opted not to repeat themselves - which is a shame because it's one of the few times they SHOULD have. If you're talking about the "legacy" of Stone Cold Steve Austin, that match is one of the DEFINING moments, far more than the Survivor Series match with Bret before, and far more than the match they show which takes place after it - Stone Cold vs. Undertaker at "Cold Day in Hell." It's not one of my favorite matches from either man, but at least it's unblurred and unedited as is just over half of disc two. Other 95% unedited matches on this portion of the set (aside from a few instances of the letters "W-W-F" together outside the block logo) are as follows:

* Owen Hart & British Bulldog {C} v. HBK & Stone Cold for the WWF Tag Team Titles
(Raw from May 26, 1997)

* Stone Cold Steve Austin v. Shawn Michaels
(King of the Ring from June 8, 1997)

* British Bulldog & Owen Hart {C} v. Stone Cold & Dude Love for the WWF Tag Team Titles
(Raw from July 14, 1997)

* Owen Hart {C} v. Steve Austin for the WWF Intercontinental Title
(SummerSlam from August 3, 1997)

Unfortunately that's where the edit free part of the set comes to a close, because Austin was out for a long time after taking a piledriver from Hart in that match that screwed up Austin's neck, an injury that would continue to haunt him for the rest of his career. By the time the DVD reaches Unforgiven on April 26, 1998 things are blurred to a ridiculous degree, which means when Mick Foley a.k.a. Dude Love comes out for his match with Stone Cold large parts of his body end up blurred out just as he dances his way down to the ring.

Now don't get me wrong, there are some great matches that occur from this point on from a wrestling standpoint. Some of the disc three matches are all-time classics I would watch a hundred times and not tire of, such as his battle with Eddie Guerrero from Smackdown in November of 2000, or his no-DQ match with Triple H at Survivor Series, or his epic war with The Rock at WrestleMania X7. Unfortunately this is becoming an all-too common problem for me when WWE does collections that feature guys who became stars in the Attitude Era. If you do a "classic" compilation featuring promotions that went out of business or guys who were stars before 1998, everything is great. If you do a "modern" compilation featuring stars who came along since May 2002 then everything is great too, beacuse the modern WWE logo and the name World Wrestling Entertainment don't have to be censored in any way. The bad thing for WWE Home Video is any "completist" out there, or should I say "hardcore wrestling geek" like I am, went out of their way to get uncensored tapes and DVD's from the Attitude Era a long time ago. There's nothing the panda lovers or the E can do about it, because they marketed and sold the videos to the fans long before they lost the legal settlement to the Fund. Therefore if I want to see Stone Cold's "legacy" the right way and not watch the crappy blurred out versions on disc three, I can do just that.

To borrow a phrase from Stone Cold, "the bottom line" on this set is that there are some newer WWE converts who have never seen half or more of these matches, who don't own the original PPV tapes or TV broadcasts, and for whom this set censored and all might be perfect. The hardcore wrestling fans who have been at this for I'd say a minimum of 7 years or more, particularly those who are often derisively called "Fed heads" by so-called ELITIST wrestling fan geeks a.k.a. uber-smarks will have seen the unedited versions, own the unedited versions, or both. I guess you can say I'm a "Fed head" too because for me the latter half of the Stone Cold set just bothers me to no end even though the quality of the matches is just fine, and the bonus features don't really wow me because I've seen most of those too and the ones I haven't don't mean squat. The filming of Stone Cold's "Gladiator" commercial? That's certainly not a bonus that makes me want to plunk down $20. I'm not telling you not to buy this set because it's going to be great for a lot of people, but from my point of view I would have edited it differently, chosen matches that represent his "legacy" more appropriately, and included bonus features that were more worthwhile. It's also worth noting there are no voices heard in linking segments other than Stone Cold's, and a little insight from J.R., Vince McMahon or so-help-me even Triple H on his career would have been worthwhile. I also could have done without all the blurred logos but sadly as long as the panda fuckers are going to keep being a-holes about it that's just not legally possible, and that's the bottom line, cause the World Wildlife Fund said so. Cautious thumbs up for most wrestling fans, slight thumbs down for the hardcore.