Hulk Hogan vs. Paul Orndorff Cage Match

I’m a lifelong fan of pro wrestling, so naturally, I have a LOT of memories from years gone by that jump out at me. One of the memories that came flooding back to me recently was the night that Hulk Hogan fought Paul Orndorff in a cage on NBC’s Saturday Night’s Main Event. Thanks to the guys of TRN’s House Show Podcast reviewing the show, I felt like a kid again.

Saturday Night’s Main Event was at one time THE biggest wrestling show on television. Pay-per-view was in its infancy for most of the series run, the NWA had yet to launch their Clash of the Champions series and the regular wrestling shows on television were still filled with non-competitive matches for the most part. Yeah, they’d throw us a bone now and then and give us a decent main event match, but even that usually was just to set up something for later, and would often end in a non-finish.

So when a Saturday Night’s Main Event show would roll around on NBC about once a month, it was must-see TV for young wrestling fans. Or must-record-TV in my case. Even during the weekend, my mom wouldn’t let me stay up to watch it as it happened. Instead, I would set the timer on the VCR, record it, and then watch it the next morning as soon as I got up.

The match I’m going to be talking about here took place on the January 3rd, 1987 Saturday Night’s Main Event. The “main event” of the show pitted World Wrestling Federation champion Hulk Hogan against his one-time friend turned bitter rival, “Mr. Wonderful” Paul Orndorff. And this wouldn’t be just another match. No sir. This match was going to take place inside the walls of a 15-foot-high steel cage! The only way to win one of these cage matches was to put your opponent down to the point that you could leave through the door, or climb over the top. The important thing is that your feet must touch the floor.

So I’m watching the tape the following morning after the live event, and the Hogan-Orndorff match was up first. It was a good back-and-forth affair, but nine-year-old me really had no reason to think that Orndorff would actually beat Hogan. But it got to a point in the match when both men were a little groggy, and they started to climb out on opposite sides of the ring. Jesse “The Body” Ventura on commentary exclaimed that it was a race! I kinda got on the edge of my seat. It was neck and neck as they both started down the outside. Vince McMahon was yelling for Hogan to drop down! Then it happened. Both men hit the floor at the same time! The theme song “Real American” started playing, which after the bout a winner’s music is played, but in this case, it didn’t tell you who won since both men used the same theme song!

Wait…who just won the match? There was confusion at ringside as both men were claiming victory. McMahon and Ventura were each arguing the case for a different competitor. Referees Joey Marella and Danny Davis were each declaring a different winner. Multiple replays of the finish were shown, but no official announcement had been made. It was Saturday night suspense at its finest. The show went to a commercial break, leaving everyone pondering what the outcome was! When the show returned, an announcement was made that this match had been declared a tie. But since a tie is like kissing your sister (my words, not theirs), the referee ordered the match to be restarted!

So after we had just witnessed an incredible battle, with an incredible ending, we were about to get even more! Unfortunately, the rest of the bout was not as exciting as the first half. Hogan went on to soundly defeat Orndorff once they were back in the cage. He even gave Bobby Heenan a good thrashing for good measure after the match was over.

Hogan would go on to an even bigger moment just a month later that I’m sure I’ll be covering at some point soon, while Orndorff would start to fall off in his importance as the rest of 1987 rolled on. But none of that could take away from the flat-out excitement of their cage match on that Saturday night so long ago. I still get goosebumps re-watching it today. You can watch the full match below and re-live the excitement, or live it for the first time.

The Stoned Age (1994)

Back around 1995, I picked up The Stoned Age at my local video store and gave it a watch late one night. I remember liking it at the young age of 17, and thinking it was a “cool” movie. I saw that it was streaming on Tubi and decided to watch it again for old-time’s sake. 

The Stoned Age is a movie with a very simple premise. It details one night in the life of two young men in the late ’70s whose world revolves around three things: getting drunk, getting stoned, and looking for “chicks”. They hear about two lovely and lonely young ladies who are looking to party, so they go to get in on the action. Various issues arise that the young men must overcome in hopes of achieving their goal of hooking up with these young ladies. We meet a cast of characters along the way, none of which are very memorable. In the end, do they succeed? Do they take any important life lessons from this night? Will they survive the wrath of an angry father? You’ll have to watch for yourself to find out.

Please don’t take that last sentence as a challenge or an endorsement to watch this movie. It’s not good. I’m not really surprised that I dug it when I was 17, but now 28 years later, I could hardly slog through it. I stopped it at three different points and only kept going back to it so I wouldn’t feel guilty about writing a review of it without watching it all. 

It feels like someone was trying to duplicate the success of Dazed and Confused from a year prior, but didn’t have the cast or story to even come close to pulling it off. The fact that both movies are set in the ’70s and weed plays a large part are really the only two things they really have in common. 

I hate to be entirely negative, so I’ll give them props for a decent soundtrack. Otherwise, this is one I can’t encourage you to watch whether you’ve never seen it before or like me, haven’t seen it in a very long time. It hasn’t aged well at all. Or maybe I haven’t. Either way, The Stoned Age is a hard pass.

1/2 a star.

Comic Book Classifieds: X-Ray Glasses

I always wanted the things I saw in the classified ads in comic books, but could never save any of my allowances on weekends long enough to get a money order to get anything. But all of the cool things I would see in those ads still stick with me today, so we’ll be revisiting some of those things as time goes on. First up…X-Ray glasses!

So what red-blooded pre-teen boy wouldn’t want something like this? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what we would have in mind when ordering these. That little line there about being able to see-through clothes probably sold more pairs of these than anything else. But according to the fabulous book, Mail-Order Mysteries, these were just an optical illusion created by feather-like things between two pieces of cardboard with little holes in them. What a bummer. I wish I had never read that, as I had spent my whole life wondering “What if?”.

Superman Peanut Butter

It’s funny how some things can just pop into your head that you haven’t thought about in many years. This is one of those things.

Peanut butter is a staple in most American homes.  You can find it in cabinets, in lunch boxes, and in lunch pails all across this great country.  It’s patriotic….right behind apple pie. And you know what else is patriotic? Superman by gosh!  If you slap Superman’s name and image on a jar of peanut butter, you have the ultimate weapon against communism. 

At least that’s what a lot of us kids growing up in the ’80s in the rural area I lived in thought anyway.  We’d spend a lot of our time at recess after lunch playing Superman vs The Russians on the school playground.  No joke. We had our bellies full of Superman peanut butter and were battling the red menace to keep our playgrounds safe…just like in Red Dawn.  It was serious business. I even started a super-secret spy club in school to help combat the threat that we were exposed to on the news every night.  But I digress. 

Anyway, I’m not sure Superman peanut butter tasted any better than Skippy, Peter Pan, or Jif.  Actually, from what I’ve read online, Superman may have even been a cheaper variety than those others listed.  No matter the cost, that brand of peanut butter with Superman on the label is what I still identify as the epitome of peanut butter from my childhood. 

As a sidebar, I can explicitly remember one distinct point in time when I was eating Superman peanut butter.  It was January 28, 1986. We were out of school that day due to snow. I was sitting on the floor of our basement where I usually played, with a Superman peanut butter sandwich in front of me as I watched the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger.  It was one of those moments where you always remember where you were and what you were doing….and I had Superman peanut butter to make me feel a little better as I watched those events unfold. 

I Miss Fat Pro Wrestlers

A couple of weeks ago my favorite follow on Twitter (I don’t call it X) @super70ssports posted the wonderful gem below that I totally identify with.

I miss when guys like Dusty Rhodes were at the top of the sport. The bygone era when guys who didn’t look like your typical star could still get a chance to shine. Guys like Terry Gordy, Big Bubba Rogers, “Playboy” Buddy Rose, and numerous others were on top because they were the best at what they did. Days when having a great muscled-up physique didn’t automatically make you a star. In short, I miss fat pro wrestlers.

Back in the days when wrestlers earned their checks by how many tickets they sold, the emphasis wasn’t so much on looks. It was a combination of their actual skill in the ring, along with their charisma out of it. If they could use their words to rile the fans up to the point that they would buy a ticket to see him get his butt kicked, that was enough. If he was good enough in the ring to make the fans believe what they were seeing, that was enough. Looks were just a bonus. Some of my favorite wrestlers would never be offered a cover spot on a men’s magazine, but they sure could make you believe they would whip the ass of whoever DID appear on the cover.

I use the term “fat wrestlers” loosely here. I’m not just talking about fat guys, I’m talking about guys who just don’t fit the “fitness” profile that you see with most guys in the ring today. Guys like Arn Anderson may not have gotten a chance in today’s wrestling world because he was not muscled up, and didn’t have six-pack abs, but he could talk, he could express emotion, and he knew how to tie guys up in a pretzel to get his point across.

You turn on WWE programming today, and you’re sure to find plenty of guys who are ripped and look like they’ve stepped straight off the pages of Muscle and Fitness. What you won’t find, however, are guys wrestling who look like your dad, or the tough guy down the street who works on cars.

The loss of the average-looking, but tough son of a gun, in favor of hiring muscle-bound freaks who sometimes have trouble with the basic concepts of wrestling, has hurt the suspension of disbelief in wrestling to a degree. I want to see a guy who looks like my uncle fighting a guy who looks like your uncle.

A lot of the best wrestlers to ever come along were great examples of what I’m talking about. Mick Foley never looked too imposing physically, but because he knew how to connect with the fans through his interview style, and his brutal style in the ring, you always knew he was a threat. He didn’t have to rely on being muscled up with baby oil dripping off of him to become a star.

Take Phil Hickerson as an example. Phil spent a lot of his career wrestling in the Memphis area. While he certainly didn’t look like a star by today’s standards, he was one tough son of a gun and you had no problem believing what he did was real. Above is a video to help get my point across, and if you’ve never seen many of these guys I’ve mentioned, I urge you to search out footage of them and see just how some of these less-than-stellar-looking athletes were some of the better workers in the business.  And as a special bonus in that video, the two muscled-up chumps Phil was beating on here grew up to be Sting and The Ultimate Warrior.

Hulkamania Started Running Wild 40 Years Ago

Today, January 23, 2024, marks the 40th anniversary of Hulk Hogan’s famous defeat of The Iron Sheik to win the WWF Heavyweight Championship at Madison Square Garden.

Since pro wrestling was such a large part of my childhood, I didn’t want to let the anniversary pass without acknowledging it, so here’s the video of the historic match that kicked off Hulkamania and a fandom of the sport for millions worldwide.