I found a VHS Tape at The Dig the other day. It said "Elvis" on the top label and "WWF' on the front.. Dude, you know that it was gonna go home with me that day. I love to find home recorded VHS. There is no way to tap into a nostalgic vibe that is more legit than putting on some recorded TV on VHS and pretending that it's airing live. If the commercials are on the cassette than it's really as real as it gets. If you have an old TV than man, you are cruising the nostalgia highway.
This tape didn't have the commercials which sucked but it did have the station bumpers and that great Wednesday Night Special screen that's up there. The Elvis Special was recorded off of one of my favorite local channels, KOFY TV 20.
20 broadcasts out of San Francisco and is still an indie station today even in the era of giant media conglomerates. I watch a fair amount of KOFY. They have a local Creature Feature show on Saturdays that I never miss.
The 1st piece of branded TV 20 stuff that I saw on the screen was this On The Calendar segment. That was a little deal they did where you could send in your local events and they'd post them on the air between segments. I miss things like that on TV.
The 2nd thing I saw was this great break with a weiner dog on it. They still do the dog gimmick today. It's one of the things that the station is known for. What they do is they have a dog sitting on a chair and then as a TV 20 logo rises from the TV the dog turns and looks at it. I've always wanted to get Ursa or Dr.Jones on the chair.
I hear that the tryouts are crazy and I'm too much of a wuss to risk failure. I do think either one of my loyal beasts could turn and look at the screen when I holler their name though.
This was the gold up until this point. I really love the old rainbow logo that they used back in the day. I also LOVE the font that they used to write KOFU in. So 80's, heck, it's so 70's really.
Here is a nice shot of the station info on the screen during the Elvis special. It was a show about Elvis being on tour around the country. It seemed alright. I only sort of watched it. I was hoping that there would be some commercials and sort of zoned out when I saw there wasn't. Until the special ended and this popped up on the screen...
DUDE! Hulk Rules! It turns out they they taped the Elvis special over an episode of Saturday Night's Main Event! That was the show that WWF aired every once and again on Saturday Night. It preempted SNL and usually annoyed all of my non-wrestling friends by doing so.
Look! It's the greatest Intercontinental Champion of All The Times: The Honkey Tonk Man! along with The Mouth Of The South Jimmy Hart. My brother got me an autographed pic of The Mouth Of The South for Christmas a few years ago. It hangs proudly in The ISR Hall Of Fame.
OMG! The Outlaw Ron Bass! He used to come to the ring with a whip that he called Betsy. On this episode of SNME he fought Brutus The Barber Beefcake in a hair vs hair match. I remember being into that gimmick. Back then having a shaved head wasn't as acceptable as it is today.
I'm of the opinion that Everlast from The House Of Pain popularized the shaved head and he didn't come out with Jump Around for years yet. That was such an influential song.
Sidebar: Once that song hit the streets just about every hip-hop whiteboy that I knew started rocking a shaved head and basketball jersey. Either that or an ironic hat from some place they didn't work like Danny Boy did in the video with his USPS lid.
This was prolly the most dopest thing on all of the cassette. What a fantastic graphic. It's wild though because The Macho Man didn't even wrestle on the show. This was the one where The Ultimate Warrior beat The HTM for the IC Strap and Hulk beat Akeem with Miss Elizabeth in his corner. It was the start of the slow burn to the Macho Vs. Hogan feud. THE MEGA POWERS EXPLODE BROTHER!
What a great tape and what a great time to be a young wrestling fan. What's great is that the SNME part of the tape has the commercials left in. I'm riding on notalgia overload!
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