Title: The Very Best of WCW Monday Nitro
Format: Three-Disc DVD
Studio: WWE Home Video
Rating: 
Review by: Bill Jones
The Monday Night Wars arguably played a large role in the success of World Wrestling Entertainment and Monday Night Raw, as the competition surely bred creativity. Wrestling fans were left wondering who would have the best matches, most outrageous moments and surprise defections each and every week, and even fans who swore allegiance to one brand or the other had a hard time not flipping channels between commercials in an attempt to see what they were missing.
WWE already documented this rivalry in Monday Night Wars, and already told the story of the Rise and Fall of WCW. Now, keeping in line with its latest three-disc sets, WWE is simply offering up The Very Best of WCW Monday Nitro, its one-time competitor. WWE now owns the brand, and it’s nice to see the company mining the archives and paying tribute to the show’s best moments. After all, most WWE fans missed them while they were busy watching the superior brand.
Instead of offering a documentary, WCW Monday Nitro simply serves up three discs of matches and segments from the defunct show, simply (sometimes too simply) set up by Diamond Dallas Page. The highlights of the set (as proclaimed by WWE) include “Macho Man” Randy Savage and Hulk Hogan vs. “Nature Boy” Ric Flair and Arn Anderson, the WCW debuts of Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, WCW World Heavyweight Championship Match Hollywood Hulk Hogan vs. Goldberg and the final match on Nitro – Sting vs. “Nature Boy” Ric Flair.
All in all, it’s a decent set, but if these are “the very best” moments of Nitro, it is no wonder WCW went out of business. There are some incredible matches to be found on the discs, as well as some great debuts and moments, but there’s also a lot of filler and questionable (read: bad) segments, like the nWo parody of the Four Horsemen. There are also a lot of story elements left incomplete, where either more narration from DDP would have helped, or where some of the filler could have been replaced by telling more of the stories of Monday Nitro. Still, for anyone looking for a collection of moments from Nitro, it doesn’t currently get any better than this.
For more info, wwe.com
Pads & Panels received a copy of the DVD courtesy of the studio for review purposes.
Print This Post