Ric Flair and The Four Horsemen DVD

The Documentary:

All I have to say is that it’s about bloody time that there was a DVD made on the Horsemen. The first disc contains a documentary that runs just over two hours on how pretty much everything you ever needed to know about them. There are comments from a who’s-who of wrestling such as Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, Tully Blanchard, Barry Windham, J.J. Dillon, Shawn Michaels, Triple H, Teddy Long, Jim Ross, Eric Bischoff, and some random guy named Paul Roma. I found it amusing that when Roma talked about his time in the group he basically said that he was better than Flair and Anderson combined. After those comments, he gets buried by both Flair and HHH. Flair also had some rather scathing comments about Bischoff, Jim Herd, Sid Vicious, Roma, and others. Another good thing about the doc is that the background music that WWE uses was kept at a low volume throughout most of the disc. There were no matches on the first disc but it did include the infamous parking lot attack on Dusty Rhodes. The match selection on disc two is at first glance rather uninviting but all in all turned out to fit in rather well with everything else.

The Matches:
1) Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, & Ole Anderson vs. Pistol Pez Whatley, The Italian Stallion, & Rocky King – 4
2) Ric Flair vs. Ricky Morton – Cage Match – 6
3) Tully Blanchard vs. Dusty Rhodes – First Blood Match – 5
4) Flair, Anderson, Blanchard, Windham, & Dillion vs. Dusty Rhodes, Lex Luger, Dr. Death, Nikita Koloff, & Paul Ellering – War Games Match – 6
5) Arn Anderson & Tully Blanchard vs. Nikita Koloff & Sting – 7
6) Arn Anderson & Tully Blanchard vs. Lex Luger & Barry Windham (3/27/88) – 6
7) Ric Flair vs. Arn Anderson – 6

I’m not quite sure what the six-man tag team match had to do with anything else on the DVD but it was a decent ten-minute match. The cage match was simple yet entertaining. Flair controlled most of the first half of the match with Morton controlling the last half. There was also a good tease where Flair had Morton in the figure-four next the ropes. The finish was rather abrupt with Flair cheating to score the pin. I touched on the first blood match in my review of Starrcade 1986. To be quite honest, if you don’t watch it then your not missing a whole lot. The War Games match has no commentary so it was kind of hard to follow along with what was happening which is probably the reason it got the score it did. The tag match with Anderson and Blanchard against Koloff and Sting was about as good of a twenty-minute tag match as you’re ever going to find. Sting was diving over the ropes, Koloff was getting stiff, and then got the hell beat out of them by Anderson and Blanchard. The crowd was totally apeshit and ate everything up. The tag match with Luger and Windham was from the first Clash and is a great ten-minute match highlighted by a title change with Luger and Windham winning the belts. The final match with Flair against Anderson was I believe the first and only time that they ever fought in the ring. It looked to me like their hearts just weren’t in it but they did what they could.

Final Thoughts:
When this DVD was first announced, I wasn’t too thrilled about it because of the match selection. I bought it on a whim and the results were far better than what I expected. The nice thing about the matches is that instead of using recycled material, they chose seven bouts that were unreleased. Albeit a little disappointing in a few departments, the documentary itself was a great way to spend two hours on a Sunday afternoon. I wouldn’t recommend this for people who by DVDs just for the matches but I would recommend it for anyone who loves old-school NWA and WCW or just about anything wrestling.