The Best of Sting DVD Review
November 9, 2014
By: Darragh O’Connor of Wrestleview.com
It is no secret that I love WCW; like many people my age, I grew up with the “Attitude Era” but I was lucky enough to have access to the “other promotion” as a child. In the UK and Ireland, WCW was a difficult thing to see for the most part but got easier as Sky packages got better and better.
By then, sadly, WCW was in the toilet and WWF (WWE) had all but won the “Monday Night War” with WCW. Throughout, its ups and downs there was one man who was a constant in WCW.
He fought legends, put over jobbers and wrestled in a fake graveyard. That’s right, no matter how good or bad things were in that that pit of confusing storylines and other non-sense, he was there. He was the icon of WCW, their Undertaker and single best thing that general WWE audiences have never seen from WCW. That man was Sting.
Fans have waited since 2001 for the WWE and Sting to arrange something. It wasn’t until this year that Sting finally became a WWE guy. Even though he has yet to really debut on WWE TV.
WWE after signing Sting to a deal early this year has produced the long awaited DVD. This is something that listeners of my podcast will know that I’ve waited for four years on record!
It is with this context that I have to say I am more than a little disappointed. This was meant to be “Best of Sting” something similar to the WWE’s stellar work on Chris Jericho, Edge, Mankind etc. However, it is just a series of matches with little else.
There are a ton of matches here from Sting’s early days tagging with the man who would become The Ultimate Warrior (as the Blade Runners) to his feud with Hulk Hogan.
However, there is no context for these matches, no documentary and the barest attempt is provided by the WWE in the form of taped interviews simply to pad things out. It is just so disappointing.
Sting had two major personas that people would know: the bleach-blonde “Surfer” Sting and the black and white “The Crow” Sting. And his first WWE DVD tries to play with that separation in its content divide.
On the Blu-Ray set, the first disc is all things “Surfer Sting” while disc two is “The Crow” Sting. The matches are hard to get into due to no context and are jarring.
Even as a WCW fan, I forget a lot of what set up these matches and what was going on during the matches. This was compounded in the case of the latter matches on the set.
There was so much happening in the death throes of WCW that you can’t just watch random matches. It’s impossible to follow or enjoy them in any way.
Sting had some good matches and he is one of my favourite wrestlers but his body of work can’t carry a DVD set alone. He needs a real DVD release with all the bells and whistles.
“The Best of Sting” barely sees the man himself on camera outside of the matches. Look, WWE, old interviews from nearly twenty years ago just don’t cut it.
To be fair, if you’re a Sting fan then buy this DVD. I liked this set as a fan of Sting. However, if you’ve never seen this man wrestle, wait. This will not be the last WWE set for the man called Sting.
Sting was a guy that was really about his character and the story of his feuds not the matches. After his short run in WWE is over, then we can expect the DVD set that The Stinger and we, his fans, deserve.
The best of Sting is out now from WWEdvd.co.uk.
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