WWF Shotgun Saturday Night (March 22, 1997)

After a bit of a hiatus from most wrestling I’ve slowly gotten back into the swing of things with my random-ass Watch WWF ’97 But Only Shotgun and PPVs project that I was working on last year. Today we’re taking a look at the March 22, 1997 episode of Shotgun. This is the WrestleMania “go home show” so I honestly don’t expect much here beyond a bunch of video packages to give me the hard sell on Mania one last time.

WWF on MSG Network (March 16, 1997)

Dok Hendrix’s constant hyping of the March 16th return to Madison Square Garden during episodes of Shotgun Saturday Night got to me and I have decided to go ahead and watch that show. I have, in the past, watched and reviewed “fan cam” footage of a wrestling show on this here website, but that is not what is going on here today. From the mid-70s through early 1997 the MSG Network would occasionally air WWF cards from Madison Square Garden. The show I’m reviewing today was (at the time of my writing this) the last of these broadcasts. So let’s see how things were on a quasi-house show from this time.

WWF Shotgun Saturday Night (March 15, 1997)

Time for another exciting episode of Shotgun Saturday Night. This is the first episode of the show that wasn’t overlapping with WWF Superstar and the show isn’t coming to us from Europe so we’ll have an idea of what the new Shotgun Saturday Night format is going to look like going forward so let’s get to it!

WWF Shotgun Saturday Night (March 8, 1997)

Time for another exciting episode of Shotgun Saturday Night. Coming to us pre-recorded from the Deutchslandhalle in Berlin, Germany. I have a feeling we’re going to get another pretty mediocre episode this week since they’re still figuring out the new Shotgun format and we’ve got this European Tour to deal with but maybe I’ll be surprised and it will be good.

Also just as a note this is the last episode of Shotgun that is more or less the same show as that week’s Superstars. The following week Superstars would transition to being strictly a recap show which I honestly hope decreases some of the recaps we’re getting here. I’d much rather see Vader squash a dude who wrestled in my hometown indie fed at this point in ’97 than a five minute recap of junk that happened on Raw but I suppose we’ll have to wait until next week to see how that pans out.

WWF In Your House 13: Final Four (February 16, 1997)

It’s time for WWF In Your House 13: Final Four! It was a PPV that was supposed to determine the #1 Contender for the WWF Championship after all manner of Stone Cold shenanigans made the Royal Rumble less decisive than folks would have liked it to be. But between the Royal Rumble and Thursday Raw Thursday, Shawn Michaels lost his smile and relinquished the belt so now the WWF no longer needs to find a #1 Contender they need to find a WWF Champion.

WWF Superstars (January 26, 1997)

So I’m taking a bit of a detour from watching Shotgun Saturday Night to watch another C-Show from 1997, specifically the January 26, 1997 episode of WWF Superstars. Why am I watching this you ask? Well on the January 25, 1997 episode of Shotgun Saturday Night they hyped this episode up and in doing so alerted me to the fact that there was actually a second WWF (Insert Program Name Here) Bowl match.

That’s right folks! The story you heard about the Raw Bowl being so atrociously bad that it was never revisited was as wrong as the legend you heard about the 1997 Royal Rumble being the first appearance of JR’s cowboy hat. So let us see how the WWF dealt with Superbowl Sunday on a random C-Show back in 1997.

WWF Shotgun Saturday Night (January 11, 1997)

I’m going to guess that because I watched an episode of Los Super Astros the other day this popped up in my YouTube recommendations. I figured “Why not?” and so here are words about the second episode of WWF Shotgun Saturday Night. This is from when the show was still a live late night broadcast primarily for the New York market.