In addition to the Bret Hart set (see here) WWE are reported to be planning some kind of Starrcade DVD for release at the end of the year. They are also rumoured to be changing the name of the December PPV (usually an awful show) to "Starrcade", though whether there will be any kind of NWA/WCW acknowledgement no one yet knows. More likely it will be little more than taking a WCW PPV name – such as the Great American Bash – and running it into the ground with a horrible show.

Starrcade was the first true super show. There had been bigger stadium shows before. There had been closed circuit broadcasts at shows which had sold all their tickets. But Starrcade was the biggest show yet. It was the most important show to date from the most important company in wrestling – the NWA. Starrcade was the original "granddaddy of them all". A title shamelessly stolen by revisionist historians and given to Wrestlemania. But Wrestlemania came a year and a half after Starrcade and not even Vince McMahon can change that. A Starrcade retrospective – a logical explanation for the company’s meeting with Dusty Rhodes who has always been credited with creating Starrcade and who headlined the second and third shows – sounds like a fantastic prospect. While full Starrcade shows will likely never be released (unlike WWF PPVs from back in the day) there should be plenty to fill a two or even three disc compilation.

Or is there?

In the words of Sir Loyd Grossman, let’s look at the evidence.

Starrcade 1983

The main event was the classic cage match between Ric Flair and legendary world champion Harley Race. It would be a lock for this collection except that it has already been released. I know it’s on the Ric Flair Collection but I’ve got a nagging feeling it is also on another WWE release. Since all these historic collections are aimed at the same core group of fans, it makes no sense to release a match that they’ve already got. Indeed, there is so much crossover between people who would buy a Starrcade DVD and people who bought the Flair set that I would be against any duplication. In its heyday, Starrcade was synonymous with Ric Flair even if Flair wasn’t always best served by Starrcade bookers. The argument could be made that a Starrcade collection without Flair is like a Wrestlemania collection without Hogan but I’m holding firm and leaving Flair vs. Race off the Best of Starrcade.

The other famous match from the show is Roddy Piper vs. Greg Valentine in a bloody and brutal chain match. That match was released only a few weeks ago on the Best of the 80s three-disc set. There is already a pattern developing here. The closeness of the 80s release to my mind bars this match from inclusion too.

I think the 1983 show should be represented by the tag team title match between Ricky Steamboat & Jay Youngblood and the Brisco Brothers. You could show highlights of the two main events but the tag title match would be worth including as it featured Ricky Steamboat and that is literally never a good thing. A nice bonus would be the Abdullah the Butcher vs. Carlos Colon match. Not that it was any good (I’ve only seen clips but it was achingly slow despite only going five minutes) but it would be good for new fans to see current superstar Carlito’s father in action.

Starrcade 1984

The theme continues as we see that the main event of Flair vs. Rhodes (with the first annual "Crappy Flair-Rhodes Finish Booked by Dusty") was also included on the Best of the 80s. Looking down the card it seems a strange affair. I’m sure it all meant something at the time but when the biggest show of the year features such unknowns as Keith Larson and the Zambuie Express you know you’re not at the Superbowl. One match stands out and that is the TV title match. Just as a Ricky Steamboat match can never be a bad thing so too a Tully Blanchard bout. So a Steamboat vs. Blanchard title match is a must. Another bonus would be the Wahoo McDaniel vs. Superstar Billy Graham US title match. It’s another short contest (and I suspect a bad one as both were past it by this point) but Graham’s early 80s comeback fascinates me.

Starrcade 1985

This was a huge show. So big in fact that it was held in two different arenas. The sixteen matches were split evenly between the two sites and the live crowd watched closed circuit feeds of the bouts from the other site. Wrestlemania 2 and Starrcade 86 recreated the idea and it has never been done since. The second annual "Crappy Flair-Rhodes Finish Booked by Dusty" match is on the Flair set so I won’t include it. The next two matches though deserve consideration. Magnum TA was on the road to superstardom and could’ve been the guy to keep Jim Crocket in business. Maybe. Who knows? We do know that he had a tonne of charisma and Dusty Rhodes loved him. He was also a good worker when in the ring with someone who could overcome his weaknesses. The always flawless Tully Blanchard was his opponent that night and the crowd loved their I Quit cage match (complete with its grisly finish – a rare example of Dusty’s booking not burning the fans). The match was included on "Bloodbath: Wrestling's Most Incredible Steel Cage Matches" but that will have been out for two years when Starrcade is released and I think a certain overlap is acceptable. If we’re being strict and saying no re-releases then the Rock’n’Roll Express’s world tag team title match against the Koloffs would be my second choice. I can imagine how excited the crowd were to see the all American boys beat the hated Russians at the height of the cold war. Oops – I suppose I should’ve put spoiler warnings in there. After all, this is only twenty years ago and purely hypothetical.

Starrcade 1986

The 1986 spectacular was once more split over two arenas – North Carolina and Atlanta – and was subtitled "The Night of the Skywalkers". Not an homage to Mark Hamill but rather the closed-circuit debut of perhaps the worst gimmick match ever invented. The scaffold match. The match – between the Road Warriors and the Midnight Express is on the RW DVD set but it is almost certainly not worth the space. It is impossible (or, as Barry Letts once said about time travel, "im possible… two words") to have a good scaffold match. Fifteen feet in the air and only a narrow walkway on which to work. The match is usually six minutes of stalling followed by a nervous scuffle and someone falling down to the ring. Fortunately, Starrcade 86 offers us our first unreleased main event – Ric Flair vs. Nikita Koloff. The match was supposed to be Flair vs. Magnum TA (perhaps crowning Magnum as the new Man in the NWA) but when Mags was paralysed in a car crash his spot was filled by a newly babyfaced Nikita. The only undercard match I’d consider is Wahoo McDaniel vs. Rick Rude. A pre-WWF Rude would be interesting to see. He wasn’t far off his rookie year in 1986 and yet already had superstar written all over him.

Starrcade 1987 was a pivotal moment in the history of the NWA and Jim Crocket Promotions for several reasons. Firstly, it was their first attempt at a pay-per-view, a venture doomed to fail when the spiteful McMahon created Survivor Series specifically to run on the same day and shut Crocket out from all but a handful of cable networks. Secondly, it was the first Starrcade to be held outside the company’s heartland of Georgia and the Carolinas. The moving of the biggest show of the year to Chicago had a significant impact on the company’s ability to draw in their key markets for years to come. Thirdly, the Chicago fans were left very unhappy when Dusty Rhodes made them think their hometown heroes, the Road Warriors, had won the world tag team titles. It was typical Rhodes booking but it killed Chicago as an NWA town. It sounds silly today but history tells us what happened. Fourthly, it featured the Starrcade debuts of two men who would each be given the NWA/WCW torch over the next few years – Sting and Lex Luger. Finally, it featured a badly misjudged world champion in Ronnie Garvin (who two years earlier had competed at Starrcade in drag as "Miss Atlanta Lively"). That said, it is a card which still looks good after nearly twenty years. Only the Warriors’ match has been released on DVD so the obvious picks would be Luger vs. Rhodes or Garvin vs. Flair. The Rock and Roll Express met the Midnight Express in what would’ve been the match of the night had not the curse of the scaffold been forced upon them.

Starrcade 1988

This is the first (of many) Starrcades not to be represented on a WWE library release. For whatever reason the entire card remains in the vaults. However, I’m not going to pick the main event for inclusion on my Starrcade DVD. But why, I hear you ask, is Flair vs. Luger being left out? The answer is that there will be a second Ultimate Ric Flair collection sooner or later and his feud with Luger (which lasted nearly three years off and on) has to be included. This Starrcade match is probably the only one Flair ever won by pinfall. It’s certainly the only PPV match I can remember where Flair came out on top. When the Flair vs. Luger programme is put down in the history books I want Flair to be seen to win it. Not Luger. My other reason for leaving it out is that I want to include the Midnight Express vs. Midnight Express match. The angle was that Paul Heyman brought the "original" Midnight Express in to feud with the 1988 version managed by Jim Cornette. As the only Midnights match not to feature either a man in drag or a scaffold, this bout has to be on the DVD.

Starrcade 1989

This was either a brilliant idea or the death of Starrcade as a Wrestlemania level show. Briefly, the show consisted of two round-robin tournaments. Ric Flair, Sting, Lex Luger and the Great Muta faced each other in six short matches while the top tag teams – the Road Warriors, the Samoans, Doom and the Steiners – did the same. I remember seeing the TV leading up to the show on ITV and thought it sounded like an awesome idea. In practice it just meant a series of brief matches which didn’t matter. There was no title on the line, no feud to be settled and no matches which stood out. The best one can say about the show is that the Samoans were last minute substitutes for the Sky Scrapers so we were at least spared three Sid Vicious matches in one evening. If we’re having every show represented then I’d pick Flair vs. Sting or the Road Warriors vs. the Steiners. It says a lot about WCW management in 1989 that they had Ric Flair vs. Great Muta go less than two minutes.

Starrcade 1990

This was the infamous night when the "Black Scorpion" storyline came to its conclusion and the masked man – designed to create a new challenger for Sting’s world title and end their reliance on the supposedly past it Ric Flair – turned out to be Ric Flair. The match (which Flair worked in a totally non-Flair way to hide his identity as long as possible) was horrible and shouldn’t be released until the WWE’s version of Wrestlecrap comes out on DVD. Most of the show was taken up with an "International" tag team tournament which was designed to put the Steiners over even more. Someone had the idea of using genuine international wrestlers which meant seven of the eight teams were almost entirely unknown to the fans. We did however get to see a pre-Public Enemy Rocco Rock (pretending to be South African), a pre-USA Konnan and Rey Misterio, uncle of Rey Mysterio. My pick from the 1990 show is Lex Luger vs. Stan Hansen. Hansen, always good value, had a brief run in WCW during 1990 but was far better suited to Japan. He left the US for good after this match with Luger and I don’t think he ever came back. Certainly not for any kind of major run.

Starrcade 1991

We finish the first half of this piece with the first ever Lethal Lottery / Battlebowl show. Yes, it had two nicknames. The concept was that there were 40 wrestlers split into 20 random teams, they would face off in 10 random tag matches with the winners advancing to a 20 man battle royal. The winner of the battle royal would face the world champion at the next PPV. The idea of seeing match ups we wouldn’t normally see was a good idea back in the kayfabe days where heels never fought heels and babyfaces never met babyfaces. That’s why the Royal Rumble has remained the second biggest show of the year. Unfortunately, the Lethal Lottery was booked very badly. For one thing WCW didn’t have 40 superstars at that time. Watching the show it is easy to believe everything was random. Indeed, the book "Wrestlecrap" claims the draw was legit. There were too many coincidences (Freebird vs. Freebird for one) to believe that but I could believe that they jotted a couple of things down on a pad and then let nature take its course for the rest. The secret of the Royal Rumble was always in the detail. Nothing was left to chance as Pat Patterson made everything count and everything logical. WCW just threw a bunch of guys (some of whom literally couldn’t wrestle) and let them ad lib their way through ten of the worst matches you’ll ever pay to see. The DVD should, at most, have the Sting & Abdullah the Butcher vs. Bobby Eaton and Brian Pillman match (which was more of an angle) and then the second half of the battle royal. That way we get out of 1991 in under 20 minutes.

I’ll be back soon with 1992 to 2000. How much worse would Starrcade get? And would anything make it special again?

The answers are "much much much" and "yes".