Kayfabe! – YouShoot with Jim Cornette

KAYFABE!
YouShoot with Jim Cornette

Some things just go together: peanut butter and jelly, milk and cookies, etc. this is one of those cases. Jim Cornette can read the phone book and be entertaining. YouShoot has, more often than not, been entertaining, if not very informative and insightful. This is the best of both worlds. In fact this really doesn’t even need to be reviewed beyond simply saying “It’s great, get it now!”

There’s only one real thing that could be perceived as a negative with this DVD. The fact that Cornette repeats a few stories that he’s told in other interviews he’s done. But he’s done so many various shoot interviews, going back to 1993 that he really can’t be expected to remember every story that he’s told before and keep everything 100% new. And, unless you’re like me and compulsively buy Jim Cornette shoots, then it’s something you won’t notice too much because there’s only a few big repeated stories to be found. The main one being from his time in Mid South where a bunchy of angry fans approached him and Dennis Condrey leading to Condrey stomping one of their heads into the pavement. That was, according to Jim from his original shoot where he told this story “wonderfully effective against this particular individual, but his twelve friends didn’t fucking like it at all.” There’s also his rant against hardcore wrestling, which he’s done before, but never gets old, and he adds a couple of things to it. Such as saying he took the scaffold bump and messed up his knee, but he made $10,000 and he still regretted it. He also makes a nice comment that twenty five years ago people thought it was real and nobody got hurt. Now, they all get hurt and nobody thinks it’s real.

The New Jack YouShoot was tremendously entertaining and funny, but I found it to be a bit lacking the insight and wrestling departments. The Bob Holly YouShoot was very informative and interesting, but not so much on the entertaining side. Here, you’ve got the best of both worlds. Cornette is in all his glory, he’ll go off at a moment’s notice about WWE, Johnny Ace, Vince Russo, Shawn Michaels, Batista, etc. He feels like the WWE intentionally tried to run off most of his prize pupils from OVW, they felt Nick Dinsmore was too plain, and then gave him Eugene just to have an excuse to fire him, but then he wound up getting over, so they buried him. He’d love to bring Nick into ROH, but he’ll always be pigeonholed as Eugene and he can’t suggest that to bookers with a straight face and fans will never accept him. Jim saw Johnny Jeter as the next Ricky Morton, and the WWE made him a cheerleader and then demoralized him to the point that he’s since quit the business. He once made a list of the OVW roster and rated them 1-20 of who was ready to go to the main roster. Dinsmore, Rob Conway, and Doug Basham were at the top of the list, they took numbers eighteen, nineteen, and twenty, Orlando Jordan, Mark Jindrak, and someone else Jim can’t recall. There’s also his epic rant against Batista (another question from myself btw), and a not-so-epic rant against Shawn Michaels.

When he’s not spewing venom, Cornette is just funny in general. When asked if he ever had a bowel movement in the Impact Zone he says he had many of them, mostly so he could hide from all the stupidity going on. When asked if he thinks TNA will charge fans admission, he says no, but they’ll probably charge them to leave. He tells a funny story about riding with Lex Luger, Cornette was eating a Wendy’s Cheeseburger and had grease dripping down to his elbow and Luger looked like he was about to get sick. Jim asks him “When did you last have a cheeseburger?” and Luger says “I had some fries about six months ago.”

But, on the other side of the coin, Jim is very informative and insightful as well. He tells some great stories in SMW. He talks about the hassle of getting the TV stations to air the show, because in the four or so years since the territories dried up and Jim started SMW, the infomercial became very popular and, as a result, TV stations no longer really cared about ratings or selling advertising time outside of their local news. Also, his original choice for the first SMW Champion was Brad Armstrong (which I agree would have been the best) but Brad was unavailable.

As per usual with the YouShoot releases, the interview is broken up into various segments with relevant questions. Starting with Jim’s early years, before he got into the business and his time working the territories up until he and the Midnights joined Crockett in late 1985. Here’s a newsflash that’s sure to rock the collective IWC. Jim and Norm Dooley started star ratings for matches (the ones so many people seem to live and die by) as a joke. Norm was writing up little reviews in his newsletter just making various comments about the match saying it was good, great, excellent, etc. Jim, as a joke, told him he should do what TV guide does and assign star ratings like they do for the movies. To his surprise, Norm did it, and the rest is history. After the early years we talk about WCW, SMW, WWE, ECW, OVW, TNA, and ROH.

Of course, it’s not a YouShoot without the fun games. First off we have Stump Cornette, which is wrestling trivia, fans sent in questions (including this fan) and if you stumped him (like I did) you get the DVD for free. Jim does fairly well for himself, he only misses my question, which is who the first person to hold all three ECW Titles was (look it up or buy the DVD), and the question of who ended Tatanka’s winning streak in the WWF? Corny was too busy running SMW to pay attention to the WWF in 1993. In the end Kayfabe Commentaries only loses $50 from Stump Cornette.

The other game is something that’s right up Cornette’s alley “The Shit List” which consists of Sean giving Cornette various names and Cornette ranks them on how much they’re on his shit list. He surprisingly actually takes a few names off the board, such as Vince McMahon, deciding that it’s not really Vince he’s mad at in regards to the WWE screwing OVW around, but rather the people working for Vince about it. Of course, this comes with the requisite (hilarious) Kevin Dunn impression.

Cornette’s final comments after nearly four hours, “I was being brief!” That’s okay though, because Kayfabe Commentaries has already announced that there will be a sequel coming soon!

The 411: Without exaggeration, this is the best YouShoot that Kayfabe Commentaries has done. Absolutely pick this up.
Final Score:  10.0   [ Virtually Perfect ]