The Very Best of GLOW
Collector’s Edition 3 DVD Set
Big Vision Entertainment
bvdvd.com and glowvod.com
$19.98
Reviewed by Joe Babinsack
Call it equal parts nostalgia, appreciation and a healthy perspective on what professional wrestling can be, but I really enjoyed watching “The Very Best of Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling”
What’s interesting to me is that when you explore the facets of wrestling that otherwise may scream “bad” -- the camp, the variety shows, the badly acted skits and sometimes less than technical wrestling, you find out that when the product is really built around that stuff, and not pretending to be otherwise, it has a certain charm.
Then again, when it is badly produced, foolishly written, hard to comprehend and pretends to be dressing up the core of what is - but isn’t - but fakes to be - professional wrestling, then you get TNA, or some of the awful crap that the WWE churns out from time to time.
Nope, for me, I’ll take GLOW.
Maybe it’s just the big hair, nylon clad legs and workout costumes; the laid back sexuality -- and the often campy gimmicks that were nothing but glorified stereotypes of women; the vastly more interesting and thought-out gimmicks; and in reality, some really good looking women who can also wrestle.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t Manami Toyota or Cutie Suzuki level.
It isn’t MsChif, Cheerleader Melissa and Sara Del Rey level either.
Nor is it Wendy Richter or the Fabulous Moolah.
It’s not Penny Banner or Mildred Burke or one of many dozens of truly class acts, truly impressive talents or classic wrestlers that deserve appreciation.
But it isn’t half-bad. Actually, it’s stunningly competent and overwhelmingly appealing to watch.
And again, I don’t just mean the classically out-dated, hairspray laced and overly bleached blonde mops that adorn these gals.
The craziest thing to me is that seeing women roll around and wrestle, with all the angles, suggestive positioning and “look at that” mentality is far sexier than watching silicon bounce al over the place, with scantily clad women, perversions on display and nothing left to the imagination.
Sure, call me a prude.
I don’t care.
Just take a gawking look at some of these ladies in action. I’m sure you remember Hollywood and Babe -- the Farmer’s Daughter, or the fabulous Ninotchka…. Or Tiffany Mellon, or Godiva or Cheyenne Cher.
Sure, some of the comedy bits were straight out of Hee-Haw, and well, maybe I’m dating myself beyond belief, but I’m sure there are those out there that remember what preceded your favorite wrestling shows, whether it was that crazy weird Doctor Who show on WOR, or Lawrence Welk, or the Meadows Racing, or of course, Hee-Haw.
Then again, there was that 11:00 hour when GLOW was on, and you just took in all that visual aspect of seeing ladies roll around the ring.
Watching men in tights?
We know how that goes in school when insidious and ignorant types can’t appreciate the bloodletting.
But talk about GLOW? That’s another story.
And it’s all here in the Collector’s Edition 3 DVD Set, Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling: Greatest TV Moments, 80’s Classics. All of it, from the horrendously bad Zelda’s Zingers, with the nerdy chick spouting off nonsense, in a sort of pre-liberal domination mindset during the last days of the Cold War. How about Tiffany Mellon’s warped sense of our own hardcore fandom, spouting off celebrity gossip and wrestling “reality” as if she was prescient to both TMZ and the WON.
We’ve got Godiva’s Bare Facts, and a whole lot of cheeky matches … but hey, almost all of that flesh is covered!
Who can forget Big Bad Mama, and her weird campaign to be mayor. Or Fiji??
And how about that opening and the intros to the different characters. It’s like someone saw the Chicago Bears rap and decided to run with it past it’s shelf life. Crappy rapping by white chicks? Is that actually legal?
But then you get to see the women in action, and they’re doing old school psychology -- albeit on a faster pace. They’re doing fireman’s carry’s and working the leg and working a body part. They’re not just finishing every match with a roll up….or a schoolgirl (to call it more cutesy and pretend that the fans just don’t care.)
Man, I just can’t get away from being a critic, now, can I?
The point is, GLOW featured sound wrestling talent. They certainly weren’t going to go broadway (wow… Hollywood writer’s can’t come up with a line like that, can they?) And they certainly weren’t going to go hardway, either.
But what I love about GLOW is that it was a self-contained universe. You could almost imagine THE GREAT MOOLAH appearing on one show, but she wouldn’t be MOOLAH, but Slave Girl Moolah, and she’d be campy, talented and awesome in her guest appearance.
These days, one problem with wrestling is that Vince has opened up to acknowledge pro wrestling’s history, and he stopped filtering it through his own unique perspective. What that has done is stop the WWE from being it’s own universe, where you know coming in that you must suspend your disbelief, that you must acknowledge that the promotion is it’s own dimension of rules and illogic, and that nothing that happens in the ring really means much -- except that it is the product.
GLOW was able to do the skits, the “back stage” zaniness and the campy reflections on what others thought that professional wrestling was. And it didn’t even pay James Hold for any of his great one-liners.
But it remained a self-contained comedy and an overall sense of atmosphere that rarely broke it’s own sense of kayfabe.
And that’s refreshing.
Argh, I can’t do the requisite “original ECW” segue….I just can’t!
So let’s skip it and go straight to the requisite continuance of complaints about Vince McMahon and the current state of the WWE: wrestling today absorbed the concept of worked reality, and we’re paying the price for it.
Wrestling is no more real than House, MD.
Wrestling is supposed to be taken with a grain of salt, and a self-contained reality, and it’s own set of rules. Since Vince doesn’t comprehend rules, and since he destroyed his products sense of self-containment, the WWE has been adrift. In part because it’s no longer about personalities, because HHH has no personality, and of course, he cannot allow talent to outshine him.
With a great TV show, you can get into the reality that it conveys.
You don’t watch House for learning about how to be a doctor, you watch it to get into the head of a conniving, super-cynical and super-brilliant bastard who solves every medical mystery he sniffs.
You don’t watch wrestling because you want to be a crazed athlete. You watch it for the ongoing drama of it all. You watch it because it rewards you for knowing the history of the characters. You watch it because you identify/appreciate/idolize or even adore one character over another.
Oh, yeah. I’m talking about GLOW here.
What did you think I was talking about? Professional wrestling circa 2008?
GLOW may not be the greatest professional wrestling of all time, but it shows a side of the product that once made pro wrestling interesting, enjoyable and most of all entertaining.
And sure, almost all of it was about the eye-candy.
It sure wasn’t about the acting, no matter how bad it got, or the comedy, not matter how bad it got, or the scripting, because that was bad as well.
Ah… nostalgia. The place where you can enjoy and experience professional wrestling at it’s finest.
