BRM Reviews KC's Timeline: History of WWF 1995 w/Kevin Nash

[Big Red Machine]

The more I see of it, the less I enjoy the Timeline series. I'm sure the information is accurate (as well as these guys remember it) and it is certainly informative, the structure of the series makes the things that are being talked about feel very disjointed, and nowhere was that more evident than in this DVD. Because they went through every event day by day, chronologically, they kept jumping back and forth between stories. While it makes sense for what they are doing, it can make things confusing for the viewer.

Another thing about this DVD was that, a lot of the time, the headline didn't really match what Nash talked about. For example, there was a heading that said "January 22, 1995- Royal Rumble, Tampa, FL- The Blu Brothers make their debut, managed by Uncle Zebekiah (Dutch Mantell)." You would expect that Nash would then talk about some contribution (whether positive or negative) that the Harris Brothers brought to the locker room, or maybe how people in the locker room viewed them, based on their time in ECW, Smokey Mountain, and the USWA, or maybe what Dutch brought to the locker room with his experience both as a worker in the US and as a booker in Puerto Rico... but no. Instead, Nash told an unremarkable story about his first road trips in the business, in which he drove for Dutch, Sid, and occasionally the Iron Sheik. In my opinion, if what Nash is talking about is entirely irrelevant and also not funny, cut it out of the DVD (especially in a series like Timeline where, in my opinion, the flow of the DVD is very important).

And this wasn't just an isolated incident. There were a few times where the headline was a show date, location and match result, and instead of talking about the match, Nash told a tangentially related story (which was also related to one or two other things) about some of the guys involved in the match. Would it really have been so much work to change the headline? Because of things like this, what seems to have been one of the major backstage events of 1995- the Kliq going on strike- never got its own headline, which it deserved, and would have been easy to do because it had a very clear starting and ending date.

Another flaw that this DVD had was that it was very Kliq-centric. Now this does make some sense, as those were the guys that Nash would have hung out with the most, and the people Nash had the most stories about would have been Kliq guys or guys that the Kliq had to wrestle or deal with often, such as Jeff Jarrett, Bam Bam, Bret, and Taker. I'm not faulting them for focusing on that, but when you compare this to the Timline: History of ECW DVDs that i have seen so far, (1994 with Shane Douglas and 1997 with Sabu) it seems that Nash isn't as in tune with what was going on in the company as a whole as the ECW guys were. I understand that ECW was a smaller company, but, for example, I don't think the tag team titles were ever mentioned once on this DVD.

I'm not trying to say that this DVD was all bad. There was some good stuff on it. You got some good stories, Nash got out some of his frustration on the way he was booked in the beginning of his run, the way that "guaranteed money" contracts originally worked in wrestling, not being included in the video game despite being the WWF Champion, some problems that people in the locker room (and not just the Kliq) had with Bret, and many other things going on in the WWE and IC Title pictures at the time. He explained what Waltman's role in vetting new talent was and the reasoning behind Mabel's push, talked about his big match with Bret at Survivor Series and his tweener turn the night afterwards. Like all of the Timeline series that I have seen so far, this one gets a rating of "rent it," but I don't think this one is even as good as the other ones I have seen.