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Meltzer reviews the Hart/Michaels WWE DVD

Posted: Oct 9th 2011 By: CMBurnham

I got an advanced copy of the Michaels vs. Hart DVD last night. It was pretty much awesome. My feeling was that Bret Hart was being painstakingly honest. Shawn Michaels was very readily admitting he was a dick a lot back in those days, tried to explain where he was coming from while always falling back to not handling situations well in those days, didn't really try and defend his actions past in certain cases thinking he took more heat than he thinks he should have.

Jim Ross was also excellent in his role, and in some ways surprising because in the discussion of Montreal, Ross was very clearly sympathetic to Hart, as was Michaels. If you had told me even seven years ago that WWE would do a DVD, sold around Montreal (and they've been wanting to do that forever) and it would have Michaels and Jim Ross (representing the company) on it and all be sympathetic to Hart and give a pretty fair appraisal of his view without any "he was going to show up on Nitro with the belt" or "Vince had no choice," I'd have been surprised.

There was no defending of Vince here other than if you view it in 2011 when wins and losses don't matter and the belt is a joke, the idea of either guy let alone both putting so much into who will agree to lose to who, who won't, and refusing to lose to a certain person on a certain day today comes off as silly. In that sense, with 2011 eyes, there is a defense of Vince (and they didn't bring up the contract issue regarding creative control, but I won't knock that because they spent more than enough time on it). But in the period from 1950-1997 at least, the vast majority of champions would not have put Michaels over in that situation. Many would have just no-showed the match as opposed to walk into the hornet's den and trusting the words of a referee.

As much as they pushed that the match in Montreal should not be the focal point, and should not define it, it was that discussion, much to my chagrin, that was the most compelling from all three points of view. Remember that Ross was running Talent Relations so he was very much in the loop and seemed to either have remembered things very well or studied them because he was right on with his questioning and where he was leading the discussion. But there was a level of introspection that I've never seen in a WWE release before, and a level of real emotion.

The reality is that because wrestling is so completely different today, when it comes to who can be on top, the value of the world title, etc. that both Hart and Michaels to someone who wasn't around at the time would come off as people who take angles and wins and losses and belts too seriously. I think a modern fan would have a difficult time understanding why both would take these things so seriously when it's all fake, and it's rubbed in your face. But in the context of the 90s, they were not that far away from what most of the main eventers would be reacting. But it was kind of a full circle of two guys who gravitated toward each other in the late 80s because the common thought was no matter how talented they were, they were too small to headline. Then when they both became headliners, their friendship turned to hatred over mistrust and jealousy, and eventually become friends again (and they really are, or at least when his was filmed, people who regularly keep in contact with each other).