WWF Hell Yeah – The Stone Cold Saga Continues

I’m continuing to pick videos that I’ve never watched at random from my collection. This has been a really fun experiment so far, as usually I’m on a more dedicated viewing path.

I finished viewing Hell Yeah – The Stone Cold Saga Continues. This was an interesting little piece of nostalgia. It picks up after that awesome Cause Stone Cold Says So tape, and chronicles the next year of Austin’s career. This was obviously a rush release back in 99 to capitalize on the popularity of Austin at the time.

One interesting thing I was reading is that Hell Yeah is one of the first DVDs ever released by the WWF, along with Wrestlemania 15. The DVD format itself has even become nostalgic, especially these early releases, which had ancient special features like a Stone Cold biography that you could read on your screen and scroll through with your remote. Special features were in their infancy at this point, and just having them alone was a big bonus over VHS.

Hell Yeah was a quick and easy watch. The story follows Stone Cold leaving the arena and driving in a pickup truck to the next town and along the way he talks in half shoot/half kayfabe about all the big moments of his career from Wrestlemania 14 up to Backlash 99. This was definitely the peak of Austin and all of his big matches and crazy antics are featured. None of the matches or segments are in complete form, instead they’re shown in a montage format (with future WWF themes providing the backing music in a lot of them, like the Hardy Boys future music, Hardcore Holly, etc.). This actually made for a fun and original concept. I would have loved to have seen these matches in full, but the montages made them seem even more insane and hardcore than they were. Makes so much sense for the car crash mentality of the Attitude era.

We get a great look at Austin’s career and a really enjoyable look at what made the Attitude era so insane and memorable. We get tons of Austin-McMahon, which was so well done and fresh at the time, that it can never be duplicated. We get Austin’s big feuds with corporate Dude Love, his first blood title loss to Kane, him winning the belt back the next night on Raw, his feud with the Undertaker, his victory over him at Summerslam, McMahon using Undertaker and Kane to screw Austin out of the title in fall, McMahon firing Austin at Judgment Day 1998, being rehired by Shane McMahon, getting screwed at Survivor Series 98, Austin’s Buried Alive match with the Undertaker at Rock Bottom, the debut of the Ministry of Darkness, the Ministry crucifying Austin to the Undertaker “symbol”, the Undertaker trying to embalm Austin, the Royal Rumble 99 match, his feud with the Rock, the Rock throwing Austin off a bridge along with the “piece of trash” smoking skull belt, his Wrestlemania 15 title win, and finally him defeating the Rock in a rematch at Backlash.

All of this brought back so many memories and totally took me back to those 98 and 99 times in grade 11 and 12. Every day at school we talked about how great the WWF was and so looked forward to Raw. It was the height of buying all those Apter mags like PWI and the The Wrestler and reading the net all the time. Memories!

In between all these big moments and matches we get lots of commentary from Austin. Most hilarious, he’s obviously drinking and driving, as he always has a beer in his hand while driving his truck down the highway. These segments were poorly recorded (I guess to give it more of an Attitude look), and sometimes it’s hard to hear what he’s saying. There’s a lot of gems in his comments and I love hearing him talk in detail about his character and matches. This was great, as he adds in all kinds of little shoot comments and stories in between. He also talks at length about driving all those different vehicles during those zany Raw segments, like the zamboni, cement truck, monster truck, beer truck, etc.

The DVD is packed with special features, but no extra matches. We get tons of classic Austin promos from Raw, more montages of Austin’s secondary feuds and angles, and even clips of older segments from 96 and 97 when he just started getting hot as Stone Cold.

There’s also a kind of cool section featuring then-current stars telling little shoot stories about Austin. All these clips were too quick to mean much, but likely would have been interesting if they were longer.

Wow, surprised I was able to write so much about a DVD that had no matches on it! I have another Stone Cold DVD, the Stone Cold Truth, that was released late in his career, likely after he stopped wrestling. I might have to keep the Stone Cold mania up and give that a view sometime soon.