Wario Van Peebles
4/30/13 4:34pm |
REVIEW: For All Mankind
Let me first express my joy, for this is my first WWE Blu-ray that has been completely free of editing "WWF" from the entirety of the disc! It was fantastic being able to watch matches and clips on the biography disc without having all the unavoidable choppy editing work to remove that content from everything! This alone will make me more tempted to buy WWE Blu-rays in the future. The only small setback is that they don't have the Cactus Jack music from either of his WCW runs so instead they use this weird generic Mankind sounding music that kind of takes away from the entrances. I wish they just would have used his WWF music for Cactus Jack as to me that was his best theme.
Naturally the first thing I watched on the disc was the biography, as someone who has bought the other Mick Foley DVDs (or even VHS for that matter) I was happy to see that not much from those videos were shown again. This biography offered so much new footage that it really didn't seem like I was just watching a slightly extended version of one of the other videos released before and I thought overall it would make a great visual companion to someone who wanted to read his first book "Have A Nice Day" and wanted something that showed many of the key moments in that book. The biography is very lengthy and covers all the way up to his promo with CM Punk about relevancy in 2012. I thought the biography was very entertaining and I really enjoyed the words they would add from his family/friends/wrestlers telling their favorite stories or adding a comment from one of them added to a segment. One of my favorite scenes is the footage of Foley wrestling at Dominic DeNucci's wrestling school, most notably with Shane Douglas. There are some great clips from his early days in this biography including some of his stuff in World Class as part of Devastation Incorporated. Foley plays up Cactus Jack as a totally different kind of character than anywhere else in WCCW so it was great to see them add footage that early on, even going earlier than that showing more clips from when he was an "enhancement talent" on WWF television. As someone who already owns the "Biggest Hits & Misses" DVD I was hoping that there wouldn't be many repeat matches besides the ones that would be too important to leave out, overall I was very happy with only three of the matches had been on the previous DVD, but most importantly it was a win/win because I now have these matches unedited on this Blu-ray. A nice touch was having Joey Styles join Mick on special commentary for a few of the matches. One of the other things I had enjoyed about the previous dvd was listening to Foley talk about the matches. Listening to these two reminded me of One Night Stand where I first saw how great they could be commentating, it is really a shame they don't at least do a video series online talking about matches if they can't get into a booth and commentate for a show on television. Overall the chronological order of matches was decent. As much as I know it seems like the typical answer that there should have been more matches, in my opinion there were quite a few matches should have made it onto this release. But, even the 3 disc "Ultimate" Ric Flair DVD didn't have absolutely every important match on it, so it wasn't my expectations that they'd get every important match to me, either. I just think there were some things skimmed over that Foley's fans would like to see. There are promotions and matches that I wish they would have certainly spent more time on. His matches in Smokey Mountain weren't even discussed and his run in ECW was more of a segway between his second run in WCW and his "anti-hardcore promos" and going to Japan and winning the King of the Deathmatch Tournament. Perhaps down the road we will get a "Mick Foley in ECW" release that would cover all of his matches and promos the way it should, that would be worth a separate purchase in my opinion. I would highly recommend this purchase for anyone who buys these releases for the WWE biographies, just as much as I do any big fan of Mick Foley. This is well worth the addition in anyone's collection. I got myself one of the "Socko Edition" Blu-rays when I pre-ordered mine. It didn't cost any extra which is a nice touch I hope to see WWE continue to do in the future. It is definitely worth getting the Blu-ray over the DVD if you can, as there are a significant number of extra stories that are spliced from interviews for the biography and added to the Blu-Ray version only. Overall I would give "For All Mankind" 8 Phantom teeth in the nose out of 10. Have a nice day! 
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