Royal Rumble rewatch: 1990

At last, I have reached my penultimate Rumble in my quest to rewatch every match before January 28th. In this one, I took on Hulk Hogan's 1st Rumble win way back in 1990 from Orlando.

Winner: Hulk Hogan

Final Four: Hogan, Mr. Perfect, Rick Rude, Hercules

MVP: Ted DiBiase, who came in at #1 a year after "buying" the #30 spot. He lasted nearly 45 minutes before being dumped by The Ultimate Warrior.

Best Moment: Lots of good stuff here, but the obvious choice is Hulk Hogan being one of the stars that helped push The Ultimate Warrior over the top rope, which planted the seeds of what would become the WrestleMania main event that year. It's good to see that even in Year 3 of the Rumble experiment, they already knew that it was a great place to advance main event storylines even if they hadn't decided yet to automatically give the winner a title match.

Worst Moment: Bret Hart was super over with the crowd, but the camera didn't even capture his elimination by Dusty Rhodes as they were too focused on Andre The Giant.

Best Surprise: Too early on in the Rumble's existence for surprise entrants.

Weirdest Entrant: This was a pretty stacked field all the way through, but I did chuckle when Terry "The Red Rooster" Taylor came out.

Best Elimination: This way a tie. First, Marty Jannetty took one of the sickest Rumble bumps ever as he went for a flying crossbody on Ted DiBiase who pulled the rope down causing him to eliminate himself. It looked fantastic. The second was Dusty Rhodes eliminating The Macho King in surprising fashion with a huge back body drop.

Overall thoughts: This was a great Rumble match. What struck me first off was the star power we had here. I usually think of the 92 Rumble having the most stars in it during this era, but this one wasn't far off. At point point early on in the ring you have: DiBiase, Jake Roberts, Randy Savage, Roddy Piper, Bret Hart, Dusty Rhodes, and Andre The Giant all in there at the same time.

My only complaint is that they sorta front-loaded it, and only Hogan and Warrior really seemed like they had any shot to win once the back half of the field came out. Still, Hogan and Warrior did their thing to set up their match and it was cool to see Mr. Perfect get all the way to the Final 2 here. This one really holds up.

Grade: 8 out of 10