Owen Hart’s passing in May 1999 stunned the wrestling world. To the wider world, the attention came as this was the first time in a long long time that a wrestler had died without it being the traditional “wrestler’s death”. It robbed fans of a talented, yet under-appreciated performer, and caused reverberations that tore a grieving family apart.
Over sixteen years later, WWE released their first official retrospective into the former “Rocket”, with the DVD and Blu-ray release “Owen: Hart of Gold”. It should be noted that this release came without the blessing of Owen’s widow (the reason why there’s been no prior tie-in with WWE, either in the form of a video release, a book, or even appearances in video games), yet still featured a lot of the wider Hart family as they told stories from Owen’s childhood, starring Owen as a precocious booker, laying out matches between a stuffed monkey and a cat.
Despite this being a two-disc Blu-ray/three-disc DVD release, the meat and potatoes of the show is painfully short. Typically a WWE documentary or retrospective weighs in at around two hours, with a smattering of bonus matches, interviews and whatever else the company can pull from its’ video library. This release barely lasts an hour, and serves as a mixture of stories from Owen’s career, along with several “Owen Tales”: these typically being stories of Owen’s reknowned ribs, which jarringly added extra colour to the main documentary. Whilst not out of place, these felt like they were DVD extras inserted into the main show to pad it out.
After covering Owen’s early career in Stampede, where virtually every talking head put him over as the “best pound for pound wrestler in the family”, we jump to Owen’s initial WWE run as the Blue Blazer. The montage of clips describes the Blazer as someone who “showed more moves in 3 minutes that most people know in a lifetime” in what was perhaps 80s coded speak for what we call “spot monkeys” these days, as Rob Van Dam (and his swollen, black eye) credited him for “being the man who makes him think outside the box”. Of course, Owen’s late 80s run in WWE came to nought, and that segued into brief mentions from Scott Hall and Vader of Owen going on to wrestling in Japan, Mexico and Europe, before another aborted run in North America, this time through a forgotten spell in WCW, which only seemed to be present as a way to give another shot to WCW “not knowing how to use talent”.
Fast-forward back to his second run in the WWE, and they rush through the short-lived New Foundation revival (with Owen and Jim “the Anvil” Neidhart), and the better forgotten High Energy tag team with Koko B. Ware, which led to Owen once again talking of quitting wrestling. We then see the story of how Bret put his foot down and insisted that a planned brotherly feud with Bruce Hart be ditched in favour of a feud with Owen. Watching the clips from Survivor Series 1993 showed the seeds being sewn for the feud that really broke Owen out of the pack in 1994. These matches only aired in very brief clip form (which I don’t mind considering that they were included in full elsewhere on the DVD).
More spotlight is given to Owen’s runs as the Slammy Award Winning Owen Hart, and his time in the mid-to-late 90s Hart Foundation. Weirdly, his spell in the Nation was glossed over, instead jumping to the events of the fateful evening of Sunday May 23, 1999.
In the WWE Network era, DVD releases have to work a lot harder to become a “must buy”, given that the network contains every PPV and a good chunk of televised matches. Fortunately, “Owen: Hart of Gold” contains several extra matches which aren’t available on the Network, including bouts from shows like Wrestling Spotlight and Wrestling Challenge (neither of which I can see ever making the light of day onto the network!), and an outing from a promotional “public workout” for WrestleMania 11.
As a wrestler, you can’t escape the feeling that Owen was always a man ahead of his time – and whilst his name will always remain high up on the list of the best wrestlers never to win the WWE title, there’ll always be that part wondering just what could have been had Owen not passed away when he tragically did. All in all, the WWE’s release of this DVD is a much overdue insight into the career of perhaps one of the first “internet darlings”, but it really did come across as something of an afterthought. Although it didn’t help that the focus of the documentary wasn’t around in a time where the company routinely recorded sit-down interviews in the way they did now. As a retrospective, it does give you a flavour of who Owen Hart was, but in the end you’re left wanting so much more.