Sofa K. Amazing Sofa's Number Fifteen Pick: Disco Inferno and Alex Wright Haas and Benjamin To be honest, I, much like everyone below me, is probably going to remember The World's Greatest Tag Team for being on the receiving end of one of The Rock's Worst Promos than anything else. I'll save them the trouble by not talking about it, but, c'mon. I don't have much else to talk about here. Shelton's awesome and all, and Charlie Haas is an idiot who likes to blow spots, land on his head, and scream as though he just won the goddamned Super Bowl, something which he, Monty Brown, and Peyton Manning will also never do. Sometimes I would wonder, in my feverish markish dreams, whether or not it was Michael Cole's absolute revulsion for this tag team that made the graphics guys add "So Called" to their team name in the little chevrons or whatever you call the stupid entrance graphics. Did they have a good entrance video? I still think we should have done best entrances. Disco Inferno and Alex Wright (Boogie Knights, Dancin' Fools, whatever) I vaguely remember them having a good entrance video. Maybe not. I almost wrote "faguely" instead of 'vaguely'. That's how Rico remembers entrance videos. I sure did vote for a lot of WCW teams. You can PLACE-AH BETS NOW-AH as to which Raven's Flock-related tag team I ultimately placed highest on my list this year, if you'd like. Maybe that should have been this year's WV-15, the 15 Best Flock-Related Things. Oh, I haven't really talked about Disco or Alex yet. Eh, they were okay. I needed throw away a point or two towards the end, and they seemed worthy enough, if only because Magnum TOKYO eventually subbed for Disco to form some sort of Japanese Male Stripper/German Raver tag team for a while. I'm having severe remorse about the Disco Inferno portion of this vote. Maybe it'd be better to just make this "Alex Wright and Anyone." Even The Wall. I hear he's is like a computer technician now or something. Alex, not The Wall. Unless you like zombies upgrading your RAM or writing C++ classes or whatever it is Alex is probably doing. int wall = 0; while (wall == 0) {       cout << BRAINS; } I don't remember much C++, but it would probably go something like that. God, this is going to be a tasteless WV-15.

Boobermonkeys Boobermonkeys' Number Fifteen Pick: Disco Inferno and Alex Wright Looking back at The World's Greatest Tag Team... there's not a lot to look back on. Sure, they had good matches with the other big WWE tag teams of the early to mid-2000s like The Frankensteins and Salt Lick, but who really gives a shit about that? It wasn't until Bradshaw's infamous "SHELTON AND SHANIQUA ARE THE SAME PERSON THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE TO ME GET A ROPE NEW YORK CITY City city" revelation that they truly began to shine, what with Shelton's application of Revlon to his Mr. Black Man Juicy-fied Lipseses. Other than that, they were pretty worthless, especially for a Guy With A Dead Brother and Black Guy With Huge Penis. So easily could have been The Emo Pimps. Rico and Haas were probably a better team. Imagine how great Rico and Shelton could have been. "A big black cock? I'M ON IT!" He'd give that Carolina Blacksnake some law. Love. I picked Disco and Alex Wright (the Boogie Knights, pssshaw) as they are sexy and sultry. Disco Inferno was kind of an afterthought after Alex's Clubbin' Dance, but the thought of a tag team never being on the same page because they like different types of music is always entertaining. Imagine if Big Show was all "dude, I'm all about Psychobilly" and Kane retorts with "fuck that, big man, New Age is where it's at. I'm ALL about the Enya." See, they're already better. Also, Disco and Alex introduced The Uneducated Americans to Tokyo Magnum / Magnum Tokyo back when he was still awesome and not Asian Val Venis.

Filmcans Filmcans' Number Fifteen Pick: Disco Inferno and... Wait, nobody Ebony and Ivory. Chocolate and Vanilla. Pryor and Wilder. Gibson and Glover. Honky and SquirreI. I preferred Shelton and Charlie as Team Angle to their stint as World's Greatest Tag Team but I think both concepts ended too early, for whatever reason. I liked their matching red, white, and blue hoodies and their synchronized pyro point when they made their way to the ring. Trying to revive the concept with Luther Reigns and Mark Jindrak was just weak and neither of them could do that cool leap frog thing that Haas and Benjamin would do all the time.

Jon Jon's Number Fifteen Pick: Nothin' I think I've seen all of 4 of their matches, so I don't have much to go on. I was always impressed by their name. That's a plus, right? I mean, it makes them more memorable than, say, The Headbangers, and that's got to count for something. Since I can't remember a damn thing they ever did together, I may as well count the indviduals. Shelton Benjamin is fun to watch, in that he just may die one of these days. If he does feud with RVD in the near future, I expect lots of blown spots/guys nearly killing themself, which will only make the matches even more fun. Charlie Hass . . . has a dead brother. And he got fired by WWE, went to Japan for one shitty tag match, and then came back and got his job back. Hmm. Oh, his wife works for TNA, which is basically the competition. That's kind of interesting. Maybe. I, personally, have no #15 pick, as I couldn't be bothered to think of 15 tag teams I like, and I made up a few of the teams that do appear on my personal list. Of course, I've thought of like 20 tag teams I like since the votes went in, so I may decide to mention them. Of course, not now.

Super Asia Super Asia's Number Fifteen Pick: The Street Sweepers For my last spot I picked the Street Sweepers, just because I knew someone had to. And, being the only person on WV who has both a) written about them and 2) seen them, I figured I was the best candidate. The had everything you could to make a crowd in a western Virginia town hate you. Well, except successful careers that didn't involve blue-collar work. But one dressed in velvety purple. Who's the last career face who did that? The other had a Yankees logo on his onesie. Nobody likes the Yankees, and why? At least in part because they're from New York, New York -- just like our friends the Street Sweepers. Did I mention they sweep together, every night? I'm pretty sure I did. After all, that is the only reason the Street Sweepers have any claim to fame. But that claim alone gets them immortality in the WV-15. The actual #15 was the World's Greatest Tag Team, proof that Shelton Benjamin is about as good at making a team better as Hardcore Holly is at making a team worse. As Team Angle, they basically showed up and suplexed everybody that messed with Kurtski, and I really wish Kurt had gotten a whistle and started blowing it like mad. "LOOK WHO I'M HANGING WITH NOW, DADDY!" They never did a whole lot of mic work, at least that I got to hear, but had good matches against just about everybody they faced, and they carry on the great tradition of tag teams using "faggoty moves." Say what you will about whether the whole premise of wrestling is homoerotic, but there's just something about guys in matching spandex outfits celebrating their elaborate methods of ramming their crotches into other dudes. And celebrate they did. What they didn't do on the mic they made up for in marking out for themselves. This is the team that was everything Doug Furnas and Phil LaFon were supposed to be, and on top of all that Charlie Haas and Shelton Benjamin are guys most people on WV rembember or have seen at some point (y'know, as opposed to Furnas & LaFon).

The Mysterious JG JG's Number Fifteen Pick: The Road Warriors I meant to write an insightful intro to my picks, much like my “honorable mention” list last year, but I got roped into watching a movie on cable with the family. Whatever the second Chronicles of Riddick movie is called. More like Chronicles of Riddickulous, AM I RIGHT FOLKS? Instead, I’ll just point out that I was deeply tempted to vote for some fictional tag teams, but restrained myself. For some reason, I really felt Pi-Ji 13, Ramza and Delita, and Sailor Jupiter and Colonel Parker should have been included. Colonel Parker, what did you get? I… My personal list opens, oddly, with a team I pretty much hated for years and years, once I was old enough to recognize they couldn’t really wrestle for shit. The Road Warriors. A myriad of jokes have been made highlighting their flaws. People have called them the Roid Warriors, people have called them the O.L.D., and people have suggested the catchphrase OHHHHH WHAT A RUSH originated with Hawk injecting cocaine right into his eyeballs. But I can’t shake my childhood memories of them ruling. Back in NWA, after Paul Ellering left but before he came back with a motherfucking ventriloqual figure, the Road Warriors used Black Sabbath’s Ironman (or a knockoff that never played long enough for you to notice it was a knockoff) and would run out and beat jobbers to death in squashes that literally went under ten seconds sometimes. That music was just awesome. The yahoos who do a local radio show I sometimes hear in the afternoons even played part of that song while doing a call-in topic about awesome guitar solos, and one of them blurted out “it sounds like Hawk and Animal are gonna come out here and totally murder our asses!” But yeah, no matter who the Roadies fought, they came out with this “we will kill you and eat you within six or seven seconds” attitude. Rock N’ Roll vs Midnights had all this circling and feeling each other out, but Roadies vs Arn and Tully basically saw Hawk and Animal just murder the Horsemen mercilessly for 99% of the match. Hawk and Animal could be facing King Ghidora and Gigan, and they’d rush out and start doing clotheslines and shit right out of the gate with no notion in their minds that they could possibly lose. And eventually Ghidora would get a low-blow behind the ref’s back with his tail, and Gigan might use his buzzsaw belly on the apron, and the gargantuan space monsters who backhand monumental buildings into dust would take over. But eventually Ghidora would try to piledrive Hawk. Hawk’s cranium somehow magically hits the ground under Ghidora’s legs even though Hawk is smaller than one of Ghidora’s fins or whatever, but yeah, a piledriver happens. And Ghidora inevitably stops to pose and make that weird screeching sound he makes, and then Hawk would bounce up like nothing happened. And nobody no-sold piledrivers in the 80s. A properly performed piledriver could kill the population of a small country, but Hawk (the finesse half of the team, mind you) would pop up like the piledriver gave him energy and just pound the crap out of Arn or IRS or King Ghidora or whoever. Gigan eats the Doomsday Device at the end because he’s clearly the jobber half of that team. And then Ironman would play again and these crazy motherfuckers in facepaint and death-spike tipped shoulderpads would stick their tongues out and yell and just be batshit insane. I can’t help it, I was like seven years old and that was the fucking best. I would also like to note that their ventriloqual figure was a badass vent figure in a leather jacket, that the Roadies and Dusty Rhodes held the NWA Six-Man Tag Titles without defending them for over 4,000 years, that they comprised 2/3 of the “Brothers in Paint,” and that I always laugh at their scary promo for that Night of the Skywalkers Scaffold Match with the Midnight Express. Animal threw a pumpkin off the scaffold, and a really amateur shot of the pumpkin breaking open got replayed over and over as Animal screamed incoherent threats. The Roadies beat Beautiful Bobby and Sweet Stan that night, but it was hardly surprising since they’d been practicing by beating up pumpkins. What can I say about the Self-Proclaimed World’s Greatest Tag Team? Their name was even worse than The Brainbusters. What was wrong with “Charlie Haas and Shelton Benjamin?” But yeah, um, they were good. Fucking awesome as Team Angle, with the superkick into German suplex combo and Charlie actually getting to use the Haas of Pain sometimes. They were not quite as good as the WGTT because they kinda lacked a story purpose by then. I mean, other than “being the world’s greatest tag team.” They would have wrestled circles around their face rivals if their face rivals weren’t Los Guerreros. They did old-school heel stuff, but since they could also wrestle, they didn’t churn out FBI matches where they used “frequent tags” to get across the idea that they were a tag team. And, of course, they brought The Beverlyizer back to American wrestling. But they feel kind of out of place on this list to me. Legitimately talented wrestlers whose gimmick as a team is that they were legitimately talented (as opposed to Shelton being a foppish bumbershoot and Charlie being Shelton’s boss’ retarded nephew) don’t fit in here. It seems like they’re slumming. Really good teams who were short on wackiness only get in here if they’re ancient and boring and got an invite from JG. But I suppose both Shelton and Charlie had some very WV moments. Bradshaw taught us all the hate when (as a babyface, mind you) he couldn’t tell them darkies apart and kept calling Shelton “Shaniqua.” He only knew who Faarrooq was due to his constant DAMNing. Deacon Faarrooq. Charlie was forced to confront his fear of faggotry when he and Rico made a team so entertaining, both were randomly fired. Shelton eventually found his long-lost mother wedged between “Kamala falling on his ass as he flees from caskets” and “Booker T as an elderly poopin’ man” in Vince McMahon’s impossibly racist subconscious. Charlie’s brother tragically died and Charlie hilariously mourned him. Yeah, as great as their WVish moments were, Haas and Benjamin were forced to find them alone. Maybe they can return some day after Shelton’s Mama dies of a heart-attack. They can pause during matches to yell “RUSS” and “MAMA” repeatedly. TETSUOOOO! KANEDAAAA! RUUUUSS! MAMAAAA!

The Next Mideon The Next Mideon's Number Fifteen Pick: Three Minute Warning JG's not going to beat me up for thinking "The" is a word, is he? Thanks to Waspinator for the banner images this year and Filmcans for his drawrings. SIMON HAS A PROBLEM! I dedicate the #15 spot to Rico, the finest police officer Nevada has ever known. Delicious, Piping-Hot Beef Injection. And so I will now discuss some tag teams that Rico knew well. In the Biblical sense. Three Minute Warning were a couple of fatasses who would start bouncing around and eating people when Eric Bischoff said his magic words. When they performed well, they would receive Jelly Bellies which allowed them to transform into the concept of a ladder. A boy and his blobs. Bischoff going "DID I JUST SAY 'THREE MINUTES' LOL???" was akin to Tim Robbins winning an Oscar and then making an eighty minute speech about how President Bush is oppressing Bruce Wayne, but instead of politely playing him off-stage with "Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Batman" or busting out the shepherd's crook, a couple of obese Samoans would start wrecking shit apart. If the Academy did it that way, I might watch their stupid awards show once in awhile. Also: Rico in assless chaps to promote Brokeback Mountain. Yes, Three Minute Warning were horrible, but they were horrible in a "HOLY SHIT THESE GUYS ARE HORRIBLE AND I AM PUMPED!" kind of way. They at least attempted to run around and do crazy moonsaults and other things that the fatties shy away from. They always wore hilariously unofficial sports jerseys with team names like "DEMONS" and "EXECUTIONERS" and "MILKMEN" emblazoned on them. And the entrance music. Sweet Jesus, the entrance music. I'm pretty sure it's on, dude, you can go ahead. Well what I mean is, we drop a hammer like Val Venis, Believe us, we rock blocks, so persevere us, The adamant aberrant associate antecedent, Preceding to your view, increasing your impedance. They drop a hammer like Val Venis. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH??? I'm not even sure what context Val Venis would be dropping hammers in. Maybe he's like a sexy handyman here to do some pounding and nailing, and then he drops a hammer to get you to bend over and pick it up, and then: fucking. Rico was just the icing on the three-tiered wedding cake that Rosey and Jamal ate. Chuck and Billy's wedding was one of the greatest segments of all time, as Eric Bischoff summoned 3MW to start fucking shit up by TEARING HIS FACE OFF. DID I JUST TEAR MY FACE OFF LOL??? A fruity stylist leading around a couple of fat gangbangers or whatever they were supposed to be was a delightful juxtaposition. And they might even be coming back this year, so the next time you're trying to enjoy some Hot Lesbian Action, make sure that one of those babes isn't actually ERIC BISCHOFF IN DISGUISE WHO WILL TEAR HIS FACE OFF AND THEN OH GOD SAMOAN DROP. In honor of The Brood getting barely, barely Edged out of the #15 spot by The World's Greatest Tag Team (I blame Rico's garlic), this is today's entrance music. He likes vampires and hitlist radio, but turns it off when he hears this one song he knows. Shelton comes to the ring drinking a chalice full of mama's Grape Kool-Aid, and Charlie seeks revenge on the werewolves that sent his brother to the Underworld. HIS BROTHER RUUUUUUUSSSSSSSS As much as I loathe Charlie Haas for turning into a spastic, hangs-out-with-Bob-Holly, falls-on-his-head-and-screams retard who got with the largely unattractive wa-wa-wee-wa that is Jackie Gayda, I still had to give the mad personal list propers to The World's Greatest Tag Team. The Rock called them "Team Suck Squad" at that fancy RAW anniversary dinner, and their jaunty monocles came rocketing out to land in Billy Gunn's soup. Cream Of Ass. So they were like the precursors to the Spirit Squad, except that they sucked more. Charlie and Sheltony. The World's Greatest Tag Team rolled with Kurt Angle, who, as we all remember, keeps the block down on lockdown, so points for association. They joined Kurt in wearing gay little velour tracksuits, beause Benjamin's Law is like Benjamin's Love: hard and fast. Shelton never performed well in school because of the sexlexia, but mama didn't raise no dummies, and he got into Minnesota State on a "Tutoring Brok In English" scholarship. Charlie was a Seton Hall Pirate, which is why Jeff Jarrett makes his wife dress like one. So yarr. And 'allo. REAL COLLEGIATE ATHLETES is probably the closest I'll ever get to my ideal All About The Benjamins gimmick of Spoiled Professional Athlete/Elix Skipper In WCW/T.O. Has B.O. Money-clippin' niggaz nationwide. The Beverlyizer was a cute move, but I preferred the thing where Haas would inverted atomic drop a dude (hopefully Spanky) onto his knee, at which point Benjamin would superkick the absolute Christ out of him. Let us never forget the "YOU ARE SHANIQUA HAW-HAW" saga, which I consider to be TWGTT's defining moment. Because Shelton was all "I WILL TAKE MY PENIS OUT RIGHT NOW I SWEAR TO GOD" but Haas tackled him like "C'MON MAN C'MON MAN IT'S NOT WORTH IT." Fucking Carolina Blacksnakes (sexually). Kurt did enjoy the bestiality sex. Wait a minute, ERIC YOUNG AND BOBBY ROODE YOU MOTHER FUCKERS. "Sting's little brother," hahaha. PREVIOUS WEEK: SEAN O'HAIRE VS. "STICKFIGHTING" KEN KENNEDY. And Slater Effing Vain. Fuck tag teams, let's do Top 15 Velocities of 2003. Anyway, The World's Greatest Tag Team was awesome, but their placement on this list kind of makes them liars. I guess "The World's Fifteenth Greatest Tag Team" doesn't have the same ring to it. It's a class ring. There's no "I" in Team Angle, but there are two a's, which means that The World's Greatest Tag Team will hit you with a Schoolhaas Rock and roll you. FOR RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS YOU MOTHER FUCKERS

Waspinator69 Waspie's Number Fifteen Pick: Three Count Wait, what have I gotten myself into? Charlie Haas and Shelton Benjamin have somehow gotten popular? YOU FINALLY DID IT! YOU BLEW IT UP! Obviously, I haven't watched wrestling for approximately two years now, so all my rememberings are going to be blurred by time and whimsy and a monitor that hasn't been wiped clean for several months. Anyway, Charlie and Shelton will always be Angle's generi-toadies to me, so I'll just talk about my number fifteen pick.. Three Count? What the hell? I give up. See you tomorrow!