144 | No Holds Barred with Brian Solomon

Are you trying to tell me my money's not good enough for you? I find that a little hard to swallow, you jackass!

We can thank this movie for some of the most absurd lines of dialogue in movie history.

No Holds Barred is unique.

It's unique in wrestling history.

It's unique in pop culture history.

And it's just a strange little movie with a weird backstory.

And that's what we're going to dig into today.

I'm a wrestling fan.

I'm more of an old school wrestling fan than a current wrestling fan.

I'll say that.

There's been episodes of this show.

We did one with the wrestler, the Warlord.

We did one with Tugboat.

We've done it about the movie Body Slam.

So definitely my interest leans old school wrestling, stuff that was coming out when I was a kid versus what's going on in wrestling today.

But nonetheless, when this movie came out, it was a big deal to me.

And I've been wanting to do an episode about it for a while.

So here we go.

No Holds Barred was Vince McMahon's first serious attempt to prove that the WWF—remember, at that time it was the WWF— could manufacture entertainment outside of professional wrestling.

It was designed to make Carl Kogan a bona fide movie star.

And what's really the most fascinating, as far as I'm concerned, is the crossover between what was going on in this movie and then how they brought that into the television storylines.

So, film...

TV, wrestling, they're all kind of blending together.

Which is which? What is actually going on here? Fascinating stuff.

All surrounding No Holds Barred back in 1989.