DANGER ZONE CALENDAR [1988]
FINAL SOLD PRICE – $405.00
This piece of wrestling merch always cracks me up whenever I see it come up in conversations online or on podcasts. This official Jim Crockett Promotions 1988 Danger Zone Calendar was a free pack-in to anyone who paid their $24.95 for the The Danger Zone video cassette. The tape itself was nothing more than an hour-long clip show essentially with hard-hitting NWA wrestling action set to free-to-use rock and/or synth-pop studio tracks.
No full matches, just quick bite-sized portions of wrestling maneuvers. The commercial clips is more-or-less is identical of what you ended up with:
Magnum T.A. and Missy Hyatt hosted the shindig and names like Dusty Rhodes, Lex Luger, Ric Flair, Tully Blanchard screamed promos at you throughout the hour to break up the action segments. Based on chatter I’ve seen online, it seems like this was something owned by EVERYONE who grew up as a NWA fan.
$24.95 for the tape and a calendar seems like a great deal for 1987. Plus, in the twenty seconds he’s given, you got the added bonus of having Nikita Koloff equating the euphoric feeling of male ejaculation to how he feels when he hits his finisher on an opponent. This was the kind of stuff fans were not getting on television, only through Turner Home Entertainment!
The calendar itself though, is such an oddity. The concept of a pro wrestling calendar can be executed in a few different ways. Twelve promo photos of your biggest names and their wrestling championships shining in giant action poses would probable be the best way to go about things. Maybe every month having a collage of various in-ring highspots or finishing maneuvers from your roster, that’s also a winning idea.
Jim Crockett Promotions went a completely different way altogether and decided on a calendar of your favorite wrestling heroes and villains like Stan Lane, “Dr. Death” Steve Williams, and Michael P.S. Hayes dressed in speedos:
That Danger Zone calendar was hard to explain to my Step-Father! 🤣 Thank goodness for @missyhyatt ! pic.twitter.com/RAywstjNQL
— Mid-Atlantic Roots (@midatlanticdna) November 25, 2021
Missy Hyatt and Precious both appeared in swimsuits to slightly off-balance the larger portion of beefcake featured inside while Sting and The New Breed smartly wore their wrestling gear for their sessions.
Jim Cornette: Guess who else was asked to be in [the calendar], that is not in it and no-showed and didn’t go? They didn’t just ask Stan Lane to be in the swimsuit fuckin–they asked The Midnight Express and Jim Cornette, ‘Hey, you guys want to be in a fucking swimsuit calendar?’
I swear to fucking God. They said, ‘Oh, Cornette, you could have like the fucking white shit on your nose and then the flowery Hawaiian shirt’, or whatever — NO.
Bobby didn’t want to do it, because he didn’t want to wear fucking swimwear. I don’t think he ever got in a fucking swimming pool. If he did, he probably wore either his fucking shorts or his tights or whatever. I was not going to dress up in a clown outfit for this fucking–Crockett still owned the company. We were still trying to be halfway fucking serious about this shit. And just do a goofy fucking swimsuit picture when we were supposed to be heels? Stan and I, what the fuck?
They said we were going to get paid. Well, they said we were going to get paid by all this other stuff too. We never got any fucking royalties for Starrcade ’86, for the video [tape]. We never got any other royalties for any other videos. We never got–basically, they didn’t make any Midnight Express merchandise, but we never made any royalty money, so what are we going to make off this fucking swimsuit calendar? So, we no-showed the photo-shoot, me and Bobby, and they just shot Stan. He got a check for $1000 for a fucking no-good swimsuit calendar!” – ‘Jim Cornette Drive-Thru’ #104 [2019]
One of these days, I’ll end up getting a copy of this calendar myself to scan in the photos in high quality for you all, but today is not that day. I do not have the $400 to burn right now for calendar from 1988, an item that cannot even be used practically for the purpose it was created again until the year 2044.
Instead, I will collect photos online and try to recreate the entirety of it for you all here. Special thanks to @midatlanticdna and @JWsWrestlingMem on Twitter for posting pictures of the calendar from their collections online:
40-year-old World Championship Wrestling fanatic/collector/hoarder. Safety officer by day, scanner of wrestling magazine by night.
He’s got posters on the wall, his favorite rock group’s KISS.
I can’t believe that Nikita clip is real.
There used to be a website dedicated to finding, and destroying, all existing copies of Shaq Fu.
We as a society must fund a coordinated effort to do the same about… this.
The men of the danger zone and Missy Hyatt. Because just a Missy calendar made too much sense