Review of

Intro
"Stone Cold" Steve Austin, along with Hulk Hogan, is the biggest star in the history of American professional wrestling. No-one else really comes close.

Hogan was the man behind the massive growth of the World Wrestling Federation in the 1980s, but when his WWF flame burned out in 1992, there was simply no-one - despite Vince McMahon's best efforts - who could replace him.

The ensuing five years were financially the worst in the history of the company, even with Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels - both of whom were leagues ahead of Hogan as a wrestler - at the helm.

But when Austin - renamed "Stone Cold" by his English wife after an awful stint as "The Ringmaster" - coined the phrase "Austin 3:16" (a slight at Jake "The Snake" Roberts, whose real life actions behind the scenes did not live up to his Christian espousals), there was a glimmer of hope for a company who McMahon claimed were "in financial peril". In less than a year, the WWF would be well on the road to recovery, peaking in 2001 when the combination of Austin and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson gave the renamed WWE the kind of star power they now crave again.

"The Legacy of 'Stone Cold'" then, is the story of Steve Austin (real name: Steve Williams), told through a series of his matches. Interspersed are comments by Austin and those that he met along the way.

Video
Video is presented in 4:3 full screen PAL and is very good for a DVD of this genre. Even the archive footage from the WCW era (early 1990s) looks excellent here, although the ECW footage (mid-1990s) is noticeably lacking in production values.

The transfer to DVD is excellent, with only minor digital artefacts noticeable throughout.





Audio
Audio is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0, and is also very good. The interview footage which precedes every segment/bout is well-mixed, and thus easily heard above the background music.

For international viewers, there are further 2.0 tracks in German and French.





Overall
With this 3-disc DVD set containing 20 matches, spanning from 1993 to 2001, there's no question that it is the quintessential release to own if you are a fan of Steve Austin. And such is the match quality, in fact, that if you are wrestling fan at all, you are going to want to own this fantastic compilation.

Quite simply, there aren't any SKIP-function moments anywhere on this set. In particular, Austin's matches with Ricky Steamboat, Bret Hart, and The Rock are tremendous, are a reminder of how good wrestling can be when it combines athleticism, story, and psychology. Austin's ability to show all of these in his matches is a direct contrast to much of which is on WWE pay-per-view today.

Even the bouts that don't necessarily sound so appealing, such as the two 1997 bouts with Kane, are quite good, in particularly the latter Raw television match, which draws such an incredible crowd reaction that it over-rides any technical weaknesses of the bout.

Interspersed between the numerous bouts are interview clips from the wrestling televisions shows of the time, plus newly-recorded, rather candid explanations from Austin about the direction of his career at the time. Most interesting are his tales of his firing from WCW, and of his devastating neck injury suffered at the hands of the late Owen Hart.

The quality of the material involved here, coupled with the top-notch WWE DVD production values, makes this release a sure-fire winner. Buy it to remember the man who was at the helm for the last, and some would say greatest, boom in professional wrestling.