Review for WWE: Shawn Michaels - My Journey

Introduction
In professional wrestling, there is a real difference between being a great athlete, and being a great wrestler. A great athlete might be able to perform any move asked of him, but a great wrestler makes sure to do all of those things for a reason.

When Shawn Michaels debuted in the WWF in 1987, he was a great athlete, and a fine wrestler. But as time went on, he developed into perhaps the best wrestler of his generation, so much so that he was able to overshadow the athleticism that he would, later, lose to injury.

"My Journey", then, is a three-disc look back at the career of Shawn Michaels, from one of his first television match in the Mid-South territory, to his greatest WWE performances. In between the matches, Michael Cole interviews the man himself, giving us a personal insight into how he perceives his Hall of Fame career.

Video
Video is presented in 4:3 fullscreen PAL, and is generally excellent for a DVD of this genre. The WWE video library is in extraordinary condition, and thus it's a real pleasure to see these matches in DVD quality. The segments with Michaels and Michael Cole also look good, though with it being merely interview footage, that's hardly as important.

Audio
Audio is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0, and is very good for a DVD of this genre. All sounds effects and commentary are clear alongside one another, which is as much as anyone can ask from a sports DVD.

Main feature
There may literally be hundreds of fantastic Shawn Michaels bouts just sitting in the extensive WWE vaults, but when you take the fact that he has already had two personal DVD sets (one two-disc, and one three-disc) to his name, you have already ruled out using many of his best known matches. For example, such is the WWE's current (laudable) policy of not repeating matches on different DVD sets, this particular DVD is robbed of the likes of The Rockers vs The Orient Express bout from Royal Rumble 1991, and Michaels vs Razor Ramon in the Ladder match from Wrestlemania X. Still, there is nothing on this DVD that even resembles a bad match, even if not all of Michaels' opponents here have one tenth the talent that he possesses.

The peaks of the set (I was tempted to use the word "highlights", but almost everything here could be considered as such) are the intriguing bout between The Rockers and The Hart Foundation - which is interesting in particular as it was held in 1989, a full year before their "phantom" tag team title change - the 1992 Intercontinental Title match with Bret Hart, the bout with Kurt Angle from Wrestlemania XXI, and the Wrestlemania XXV contest with The Undertaker. Each of the matches are particularly memorable for different reasons; the matches with Bret Hart because they previewed the feud they would take to real-life several years later, and the bouts with Angle and The Undertaker for their sheer workrate and drama.

The closest thing to an in-ring let-down on the set is the match with Ric Flair from Wrestlemania XXIV, which doesn't measure up to the standards that both men had set for themselves in previous years. However, it must be remembered that it would prove to be 59-year-old Flair's retirement match (for a couple of years, anyway), and anyone who saw the match at the time - not to mention the Monday Night Raw send-off Flair received the next day - will not mind its inclusion here. If you are seeing it for the first time, it may not translate quite as well to what is essentially a "Best Of" collection.

If there is any kind of complaint I could make about the set, it is that it does not include the rematch with The Undertaker from Wrestlemania XXVI. The authoring of this DVD pre-dated that bout, but it might have been nice to have rounded off Michaels' career with what may prove to be the last match he ever has.

Overall
Taking into consideration the bouts already used on other releases, you simply cannot argue with what is another stellar WWE release. Some may argue that a Shawn Michaels collection is not complete without, say, the aforementioned Michaels vs Ramon bout, but for those of us who already own the "From The Vault" set, there's no arguing about how much fun "My Journey" is to watch, even over the course of several evenings.

If you are a fan of professional wrestling, you will want to own this DVD.