Monday night. The new weekly show, WCW Monday Nitro, debuted on September 4, 1995, live from the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, in a timeslot that specifically overlapped with Raw. Bischoff himself was initially the host, alongside Bobby Heenan and ex-NFL star Steve "Mongo" McMichael. The initial broadcast of Nitro featured the surprise return of Lex Luger (who had been in the WWF since 1993) to the WCW audience. Because Nitro was live at the time, premiering major stars on the show would signal to the fans the amount of excitement the broadcasts would contain. Luger himself had come off a successful run in the WWF, and became one of the company's top stars. Luger had been employed with the WWF as recently as a week before his Nitro appearance, he had wrestled on a house show for the WWF in Halifax, Nova Scotia the night before his appearance on Nitro) The significance of this event would lead to the beginning of a period that would be known as the "Monday Night Wars". Nitro was successful enough that it was expanded to two live hours in May 1996, and later three in February 1998. Early on, Bischoff would give away Raw results on Nitro, as Raw, unlike Nitro, was then mostly taped in advance. Another famous jab at the WWF was takent on December 18, 1995, when the reigning WWF Women's Champion Debrah Miceli (who had previously competed in WCW as "Madusa") returned to the promotion as her WWF character Alundra Blayze and, live on Nitro, denounce the Blayze character and throw the WWF Women's title belt in a trash can, reclaiming her "Madusa" moniker in the process. In response, The WWF created the "Billionaire Ted" skits, which featured parodies of Ted Turner ("Billionaire Ted"), Hulk Hogan ("The Huckster"), Randy Savage ("The Nacho Man"), and WCW interviewer "Mean Gene" Okerlund ("Scheme Gene"). Turner would later admit that he was not offended by the skits, and instead found them funny. Dominance (1996–1998) On Memorial Day 1996, Scott Hall, who had wrestled in the WWF as Razor Ramon, interrupted a match by walking down through the crowd into the ring. He then delivered his "You want a war?" speech: "You people know who I am," he began, "but you don't know why I'm here." Hall said that he and two of his associates were going to "take over." Many thought he