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Above post made me think of this documentary and I'd highly recommend it even if you have no interest in MMA because it's just fascinating. edit: okay maybe not the above post since new page, previous page's last post then. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DoaUyMGPWI
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Feb 13, 2022 17:03
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Trollologist posted:AEW is after my time. I hope it goes well, I really do. But I don't see the sell to anyone other than existing wrestling fans. I hope I'm wrong and they loving blow up though. yeah. they'll be fine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVFGPVhPp5o
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Feb 13, 2022 17:25
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i think the point Trollologist made about the PPV model is a really important one, because once you come to understand the model it genuinely ruins any storyline surprise or suspense. but to me what keeps it around is the ability of uniquely talented performers to make it work. like pretty much any storyline involving prime-era macho man randy savage. he was truly electrifying and put in 100% at all times, so even watching the filler matches and promos leading up to a PPV was still fantastic. it's not just macho man, i just used him as the example because you can pretty much link anyone the 'lust in your eyes, hogan' promo and once they get over the shock of his affect it's just a riveting performance. to use another example, someone whose story was already told in this thread, dusty rhodes. that guy could turn poo poo into gold. he was kind of a sleepy giant baby man by appearance, and he got saddled with intentionally bad gimmicks to try and destroy him, but he always came out on top because he just had that x-factor. to use a more modern example, one of the most electrifying matches i've seen was bryan danielson vs bray wyatt at one of the royal rumbles, i think the last match of the night. a staggering performance of physical storytelling by two people at the top of their game. it was a fantastic end to a storyline, and a fantastic standalone performance. i'll remember it for the rest of my life. i will not remember the rest of that royal rumble because the royal rumble is a loving horrible format. there was probably an awful slow match with guys vince liked early on, underappreciated midcarders having the first match, and then the dog rear end royal rumble itself. but because you get those fantastic high moments, you get people carrying on buying into PPVs just on the off chance that something like that will happen. it very rarely does. but enough people buy in to keep the business alive, and so management thinks that what they are doing is working, when what is actually happening is they're failing horribly and being saved by the talents of individuals who for the most part they hate and want to destroy. WWE, and to be fair a lot of the business at large, takes people with incredible drive, passion, and ability, and tries to grind them into homogenous slop. they're doing the equivalent of making spam out of kobe beef. i imagine you could make money if you owned a bunch of fancy cows and you made their meat into spam, but you would make a lot loving more money if you treated what you have with some respect and processed and packaged it in a way that at the very least didn't actively make it worse. that's basically where CM Punk's 'a millionaire who should be a billionaire' line about mcmahon comes from. he's constantly cutting off his nose to spite his face, he should have died of blood loss a long time ago, but for the fact that talented people are pumping their own blood into him to keep the corpse moving. if he knew how to leverage his talent better, which for the most part would consist of 'interfering less and letting people develop their own character w/ guidance from the veterans (not hazing, actual guidance)', he would be fantastically wealthy.
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Feb 13, 2022 17:28
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When your only metric for success is money, none of that stuff matters. The most recent Royal Rumble was a total letdown and a huge turd but they don't care because a ton of people bought it, and as long as most of them buy WrestleMania then they don't care. We the fans can say they've failed a million ways but as long as they're making record profits or close to it they can claim they're doing everything right because their metric for success, money, is still meeting expectations. As long as marks are subscribing to the network and buying merch, Vince and Bruce don't care. And unfortunately they've also created a large fanbase of extremely weird stans who defend or excuse every single stupid thing they do and attack other promotions, especially AEW, without ever watching them. They're at the point where they can pretty much do anything they want, bad or good, and they'll still rake in the cash. It sucks but 
Elephant Ambush fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Feb 13, 2022 |
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Feb 13, 2022 18:01
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WWE isn't about wrestlers or wrestling. It's about the brand, nothing else matters. All serve the brand, that's the beginning and end of Vinces plan. It's also why take red hot wrestlers and make them into just another guy or girl on the roaster.
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Feb 13, 2022 21:05
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The Last Call posted:It's also why take red hot wrestlers and make them into just another guy or girl on the roaster. * Jessie Ventura advocating for a Union (re:Healthcare benefits + retirement) after getting a taste of SAG*AFTRA thanks to Predator. * Hogan becoming a household name and getting movie opportunities * Hogan, Nash, Hall being on WCW and transferring their WWF-Bourne popularity to a rival * The Rock jumping ship to Hollywood asap * Lesner dropping WWE and coming back to it like his personal piggy bank. Vince just doesn't want any wrestler to get over the WWE branding anymore.
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Feb 13, 2022 22:06
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The Last Call posted:WWE isn't about wrestlers or wrestling. I get that but then I always want to ask Vince "if you're an entertainment company and not a wrestling company THEN WHY IS THERE A WRESTLING RING IN THE MIDDLE OF EVERY SHOW YOU RUN?" If he's really being honest about the entertainment business thing and "we make movies" and all that poo poo then why hasn't he just completely dropped the wrestling part?
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Feb 13, 2022 22:30
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Vince thought that the XFL would thrive because of poo poo storylines like "The L.A. RIPPERS head cheerleader was seen coming out of the Austin GUN-SHOOTERS lockerroom!!!!!" He also tried to launch a Monster Truck show with similar stupid.
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Feb 13, 2022 22:59
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Elephant Ambush posted:I get that but then I always want to ask Vince "if you're an entertainment company and not a wrestling company THEN WHY IS THERE A WRESTLING RING IN THE MIDDLE OF EVERY SHOW YOU RUN?" Someone forgot their ICOPRO and Gary Strydom song and dance super show history.
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Feb 13, 2022 23:00
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FilthyImp posted:Vince thought that the XFL would thrive because of poo poo storylines like "The L.A. RIPPERS head cheerleader was seen coming out of the Austin GUN-SHOOTERS lockerroom!!!!!" This is probably just me being a loving nerd and all, but, for all the hullabaloo about UFC being a competitor to WWE Dana White was never going to eat Vince's lunch. And while Vince had his head turned, Kevin Feige came along with the MCU took all the same audience, and devoured Vince's place in pop culture. But if he's making money, he's making money. Who the gently caress am I to say otherwise?
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Feb 14, 2022 02:25
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FilthyImp posted:WWF-Bourne gently caress Scooby Doo, leme get this crossover
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Feb 14, 2022 03:19
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Remember that time the 45th President of the United States was a character on WrestleMania
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Feb 14, 2022 06:05
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FilthyImp posted:Was it Monday Night RAW where the WCW announcer was like "Well I guess Mankind is the WWF champ now lol" and then Turner Broadcasting heard the sound of 65% of their audience hit the PREVIOUS button on their remotes to see it? Reminder that this immediately preceded a Nitro main event of a world title match between Hulk Hogan vs Kevin Nash that had been built up for several weeks as a showdown between the Hollywood and Wolfpac factions of the nWo, and which eventually consisted of Hogan poking the champion in the chest, Nash taking a pratfall, and Hogan pinning him for the title to reset the now two-year-old nWo storyline right back to the beginning. You can pretty much circle that day as the point where the tide turned in the Monday Night War and never really came back. It should be noted that line came down from WCW management and wasn't an ad-lib by Schiavone - according to Foley, a couple of days later his wife came in holding the phone and saying "it's someone called Tony for you.... he sounds really sad" and Schiavone would apologise to him privately for the whole thing.
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Feb 14, 2022 15:16
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FullLeatherJacket posted:Reminder that this immediately preceded a Nitro main event of a world title match between Hulk Hogan vs Kevin Nash that had been built up for several weeks as a showdown between the Hollywood and Wolfpac factions of the nWo, and which eventually consisted of Hogan poking the champion in the chest, Nash taking a pratfall, and Hogan pinning him for the title to reset the now two-year-old nWo storyline right back to the beginning. You can pretty much circle that day as the point where the tide turned in the Monday Night War and never really came back. And it could have been even worse, as the setup was originally supposed to involve Miss Elizabeth having Goldberg arrested on a rape accusation.
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Feb 14, 2022 15:23
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It's me, I'm the dummy that was so out of the loop with regards to WCW that I never knew the nWo was supposed to be a riff on WWF In Our House. Having a dozen spin-off nWos and then having it full of WCW staples is sure stupid, though!
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Feb 14, 2022 15:27
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Gavok posted:And it could have been even worse, as the setup was originally supposed to involve Miss Elizabeth having Goldberg arrested on a rape accusation. what the HELL 
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Feb 14, 2022 15:30
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Gavok posted:And it could have been even worse, as the setup was originally supposed to involve Miss Elizabeth having Goldberg arrested on a rape accusation. It also wasn't even an original idea - WWF did it a few months earlier when Shawn Michaels had both the World and European titles and Sgt Slaughter as commissioner booked Michaels to defend the European belt against Triple H to try and create dissention in DX. https://youtu.be/NVPe5VPLCac except that Michaels and Triple H doing a comedy send-up as a troll on management so that they can switch a minor belt is funny, while WCW doing it with their world title belt for no reason other than to gently caress with the audience killed their entire company
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Feb 14, 2022 16:09
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Seth Pecksniff posted:what the HELL So going back a little further, Goldberg was WCW champ and was undefeated. He took on Nash at a big PPV and Nash won due to lots of ridiculous interference. The idea was that although Nash was now champ and ended Goldberg's streak, he was pissed off because it was all such a farce. The next night on Nitro, he said that he'd give Goldberg a rematch the next week. A week later, Goldberg couldn't do the match because he was arrested at the beginning of the show. Elizabeth claimed he had been harassing her and she didn't feel safe. As Goldberg was taken away, we saw Hogan backstage for the first time in like a month or so. Nash said that he knew Hogan was behind this and demanded a match against him for that night, title on the line. Then the Fingerpoke of Doom happened. Meanwhile, the police found holes in Elizabeth's story, realized her claims were unfounded and let Goldberg free a little too late. Originally, they wanted Elizabeth to straight-up say that Goldberg raped her, but Goldberg absolutely refused to go through with that plot.
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Feb 14, 2022 16:10
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missed a chance to have goldberg spear an endless wave of police while bullets bounced off of him
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Feb 14, 2022 16:12
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Gavok posted:Originally, they wanted Elizabeth to straight-up say that Goldberg raped her, but Goldberg absolutely refused to go through with that plot. Good on Goldberg for saying no but holy poo poo how did anyone ever think that was a good idea?
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Feb 14, 2022 17:06
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Seth Pecksniff posted:Good on Goldberg for saying no but holy poo poo how did anyone ever think that was a good idea? People who book wrestling shows and have the first name Vince love that poo poo
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Feb 14, 2022 17:20
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Gavok posted:Meanwhile, the police found holes in Elizabeth's story, realized her claims were unfounded and let Goldberg free a little too late. Oh, it's better than that. What makes it even stupider (but funnier, unlike the suggested rape idea) is that once the 'police' clued in that Miss Elizabeth was full of poo poo and this had been a purely prejudiced and agenda-driven act (on top of being, well, a storyline, of course), they were shown to release Goldberg, and the on show storyline then became, CAN GOLDBERG MAKE IT BACK TO THE ARENA IN TIME BEFORE KEVIN NASH HAS THE MATCH WITH HOGAN INSTEAD? Fine by itself...except that this release happened at 10:00 PM at the latest: it's been a while, but it might have happened even earlier than that. Which meant Goldberg had at LEAST an hour to make it back...and WCW's camera shots from earlier in the evening had shown that the police station, or what they were using as a stand in, was more or less right across from the street to the arena Nitro was happening in. Which means Goldberg could have gotten down on his hands and knees and CRAWLED there and still arrived in plenty of time to get his title shot match back. As the Death of WCW book sardonically noted, "Perhaps the crosslight was broken."
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Feb 14, 2022 18:20
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Seth Pecksniff posted:Good on Goldberg for saying no but holy poo poo how did anyone ever think that was a good idea? WCW was running wild on cocaine, egos and general idiocy.
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Feb 14, 2022 18:37
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I wish Necrobutcher wasn't a right wing idiot
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Feb 14, 2022 20:09
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Mumpy Puffinz posted:Remember that time the 45th President of the United States was a character on WrestleMania Which time? I'm officially requesting someone regale us with the story behind this moment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTYJxpeltEI 
Jamesman fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Feb 14, 2022 |
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Feb 14, 2022 20:17
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Jamesman posted:Which time? Years ago, in simpler times, when you saw Trump on TV it was due to his media rivalry with Rosie O'Donnell. Vince decided to have fun with this by doing that "match." Everybody hated it. In-story, Trump was telling him it was the stupidest thing he's ever seen. Then when they did Fan Appreciation Night, Trump showed up unannounced (probably via satellite, I can't remember) and had it rain money on the fans. Vince was angry with this and it led to the WrestleMania 23 match where they fought via proxies (Umaga for Vince and Bobby Lashley for Trump) and the loser had to have his head shaved. Also, Austin was the special guest referee. As much as "Rosie" vs. "Trump" was hated, they still pulled the same bullshit a year later by doing "Obama" vs. "Hillary."
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Feb 14, 2022 20:57
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There's so much you're leaving out. People need to know that "Rosie" was constantly eating backstage, including an entire Fudgie the Whale ice cream cake, and she was perving in the ladies' locker room.
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Feb 14, 2022 22:41
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Anyone backstage for the first time at a wwe show with access to their reputed catering will justifiably be eating all the time. Probably moreso in the era of real ppv when they may have added extra pizzazz to the spread for the occasion. Eating a whole cake is just good manners because like it is with breakfast cereals maybe Rosie got the notion that cakes were for full time bump-taking workers only. So perhaps she sensibly ordered her own and was worried she would offend the boys’ cereal/cake traditions If she offered to share shadow puppet of a fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Feb 14, 2022 |
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Feb 14, 2022 23:28
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Animal-Mother posted:The Rock was pinned by a forklift once. I wish he stayed pinned by that forklift.
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Feb 15, 2022 00:44
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Trump started this feud because Rosie said something on The View about how he's a horrible business man and a joke, which anyone from NYC knows. This was at the height of his realty show popularity and also when he started his Twitter addiction.
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Feb 15, 2022 00:48
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verbal enema posted:I wish Necrobutcher wasn't a right wing idiot Just remember that for every hot political take he has, you can watch him get bashed in the face with florescent lights. Which is a far sight better than Ben Shapiro will ever experience.
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Feb 15, 2022 01:43
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Someone can do an epic rock opera on The Hubris of Hunter Hurst Helmsley.
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Feb 15, 2022 04:27
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Trollologist posted:Just remember that for every hot political take he has, you can watch him get bashed in the face with florescent lights. Which is a far sight better than Ben Shapiro will ever experience. It would not surprise me if all the blows to his head with all his stupid garbage matches is WHY he's a right wing idiot. --- Yeah, we STILL need to keep digging into side piles to even get to TNA. So. As said. Pro wrestling is very basic. People like McMahon might both equally view their audiences as idiots who will like what they’re told to like, while resenting the concept that pro wrestling fans are viewed as low IQ folks with whatever stereotype you want to attach, but in truth, we do at all our cores just want the most simple of plots. Good vs evil. Underdog vs the unbeatable. The good guy wins. The redemption story. No matter how smart you might consider wrestling fans, trying to weave a complex analogy into the storylines of wrestling is akin to trying to bake a cake only using a stovetop’s burners. Yeah, maybe it could be done…but you’re swimming against the tide, and with the actual oven right there, you’re better off just putting it in. Like the veto'd Goldberg rape story, or the infamous Katie Vick angle, to which Vince tried to fend off criticism for by saying they were trying to go for 'edgy, genre-shattering' entertainment like then-popular show Six Feet Under...except pro wrestling is NOT an HBO show, and it can't do these sort of things. It has its own unique aspects, and that ain't one of them. So what is? Well, an interesting thing about pro wrestling stories, if you think about it, is that the bad guys CAN actually win, in a sense. Most entertainment would stop dead if the bad guys actually won. Trollogist was talking about Breaking Bad a few pages ago; if during the start of Season 3 Walter tossed a pizza on the roof of some house which happened to be owned by some unknown criminal who immediately stepped out and then shot him dead, Breaking Bad would have screeched to an immediate, abrupt, and very bad feeling halt. It would have been the Sopranos ending all over again, and worse. But in pro wrestling? There’s no guarantee that the good guy will win. They might lose, and the bad guy will go onto another challenge while the good guy has to do something else. The 'show will go on'. A good example is Wayne Farris, nee the Honky Tonk Man, who, despite being the most classic of cowardly, cheating heels, had the longest reign as WWE’s intercontinental champion to this day, fending off challengers like Ricky Steamboat, Macho Man Randy Savage, and Brutus Beefcake before he finally did lose the title. A more recent example would be Kenny Omega, who, after winning the AEW title and turning heel in the process, defeated Jon Moxley as he tried to reclaim the belt, then fending off challengers like Christian Cage, Orange Cassidy, and Jungle Boy, all of whom could have credibly beaten him, only losing the title to his ex tag team partner in a long time coming grudge match before he took time off to heal injuries. So yes, while the bad guy did eventually lose, they won more than most fictional villains do. More amusingly, even in losing, a bad guy can win. Roddy Piper is a great example: in his infamous segment with Jimmy Snuka, Piper’s character mocked the man, pulled out a bunch of race-baiting items to further insult him, and then smashed a coconut over his head and beat on him more. Why did Piper do this? Because he was a giant rear end in a top hat, basically. He paid for it, as Snuka kicked Piper’s rear end in matches up and down the States, but despite being beaten and bloodied so many times over, Piper came out of it with the higher star; his next big feud would be against Hulk Hogan, playing the first bad guy of the Rock ‘N Wrestling era, and he’d go from relative high point to high point for the next fifteen years, whereas Snuka’s career basically peaked with the feud, with his importance dropping and the biggest thing he accomplished afterwards being the first victim of what would become the Undertaker’s Wrestlemania Streak. (And yes, it is VERY likely he murdered his girlfriend and got away with it just before this Piper feud happened, but that’s another dark, not funny at all story) Or, if you want a closer to our time example, just look at Steve Austin losing to Bret Hart in November of 1996 and in March of 1997 in the two big matches the pair actually had, and coming out of it a far bigger star on his way to maybe becoming the biggest in the history of the business. My point, as I do ramble, is that wrestling works best with simple good vs evil, or face vs heel in wrestling parlance, setups and matches. Anything else is adding more dice to the roll. Face vs face matches are risky, because whoever wins is also likely to lose as they beat part of the crowd’s favourite. And heel vs heel matches, in the logic of wrestling are ‘Why should we care if these two bad guy assholes are beating each other up? Let ‘em.”, though if said heels REALLY do a good job trashing each other (see: Steve Austin vs Mick Foley in the fall of 1996, when both were still technically ‘heels’), you can get the fans to care, though this will always result in the crowd assigning one of them the ‘face’ role. Now, you can sometimes have some wiggle room: there’s a term in wrestling, a ‘tweener’ who is neither pure face nor pure heel; basically, they lean more towards one or the other based on who they’re trying to beat up, but they might do so without changing any aspect of their methods, tactics, or talking points (again, see Steve Austin, who was basically ALWAYS this when he wasn’t a straight heel). However, there’s another ‘in between’ role that can be played, but one that’s far more likely to have long term negative consequences: the ‘cool heel’. Heels in wrestling do tend towards certain archetypes. The two biggest are the ‘cowardly heel’, who flees from danger, cheats to win, will do anything to keep his whatever (usually a title belt), and generally makes the promotion money by people paying in the hopes he’ll finally get pinned down and beaten horribly (the Honky Tonk Man, as mentioned, was this kind of heel, and he didn’t have his record breaking title run by pinning his opponents, he had it by running away from his matches to get counted out, or attacking the ref to get disqualified, or smashing his opponent with a guitar, or a dozen other dirty tricks), and the ‘monster heel’, who basically smashes everyone in their path and requires a plucky face to summon up the willpower and skill and all that to overcome his strength and merciless wrath. Of course, there’s other variants; trying to force heels into playing just one of the two roles (usually the cowardly heel) is almost always counterproductive. Mick Foley said it best in his first book, commenting on such square peg and round hole nonsense… “Goliath in the bible wasn’t a heel because he was a coward, he was a heel because he was so drat big. Apollo Creed from Rocky I wasn’t a heel because he was a cowardly cheater, he was a heel because he was the best and he knew it. The shark in Jaws didn’t need cowardice; he got his heat by eating people. The mother hated the shark because it ate her son, not because it attacked while the sheriff’s back was turned.” But of all the roles, the ‘cool heel’ is the one akin to trying to, and yeah, this is a terrible stretch for an analogy, but it’s the only one I can think of, that scene in the less than great Double Dragon movie where the heroes, being chased, and with a special car that seems to run by throwing random items into some sort of fusion engine, and out of other items for fuel, decide to toss in a canister of something that explicitly says DO NOT COMBUST. It promptly gives them a giant burst of speed…and reduces their control so much they almost immediately crash, only plot saving them from the villains that then corner them. In this case, being a cool heel is ‘toss the canister in, get a brief superboost, then crash’. So what is a cool heel? Well, it’s just that. It’s a heel that can’t fully commit to being a bad guy; they insist on doing stuff like having a catchphrase that the crowd can sing along to, or trying to be funny, or generally stuff that clashes with the actual heel deeds of violently beating up people, or hitting them with pipes, or running them off the road so they’ll be injured and unable to complete. In essence, it’s a wrestler that can’t live with the crowd just booing them, they need some of both. Two issues arise from this. One, if a heel does their job well, they will eventually get cheered regardless of what they do. They can betray their friends, smash cinder blocks over people’s heads, steal their opponent’s personal pictures and burn them, and punt a puppy or two, and if they perform well on the mike and the ring, eventually the fans will start supporting their success, especially if a new flavor of nasty heel comes along. Seriously. There’s more than a few heel turns and actions that should have been irredeemable, but like I said, wrestling fans are a sucker for a redemption story. The other one is the problematic issue. Playing a ‘cool heel’ means that the people who run the shows can start interpreting ‘we like to hate these people’ as ‘we like these people’. And make business decisions based on it. While Hulk Hogan’s ways might have been the main corrosive that ate away at WCW’s underpinnings, his fellow “Outsiders” would definitely contribute in their own way. Then again, maybe it was inevitable. It was what they had learned. --- So, what was the Clique? In 1992, Michael Shawn Hickenbottom, nee Shawn Michaels and Frederick Martin Jannetty, nee Marty Jannetty had undergone perhaps the most famous tag team breakup of all time, likely because it became the archetypal example of a tag team breaking up, and one member going on to larger stardom and the other falling into mediocrity or worse (A hint on who that was: It was not Shawn Michaels)... (It was probably aided immensely by Bobby Heenan firing off one of the best 'heel color commentator rewrites reality' lines ever made just after it happened. If you're knowledgeable about wrestling, you probably know the one. If you don't, it's after poor Marty gets defenestrated) ...and Shawn was building up his heel cred as as a cocky bastard who had famous female manager Sensational Sherri following him around like a lovesick teenage girl, and Scott Hall, entering his 8th year in the business, signed with the WWF in mid-June. Hall was a good package: large, muscular, good movement, and a good talker, though it took him some time to get his look down; He infamously began his career with a huge head of bushy hair and a giant porn star bushy moustache. By the time he came to the WWE however, he’d worked out the kinks; his hair was now dyed black, straight and slicked down, and the mustache had been replaced by near permanent five o’clock shadow stubble.  Taking his WCW gimmick of “The Diamond Studd” and changing some aspects of it (the diamond motif were exchanged for razors) and adopting an imitation of Tony Montaya from Scarface as his gimmick, Hall debuted as “The Bad Guy” Razor Ramon, receiving a strong push from the start, pairing with Ric Flair to help him fight his enemies and getting a world title shot in January 1993, though he lost. Shawn Michaels, meanwhile, captured the Intercontinental Title, lost Sherri’s services, and as 1993 proceeded, the WWF decided he needed some backup, a bodyguard character of sorts. Hall suggested a man he’d worked with in WCW, a very tall but not exactly skilled at wrestling man who had had one of the most infamous gimmicks of all time in “Oz” ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAeGyTbn_ko ...and after somehow surviving that with an intact career, had been working as an undercarder named Vinnie Vegas before he left WCW. So, Nash was hired, repackaged as ‘Diesel’, a tough biker-esque fellow, and the three men became friends and started travelling together. Right around that time, a skinny but very talented (and agile, ESPECIALLY in the lands of the WWF giants) young man named Sean Waltman got a break and was signed by the WWF; his first big storyline was getting destroyed by several other wrestlers over a few weeks before having a match with Razor and getting a shock upset pin when Razor underestimated him and paid for it; the upset would make Waltman’s career, as he would name it himself after it (The 1-2-3 Kid) and Razor being mocked by Ted Dibiase for losing to a nobody would lead to Razor beginning a face turn that he’d have for the rest of his WWF career. Waltman would soon end up as part of the trio, making it a foursome. And hence, the Clique was born. Probably the first sign of what was to come was the 1994 Royal Rumble. Nash, as Diesel, had had few in ring matches, mostly just standing silently behind Michaels and looking tough and cool, and he hadn’t exactly set the world on fire with the few he had. But, as Royal Rumble matches tend to happen in ‘blocks’, and Nash was such a big guy, they decided what the hell, let’s have the first block being him eliminating some smaller guys. So Nash entered at Number 7, with four other people in the ring, and he swiftly tossed them all out. Then along came a new guy at no 8, and Nash swiftly tossed him out, the character then prowling around the ring and indicating ‘bring on the next challenger!’ Along came No 9: out he swiftly went. No 10? Bye. Nash had now eliminated seven men in record time, and the crowd was now chanting his name. Number 11, Randy Savage, proved too ferocious to eliminate with ease, and Diesel would ultimately be eliminated by a group effort (aided by his so called friend, Shawn Michaels), but the moment had happened, and the WWF took notice. The second was Shawn and Razor having their legendary Ladder Match at Wrestlemania 10, a classic example of a match with zero losers and the first notch on the belt of Shawn’s “Mr. Wrestlemania” honorific. With the hype of the match, and Diesel getting over basically by standing there, looking cool, and having done one impressive thing, and the Kid attached by proxy by being Ramon’s buddy, the four had been steadily gaining more TV time, and hence more backstage clout… And they had realized that they could keep using each other to keep getting each other over. And ONLY each other. This was best demonstrated by a late October match shown on one of the WWE’s ‘B-Shows’: the expectation would be it would just be ‘a match’, but with the four friends willing to do absolutely anything to make each other look good, it produced an explosive gem that was one of the ‘hardly seen brilliant matches’ back in the early internet wrestling fan days. And in terms of a group helping each other, it was a drat good package. Razor Ramon was a great talker and a generally good wrestler, who could be great or amazing with the right opponents. The Kid couldn’t really talk, but he was an amazing wrestler with a style that stood out like a sore thumb in the mid WWE 90’s. Shawn Michaels was the complete package; an amazing wrestler, talker, and things like a bumper (he could make other offense look good) that other great wrestlers can be weak in. And Diesel? Well…he was tall. And he looked good. And he was good at looking cool. And he was big. Take a wild guess who got the moon push. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Apr 14, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2022 04:38
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Who commentated with Vince on that match? I know it wasn’t him but all I could picture was Mike Tenay
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Feb 15, 2022 05:21
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forcedstealthlevel posted:Who commentated with Vince on that match? I know it wasn’t him but all I could picture was Mike Tenay Todd Pettengill.
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Feb 15, 2022 05:42
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Cornwind Evil posted:As the Death of WCW book sardonically noted, "Perhaps the crosslight was broken."
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Feb 15, 2022 06:59
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Gavok posted:As much as "Rosie" vs. "Trump" was hated, they still pulled the same bullshit a year later by doing "Obama" vs. "Hillary." At least in that case, they had some entertainment by having someone playing Bill Clinton at ringside who interfered and then did stuff like "I did not just interfere in that match!" He did a pretty good impression of the man, all things considered.
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Feb 15, 2022 07:11
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American politics is a lot like pro wrestling.
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Feb 15, 2022 11:50
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Then who would you say is the Shane Douglas of politics?
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Feb 15, 2022 12:07
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shadow puppet of a posted:Then who would you say is the Shane Douglas of politics? Jeb Bush
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Feb 15, 2022 14:14
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