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Ghost Leviathan posted:Has there been a literal alien in the ring? Anal probing? Giving birth? Max Moon was a literal moon man May young gave birth to a hand No anal probing because wrestling ISN'T GAY. NOPE NOT GAY. NOTHING GAY ABOUT HAVING DOZENS OF MEN GET PERFECT BODIES AND THEN ROLL AROUND WITH EACH OTHER COVERED IN OIL. WRESTLING ISN'T GAY! Trollologist fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Feb 19, 2022 |
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Feb 19, 2022 19:15
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Trollologist posted:
 The Jackyl™ does not feature Bone Crunching Action.
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Feb 19, 2022 19:25
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when sheik was at the toronto international film festival i tried to go meet him so i could hear how much of a jabroni hulk hogan was in real life when i got there it was like 6pm and i asked the staff "where's sheik?" they were like "oh hes' really old, lol. he went to sleep."
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Feb 19, 2022 19:45
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bagmonkey posted:I'm picking out the non-wrestling thing here but tooth abscesses are EXTREMELY dangerous because they can hop into the blood stream at any time and go wreak havoc wherever it lands. Source, two different dentists warning me to make sure I get my poo poo treated. Yeah, Brodie Lee didn't die of COVID, unless you start believing extremely truther poo poo that his wife came up with an 1hr+ bullshit story about having to decide whether to put her husband on the transplant list and then giving him end of life care, all for whatever mild PR hit Tony Khan might have taken for having a wrestler die of a communicable disease. For the rest of it, if AEW can get their next TV renewal anywhere near WWE's deal (which is somewhere around a billion dollars for twice the viewership, most of whom are 50+), they're pretty much insulated against ever posting a loss again. In a lot of ways, that's now WWE's biggest problem - they have no new stars, their television is written presumably by someone who resents the obligation, and they're struggling to sell tickets for Wrestlemania (their rumoured solution is bringing back 57-year-old Steve Austin and 56-year-old Shawn Michaels for matches), but they're also exponentially more profitable than they ever were with Austin and Rock on top in 2001, so why would they want to change anything
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Feb 19, 2022 22:03
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gbs but from 2004 posted:what stuff has Tony Khan done to make him such a liability? for the most part he does the same poo poo that wrestling promoters have done for decades and nobody has given a poo poo one of his guys just came back from time off for alcohol rehab and there are a couple who are pretty juicy, but for reference vince mcmahon was actively put on trial for running a steroid ring, and when WWE fired kurt angle in 2006 as a final resort because he wouldn't go to rehab and they'd already had two top stars die on their watch, TNA immediately signed him to a contract, as well as jeff hardy who had to be legit held down for a pin once because he showed up for the main event strung out of his gourd he also lets his wrestlers do a bunch of hardcore poo poo and bleed on television, which is now a hard no for WWE (and by all accounts vince mcmahon is aghast at women doing it), but I'm also certain at no point did he go to allie with a script that called for her to do the splits on a pile of thumbtacks, or one that said that cody rhodes should set his dumb rear end on fire out of spite for the fans booing him, that's all from them his main weakness appears to be a trumpesque desire to search he own name on twitter and then be mad about it a wrestler named Big Swole got "mutually" released last year, but then went on a podcast and basically implied that AEW didn't want black faces on their tv, which is kinda bullshit but as a response to that headline Khan then went on twitter and posted something to the effect of "here are a list of black wrestlers who won last week, we fired big swole because she sucked rear end, WATCH RAMPAGE TONIGHT AT 8" and while big swole definitely did suck seven kinds of rear end, that's definitely the sign of someone who isn't one mean tweet away from a PR disaster he also does the same poo poo at fulham and roy keane is not a fan
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Feb 19, 2022 22:30
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shadow puppet of a posted:Laid out a red carpet for whoever will become his Kevin “nailz “ wacholz I don’t know what this means or who that is X JAKK posted:
I always hated kurrgan and I could never put my finger on why
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Feb 19, 2022 22:31
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FullLeatherJacket posted:for the most part he does the same poo poo that wrestling promoters have done for decades and nobody has given a poo poo sounds like shades of Dana white from ufc, albeit milder
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Feb 19, 2022 22:36
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FullLeatherJacket posted:a wrestler named Big Swole got "mutually" released last year, but then went on a podcast and basically implied that AEW didn't want black faces on their tv, which is kinda bullshit but as a response to that headline Khan then went on twitter and posted something to the effect of "here are a list of black wrestlers who won last week, we fired big swole because she sucked rear end, WATCH RAMPAGE TONIGHT AT 8" and while big swole definitely did suck seven kinds of rear end, that's definitely the sign of someone who isn't one mean tweet away from a PR disaster It also came out shortly afterwards that Swole was basically mad that another black female wrestler named Jade Cargill got the push Swole felt she should have got, and when Jade (who is younger, has a much more marketable look, and isn't afflicted with Crohn's disease like Swole is) very subtly called her out on it, Swole did a whole bunch of backtracking. So there's a few people who think Swole cynically used the issues some people have regarding AEW not being diverse enough in their eyes, as a way to garner sympathy and complain about her lack of a push without getting negative reactions in response. She just didn't realize that Billionaire Tony A) is terminally online and B) don't give two fucks. That all being said, Tony Khan's tweet about Swole being a bad wrestler was absolutely lovely and he should never have made it. Even if he legit thought her wrestling sucked that's still unprofessional as gently caress, no denying that.
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Feb 19, 2022 22:45
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i for one demand a professional and etiquette-first sports entertainment mania league
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Feb 19, 2022 22:45
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FullLeatherJacket posted:bleed on television, which is now a hard no for WWE (and by all accounts vince mcmahon is aghast at women doing it), I'm surprised that he never thought a "menstruation match" would be a good idea. "Its that time of the month and these girls have had ENOUGH of each other".
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Feb 19, 2022 22:49
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FullLeatherJacket posted:
Lmao I did not connect Fulham with AEW before now, this is brilliant. Can't wait for the CM Punk statue to go up outside the cottage in keeping with the club's history. Shout out to all the effort posts ITT as well, if I get the time I'd love to get something together about WrestleMania X-Seven which had it all - from a gimmick battle royal to a great hardcore match, a TLC match, Shane O'Mac vs Vince with a comatose Linda at ringside and, of course, the culmination of the Attitude era with Stone Cold vs The Rock. Gold from top to bottom in memory, but let's see if it stands up to a rewatch.
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Feb 19, 2022 22:56
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oh yeah, the other thing with tony khan is that he's a tedious wrestlenerd who makes j/o material for other wrestlenerds where it's all "sports-feel" and statistics, which is refreshing in comparison to wwe shows where just the same two guys fight every week for two months to kill some airtime, but it also means that if you're not super excited to watch a match where it's entirely obvious who's going to win the only thing he can do to get your attention is to yell 'BIG THINGS COMING' and roll out more mans LOOK IT'S CM PUNK LOOK IT'S DANHAUSEN LOOK IT'S KEITH LEE LOOK IT'S JAY WHITE sometimes you just want there to be a milk truck and kurt angle is driving the milk truck and then he's spraying people with the milk and also drinking it and jr is yelling that it's unpasteurized
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Feb 19, 2022 23:21
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Watching X-Seven right now, had forgotten about Right To Censor, maybe it's not all gold 
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Feb 19, 2022 23:26
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FullLeatherJacket posted:sometimes you just want there to be a milk truck and kurt angle is driving the milk truck and then he's spraying people with the milk and also drinking it and jr is yelling that it's unpasteurized The secret to Pro Wrestling is to know when to have a custody ladder match, when to have Robocop, and when to have a serious wrestling feud with technical wrestling.
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Feb 19, 2022 23:29
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dang Tony Khan sounds like a dork but aew is great
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Feb 19, 2022 23:38
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FullLeatherJacket posted:oh yeah, the other thing with tony khan is that he's a tedious wrestlenerd who makes j/o material for other wrestlenerds where it's all "sports-feel" and statistics, which is refreshing in comparison to wwe shows where just the same two guys fight every week for two months to kill some airtime, but it also means that if you're not super excited to watch a match where it's entirely obvious who's going to win the only thing he can do to get your attention is to yell 'BIG THINGS COMING' and roll out more mans Milk? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcv9kp0jwWY
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Feb 19, 2022 23:45
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gbs but from 2004 posted:dang Tony Khan sounds like a dork but aew is great The two are probably related, tbqh I'd rather watch a wrestling fed run by someone who's an absolute wrestling fan geek than one run by people who are not only embarrassed to be associated with wrestling but have an active contempt for it, their workers, their fans, and themselves
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Feb 19, 2022 23:45
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At least half of it, I'd say. (Wrestlemania X-7) But let's head back to that time period for other things... --- So yeah. Russo? Signed to save WCW? Had made things even worse to the point where in early 2000, having been on the job for less than three months, he was removed from his position and sent home. Which as mentioned, put Kevin Sullivan back in charge, which was likely one of the reasons Chris Benoit left. Then when WCW continued to slip, Busch, flailing, threw all sense to the garbage and brought back Bischoff and Russo as on air characters and Russo as writer, an event in which they ‘reset’ WCW storylines, as the pair tried to do a new big storyline based around the idea of the new younger stars of WCW (dubbed the New Blood) fighting the old, established stars of WCW (dubbed the Millionaire’s Club) for their ‘spots’. The giant red flag over how this would turn out was probably the fact that the first promo doing this involved them stripping then-champion Sid of his belt, and when he refused, Bischoff asked if he was scared because he didn't have any scissors. The crowd sat there baffled. Bischoff thought he hadn't been heard, so he repeated it. The same result, because Russo was still writing under the assumption that every fan in the audience knew this was a fake show and scoured the internet for all stories and would know that Sid had had a very ugly incident several years ago where he'd gotten into a real life fight with another WCW wrestler and actually attacked him with a pair of scissors. One should be surprised that when the crowd didn't react, Russo didn't get on the mike and bring up squirrels or squeegee mops, based on apocryphal stories about Sid where he got in another fight with another wrestler, who despite being half his size was much tougher, so Sid fled and came back with a weapon, that being a squeegee, or that at one point Sid had a squirrel as a pet and got bet that he couldn't keep said squirrel down his pants for one minute. I'll leave it to your imagination how that worked out. Oh yeah. This new direction? It didn’t work either. For the exact same reason that putting shine and glitter on a pile of crap doesn't change it. Nowhere was this demonstrated more than one of the 'feuds' that spun out of this storyline reset: Billy Kidman vs Hulk Hogan. Kidman was a very talented cruiserweight who could do a very nice version of a leaping backwards spin/splash called a ‘Senton Bomb’, and while light on mike skills his lightness on his feet made up for it. Hogan, for some reason, had disparaged Kidman in an interview, saying ‘he couldn’t sell out a flea market’. So Russo, ever obsessed with reality, had Hogan fight Kidman…in matches where Hogan kicked Kidman’s rear end all over the ring and then lost at the end due to a fluke, hence doing absolutely nothing for Kidman and basically ‘proving’ Hogan right, in the same way you ‘prove’ you won a board game by knocking it over and claiming that by virtue that it is over, you won. Also, I think part of the feud had Kidman's on air lady escort leaving him for Hogan because Hogan was just so much more manly. But I could be wrong there. But now, ho boy now, because WCW was determined to show that when it rained, it not only poured, but hailed, snowed, and tornado’d as well, they went and decided to do something so stupid every time I think of it, I lose brain cells. See, WCW had, back when things were going much better for them, started work on a WCW focused comedy movie called “Ready To Rumble”. But movies take time to set up, film, and edit, and by the time it was ready to be released, things had gone very south, very fast for the company (see also: WWE video games having wrestlers in them that had, by the time of the game’s release, departed the company. Case in point: the not very good WWE game In Your House, released at the end of October 1996, having Ultimate Warrior in it despite the fact he’d left the company back in June. And on a side note, said game decided to give the wrestlers ‘Superpins’, which were the equivalent of Fatalities. Most made some sort of sense, but some, namely Triple H’s and Ahmed Johnson’s, didn’t, and Vader’s…well, it has to be seen to be believed.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzSo5Zlc_6o But while In Your House the game was subpar, Ready To Rumble ended up being just as bad as WCW was at the time, in the same vein as Leonard Part 6 and The Adventures of Pluto Nash. On top of that, it presented WCW fans as the dumbest, crudest people on the planet, wholly believing wrestling was real (though to be fair, in the film, it was presented as sort of being real instead of all storylines and performance) and finding enjoyment in sniffing each other’s farts, or something, my mind has repressed what little bits of it I’ve seen. But it was a movie being released in the hot period of May, so WCW figured they should do some cross promotion. So they had the movie’s main star, David Arquette, win the WCW World Title. They got attention, all right. They became the utter laughingstock of any real-world entertainment recapping that bothered to talk about it. It also got NEGATIVE attention, as the lone PPV where Arquette defended his title in the main event resulted in a buy rate so low, WCW refused to release it publicly. (And I’ll note that on his first and only PPV as WCW champion, ARQUETTE got to be in the main event, where Goldberg didn’t.) If WCW had been bleeding out, that was someone ripping out the company’s lungs for good measure. Now hemorrhaging money, WCW started cutting costs like someone on a serious diet cuts calories. They did smart stuff like stop doing that ‘buy EVERYONE a plane ticket’ thing, but they also released dozens of wrestlers to the point where the roster was reduced to a third its size, while also firing all of the Mexican wrestlers besides Rey Mysterio and I think one other. Which looked real good when another employee, the Japanese Sonny Onoo, brought a lawsuit against WCW/Time Warner for racial discrimination; the suit wouldn’t be settled with Time Warner until long after WCW had ceased to exist, and according to one source, Onoo and the people who had filed the suit ‘made out like bandits’. Bischoff, perhaps finally burned out, more or less fell to the wayside, leaving Russo in charge, who doubled down on his gimmicks, ‘reality slaps’ like having Jeff Jarrett literally lay down for Hulk Hogan, then after Hogan left, coming out and cutting a promo that legit ripped Hogan apart, which led to Hogan leaving WCW for the last time and filing a legit defamation lawsuit against Russo, and terrible decisions like turning Bill Goldberg heel. And having him do reality bits like ‘refuse to follow the script’ on TV. Except he still was following it. The script just said he was not following it. And just to show how toxic things had become, after Bret Hart, who had basically had NOTHING done with him during this whole two year period (and due to his brother’s tragic death, spoken of before, had more or less stopped caring), was finally given the WCW Title at the end of an utter mess of a tournament whose final rounds happened in Toronto, so the Canadian hero won in his backyard, at least… Oh wait wait, I’m getting my timeline screwed up. That happened at the end of 1999. Hart’s first PPV Title defense would be against Goldberg at Starrcade, where Goldberg, who while being very over, strong, and capable, was still green as a wrestler; he’d only been doing it for a little over two years. And so, Goldberg screwed up a kick and legit kicked Hart in the head hard, giving him a concussion, which was compounded by further concussions over the next few weeks because Bret didn’t know how severe his injuries were (and people didn’t quite get how bad concussions were in those days too). The injuries forced Bret to vacate the title and would more or less have to retire after that point, his whole WCW career having been a waste and said career ending out of nowhere. Worse, the injuries would result in Bret suffering a series of strokes a few years later, though he recovered, and he doesn’t blame Goldberg for what happened. While Bret did come back for a few ‘gimmick’ matches afterwards, you’ll notice that in them, Bret never takes a single bump or even a strike. He can’t, he’s literally insured to not do so. But before that happened, Bret still won that Goldberg match…when Roddy Piper came out…and said Goldberg submitted even though he didn’t…just like the Montreal Screwjob, because wrestling would be reusing that act because let no good RL drama go to waste, even if it makes no sense. Then Bret helped reform the NWO. Again. Wasn’t it reformed at the START of 1999? Well it fell apart in a few months. Until it got reformed again. Then fell apart within two months. Oh yeah, and Goldberg, seeking revenge on heel Bret Hart, attacked his limo backstage, using a concealed piece of pipe in his hand to make it look like he was smashing the limo’s windows with his fist. Except he dropped the pipe after the second window broke. So he broke the third window with his actual bare hand. Which inflicted a laceration and muscle severing so severe Goldberg was at risk of bleeding to death and ended up on the shelf for six months. And then when he came back, Russo turned him heel. Now we’re synced back to the latter half of 2000…which somehow led to Vince Russo, having become an on air character more and more, somehow ending up the Number 1 contender for the WCW Title. In a cage match. Which had so much interference I swear I remember WWF wrestlers showed up in the building to pump the number of run ins, and ended with Russo getting the win by Goldberg, who was now face again (heel turn happened in June, this was October), speared him through the cage before the actual champion could leave, and hence Russo ‘won’ by ‘escaping’ the cage. He then declared that he was forfeiting the belt and that he’d done what he came here to do, win the title, as WCW finally realized that no, Russo was not going to help them, and sent him home again, this time for good. Everything had gone to poo poo. Nitro and Thunder’s ratings were a fraction of their heydays. WCW Saturday Night, which had once been WCW’s main show, and now was one of WCW’s B shows for undercard job matches and recaps, and had run, more or less, for something like 18 years, just stopped airing one week, vanishing from TBS. Starrcade 2000 had a buyrate that was around one-TWENTIETH of what Starrcade 1997 had done. And as 2001 started, WCW had their Hardcore Title on a wrestler named Meng (yeah, they also played copycat with WWF and made a Hardcore Title), who was working without a contract. The WWF just signed him, and the next week, the Hardcore Title literally disappeared, with its whole history erased from WCW’s own website. Like they were so tired that instead of just putting it on someone else, it would be easier to just stop using it and erase any evidence of its existence. Oh, and they aired a match with Meng that had been taped a week after he left. But, but, but, but… Despite all this, WCW still had great, steady ratings for cable shows, even if they were down so much. And they had Ted Turner at their backs. Oh yeah, they managed to lose something from 80 to 100 million dollars in 2000, but wrestling is ever resilient and re-creatable. Hell, WCW’s sheer failing led to interest in the company being sold, with Eric Bischoff again seeing a chance to reign as empire maker if he could officially get to be the official, in reality owner of WCW. He had learned from his mistakes, he would tear everything down and rebuild it from the ground up. No more old WWF stars with guaranteed contracts and creative control. No more endless crap I couldn’t even mention without making this even longer, like Hogan vs Warrior II, THE MACHINE, and Ric Flair as President of WCW, insane asylum inmate, betrayed by his own RL son, and buried alive in the desert and dug up two months later like he was a hidden treasure rather than a person. Those all happened with and to Ric Flair, those last four, that is. But Time Warner was a business that did other things besides own a wrestling company, and they had decided to merge with then-Internet giant AOL. It was a decision that would more or less send both companies plummeting from their then-perches in flames; as Death of WCW commented, maybe WCW managed to lose $100 million in one YEAR, but how terribly done the Time Warner/AOL merger caused them to lose something like $54 billion in one QUARTER. But WCW would be collateral damage. The merger would reduce Ted Turner to essentially middle management with no power. While WCW had dealt with ‘business people’ before, they at least had Ted, who’d had a soft spot for wrestling ever since it helped him get his “Superstation” off the ground in the mid 70’s in their corner, though Bischoff had been the only one who really knew how to exploit that. Now Ted was gone. In his place were boards of executives who knew nothing about wrestling. And so Jamie Kellner, Time Warner-AOL’s new entertainment president, took a look at WCW programming, and likely with a sneer in his tone, decided it wasn’t something that ‘his company’ wanted on their channels, especially since the ratings had dropped so much, and cancelled WCW programming entirely. Nitro and Thunder were gone. Bischoff, who’d wanted to buy WCW, now had nothing to actually air company content on. That was it. This final act so destroyed any value WCW had that when Vince purchased some of its contracts and its tape library, he did it for a song, less than 5 million. The final Nitro opened with Vince himself, legit firing people who had angered him on air, and in the final segment, simulcast it with Raw. And on that final Nitro segment, instead of a fond goodbye, it was devoted to Shane McMahon showing up at the Nitro arena, saying he had managed to (storyline) purchase WCW under his father’s nose, and now he was going to use against his own father and destroy him with it just like old times. Fittingly, the very last part of Nitro, the main show of WCW, was all about sacrificing it to the WWF’s benefit. The worst part, perhaps, is that WCW had pulled so much nonsense with its own backstage people that a chunk of them thought this was just another worked shoot storyline. They didn’t actually know it was real and that WCW was dead and gone until they stopped receiving paychecks. How in the hell could that happen? Well, remember how I mentioned that Brian Pillman real release thing? That was the endgame to what seemed like an utterly insane side story of wrestling in the mid 90’s; that Brian Pillman was breaking the rules on TV, having real life fights with people (for example, he was having a match with WCW wrestler slash booker Kevin Sullivan which would only end when one of them said “I respect you.” Before the match barely started, Pillman grabbed the mike, said “I respect you, bookerman.” and left the ring, like he’d both called out said wrestler's 'real job' and then left without doing the match 'for real'). What was the point of all of this? Well, for Pillman it was a trick to get signed by WWF. For Eric Bischoff, who was in on it (until the part where Pillman actually resigned and went to the WWF), it was basically done to ‘work the boys’. Just because. It made no money for anyone save Pillman, and when the wrestlers realized they’d been lied to, all it did was make them stop trusting the management. Which ultimately concluded in some of them not even realizing they didn’t have a job any more. Until the money stopped. They say wrestling’s fake. Most people have no idea. —- The thread title is “Vince McMahon is old”. It was, is, about the fact that he’s now an old man. But everyone ages. It’s not exactly special or unique. But in a way, I think Vince McMahon was ‘old’ before most of us had been born. In the sense that he was set in his ways, as bassackward as they were many a time, and refused to budge. WCW’s utter failure was Vince’s potential gain. He could do his own invasion angle, and hell, since the WWF was still riding its biggest hot streak ever (though that was coming to an end as well, as said, with Wrestlemania 17, though one wouldn't know it at the time) instead of it erupting from a rather cold status quo like the Outsiders and NWO had with WCW, he could do it even bigger and better. And yet… There’s some things that were out of his control, one has to admit. It had been said that the original idea was that WCW would get its own show, to rebuild itself some and give Shane McMahon some legit real experience in running a wrestling company, before they did the big invasion angle. But TNN, which would become Spike TV, which WWF had left its long time home on the USA Network for in mid 2000, said no. They’d paid a large amount of money to get the ‘big’ wrestling company (hell, some think that ECW, which also went out of business at the start of 2001, but had had a TV slot on TNN first before then, was basically leveraged by TNN to get the WWF programming and was then discarded) and they didn’t want to spend more for the ‘loser’ one that had fallen into the abyss and lost tens of millions of dollars. This was 2001; something like running a WCW show online only wasn’t going to fly. So, lacking a spot for WCW to be its own thing, there seemed little else but to get right to the main thing. (Which makes me remember how when Kellner cancelled Nitro and Thunder, Bischoff made one last desperate effort to try and get the shows on another network. One network he hit up was USA, but its entertainment director turned him down and said something along the lines of "A bunch of pimply faced teenage punks tainted this network's demographics before going on to whatever other stupid pursuits long enough and we don't want them back." Which doesn't sound like a bitter ex at all. I suspect that when WWE ended up jumping back to the USA Network several years later, said executive was no longer with the company.) Secondly, the WWF wrestlers had been working to more or less get this to happen (ie, WCW failed and closed down). I can’t blame a lot of them for not liking the idea of wrestlers coming in from the company that had also tried to take their jobs and potentially take their spots. I do blame them for being so self-focused that many ignored that EVERYONE could benefit from this, spots or no spots. Hell, all of WCW’s big stars were still ‘locked up’ in guaranteed contracts: even if the company was gone, Time Warner-AOL still had to pay them until the contracts expired; WWE had just picked up most of their midcard, more or less. To get them out of those contracts would require the WWE to buy them out, which was again, money spent for the people who had tried to take the WWF wrestlers’ jobs. Which would stir poo poo in the locker room. And Yet… The proof was in the pudding. The Outsider/NWO ‘invasion’ had pulled WCW to the top of the mountain, and been so much that it took three years of endless, ever growing fuckups to fully tear down everything it built. Doing it again, with lessons learned? It would pay for itself almost as soon as it had started. There would be so much potential money. So much story. It could go on for years more. And YET… The aforementioned issues might have screwed things up, but they were at most 10 percent of the problem. The rest was Vince McMahon. He didn’t see the money. The ratings. The sheer potential. He saw himself getting told by ‘wrestling fans’ to ‘get his poo poo off the air’ when he’d snuck-bought that NWA timeslot in the mid 80’s, with the reality that if he stood his ground, he’d just lose the slot and get nothing from it save more bootprints on his rear end. He heard Ted Turner on the phone. “I’m in the wrasslin’ business!” Wrasslin’. Wrestling. Vince so dearly wanted to run anything else, like Ted did. But he couldn’t. Because all they saw of him was a 'wrasslin' promoter'. Ted was in the seat he wanted for his life. And Ted didn’t even realize it. And he thought about those dark mid 90’s days when Bischoff stole his bag of dirty tricks and unleashed them on him, taking people HE had made and using it for HIS benefit. Putting the company, HIS company, in danger of destruction, whose content he might have despised, but it was HIS, it was still his chance to springboard into ‘better, proper’ things that he deserved, and now it was threatened that he would lose even THAT. To end up with utterly nothing. Save being known as a ‘wrasslin promoter’. And a failed one. Really, what did you expect? So WCW invaded…and swiftly were made to look inferior. They arranged to have a ‘WCW main event’ for a Raw, and then had WWE stars Steve Austin and Kurt Angle beat up both stars and literally throw them out the door. Worse, the WWE had so effectively turned their fans against the WCW name that when the ‘match’ was being set up, a majority of fans LEFT the arena. It ended up landing with such a thud (which really could have been softened, at least) that within the next week the whole storyline got drastically reworked; ECW wrestlers showed up in WWE, WWF and WCW wrestlers who had worked for the ECW company before joined them, and the WWF and WCW actually united to take out this third renegade faction, only for WCW to turn on WWE anew and reveal that WCW and ECW had formed an alliance…led by Stephanie McMahon. This was all on one show; if properly used all those events could have covered six months of television and PPV. And finally, the big July PPV, called Invasion, which would feature the first slate of matchups of WWE vs WCW and now ECW? The main event would be five WWF top stars, that being Steve Austin, the Undertaker, Kane, Chris Jericho, and Kurt Angle…against five men, only two of which, Booker T and Diamond Dallas Page, had actually been WCW top stars. The other three were the Dudley Boys and Rhyno, and while they had been perhaps ECW’s top tag team ever and ECW’s last-as-an-independent-entity world champion, the fact remained that they had until a few scant weeks before, been WORKING FOR THE WWF. And then the show ended with Steve Austin turning on Team WWF and joining the Alliance. Because these WCW wrestlers had nothing. They were nothing. They needed McMahons, and WWE guys to even remotely seem like a danger. The PPV still had a giant buyrate, which showed the interest, but fans quickly picked up that this wasn’t going to be what they wanted. It was what Vince wanted and what Vince wanted, more than anything else, was revenge. And so, what could have been a feud and angle that lasted for years and made Vince hundreds of millions of dollars ended with a wet fart six months later at Survivor Series when Team WWE again faced ‘Team Alliance’ for a general ‘loser ceases to storyline exist’ match. And who were the five members of Team Alliance, nee Team WCW? Why, they were Steve Austin…who had rebuilt WWF almost single handedly, after WCW had fired him via fax under the logic that no one in simple black trunks who could talk would ever get over and draw money. And Kurt Angle, who had been WWF’s main foe against Austin after he had turned on the WWF, only to make a shock turn himself a few weeks before the PPV and join the Alliance himself. And Rob Van Dam, who was also a big ECW star who had gotten over in the WWF as well during the Alliance Invasion storyline, but again, was an ECW STAR. The lone WCW star on the team? Booker T, who had by now been beaten and stripped of his WCW Title by the Rock, even as Rock was beginning to draw away from the business due to the lure of Hollywood. The last man on Team Alliance? Shane McMahon. Yeah, Vince had originally been planned to be on Team WWF, but he ended up being replaced by the Big Show. The fact that Shane was not said it all in regards to what mattered to how Vince wanted to present things. And oh yeah. You remember all those guaranteed contracts that the WWF didn’t want to buy out lest it upset the locker room? Once the WWF vs WCW angle was done with Team WWF’s victory, Ric Flair showed up the next night on Raw to play a face authority figure vs McMahon. And all the big stars that Vince could have signed would end up in the WWF as the next years passed. Goldberg. Scott Steiner. Rey Mysterio. Even Hall, Nash, and Hogan as the NWO. But whatever money they drew was an inkling compared to what they could have drawn had that Invasion PPV had a WCW team of Booker, Page, Flair, Steiner, and Goldberg, or Austin had remained on WWF’s side, forcing the Alliance to keep bringing in bigger WCW stars to try and take him down. Vince's choices might have led to the amazing-as-experience Hogan vs Rock match at Wrestlemania X8, which I was there live for, but if he'd made the smarter choice, we could have MORE THAN ONE such experiences as wrestling fans. It says so much that if I grabbed any random person who has read or posted in this thread and shoved them into a theorized position where they were running WCW in 1997 or the WWE in 2001, that they could probably do a 10x better job than the people who were, even if they knew next to nothing about the business. But Vince, much like any good psychopath, never forgets a slight. Ever. And he never stops holding a grudge. Ever. Look no further than the earlier thread discussion about Sting finally arriving in WWE in 2014; originally presented as a vigilante figure standing up against injustice, by the time Wrestlemania and his match with Triple H rolled around it had become “Sting was fighting to avenge WCW”. Despite Sting never actually saying that. But no need for him to do so. The play by play announcers, who had Vince in their ear, made sure they beating that new reason and the fact that WCW sucked into the ground in their commentary during the whole match, FIFTEEN YEARS after WCW had ceased to exist. And who came out to help Sting as part of Team WCW, to counter Triple H’s reinforcements in the form of Degeneration X? Why, Hall, Nash, and Hogan as the NWO again. Which was utterly stupid. The NWO had been anti WCW. Sting had been the champion against them. If they REALLY wanted to send Sting WCW aid, and presuming in this theorized world that certain injuries and other bad poo poo didn’t happen, they would have sent out Goldberg, Ric Flair, Lex Luger, and maybe Diamond Dallas Page. But no. No actual WCW. It was, always has been, about the WWF. And of course, Triple H won that match, which meant that Sting ‘failed’ to avenge WCW. Some people have mockingly referred to wrestling as Shakespeare, as Shakespeare at his time was considered somewhat lowbrow, his plays including sexual jokes and puns including a literal “Your mother” line, only for changing times to have him re-analyzed as an utterly brilliant writer who produced brilliant content. I don’t think the same will ever be said about wrestling, but there’s definitely a line from the Bard that does. “It is a tale told by an idiot. Full of sound and fury. “Signifying nothing.” Coda:...wait, wasn’t this supposed to be an answer to what happened to TNA?! Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Feb 21, 2022 |
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Feb 19, 2022 23:53
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MyChemicalImbalance posted:Watching X-Seven right now, had forgotten about Right To Censor, maybe it's not all gold
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Feb 20, 2022 00:00
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https://youtu.be/2uBATjbsWTc Don't know the context but seems to sum up what I'm reading about this era
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Feb 20, 2022 03:51
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Gavok posted:Khali was brought in as a big, scary heel, but there was only so much you could do with him. He was incredibly limited and only had a couple moves he could do, but they were at least able to coast on his mystique by having him feud with various top faces like Undertaker, Cena, Kane, Batista and Triple H. At one point, Edge was World Heavyweight Champion and got injured, so the title was vacated. They held a battle royal for a new winner and because 1) SmackDown had a thin main even scene and 2) it made more storyline sense for Batista to chase the title, they had Khali win it. He's considered one of the all-time worst world champions in wrestling history. God I love this thread Thank you!
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Feb 20, 2022 03:59
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Quick note about The Great Khali: During his face turn Khali adopted the persona of "The Punjabi Playboy" and weekly they would drag this seven foot tall charisma vacuum out to the ring and have a "Khali kiss cam" where he would smooch a random lady from the crowd. Again, I'm not sure who wanted to see this (Vince) or how it was supposed to get Khali over. Are, are women supposed to find him attractive? No offense to the big man but he looks like someone bashed him in the face with a brick. He has a CONCAVE FACE.  .....ladies.I'd wager that Vince thought it was funny and Khali went with it because, money. And what else is he going to do? He can't wrestle with out pulling every tendon in his body. He can't cut a promo because English is NOT his first language, and he has the charisma of a full diaper. All he can do is be tall. But, if you're tall enough, Vince McMahon will put you in the main event. Remember WWF legend Giant Gonzalez? Of course you don't. But he was still on the top of the card at WrestleMania. Because he was tall. So, you're tall. Vince loves you. Thanks for signing with the WWE. Here's your 3 titles runs and $7million. Good job, bad job, who cares. Just be tall. Sydney Bottocks posted:The two are probably related, tbqh I've always wondered if building a strong 4th wall could help win back general audiences and maybe even allow wrestling to be thought of more as an art form. But everyone I've spoken with that's affiliated with wrestling doesn't want to try, and most wrestle dorks get off on knowing the inside baseball of wrestling, so, you know they don't want it. Seis la vie I suppose. Trollologist fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Feb 20, 2022 |
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Feb 20, 2022 04:18
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So, someone asked what the hell happened with TNA. I said to really understand it, you had to understand what happened to WCW, and to a lesser extent, the AWA before it. And having talked about all that…you don’t really need to talk all that much about TNA itself. Because it’s the exact same stories, repeated by people who didn’t, or refused to learn, from history. TNA was essentially founded by Jeff Jarrett, son of legendary territory promoter Jerry Jarrett, who was so renowned that if the steroids trial had gone differently, he actually would have been tapped to run the WWF while Vince was in jail. With a father like that, you can bet that Jeff 1) Would get into the wrestling business, and 2) Get opportunities the average joe did not. Unfortunately, Jeff was that unfortunate tragedy of having good talent in ring and on mike, but not great. The kind of wrestler who peaks at upper midcard, and who might occasionally work in the main event but would never be a main event star. You can’t blame the man for having higher ambition: who wants to listen to the advice that’s basically “Know your place”? But it seemed like that real life would just keep Jarrett in his lane…until he became friends with Vince Russo. When Russo left for WCW, Jarrett went with him…after holding up McMahon for a large cash payment to work his last date with an expired contract to drop the IC belt before he left. Once in WCW, Russo tried to push Jarrett as a main eventer. And unfortunately, like most other nepotism pushes, it just didn’t work, along with all the other things in WCW that didn’t work. Fans might have wanted new top stars, but that didn’t mean they would accept just anyone. Russo tried anyway, and Jarrett would rack up 4(!) WCW Title Reigns before the company closed…all in the year 2000…all within the space of less than three months. As part of 15+ title changes that happened within those first seven months alone. Note that if we consider the WCW Title to be attached to the NWA Title that came into existence in 1948, that title first 15 times' changing hands happened over the space of twenty seven YEARS. Once Vince bought WCW, Jarrett was fired (on air) for the whole ‘holding McMahon up for money’ thing, and with WCW and ECW gone, Jarrett was out in the cold. And unfortunately, like other spotlight addicts, he’d gotten a taste for it. So, as the joke goes, he started his own, with blackjack and hookers. Just like the AWA, TNA was part wrestling organization and part method for Jarrett to feed his ego by booking himself to be the top dog. And boy oh boy, was it BAD. Jarrett the unstoppable wrestler who was Hulk Hogan, Triple H, and John Cena combined with the world title always around his waist and killing the careers of people who could have potentially helped TNA become more than just a Jarrett vanity project was bad enough... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO7mba-GFC4 …but Jarrett, in turn, brought in Russo to write for them. Russo had not improved. At all. TNA’s attempt to do something different (mainly having weekly PPV’s) failed, and the company would have gone deep into the red and broken down just as fast as the XFL had Panda Energy not purchased a controlling interest in it in October 2002. But why would a Texas company that dealt in environmentally friendly (?) power plants want to purchase a large controlling stake in such a risky, likely to bleed money venture? Well, it was because the company founder’s daughter, Dixie Carter, went to her father and suggested it. As the years would unfold, it would become very very clear that Dixie was a shining example of a Money Mark. And maybe she wanted to use the wrestling company as a way of having a close personal male harem, I don’t know. Whatever her exact motivations, Panda Energy was now TNA’s ‘buffer’, their safeguard against mistakes and missteps. They wouldn’t fall apart over one or two errors. You’d need to make a lot. Take a wild guess what happened. Despite Jarrett’s giant masturbatory reign over the company (and related to that, Vince Russo again made himself an on air character in that first year and formed a giant stable he dubbed Sports Entertainment Xtreme, ha ha ha. Well, better than the time he took WCW wrestler Hugh Morrus, and had him change his gimmick, and said he wanted to be called by his real last name, Rection. Also, his middle name was Grant, but you can call him G. How I worded this is 10x more clever than how Russo did it) and stomping out some potential big stars in the crib, as demonstrated in the previous video and here... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz3-FaKcOSI (I think the valid bit of what I said kicks in around the 9:00 mark or so...) ...TNA managed to get itself a TV slot for syndicated shows, and then managed to get a set time slot on Fox Sports Net. Though said slot would expire and not be renewed in 2005, TNA managed to negotiate a new tv show spot. On TNN, or Spike TV now, as after five years, WWE had gone back to its home on the USA Network. While TNA had debuted unique things like a six sided ring and, despite Jarrett’s best efforts, cultivated some hot prospects like amazing wrestler AJ Styles, rising star (mainly due to his cruiserweight like agility despite being a bulky man) Samoa Joe, and other possibles like the tag team America’s Most Wanted and Chris Sabin. It was very possible, very doable, that TNA could stand on its own and become a sort of secondary competition to the WWF, though unlikely in the way WCW could without at least five if not ten if not MORE years of development and luck. And unfortunately, and you’ve heard this story before, TNA was not secure enough on its own merits to try and get by on its own product. They felt that they needed ‘established stars’. Nowhere did what this meant and how it would just be history repeating itself would be shown than on the first episode of Impact that aired on Spike TV. The show would open with AJ Styles to show off his skill with an opponent who would keep up with him. Fine, that could grab eyeballs…but at the end of the show, in a spectacle event rather than any sort of match, the last moments of the first Impact were spent hailing and goggling over the newly arrived Dudley Boys, or Team 3D as they would be dubbed as WWF now owned the Dudley Boys name. While the Dudley Team had indeed been a very successful tag team in WWF and the defining tag team of ECW…they were still outsiders. But after that moment came another one, as the final wrestler to show up at the very end of the show…was Kevin Nash. Yeah. Nash. The same man who helped drive WCW out of business. Like I said. Good parasites will know where to look for fresh blood. Now, I’m not saying the concept of having ‘better known’ wrestlers on a fledgling program is inherently and wholly bad. Hell, some of the wrestlers who did jump to TNA could even have found a proper home in it, like Sting, whose WCW loyalty kept him away from the WWF when all his peers eventually went through its doors, or Christian Cage, an underutilized WWF talent who could have reigned in the main event proper in TNA and then helped its homegrowns get up there. But as said, all of that relied on the people in charge doing what the fans wanted, instead of what the Clique-style wrestlers wanted. I don’t like the term “Money Mark”, but if it must be used, it drat sure fits Dixie Carter, because she promptly repeated Eric Bischoff’s whole playbook. In came more already established stars; Scott Steiner, Rob Van Dam, Jeff Hardy, Booker T. Some even possibly had more potential than they ever would have in WWF, like Rhino, or actively wanted to help improve the company, like Mick Foley, so that it could compete and be an alternate to the WWE.. But the poison that came with it was too great. Maybe Kurt Angle being signed in 2006 potentially allowed a money angle/feud with Samoa Joe, but it also basically enabled Kurt Angle’s demons; while he’d survive and even make it back to the WWF for his last matches in 2018-2020, he could well have ended up permanently crippled or dead (and they ended up fumbling that money match and feud anyway). Same with Ric Flair, spitting on his epically presented retirement match at Wrestlemania 24, partly because Flair was so irresponsible with money that he needed it wherever he could get it, and partly because Flair had been in the business so long he likely just couldn’t live without it and possibly wanted to die in the ring, like some theorized Apollo Creed wanted to in Rocky IV. The TNA stars that were grown solely in TNA? Every time they’d get somewhere, something would pop up and cut them off at the knees. They’d play second fiddle to the outside stars, who’d get the main events, even if they weren’t the type who would want them, because TNA was possibly even more insecure than WCW about its own talent. Depending on how you analyze it, TNA over those years had not one but TWO stables that were basically "The NWO and most of its concepts with the serial numbers filed off" (Immortal and The Main Event Mafia). And nowhere was that demonstrated than in 2010, where Dixie Carter signed…Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff. The two main reasons there was no more WCW. Anyone with ANY SENSE at all should have kept them far away from their wrestling company, or at the very least, far from any place in it where they could make decisions. Forget their names. Forget Hogan’s legacy. General Custer might have been a talented general, but all the average person tends to remember is him wholly misreading a battle situation out of racism and a thirst for glory and getting himself and his small army slaughtered to a man. Does a person’s accomplishments mean much if they led to them pissing it all away and ending up destroying themselves and a whole bunch of other people in the end? I don’t know Dixie Carter. I don’t know what goes on in her head, then or now. I just know that for all its ups and downs, TNA had a chance to be more during the first years of its existence as a show on Spike TV. Hogan killed any and all hopes of that, again, dead. He took over the storylines. He threw out TNA’s unique six sided ring, in a promo about how such things were ‘child’s toys’ and that he was going to do things ‘properly’. He moved TNA to compete directing with WWE Raw: the resulting ratings massacre was so severe TNA fled back to its old timeslot before three months had passed. The WWF Attitude Boom was long gone, but it was so entrenched that fighting it was a foolish move, and fighting it for Hogan’s reasons was suicide. It was just a long, long slow decline from there. The ‘established stars’ that had jumped realized the company had no future, and went back to the WWF: Foley, Booker, Nash, Rob Van Dam. Whatever TNA did right, like getting eyes on their product for their exceptional women’s wrestling, they either killed or just took it for granted until what potential for more there might have been faded away. They brought in all these ‘huge stars’...and yet numerous wrestlers who were not these 'huge stars' were so poorly paid in turn that one female wrestler had to supplement her income by working at a Sunglasses Hut. TNA kept trying new ideas, but the message had been gotten by fans by then. This was not potential competition. This was WCW Redux. And they weren’t going to be burned again. Then those established stars left, going back to the WWF. Hogan, after basically strip mining the company for yet another spotlight fix even if by then he was so worn down from the years and years of wrestling that he couldn't even do his trademark 'lift kick', let alone a legdrop or take any sort of bump, yet still heels had to quail and fall before his 'mighty punches', literally walked out with Dixie Carter on air clinging to his leg, and while tape recordings of racist comments would shortly thereafter get him banished and erased from the WWF, after a few years 'all was forgiven' and he was back making the occasional appearance. You'd swear that Hogan could have been the ultimate double agent, sent by Vince to destroy all competition. But Vince and Hogan, I suspect, are nowhere that smart. Hogan is just that drat good at being a selfish POS. He wasn't alone. Others left and returned to the WWF. Jeff Hardy (who again, TNA enabled so that his drug problems became so bad that he showed up at the main event of a PPV in no condition to perform, literally forcing his opponent to immediately drop him and actually HOLD HIM DOWN so the ref could do a fast count and end things before he could injure himself or others) left and went back. Christian left and went back. Rhino left and went back. They'd probably never do more than sniff the upper midcard at best in the WWF, but they still decided it was preferable to TNA. Eventually, even Angle, even Sting, even eventually JEFF JARRETT, who made a few appearances in WWF post 2018 after enough time had passed that he’d fallen out of power in TNA entirely and the WWF decided to put him in their Hall of Fame in 2018. And not just them. So did the TNA homegrown stars who had realized that this was a dead end and being on top either wouldn’t happen or would be ruling an empire of dirty ashes: AJ Styles, Samoa Joe, Bobby Rood, Abyss, all of them and others ended up in WWE (the last one as a producer, which considering all the horrific bumps he took in all his garbage hardcore matches, is probably best). Spike TV got tired of the show and what they were paying for it for a rating that never budged and just kept very slowly drifting ever downward; it wasn’t worth the expense, and Impact would be forced to move to a new, lesser channel, Destination America. Who decided after a year that they didn’t want it either, forcing them onto even LESSER channels with names like Pop, the Pursuit Channel, and AXS. Panda Energy would essentially sell it off in early 2017, and then proceed to close its own doors in 2018. Was Dixie’s little wrestling fed and all the money dumped into its black hole for the exact same things that killed its predecessors THAT much of a money sink? Maybe, maybe not. But Panda Energy no longer exists. And now, in 2022? Well, TNA still exists. It outlived WCW as an entity: that company as how you would define 'WCW' made it 12 years max, while TNA’s been limping along for 20. But the time where it could have been considered competition for WWF is ancient history. Now it’s little more than a glorified indy, akin to the sadly now defunct Ring of Honor, or Chikara, or SHIMMER, very small companies that exist in small bubbles of constant red (business wise) but continue due to the passion of those involved. Nothing wrong with that, except TNA could have been more. But the people who needed to learn the lessons of history most? Well, they had other desires. Will history repeat AGAIN with the AEW? Will Tony Khan just end up another money mark whose failings destroy potential great things, and all we wrestling fans can do is wait and take what great moments we can before it all falls apart? I don’t know. If AWA was the first, and history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce, maybe the third time will be the charm. After all, it wasn’t INEVITABLE what happened to WCW or TNA. Sometimes people do learn. Or maybe this is just a business where anyone who can learn will never get into a position to do anything about it. The irony is, despite the WWE suffering its own long, slow, decline, nowadays through labyrinth entertainment deals and money from the worst sources, it’s more profitable than ever. Not like that that trickles down to the many wrestlers who got squashed, tossed, fired, and otherwise wasted, especially over the last several years. Vince has, in a way, despite failing at everything else, bodybuilding, football, movies, politics, become more than a ‘wrasslin’ promoter’, if you consider business profitability as a measure. But just like his maybe half-brother Trump, the people Vince wants to acknowledge it never will. To them, it doesn’t matter if you multiply a zero by a billion, a trillion, an ocxdillion, a googleplex…in the end, you still end up with zero. And Vince will never be able to change that in his little racist teenage gang, that while maybe he could recover from family abuse through therapy, nothing will change the fact that then, now, (and forever), they won’t respect him and see him as a wannabe. And the people he hates most will be the ones there at the end. Wrestling fans. Wrasslin' fans. Telling him all the way into the void. Wrasslin promoter. You, being anything else? No chance in hell. And that’s that. — Though I could discuss other things, like the Montreal Screwjob, Hell In A Cell II, or something more absurd like the Dungeon of Doom (and by extension, just how much Ed Leslie has gotten by being friends with Hulk Hogan) Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Feb 21, 2022 |
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Feb 20, 2022 05:18
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Trollologist posted:Remember WWF legend Giant Gonzalez? Of course you don't. And shame on you if this is true.
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Feb 20, 2022 05:22
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Alright Marks splain me the following: I've heard a lot about how WWE is dying but also most profitable time ever. How that be?
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Feb 20, 2022 06:39
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Trollologist posted:Alright Marks splain me the following: I'm not smart enough to post 75 paragraphs about it but The product is creatively bereft. Everything is so heavily scripted and planned that no one character has an identifiable voice. Matches take place with basically no stakes or consequences because the stories that drive them are so uninteresting that the wrestling itself might as well occur in a void. Real, long- time wrestling fans have been completely disinterested for years and dont give a single gently caress. Anything interesting that they may have done over the last 10 years turned out to be too much like wrestling for vince's palate and has been brutally murdered by whichever guy named khan whomst doesn't work for aew. On the other hand, they've cut their talent budget by tens or even hundreds of millions by firing everyone, and worked big money deals to promote saudi shows and to shutter the wwe network and sell the streaming rights to peacock. Their tv deals and house gates coast on inertia and pandemic boredom. This makes their numbers look excellent on paper which pleases the stakeholders and theoretically they are excellently positioned to sell and make a massive profit. This is how you completely kill your product and pencil whip your numbers into looking so fly Eta that I'm just making this poo poo up, i haven't watched or followed wrestling since like 2006 titties fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Feb 20, 2022 |
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Feb 20, 2022 07:05
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titties posted:Eta that I'm just making this poo poo up No, you pretty much hit the nail on the head
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Feb 20, 2022 07:13
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The Great Khali is still around and he's on weird twitter https://twitter.com/greatkhali?t=-upJzDOUzz7CZQ4gK3e_yw&s=09
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Feb 20, 2022 07:14
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Elephant Ambush posted:The Great Khali is still around and he's on weird twitter https://twitter.com/greatkhali/status/1452236643365183490?s=20&t=HNcamvywg3Z3oHg5nnhMOA
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Feb 20, 2022 07:22
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titties posted:I'm not smart enough to post 75 paragraphs about it but Some things don't need half a dozen effortposts to fully understand. It's basically the same reason Fox News is profitable despite being so toxic that virtually no one wants to buy advertising on it: their money comes from it being tied up in entertainment bundles and deals in that vein.
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Feb 20, 2022 07:39
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Trollologist posted:The secret to Pro Wrestling is to know when to have a custody ladder match, when to have Robocop, and when to have a serious wrestling feud with technical wrestling. Robocop is somehow always the most pleasant surprise in everything.
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Feb 20, 2022 07:52
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Trollologist posted:Quick note about The Great Khali: I dunno, you turn Khali to the side and I think he might actually literally look like the Chad meme.
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Feb 20, 2022 08:03
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TheSwizzler posted:https://twitter.com/greatkhali/status/1452236643365183490?s=20&t=HNcamvywg3Z3oHg5nnhMOA Where do you think this man shops for gloves?
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Feb 20, 2022 10:44
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bruh i'm not reading all these longposts but did you mention TNA is basically the canadian indy fed now
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Feb 20, 2022 10:49
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Ad by Khad posted:bruh i'm not reading all these longposts but did you mention TNA is basically the canadian indy fed now Pretty much, yes.
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Feb 20, 2022 11:08
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Trollologist posted:Alright Marks splain me the following: ok, so wwe has three things going on: - network tv is dying a slow death along with doorbells and whatever else millennials are conspiring to murder this week, but the one thing that generally holds up is live sports. wrestling looks a lot like live sports if you squint really really hard, so fox threw them a ridiculous pro-sports style deal on the assumption that boomers will stick around after smackdown to watch king of queens or whatever the gently caress it is now. if they were a real sport (excepting those run by dana white) some of that cash would then go to the star athletes, but instead vincemoney.gif - they sold their streaming rights to peacock, which is now one of those things where they could stop producing new shows and just live off the proceeds of their existing library of 40+ years of content, which isn't just WWE stuff but they also bought up the WCW, ECW and a bunch of old territory tv libraries long before streaming was ever a thing - saudi arabia has gone hog wild with sportswashing, which is why the spanish super cup is now played in loving jeddah and lewis hamilton has a cool rainbow helmet, but again pro wrestling is close enough for the purposes here that they were willing to pay $50m a show for them to do two "wrestlemania"-level shows per year in saudi. but whoever there inked that deal also hasn't watched any wrestling since 2006, so you better loving believe we're bringing back bill goldberg twice a year every year until he falls on he own head and can't get up no more the last saudi show was yesterday and they had one title match where roman reigns beat the goldberg and one title match where brock lesnar beat up literally all of the raw main event for twenty minutes and yeah, the big problem with being a billion-dollar "content" company is that all of the wrestlers now have to operate by the same rules that the dude who plays jack sparrow at disneyland does. stand there, read this, do NOT try to be more popular than mickey mouse, do NOT get into unauthorised slapfights on twitter. this is a problem, since the last time WWE went through a creative slump in the mid-90s, they also went through a financial slump and as a result let the wrestlers more or less throw stuff at the wall and see what stuck. guys like shawn michaels and steve austin weren't "supposed" to be big stars, but once hogan and savage and friends all left for WCW, they bubbled up into that space in spite of whoever vince mcmahon thought was going to be the next icon of pro-wrestling because LOOK AT HIS BIGNESS, WOWWW there's no incentive to do anything good or new or to plan for the future or to try and attract younger fans or to make someone a star who wasn't a star in 2005, but occasionally someone will become popular because the crowd actively feels sorry for them and WWE can frame that like it was a big creative project they did, and then 44-year-old brock lesnar (who has a contract where he doesn't have to wrestle on tv) can beat them to absorb their power
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Feb 20, 2022 11:16
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Ignore people being sassy about your longposts, they're making my day, make more please!
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Feb 20, 2022 11:17
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I feel like if vince mcmahon would have just banged a huge bodybuilder dude a lot of things would have been different
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Feb 20, 2022 11:36
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gbs but from 2004 posted:I feel like if vince mcmahon would have just banged a huge bodybuilder dude a lot of things would have been different Unfortunately, Vince fell in love with that big beefy bodybuilder booty.
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Feb 20, 2022 12:44
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gbs but from 2004 posted:I feel like if vince mcmahon would have just banged a huge bodybuilder dude a lot of things would have been different https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbsRtuoIDSc he wanted to
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Feb 20, 2022 14:08
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