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Ghost Leviathan posted:Like, no one reminds me of Vince more than Judge Doom. This is who reminds me of Vince: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vFTMjYJTnY
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Mar 4, 2022 14:36
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So from what gather from this thread, pro werestling is now in its post-modern period, where there is no longer any pretense of substance or deeper meaning and everything is either hollow consumer mass-marketing (WWF) or a cheeky send-up of the conventions of the genre (AEW). And so the population of potential pro wrestling consumers is split into 4 groups: a tiny number of super wealthy patrons who have very specific ideas about what wrestling should be; a small number of people who "get" wrestling and devote a lot of time, effort, and money to it; a medium-sized number of people who used to enjoy wrestling but are unhappy (or downright bitter) about what it has now become; and a very large number of people who don't give a gently caress about wrestling because it doesn't speak to them at all.
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Mar 4, 2022 14:44
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Gavok posted:Orange Cassidy is great because his "serious gimmick" is him dressing up like an angry ant man. That's awesome.
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Mar 4, 2022 14:44
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snoremac posted:Was it Vince who chased someone around with his poo on a stick? yep
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Mar 4, 2022 16:12
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snoremac posted:Was it Vince who chased someone around with his poo on a stick? it was
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Mar 4, 2022 16:15
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snoremac posted:Just wanna say again I'm loving the long reads, they really make the work day go faster, thank you. Close, it was Vince who chased one of the Brisco brothers (not the Briscoe brothers from modern ROH, but one of the old-school 1970s territory era Brisco brothers) around with his lovely underwear, after he accidentally dropped a steroid/coke/steak and ketchup wrap-laden load in his pants one night. "No wonder babies cry when they poo poo themselves, this loving stings" was something Vince said after he'd shat himself.
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Mar 4, 2022 16:19
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Prof. Crocodile posted:So from what gather from this thread, pro werestling is now in its post-modern period, where there is no longer any pretense of substance or deeper meaning and everything is either hollow consumer mass-marketing (WWF) or a cheeky send-up of the conventions of the genre (AEW). Pretty much.
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Mar 4, 2022 17:03
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Prof. Crocodile posted:So from what gather from this thread, pro werestling is now in its post-modern period, where there is no longer any pretense of substance or deeper meaning and everything is either hollow consumer mass-marketing (WWF) or a cheeky send-up of the conventions of the genre (AEW). the problems with the respective companies (or at least how they're framed) are more or less as you say, but neither company is guilty of their respective shortcomings in absolute your wording, forgive me, makes it sound almost nihilistically cynical, and I wouldn't go that far at all. there are still tons of people in the business who are passionate about this unique form of storytelling and put their hearts and minds and bodies into making it great, and there's still plenty of compelling stories being told we're geeks on the internet, and geeks on the internet are always going to tend towards tribalism and hyperbole as they frame their pet fascinations in terms that suit their personal preferences, and goons in specific have a particular love of iconoclasm MJF cut a promo a short while ago about... well, I'm not going to be able to do it justice, but it would be insane to me for someone to suggest that this is somehow guilty of not taking itself seriously https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAf6epYTUAM this is a man telling a story of when he was a defenseless child, and his hero walked away if you're into video essays, this one by Super Eyepatch Wolf is a pretty good run through of the positives of current day wrestling as entertainment and it uses plenty of recent examples to illustrate
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Mar 4, 2022 20:07
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Prof. Crocodile posted:So from what gather from this thread, pro werestling is now in its post-modern period, where there is no longer any pretense of substance or deeper meaning and everything is either hollow consumer mass-marketing (WWF) or a cheeky send-up of the conventions of the genre (AEW). mm-hmm although aew is more the "art for art's sake" oscar bait branch, where everything is beautifully made but there's a cap on the audience that will watch a three-hour movie about the history of kosovo from the perspective of a boy with down syndrome and no legs unless you can get will smith to star in it and fight a giant spider the whole "let's send up the genre" thing is mainly out on the indies, which is an impenetrable world of people yelling "INVISIBLE GRENADE" and everyone jumping out of the ring, or ladder matches where the ladder wins and becomes champion, or wrestlers with a pause button on their gear who'll freeze in place when pressed but aew is at least a departure from a generation of old men who did a bunch of jerry springer / south park poo poo when jerry springer and south park were the hottest things going, and who think that therefore the eternal solution to make wrestling popular again is to go back to that well instead of trying to be culturally relevant to what people want in 2022 (shark girls, mostly)
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Mar 4, 2022 21:20
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pro wrestling is very stupid and it owns
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Mar 4, 2022 23:26
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Can't wait for some of us older(ish) goons in 30 something years be all like "yeah back in MY DAY, wrestling was so muc more realer than it is now, i mean like how is it fair to have robots and genetically enhanced cyborgs wrestling against people who've only done 25-30 kinds of steroids"?
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Mar 4, 2022 23:30
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What
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Mar 4, 2022 23:38
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16-bit Butt-Head posted:pro wrestling is very stupid and it owns
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Mar 4, 2022 23:45
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The best part of wrestling is that it’s stupid and it owns. But every once in awhile it’s incredibly heartfelt and moving. And if you didn’t like the heartfelt part, well here’s a wrestling dinosaur. Wait till you see his standing moonsault.
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Mar 5, 2022 00:09
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As someone who tuned out of wrestlign completely around 2002 and only became slightly aware in the 2010s through youtube clips and general stuff, what exactly when down with...CM Punk? The guy who just took a squat at the entrance with the mic and went on a tirade about how bad WWE was?
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Mar 5, 2022 00:10
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Someone else can effortpost about his history and how WWE did him dirty, but he took a 7 year hiatus and it seemed likely he would never return, until AEW started dropping hints about something big coming in Chicago. His re-debut is one of the biggest crowd reactions I've ever seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByAXCjqBzLg
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Mar 5, 2022 00:25
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pentyne posted:As someone who tuned out of wrestlign completely around 2002 and only became slightly aware in the 2010s through youtube clips and general stuff, what exactly when down with...CM Punk? The guy who just took a squat at the entrance with the mic and went on a tirade about how bad WWE was? Well, I would argue that the WWE has a history of using real feelings as story fuel to help sell. So, in a sense yes, Punk was mad, but also, yes, it was scripted. The real story of Punk starts in 2014, with an Art of Wrestling Podcast he was on with his friend Colt Cabana.
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Mar 5, 2022 00:37
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I’m old as gently caress and in my day wrestling was guys like Warlord, Herculese with his ring clearing chain, the berserker with his ring clearing right hand. Earthquake and Bronto both. And my personal fave el gigante. We should have never let non 99.9th percentile humans enter the squared circle.
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Mar 5, 2022 01:05
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pentyne posted:As someone who tuned out of wrestlign completely around 2002 and only became slightly aware in the 2010s through youtube clips and general stuff, what exactly when down with...CM Punk? The guy who just took a squat at the entrance with the mic and went on a tirade about how bad WWE was? It was a worked shoot. He said what he really felt but it was all approved beforehand and timeboxed like any other promo. If Vince had actually been pissed off about it they would have cut the mic sooner and Punk would not have gone on to do exactly what he said, which was beat Cena for the title and walk out of the building with it. A whole bunch of backstage poo poo happened after his title reign was over (some of it was talked about upthread but someone else may want to elaborate further) and eventually he got fired and the petty vindictive carny bullies in the Stamford home office made sure Punk received his release paperwork on his wedding day. WWE broke him so hard he stayed away from wrestling for good. He tried MMA and failed at that and only came back to AEW last year because AEW gives a poo poo about the pro wrestling business and treats people the polar opposite of how WWE treats their talent.
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Mar 5, 2022 01:27
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I'm actually working on a CM Punk effortpost, though I'm giving it a prelude by explaining the history of "WWECW," which is its own fun story.
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Mar 5, 2022 01:49
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Elephant Ambush posted:and only came back to AEW last year because AEW gives a poo poo about the pro wrestling business and treats people the polar opposite of how WWE treats their talent. Love that “only” you tucked in there which means a that it had nothing to do with a spendthrift son of a billionaire making him the highest paid person in the company. It was pure altruism like everything else aew does. Right?
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Mar 5, 2022 01:55
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shadow puppet of a posted:We should have never let non 99.9th percentile humans enter the squared circle. bad takes like this is why goldberg and undertaker were main-eventing well into their 50s and their match in 2019 was pure dogshit hell goldberg wrestled as recently as 2 weeks ago. he is 55.
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Mar 5, 2022 01:55
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goldberg nearly murdered undertaker in the ring during a show for the crown prince of saudi arabia
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Mar 5, 2022 01:56
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vince got into a pay dispute with Saudi Arabia and left a plane full of wrestlers to fend for themselves when the government took the plane hostage during the negotiations
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Mar 5, 2022 01:57
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shadow puppet of a posted:And my personal fave el gigante.
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Mar 5, 2022 02:08
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snoremac posted:Just wanna say again I'm loving the long reads, they really make the work day go faster, thank you. I'm sorry uh he did what with his what. I need to know more about this lol 16-bit Butt-Head posted:goldberg nearly murdered undertaker in the ring during a show for the crown prince of saudi arabia More information please
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Mar 5, 2022 02:23
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Cubone posted:oh you Yeah I have no taste, I'm fine with that. As a kid I loved superlatives, I read the 1989 guiness book every night, back when it was a serious publication. El Gigante was my catnip. I could never get enough of that guy no matter how badly his forehead palming moves were. He was the largest therefore he was at the top of the wrestler pyramid.
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Mar 5, 2022 02:27
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pentyne posted:As someone who tuned out of wrestlign completely around 2002 and only became slightly aware in the 2010s through youtube clips and general stuff, what exactly when down with...CM Punk? The guy who just took a squat at the entrance with the mic and went on a tirade about how bad WWE was? Oooh. Ok, so CM Punk, formerly Chick Magnet Punk, of the Chick Magnets. I talked earlier about how TNA basically became a low-budget spiritual successor for WCW and Jeff Jarrett's Jarrettfriends. In that same context, Ring Of Honor was also founded in 2002, and I consider it to be the spiritual successor to ECW, even though it was prima facie the exact opposite of ECW. It was a niche technical wrestling-focused company for a small group of hardcore internet fans, where every match began and ended with a handshake and the fans would throw streamers during the ring introductions because that's what they did in Japan. This was the golden age of going on the stupid internet to buy stupid wrestling DVDs from your stupid favourite company, and so ROH quickly filled that liminal space ECW left behind of not quite being a major company but being too big to be a true indy. And during this golden era, three guys basically stood out. Bryan Danielson, Samoa Joe and CM Punk. Two of whom are now AEW's highest earners twenty years later. There's an argument that Austin Aries should be on that list and that I'm excluding him retrospectively, but that argument is wrong and I'm not going to do an effortpost about Austin Aries because the world would be poorer for it. Of specific note, Joe and Punk have a match in 2004 that gets the first five-star rating from Dave Meltzer for a match in the US since 1997. ROH were big enough that in 2005 they were able to book Samoa Joe vs Kenta Kobashi. Fun fact - according to Joe, Kobashi originally tried to lay out the match where he would be the inscrutable Japanese heel who none of the US fans would know, Joe had to talk him out of it, and he was not expecting that reaction from a US audience at all. But on the other hand, yeah, it's a niche product for people who knew who Kenta Kobashi was in 2005. And, just like ECW, they got big enough that all of these guys were promptly then signed away to deals by WWE and TNA, and Ring Of Honor would continue on for another decade or so without quite reaching those same heights before essentially being shuttered last year and sold to Tony Khan (mostly for tape library purposes) as of... last Wednesday. So, Punk ended up with a WWE contract, spent a while in developmental under Paul Heyman, and showed back up on... ECW. Yup. Fighting Justin Credible, at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Because, for a very brief moment, that was a thing. WWE rode a nostalgia wave by bringing back the ECW name for a semi-developmental third show under the WWE banner. It probably deserves its own effortpost in order to cover Vince McMahon as ECW champion, the Sandman beating up a zombie on TV, or the single worst and least-purchased PPV in WWE history (and the only one bad enough for the fans to chant for TNA during the main event), but that's for a different day. WWE would quickly stop using the Ballroom for television after a Big Show vs Batista main event got buried by the fans so hard that 911 coming out to chokeslam them both wouldn't have saved it, but Punk? Punk was over from day one. I'm not going to go through the narrative history of the following four years or so, you can go on Wikipedia if you want to see the detailed breakdown of Jack Swagger vs Big Show on pay-per-view, but for the most part Punk was in the upper-midcard or lower main-event, competing for WWE's secondary world title, and being someone who would pretty much deliver every time but who people would argue about on the internet as to whether he was a major star or not. And then, in 2011, he got pencilled in as the challenger for Cena's title on a Chicago pay-per-view. Which he built to by coming down to the ring in a Steve Austin shirt and then cutting the single most famous promo since Austin's King Of The Ring speech. It's actually quite clever, because as much as he claims to be breaking the fourth wall, he really isn't. He name-drops a bunch of people that don't get spoken about on WWE television in 2011. He name-drops Ring Of Honor and New Japan. He says that Vince McMahon's promises are bullshit. But at no point does he actually claim that pro wrestling isn't real. Quite the opposite, he's going to beat Cena and take the title to Ring Of Honor, and there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. Of course, this was all pre-approved (or at least enough of it that Punk knew he wasn't going to get fired for it), but this was absolutely a huge shot in the arm for a product that was already getting pretty stale. And he goes out in Chicago, wins the belt in front of his home town and leaves through the crowd, presumably never to be seen on WWE television again. Except of course, he doesn't, and he's back the next week. There then follows a near-enough twelve-month title reign which ironically seems to be the start of Punk having a foot out of the door with WWE. Punk was the champion and the hottest act on the card, but everything he said in that promo still felt like it applied - he wasn't a Vince McMahon guy. Nor did it help that even by his own account, his relationship with Triple H never particularly sounded like they were on the same page about much. Punk's real-life goal seems very much to have been the Wrestlemania main event, but instead WWE had Rock come out of retirement and beat Punk for the title at the Rumble in order to set up Rock vs Cena II, and Punk instead fights the Undertaker in a match where Punk nearly kills himself to prove a point. He would last until the following Royal Rumble in 2014, by which point Daniel Bryan (nee Bryan Danielson) was on his own hot run, this being the first of two Royal Rumbles that completely fell apart and managed to get the Rock booed over his booking, but that's another story for another day. As it relates to Punk, all that's important here is that after the match he went home, and he never came back. Very little would then come out until November, when he'd show up on Colt Cabana's podcast (of which no-one I know has listened to an episode before or since, but that episode has a million views just on youtube and crashed his original hosting platform) and give a two-hour rundown of his entire exit from the company, and in particular how he had a MRSA staph infection on his back for which WWE doctors just fed him antibiotics for until he poo poo himself in the ring. WWE responded to this by releasing a four-minute 'CM Punk's rear end' cut of the Royal Rumble. Literally. Just a four-minute video of CM Punk's rear end. Which was supposed to disprove his claim somehow. Also WWE funded the doctor to sue both Punk and Cabana for defamation, which resulted in an actual court case and the jury throwing it out fairly quickly as bullshit, but also in turn led to Punk and Cabana suing each other and no longer being on speaking terms. Because, as you may have been able to tell so far, Punk is very talented, but also very highly strung and sounds like he'd be the most exhausting friend you've ever had in your life. Meanwhile, though, Punk had found a new job. He was a long-time MMA fan and was a regular at UFC events, where apparently he was sitting next to one of the Fertitta brothers, who asked him as a joke how much they'd have to pay him to fight, and Punk essentially replied "don't you threaten me with a good time". Narrator's voice: He did not have a good time UFC milked this very, very heavily, and I definitely got the sense that Punk put his whole rear end into it, but at a certain point bootstraps and a relentless no-I-am-doing-this-gently caress-you attitude aren't actually replacements for top-level athletic experience or for a Gracie black belt. Guys like Lesnar and Jack Swagger jumped to MMA with an amateur wrestling background (and also with heavyweight being dogshit), but it turns out that you can't just have Conor and Ric Flair cut promos on each other and call it MMA. On the other hand I will admit for the first time on the internet that one of the main reasons I decided to start training MMA was entirely because 38-year-old CM Punk was doing UFC and I could no longer justify saying I was too old to start training. As such, I would like to thank CM Punk for getting me to a level where I could easily beat up CM Punk. But, as he said on the podcast, he woke up one day and looked over at his hot wife (seriously, go look), and his bank account with enough money to easily last him for the rest of his life, and he realised that he never had to have someone tell him what to do ever again until tony khan parked a big dump truck of money outside his house FullLeatherJacket fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Mar 5, 2022 03:34
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FullLeatherJacket posted:Oooh. Ok, so CM Punk, formerly Chick Magnet Punk, of the Chick Magnets. GRADE B+: You've failed to enumerate his many backstage conquests and thereby missed the chance to revisit your introduction in your conclusion like any solid highschool essay should do.
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Mar 5, 2022 03:39
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shadow puppet of a posted:GRADE B+: You've failed to enumerate his many backstage conquests and thereby missed the chance to revisit your introduction in your conclusion like any solid highschool essay should do. i said i would have sex with his wife, that counts as due diligence
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Mar 5, 2022 04:05
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shadow puppet of a posted:GRADE B+: You've failed to enumerate his many backstage conquests and thereby missed the chance to revisit your introduction in your conclusion like any solid highschool essay should do. That made me remember this picture I saw when he was dating Maria Kannelis.  I thought it was very cute.
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Mar 5, 2022 05:39
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HOW DO YOU CAUSE A PROBLEM LIKE JOHN CENA? It’s yet another mystery that can never be known save for Vince, his warped mind inaccessible to the likes of us mere mortals. That mystery is this: did Vince, deep down, utterly hate the Attitude Era? Why would he? It saved the WWE from bankruptcy. It made them so popular it helped drive his main competition and the organization he cribbed a lot of it from, ECW, out of business. It showed that he wasn’t just a one trick pony, in the end. And ignoring all that, it made him shittons of money: Vince might be a millionaire who should be a billionaire, but there was a time when with public stock offerings, Vince actually was a billionaire. How could he hate it? Because he had to do it by LISTENING TO THE FANS. To giving them what they want. To giving up control. Again, Vince is a walking paradox when it comes to the business he’s committed his life to; he has enough common sense to not cut off his nose to spite his face, but not enough to not seethe about it, deep down, those that are keeping him a WRASSLIN’ PROMOTER. And as much as Vince threw weight behind the Attitude Era, on screen and off, it was something he might have done against his will. Vince wanted to do things HIS way, and HIS way had included the likes of Hulk Hogan and how he was presented. So once WCW and ECW were dead and buried, why WOULDN’T he start to slide back into old, bad viewpoints? An addict is forever an addict, after all, the overcoming of addiction being a lifelong journey. And you have to want to fight that addiction: if you’re tied to a chair and unable to take a drink, or use a drug, or whatever, yes, maybe eventually the physical need will detox out of you, but the mental aspect is a whole different story. Who knows? But if this theorizing is any way accurate, it would explain a lot about the career of John Cena. Triple H was described as “a 7 booked as a 10 ending up a 6”, but Cena was “A 7 who advanced to an 8 and then a 9 and eventually a 10 according to some booked as a 12 which caused many people to permanently label him a 2 which just prompted them to book him as a 13 and in the end what could have ultimately been a career that was a 9 or a 9.5 ended up just a 7 or so.” I’m sure if you asked the man, he’d be more than happy with his life and career and think asking for more would be greedy at the very least. If he does think that, good for him. How much of my other rundowns have had the root of ‘never enough’? Still… Lemme pull out this old chestnut again. It didn’t have to be this way. — I said in my Hell In A Cell posts that people generally get into wrestling for two reasons: as a calling, or a job. I believe Cena is the former, or at least, leans that way much more than the latter. Admittedly, he didn’t start as a wrestler-to-be; he was originally a bodybuilder. Whether that was just what he did first before moving onto his desired career, or not, that’s what happened. Cena was probably the first of the ‘tippy top guys’ who wholly came out of the post territories days. Before Vince had run roughshod on them, wrestlers with potential and drive would temper themselves by going from town to town, place to place, working with different people, maybe going overseas somewhere. It wasn’t a perfect system but it was one that when it worked, it worked drat well. And when the WWE destroyed the territories, reducing them to the lesser state of ‘The Indies’, it also crippled a lot of wrestlers' abilities to really become seasoned. Alas, that was more or less Cena’s fate; he’d only work for two companies before he arrived in WWE, and one was the WWE’s developmental territory at the time, OVW. He had about 2 and a half years experience in the business when he made his first appearance on a Smackdown show in June 2002, and with a limited talent pool of ‘WWE-style’ trained talents. (Reminds me of a video I saw of Randy Orton and Cena in said promotion, with Orton playing the whitebread babyface and Cena the cocky heel. Couldn’t find it, unfortunately, but it was interesting to see, especially considering the paths their WWE characters would take). So how did Cena debut? Well, he had a more notable start than some. After Vince McMahon cut his semi-infamous “Ruthless Aggression” promo, where he basically challenged the WWE roster to find, well…ruthless aggression in themselves, by then well established and very talented WWE wrestler Kurt Angle made an open challenge. And out came John Cena, who said he had ‘ruthless aggression’, and fought with Angle. He lost, but he made a good showing of it, and he was now on the show. Unfortunately, the show was not on him. Or in him. Cena’s first months, despite a fair winning record, were of him playing the blandest babyface possible, the ‘just happy to be here and competing’ type. You can START with such a character, yes, but it has a VERY short shelf life. Look no further than the Rock, who started as ‘the blue chipper’ Rocky Maivia who was told to smile all the time and went from ‘okay he’s kinda cool let’s give him some cheers’ from Survivor Series 1996 to “Rocky sucks.” and “Die Rocky die.” by March of 1997, if not earlier. And at least Rocky got a negative reaction, which spurred him and the writers to turn him heel, at which point he did start getting over organically. Cena was just getting a big ‘meh’. Nothing special. Nothing unique. All he had, at most, was a hand sign he did, where he put his thumbs together and extended his pinkies, a gesture he would semi keep. Even a heel turn in October 2002 got nothing, and it seemed like Cena would just fall by the wayside and be released like so many others.  Not exactly the most unique looking sort, is he, 2002 WWE Cena? I also discovered while looking stuff up that his first theme music was called "Slam Smack". Cripes. Why not just call it "Fist Punch"? Or "Pablum Problems"? Then Smackdown aired on, or near enough Halloween, so that the show was Halloween themed and many wrestlers dressed up in costume. Whether Cena was asked by the writers what he wanted to be, or he suggested it, or they’d noticed that he was fond of hip hop in real life and that he liked to try and freestyle, that one night would save Cena’s WWE career, as he dressed up as famed one hit wonder Vanilla Ice. And proceeded to do a drat good impression of him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRii775_xpE Just like that, Cena now had a personality. The WWE noticed, and threw him a bone. John Cena: Blandest Blandy Bland was gone. In his place was, for lack of a better term, and I’ll remove it if anyone thinks I should, John Cena: Wigger.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUb8YsyshOk Well, maybe his chosen title, “Doctor of Thuganomics” fit better. In any case, Cena was now a heel, who would cut rapping promos (and despite the whole undertone of ‘wannabe rapper’, Cena generally could at least mimic the art fairly well) and hit opponents with a chain that he dangled around his neck. For a brief time he had a partner, a wrestler known as Bull Buchanan, who Cena dubbed B2, but B2 would swiftly B-gone and it would just be Cena. Cena’s character beyond being ‘the Doctor’ was, at first, trying to punch too high above his station. This was first demonstrated when he began calling out Brock Lesner while he took a month off TV or so to heal a minor leg injury, cutting insulting rap promos, during which, to mock Lesner’s ‘F5’ finishing move (named after the Fujita scale for measuring tornadoes) by declaring his own finisher, which mirrored Brock by having both place their opponents on their shoulders, as “The F.U.” Fittingly, when Cena later adapted the STF as his trademark submission hold, it would be dubbed the “STFU.” Cena would actually get to challenge World Champion Brock Lesner, and would be swiftly crushed. Next, he’d pick a fight with the Undertaker, and get crushed again. Next, he’d try to take the U.S Championship from Eddie Guerrero in September 2003, failing once more. But despite all that, Cena was getting over. It has often been said that the best gimmicks are just the wrestler’s natural personalities exaggerated by a few, or a dozen, degrees; fans can subconsciously pick up if a person is playing a role that just does not suit their general personality. So while Cena as a bland face got no reaction, fans would follow heel Cena’s raps and finish them for him. He was entertaining, and hence by the time when he was defeated by Kurt Angle at the October PPV, the crowds were ready for him to turn back to face. Which he did, joining Angle’s team to face Brock Lesner’s team at the Survivor Series 2003 PPV. It was the next month, December of 2003, that the first sign of what was to come, at least to me, happened. Cena came out, did a rapping bit, and then did a promo where, while during it, he dubbed his fans “The Chain Gang.” This made me double take. What? He was naming his fans? What was this, the mid 80’s again? That was an element of the past. Maybe Hulk Hogan had had his Hulkamaniacs, and Ultimate Warrior his Warriors, and the Undertaker his Creatures of the Night, and Tatanka his ‘little Braves’ (that’s the four I remember off the top of my head, anyway), that aspect had completely fallen away when the Attitude Era came along. Heck, they’d mocked it shortly before Cena’s debut, in this bit where Hogan, Rock, and Kane were teaming up, and Kane proved to be of a somewhat different mindset than the pair expected. And Cena had much more of a foot in the Attitude Era then the Rock ‘N Wrestling/New Generation one. He’d do promos where he’d let the fans finish because his last word was a curse and he couldn’t say it, but the crowd could (“I come straight down cracking, your bones’ snapping like a stick, you know who’s the man around here, when I grab my- *holds up mic for the crowd to say “DICK!”*)(No Cena did not actually say that, I just remember he did a promo where that was how it ended so I just made up what he supposedly said). He was the Doctor Thuganomics, a hard edge face who’d rip a strip off their ego before he smashed a chain in your face. He had simply, as some heels to face turns do, changed who he was fighting and insulting, and nothing else. And yet…there was his promo. He’d named his fans. The Chain Gang. It wasn't a joke either. He was legit doing it. And it didn’t seem ‘classic’ or ‘retro’. It seemed ‘This aspect of the business is dead, why are you dragging it back up”? The answer to THAT, of course, was it was just the harbinger for all the OTHER ways Cena’s character would end up going backwards. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Mar 5, 2022 06:31
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Cena's an all time great. Probably one of the best guys WWE ever had.
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Mar 5, 2022 06:36
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SyntheticPolygon posted:Cena's an all time great. Probably one of the best guys WWE ever had. He's like cheese pizza. Everyone that's a "pizza fan" will throw up their noses, and complain that this bland dish is beneath them. But it sells, and tastes great. Like Taco Bell (and the circle is complete) I think with Cena, everything he did worked well, but just went on a little longer than it should have, but that's a demographics issue more than anything. While I'm sitting there going "Cena v Orton?! AGAIN?!?  "The kids in the seats, wearing head to toe hustle, loyalty, respect merch are going "Cena v Orton? Again!  "He deserves his place. On the card, in your little Brother's heart, and in the Hall of Fame. And loving lately, listening to him talk about John Cena the character, from an acting perspective while promoting peacemaker is ten thousand times more interesting than CM Punk's dirty laundry. Trollologist fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Mar 5, 2022 |
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Mar 5, 2022 06:50
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At least 7% of Cena's net popularity comes from the first few seconds of his Raaaaapppadooooo intro once the horns kick in. Which also did the good service of exposing families and households around the globe to M.O.P.
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Mar 5, 2022 07:08
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Cornwind Evil posted:That made me remember this picture I saw when he was dating Maria Kannelis. Also wanting to keep the Cute Wrestling Couples Photos thing alive with this, mine favourite.  Melina looks so proud of what that Mundo bum has been through.
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Mar 5, 2022 07:55
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that CM Punk clip had me go "drat that announcer sounds familiar , how did the WWE gently caress up so bad he went to the competition? .....oh"
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Mar 5, 2022 08:03
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requesting a decline of WWE megapost from let's say, 2014 onwards when the ratings started to crater
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Mar 5, 2022 13:58
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Trollologist posted:He's like cheese pizza. Everyone that's a "pizza fan" will throw up their noses, and complain that this bland dish is beneath them. It's one of those real funny things where you see such a clash between two very different segments of target audience. Like, I made the Sesame Street comparison before. Or if comic books were actually still read by children. And Vince being like those comic book writers who desperately want edgy antiheroes when if he was half sane he'd be trying to make an entire stable of John Cenas who are basically pantomime heroes.
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Mar 5, 2022 14:08
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Hefty Leftist posted:requesting a decline of WWE megapost from let's say, 2014 onwards when the ratings started to crater if anyone actually does this, please include hunter's "me and my friend mark" promo which has aged and continues to age absolutely beautifully
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Mar 5, 2022 15:30
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