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MassRafTer posted:I honestly had that feeling when Orton punted Vince, but I also feel like the next Steve Austin is going to catch on because of some dumb thing I see every few years. Orton felt red hot going into the 2009 Rumble and then Shane hurt the angle and Triple H beat him at Wrestlemania. Dave kind of hit on this in today's WOR so I'm going to sound like I'm parroting, but Orton's only an average or slightly above average talker even by current standards (and current standards aren't that high) so I'm not so sure I ever really buy that he could have been that kind of guy. Do agree that that is one of several times they hosed up Orton's stuff, absolutely.
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Oct 29, 2013 20:40
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MassRafTer posted:To me it was kind of an aura thing, but it's not like WWE wasn't going to book him to cut long promos even if they double turned at WM and handled the rest well. The recent "what if"/"aura" guy for me was Jeff Hardy, considering how big he did become with the business indicators even given how tepidly he was pushed at the top. If he swantons Orton for the title at that Rumble and gets the star protection from Wellness and they rip off like six months of peak Cena booking for him, does he actually become a crazy huge deal instead of just a huge deal? In Hardy's case there are of course very good reasons not to shove all the eggs in his basket, but they still cut him off way too quickly when they struck the lightning. And that one was to benefit Triple H's program too.
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Oct 29, 2013 20:49
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Tato posted:Orton's face run reminded me of the T-800 trying to learn to smile in Terminator 2. It just doesn't work for him. Like when he did those weird spontaneous jumping splits. See guys, I can be fun! In very late 2008 and January 2009 Orton was still a heel and still acting like a heel, but they loving shot him to the moon after he was off TV for awhile with one of the strongest pushes they've given anyone, forming the Legacy, having him beat and lay out everyone (he won the Rumble that year in perhaps the strongest Rumble winner performance they've ever given someone, up there with Flair and Benoit, since so often the guy the match is built around isn't the winner), and letting him do things like "punting Vince" and "outing Hunter and Stephanie's real marriage" and "laying out Stephanie" that was just stuff they didn't do. And because of all of this, he became by far the most over guy on the roster and fans were basically just begging for an Austin like semi-face turn where Orton still acted like a dominant badass and him to be the new top guy over Cena (this was one of the periods where Cena felt beyond stale). Of course it turned out the reason they were shooting him to the moon wasn't to create a new top guy, it was to build a strong heel for Triple H to beat at WrestleMania for what he hoped was his big WrestleMania Moment. Having realized they accidentally created a thing by putting him over too strong, their response was to book Orton in an even stevenish feud with Shane McMahon to cool him, and in the storyline turn him into a cartoon villain. Then they put Hunter over strong at Mania and eventually this all ended up with that awful "Passion of the Cena" feud. When they finally did just let the crowd turn Orton face in 2010, it was still kind of a big deal but he didn't have that kind of steam anymore, and what steam he had got petered out quickly. oldfan fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Oct 29, 2013 |
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Oct 29, 2013 21:14
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By the way this entire discussion is why I am really, really, really skeptical that things will be "better" when the Levesques take over, because these are not nearly a comprehensive list or discussion of the times Hunter hosed with someone else's heat to get himself over, often at great detriment to the product both creatively and for business, and nobody's ever really answered why that would change once he has unfettered ability to do that instead of the ability only to the extent that he can convince Vince.
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Oct 29, 2013 21:24
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MassRafTer posted:Austin, Angle, Jericho, Booker, Benoit, Hardy, Orton, Eugene(?), Punk, Bryan, Goldberg, Steiner, RVD, Sheamus... I don't know about Foley, not sure how HHH influenced their matches in 97. Orton and Jericho should really count at least twice each, and you missed Kane, Chris Masters, and obviously Lesnar out of the inarguable ones just off the top of my head.
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Oct 29, 2013 22:15
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MassRafTer posted:Does Kane really count? A top guy does have to win some matches, and Kane was pretty far into his run at that point. It'd be one thing if he unmasked him in the first year or two, but by 2003 it was time for that thing to come off and HHH was top dog on Raw. I'm not going back to watch that poo poo again but my memory is that like with the recent one, the tenor of the story and the interviews emasculated Kane pretty badly and then Hunter decisively won the feud so it was like "welp goodbye Kane's credibility for awhile."
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Oct 29, 2013 22:39
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You know you're right, we're talking about two separate Triple H/Kane feuds. I'm talking about the Katie Vick/IC title one, not the unmasking one the next year.
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Oct 30, 2013 03:22
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WON HOF has six inductees this year (good news for the usual suspects) so Dave split the bios over two weeks. The first inductee is Henri Deglane, who Dave says is the second to last guy he plans on putting in as the Veterans Committee equivalent.
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Oct 31, 2013 03:33
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Bard Maddox posted:Watch WrestleMania 4 on infinite loop, never stop talking about it. I may have done this a few times as a kid, it was one of the first tapes I had (and it was the commercial copy with the tape break in the neverending nervehold of doom).
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Nov 8, 2013 02:50
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The National Treasure is angry at the Hall of Fame results and their bias against North Americans and Big Daddy and he can't take it anymore!
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Nov 8, 2013 07:25
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I can see not wanting Davey Richards because he's, well, Davey Richards, but Eddie Edwards is someone they really should have signed a couple years ago.
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Nov 21, 2013 20:03
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LividLiquid posted:Sorry. I do this a lot. But you can assume when I say "wrestling," I'm talking about TNA and WWE. Like most, I don't follow things that aren't easy to follow. Within the last two years, New Japan has made every show of consequence readily available (and a whole bunch of the inconsequential house shows more recently), both through PPV and not being all that aggressive about pulling down YouTubes/other options. Unless you desperately need bad English commentary instead of commentary that's 10 percent the announcers screaming out the big moves in English, it's actually a hell of a lot easier to follow than TNA, and probably easier than WWE given that I don't know how some of y'all can actually watch everything WWE does these days.
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Nov 21, 2013 20:47
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Not really all that surprising but Jim Ross is doing the Observer show this week.
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Dec 4, 2013 00:09
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Arbite posted:I don't get it, is he talking about the deli thing or her whole participation in the angle? They spent a very long time building to a Bubba and Brooke vs. Hulk feud that was going to culminate in what for TNA passes as a big money match between Bubba and Hulk. Brooke Hogan imploded the angle right before the key point by getting engaged in real life and leaking it to all the celebrity outlets for coverage, which Hulk Hogan then used as his excuse to get out of the angle pretty much entirely. Then Brooke's real life engagement broke off almost immediately. Shocking how that all went.
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Dec 5, 2013 18:52
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In case y'all want more National Treasure in your life:
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Dec 12, 2013 17:30
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Most of the reason to subscribe to the Torch for podcasting would be Bruce Mitchell's shows IMO.
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Dec 19, 2013 01:53
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friendo55 posted:I do enjoy Bryan & Dave's show together but what else does WO have during the week to make it worth it? I just can't justify spending money on both networks of shows. Dave's shows with Sempervive are awesome, Bryan does some good interviews on his own, Todd Martin is an awesome cure for insomnia, and they've got the National Treasure.
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Dec 19, 2013 05:29
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sportsgenius86 posted:TNA is left without television, WWE is probably affected very little and Bellator has a MUCH stronger lead-in In even fewer words: TNA dies, WWE gets rich, Bellator thrives.
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Jan 7, 2014 05:27
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Skunkrocker posted:What is the purpose of that? Have one semi-meaningful secondary champion at the old World title level (or the old old IC title level) instead of a bunch of dudes walking around with meaningless belts doing random jobs.
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Jan 15, 2014 17:12
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HulkaMatt posted:Bryan is the default guy because he was the best at it on the indies and nobody really came close. Who did you vote for, out of curiosity? That was one of the categories where I was like "I just can't answer this because I don't accept the premise of the category" (best weekly TV was the other one) and I ended up not voting largely because of those two.
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Jan 24, 2014 06:52
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MassRafTer posted:The answer is to vote for CMLL guys you don't watch. I considered just voting like Tanahashi/Okada/Nakamura but that didn't feel right either.
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Jan 24, 2014 06:55
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At the risk of double posting: the reason I don't consider Bryan a contender for a best technical award at this point is because he just doesn't do all that much technical wrestling anymore - he's eliminated most of those moves and rarely does complex transitions anymore. I don't even know that there's can be such a thing as a high level technical worker in Cena era WWE main events because of how much the style has evolved away from holds and transitions, especially post-Angle and Benoit, and Bryan at this point probably isn't even the closest guy with Lesnar around. It's obviously a big credit to Bryan as an overall worker that he went from being the best worker in the world working one way to working a vastly different style, in the process doing a near-complete overhaul of his moveset and ring psych, and still remains one of the 5 or 10 best workers in the world. But he really is a way, way different worker than he was from his king of the indies period in 2005-09, and in a way that makes giving him awards for technical mat work kind of ludicrous. Backtracking to the "if not Bryan, then who," if I'm voting for the guy who does the best, crispest real looking mat wrestling, it's pretty clearly Katsuyori Shibata, but he's even more clearly the best brawler in the world while distinctly not being the best worker in the world (though he would be top 10 and maybe even top 5). I don't know how that can make sense unless you just chalk it up to the vagaries of a guy being a great worker while having a shooter gimmick. The other elite puro workers like Tanahashi, Okada, Nakamura, Devitt, KENTA, etc. do a lot of the transitions and reversals that you'd associate with a top level technical wrestler but I don't know that any of them really does it within the confines of technical wrestling, certainly no more than Shibata. Same with the American indy guys except they're all worse than the top Japanese guys, so no one there is even a contender here outside of Kyle O'Reilly who I'm not particularly enthralled with. With Angle and Nagata, who used to be the fallback choices, both shot as workers, this was the point where I just went "gently caress it" and I assumed I hadn't seen enough 2013 wrestling to have an informed vote and trashed my ballot. In retrospect I guess I could have watched a couple more Panther and Zack Sabre matches as ballot research and probably cobbled something together or whatever but 
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Jan 24, 2014 07:44
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Rodney the Piper posted:Could you clarify those numbers for me a bit with this: when Hardy's push to the title finally happened, wasn't he actually, you know, pushed to the title? No, he was beaten cleanly by Orton in a manner that was frankly kind of midcardish.
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Jan 28, 2014 02:16
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