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Davros1 posted:And, if anyone in that company had half a brain, if they wanted him to get over huge in a new market, they would have booked him as a triumphant face, not a cowardly heel. The annoying part is that WWE knew this, because the Indian commentary desk portrayed him as more of an antihero whose friends care too much about having an Indian as champion for the first time to not interfere. They just had him be a cowardly heel with minions in every other market because cheap heat is safe, and I hate it.
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Feb 9, 2020 22:20
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Breitbart Is Rightbart posted:What would have a WCW Brawl For All have looked like and who would have been in it? Honestly, given the person Bischoff was, if WCW did a Brawl For All I'd expect to be a karate tournament with all the random karate guys he kept bringing in. Like everyone else said, WCW wasn't really known for it's collection of lower-card brawlers who'd join something like Brawl For All. What it did have is a lot of karate guys and a decent amount of small scrappy guys who think they could take the average karate guy in a fight.
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Apr 20, 2020 16:23
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Red posted:5. Bobby Lashley seemed like a face with a future when he originally debuted over a decade ago. He couldn't really do interviews very well, but he was protected and booked well enough to get over (edit: I feel like Finlay worked very hard to make him look good). Back then, he seemed to stay near the top, while now, he seems like just another guy. Should he be an upper guy, or is he kind of where he belongs? The way I see it, Bobby Lashley generally has the skills to be at least upper-midcard. His TNA run wasn't perfect by any means, but it proved he can do good work as a quiet-but-powerful MMA rear end in a top hat. The problem is that WWE just... had him come back as a smiley babyface who spoke for himself which everyone already knew he was bad at, and then just slotted him into the generic heel slot once that failed and they got tired of using Lio Rush? I know answering this kind of question with "WWE is bad" is kind of cheap, but sometimes WWE is just bad.
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Jul 21, 2020 22:22
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Also, even if scratching didn't go against the spirit of a good clean fight, you're still attacking the other guy from behind for the sole purpose of doing something that just hurts like hell. It's not a move that feels good to cheer for.
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Oct 24, 2020 06:33
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karmicknight posted:It honestly adds to the Bob Holly mythos so much that it takes him from "bullying dickhead" to "oh he's just very dumb" so I'm inclined to agree with your reality. For what it's worth, Bob Holly's book confirms he didn't intentionally sandbag Brock but also confirms that he agreed to not sue WWE over his near-death experience because Vince promised him that he'd be a major part of the Vince vs Trump Wrestlemania match, so there's the same amount of Bob Holly being a loving dumbass in the world. EDIT: Not the near-death experience from getting his neck broke, the later near-death experience from having an infection be ignored by WWE's doctors. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 16:03
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The Grey posted:This is hilarious. Who was clickfarming Jinder if Indians didn't care about him? As far as I know, just WWE or someone else who wanted their general social media numbers to be big. They just didn't realize those clicks had to come from somewhere.
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Apr 10, 2021 18:28
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Red posted:I've long wondered how people feel about Montreal: 1) As far as I understand it, the screwjob itself didn't hurt Bret's career too much, other than it making sure he'd stay in WCW. The only thing that really destroyed his career was WCW being a mess and tragedies happening in his life every time he got closer to the top of the card, and that's mostly unrelated. (WCW squandering Bret right after Montreal was bad, but that's just a symptom of WCW being bad at this.) For the rest of those questions, other people are in a better place to answer them.
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May 26, 2021 20:43
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Hellblazer187 posted:Is there any word on how well that model is working out for them? With so much wrestling out there for free I find it hard to believe people would pay $5 an episode... but now I see the monthly cost is also $5 so that's a bit more understandable. Do we have an NWA thread? Yeah, it's over here. Everyone just stopped enjoying it once Jim Cornette was incredibly racist on an episode of Powerrr and the thread has since gone back to focusing on how much of a mess the NWA is.
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Jul 10, 2021 16:37
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harperdc posted:yeah, and like a focused Rumble, a number one contender's tournament inside of one match, something like that. the six-man match format also lets somebody on the periphery of the main event scene scrape in -- remember the year where they Pushed Cesaro and he knocked the loving house down in the Elimination Chamber? Good times. Lukewarm take: the only reason the crash pads around the Hell In A Cell were bad was because WWE already made falling off the cell completely meaningless by that point. If it's a safety feature to let people do a cool stunt, then you laugh about it for five minutes and it's fine because you don't have to worry about someone's spine turning to dust when they land.
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Sep 1, 2021 17:31
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Q7kid posted:
This is second-hand, but as far as I know it's two main things. One, New Japan in general had a really rough year. Covid restrictions hit them really hard, and they were starting to run low on booking ideas before everything fell apart. Two, the complete lack of crowd noise is affecting Okada's performance even more than you'd expect. As far as I know he's still good, but it's a lot rougher than you'd hope.
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Sep 22, 2021 18:46
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britishbornandbread posted:Thank you for the explanation If I remember correctly, TBS is also able to air Dynamite at the same time on both the east and west coast, vs TNT where it was shown on a three hour delay on the west coast. As far as I know that's a significant part of why Dynamite's ratings are kind of trash on that end of the country, so it should be a good change. But other than that, yeah. It's a good sign for AEW's future, but it isn't that big of a deal.
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Jan 8, 2022 03:29
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Gaz-L posted:Callahan's in Impact, I think. And Kendrick would've been All Elite if he wasn't an anti-Semitic conspiracy nutjob But they were both in WWE between that spot and now, though. At least, if I have my times straight.
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May 7, 2022 16:12
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Jungle Express just don't have a very juicy storyline to latch onto week to week at the moment, in my opinion. The world title doesn't either a lot of the time, but Hangman/the world title in general have enough of an aura to make those periods still feel impressive. The tag titles/Jungle Express don't quite have that prestige even if they still put out quality matches, so they just feel a bit weird at the moment.
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May 16, 2022 15:06
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And stuff like babyface or heel has filtered into general nerd slang thanks to sites like TVTropes. Still, there's definitely a line where it stops being slang people can easily understand through context clues and becomes cringe.
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Aug 17, 2022 17:37
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Gaz-L posted:The only thing that makes me think the 'Dunn has made himself irreplaceable' thing is bullshit is, like, if his way of doing things is too complicated for anyone else to do... wouldn't the new person just do things their way/the way anyone else in that role would instead? Like, if they hired Keith Mitchell in that role, wouldn't Keith just do things his way? He's not literally irreplacable, he just made the culture in WWE's production department weird and finnicky and a pain in the rear end to take apart and put back together if they wanted someone else to take over and change things. You know, like everything else about WWE's work culture.
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Sep 27, 2022 04:07
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Halloween Jack posted:Dunn's been around a long time, but the super-choppy editing and camera-jiggling hasn't. When did that begin in earnest? I stopped watching long before that, I think. If I remember correctly, it started as a reaction to the switch to HD. As the footage becomes clearer it gets easier to tell that the hits are all soft (especially with the WWE style being pretty soft that way in the first place), so they started overcorrecting with camera cuts. And then it devolved into self-parody because WWE's weird and controlled by people with no taste.
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Sep 27, 2022 22:13
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CopywrightMMXI posted:I was on Brad Dourif’s IMDb page and saw WWE credits. Why was Chucky on WWE last year? Showed up on NXT to promote his TV show and talk about Halloween Havoc as cross-promotion. Didn't even confront Bronn about his established rivalry with his family. Celebrities these days have no respect for the business.
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Oct 2, 2022 22:44
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Pope Corky the IX posted:I can recall people complaining about themes that don't fit or songs being used in general (like for a PPV) but now all I can think of is a bunch of examples from the 80s. There's always that one guy with an off-brand Randy Newman song for his WWE theme. I'm blanking on his name and there have been too many conversations about whether it "works" as an entrance theme, but it does make it a lot more memorable than the dozen vaguely metal themes his peers had.
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Oct 21, 2022 16:56
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Kosmo Gallion posted:What did Public Enemy do to piss off WWF management so much in 1999. I've heard they got on the wrong side of the acolytes during their early run. But there must have been something else, because they've been totally buried any time I've seen them wrestle in WWF. From what I've heard, it's mostly a combination of them acting like they're really important when they're only good at garbage brawls and WWF backstage culture just not giving a drat about some random indie guys who think they're hot poo poo. It isn't actually very complicated.
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Oct 22, 2022 01:34
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duckdealer posted:I haven't followed WWE in awhile so someone else here could probably be more useful but I did find this article: https://wrestlingjunkie.usatoday.com/lists/wwe-survivor-series-wargames-start-time-card-predictions/ Honestly, that seems like a good enough summary. The only thing you can really add is that a lot of the factions on that card have been booked pretty badly, but if you're only watching it as a one-off show where everyone involved is going to give a poo poo that shouldn't matter. (Well, it's worth mentioning that Rousey is a lot worse at this than you'd hope, so keep your expectations there low. But otherwise, you should be fine going in fresh.)
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Nov 24, 2022 01:37
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Also, AEW's lead video engineer did die unfortunately young back in October, so... yeah. Weird changes to production are kind of inevitable under the circumstances.
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Jan 8, 2023 20:14
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Kennel posted:Was there any reason for Nikki Cross becoming Nikki ASH? As far as I know, mostly that her old character was dead in the water because Nikki Cross was a midcarder in a division that gives midcarders nothing, and she had a superhero idea in her back pocket. She convinced people in creative to give it a shot, they handled it horribly, and the rest is history. Unless you mean in-universe, which is a lot more relevant to the rest of the conversation. She definitely had a few weeks of thanking the audience for believing in her and making superhero metaphors before she went full superhero, so there was some transition between gimmicks.
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Jan 20, 2023 18:12
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Halloween Jack posted:The whole thing was a worked shoot. He came down in the costume and said "gently caress this Goldust ripoff, Goldust sucked" in his first in ring appearance. In other words, if it wasn't a worked shoot the entire time the pivot from Seven to Not Seven was a few weeks before his debut when someone told Dustin everyone thought his sleep paralysis demon gimmick looked like a pedophile and they needed to change it. (I don't think there's a shoot interview that says if the plan was to always call it a bad idea, at least.)
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Jan 21, 2023 03:33
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D.N. Nation posted:also, the Katie Vick angle was done to support a feud over unifying the WHC and IC titles, and it's like....why isn't that the actual feud? 1) You know how a lot of people describe wrestling as a soap opera with more violence? Well, WWE was really trying to lean into that during the 2000s. Sometimes it worked, like when Eddie Guerrero and Rey Mysterio did a melodramatic telenovela plot. Usually... it really didn't. It didn't help that they were planning on debuting someone (I forgot who, exactly) as Katie Vick's brother, but then they changed their mind on whether that guy's worth putting on TV and they just spent the whole time scrambling for a plan. 2) Well, they had a lot of extra belts after buying WCW, and they massively overcorrected. Partially because Triple H was on top and he was way too focused on being an unstoppable eternal top heel who will never have a true equal.
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Jan 25, 2023 19:54
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Sisal Two-Step posted:Why do they call the WCW monster thing a "yeti" when it is CLEARLY a mummy???? They were planning on bringing El Gigante back for the role, and he has a much clearer "giant ape-man" look. But there were some delays getting him in, so they just took the first guy his size they could find and put him in the first costume they could think of that covered up everything so they could pretend Gigante was under it the entire time. ... And then El Gigante decided to retire from wrestling for health reasons in December, so it never actually mattered.
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Jan 31, 2023 18:23
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SG Bamboo posted:Doesn't that just make them a freelancer, or is there some distinction i'm missing? Just that no one calls them freelancers. Like yeah, most actors are technically freelance, they can work with whatever film production they want, but you'd sound weird if you called them that.
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Feb 5, 2023 16:43
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Tweak posted:I think it's just that you shouldn't be awarding the win to someone/team for a DQ only one of the participants committed, so there are no dqs at all. That said I do like the idea of a DQ just removing a person/team entirely from a match and continuing with the remaining participants. Like a backdoor elimination match. It's also just kinda weird to pause a match for a rules violation, shoo away one of the participants, then continue the match as if nothing happened. It's a fiddly mess unless you can somehow make a DQ as immediately recognizable as a pin, and I'm not sure it's worth the effort.
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Mar 11, 2023 18:46
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MassRafTer posted:He got the US title and it's not like the cruiserweight title was a joke title when he held it, plus the stuff with the Horsemen. He was never pushed as a top guy but he was given real pushes in the midcard. Yeah, this. Dean Malenko hit the ceiling for a short technical guy in WCW, but you could hit that ceiling and still be a deeply respected wrestler and considered one of the best at the time. Doing nothing with him and treating him like a generic good hand is in fact a sign that WCW was starting to fall apart in 1998.
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Apr 1, 2023 02:32
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Defenestrategy posted:got accused of doing some bad stuff during speaking out. I don't remember/think if it was him getting accused of being a sex pest, but I think a wrestle factory trainer may have date raped a trainee and quack got accused of sweeping it under the rug as well as creeping on random female wrestlers? And all the stories about Quackenbush being an insufferable rear end in a top hat with control problems also came out at the same time. It's not as major as any of of what Defenestrategy mentioned, but it did drive home that everyone just had better places to be than anywhere Quack was running. (And then his response was just posting through it and trying to keep treating himself as an indie wrestling genius, so now he's just an isolated weirdo.)
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Apr 5, 2023 22:19
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Hirez posted:E: like his wiki stuff: As far as I understand it, it's that PWI follows kayfabe and the Observer gets a bunch of wrestling turbofans to write in, and Backlund's reign was impressive on paper but got really old. He was a generic athletic good guy for most of his title reign, and he didn't stop being that until he turned into a lunatic in 1994. Like, he also won Most Overrated of '83 in the WoN awards.
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Apr 11, 2023 01:10
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Admiral Joeslop posted:Will Cole start doing his own thing when Vince dies? I assume he'll still be barking orders from the Gorilla position even after the company is sold. Probably not, to be honest. Too many of WWE's weekly operations are set up to produce something Vince would like. After all, the times Cole was good are also separated from the usual weekly Raw production and so on. Compare him commentating the Mae Young Classic to his work during the months Vince wasn't part of the company. Sure, he was better than usual during that half of 2022, but he still wasn't good because he still had to be the Smackdown commentator.
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May 11, 2023 14:42
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Grendels Dad posted:lmao Butcher is only seven years older than me. Makes me feel even better about myself than all those pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio with all those signs of aging. He's currently out due to a back injury. Before that, he was in an odd couple tag team with Matt Riddle. If the rumors are right, that tag team was supposed to break up a year ago but Orton fought to keep them together because he was so happy to be something besides The Viper (he hears voices in his head, they talk to him, he understands, they talk to him) for once.
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Jun 9, 2023 22:32
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Kvlt! posted:Follow up follow up question: whats the difference between a guild and a union The short version is that a union is an organization made to advocate for the workers at a specific employer, and a guild is when a group of independent contractors come together to advocate for their rights with whoever hires them. An auto-workers' union represents people working at specific auto factories, the Screen Writers Guild represents writers as they bounce between any given writing job. The point is, WWE calls it's wrestlers independent contractors, but they're locked into an employee relationship with WWE and should be employees with a union. AEW actually treats it's wrestlers like independent contractors, and they should have a guild that would be positioned to advocate for them no matter what promotion they're working for.
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Jun 13, 2023 03:05
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Open Marriage Night posted:QUESTION: What happened that made Sami cool with going to Saudi Arabia? As far as I know, it's that Saudi Arabia stopped actively banning him after they restarted peace talks with Syria. At that point, Sami's getting paid with Saudi money either way so he may as well go and visit a major religious monument and show there's a chance for peace between these nations and so on.
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Jul 3, 2023 18:56
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Purple Monkey posted:Stone Cold's career has quite a few moments like this, not just the aforementioned Montreal Screwjob leading to the creation of Mr McMahon but him also not originally being booked to win the King of the Rong where we cut the Austin 3:16 promo. Also wonder how long HBK would have tolerated Austin on top if he hadn't broken his back To be fair, it did take several months after Austin 3:16 for WWE to really realize that Stone Cold was the next big thing. He wouldn't have a super-iconic catchphrase to turn into one of the biggest shirts in the company, but you could add an extra month to how long it took him to get over and you wouldn't change the timeline in a meaningful way. Also, escape-style cage matches are fine if you treat them as a fancy gimmick that you plan a match around, and WWE doesn't really do that. The Bret/Owen cage match is divisive, but at least it's meaningfully different from a normal match throughout.
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Jul 11, 2023 16:21
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SatoshiMiwa posted:Thing is Hogan in 99/2000 probably was one of the worst wrestlers in the world as his character works was awful and he just couldn't connect with fans. It was just dog poo poo creative too (which he was part off) but like he was also just bad in the ring and like he had in the past just refused to change his character to adapt to the changing times (Despite his heel turn rejuvenating his character Hogan never learned the lesson that he needed to change his character at times to stay on top. It's why his one weakness as a draw was always burning out crowds) Yeah, this is a big thing to remember. Hogan's big strength is that he's constantly doing things to get his character over in-ring, which is more common now but was revolutionary by 80s standards, but the only character he knows how to play is Hulk Hogan. It's why his acting career sucks, and it's why he inevitably warps every company around himself if you let him.
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Aug 11, 2023 09:30
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Defenestrategy posted:thought experiment: I'm assuming this is just them being out of commission with a broken leg or a stupidly long flu and not everyone involved dying, because I think that would unironically kill the company. What I'd hope would happen: Give Big Show a big push because him being world champion would be less weird if the entire promotion is in the phantom zone, and if Vince is out maybe someone who knows how to book a giant will be writing the show. Push Steve Blackman and Ken Shamrock to make a nascent Angry MMA Man division, then put Dr Death in with them instead of running Brawl For All. Push the tag division, which they'd kinda do normally but they have a lot more time to fill. When Jericho shows up a few months into this, strap a rocket to his rear end so your injured people have a big cool new guy to feud with when they come back in like a month. EDIT: Oh, yeah, I forgot about Owen and D'lo. And Jarrett could give you a good generic top heel at this point. Also ignore the Dr Death suggestion, I forgot when Brawl For All was. What would probably happen: Those seven guys being wheeled out to cut promos all show despite being visibly injured, like Steve Austin in 97-98 but sadder. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Aug 12, 2023 |
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Aug 12, 2023 02:09
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forkboy84 posted:No idea what he's like in AEW though. He was good at the start of Collision, or at least fresh. But he's just degraded in quality over time and last week he was kind of unbearably quippy and unfocused while still technically being the main play by play guy and it's one of the main things making Collision feel like a b-show. Which is a shame, because Nigel McGuinness has grown from a bad Jesse Ventura impression to a decent heel ex-wrestler commentator over the same period. Collision's main announce team is just cursed to stay at the same overall quality level.
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Sep 11, 2023 15:29
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Venomous posted:idk about that, Ian was and is fantastic with Nigel. Collision was at its best with the two of them, particularly in BCG/FTR II. Kevin Kelly just sucks. Yeah, but I was counting Ian as more of a guest fill-in announcer. You know what I mean, the Kelly/Nigel/dash of Jim Ross announce team is just doomed.
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Sep 11, 2023 15:57
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NameHurtBrain posted:Relatedly, what ever became of Sheamus's horrible neck issues? I remember years ago that people were expecting his imminent retirement because he had, "a bad case of Edge-neck". But the guys still going strong and one of the bright spots in WWE's darkness? Sheamus has been pretty public about the recovery process through his various workout vlogs. As far as I can tell, they just... caught his neck issues at a better time and had better therapy routines for it than they had when Edge retired. Besides, brawling has always been a reasonably safe style for people with bad necks.
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Oct 7, 2023 02:09
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