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Vince has always succeeded in spite of himself rather than because of it. (But yes, expect a massive amount of armchair psychology here) People have already mentioned that there is a strong indication that Vince's family life was abusive: his stepfather might have been physically abusive and his mother MIGHT have sexually abused him, but there was a third story in a book called "Sex, Lies, and Headlocks" that stuck to me even moreso and I think crystallized the exact shape of Vince's trauma, wrath, and curse. Supposedly, he and his older brother Jesse were being raised in a classic Southern hick town, trailer park, nothing to do, a very "Day They Missed The Horror Show" type of place (note: Do not read "Day They Missed The Horror Show" unless you have some steel, it's BRUTAL) and then the U.S built a military base near the town. So the 'thing to do' amongst the teenage and young adult male youth was to go and try and pick fights with the black marines that came there to train. And while part of this little gang racism boredom, supposedly, Jesse innately got respect, he was a genuine article that people would listen to, admire, and so on. Vince supposedly tried to be the same way and got nowhere: not only did he want it and not get it, he was seen as probably the worst thing he could think of: a wannabe. A tryhard. Not worthy and never will be. And why was he in this messed up situation? Because his dad abandoned the family to go run WRASSLIN' in New York and the Northeast. I would bet money that Vince, among all other things, has never left that little gang of punk racists mentally. Between it and the extreme desire for control a physically and sexually abusive upbringing can implant, Vince (again, all theorizing) when he grew up didn't go to join up with the family business. He went with the long term goal of DESTROYING the family business, using it as a springboard to 'better things' in 'proper' entertainment, like how people can core out companies with stuff like junk bonds and leave their shell to collapse while they skip away with the money. Vince hates 'wrestling' as someone like Jim Cornette would define it (and while the man has his own severe GET OFF MY LAWN and "Too close to wholly accurately assess" issues, there's few others who could assess things as well as Cornette could about the concept of 'wrestling') and he hates, hates, HATES 'wrasslin', the idea that wrestling is solely for brain dead toothless hicks who only drive rusty pickup trucks and gently caress their sisters. Of course, 'wrasslin' being the majority if not near absolute of the wrestling audience has always been an incorrect and prejudiced based concept: wrestling can and has drawn an audience from just about any sort. A very good example was (mainly big in the 80's territories) wrestler Ricky Morton, who drew large gates of teenage girls who would shriek for him like the Beatles, and was so good at getting 'sympathy heat' (getting beat up repeatedly by the bad guys until, after a false hope or two or three, he finally tagged in his tougher tag team partner to clean house) that he would sometimes risk mobs of these girls being one step away from jumping into the ring to save their precious Ricky from the big bad dastardly heels (one term for doing this as part of a match in some online circles is 'playing Ricky Morton', that's how much he defined it). But again, this is all coming from pain and rage. Vince succeeded because he broke all the rules and got very lucky. When he started, he refused to play ball and went around doing stuff like stealing other promotion's stars, running shows in their territories, and getting high quality production companies to videotape his shows and then go to local networks that ran, or would pay for, local wrestling, and offer to pay THEM to put his (looking much better in terms of visuals, lighting, camerawork, etc) shows on the air in their place. He basically bluffed all his competition in a game of chicken where his 'side' was mostly made up of potential future earnings, and no one called it: if some people had decided to, odds are Vince would have flamed out and been a cautionary tale these days about not rocking the boat. But at the same time, Vince did everything to drive out 'wrestling and wrasslin' and rework the business to his ideas. Larger than life characters, gimmicks, spectacle, forget all the actual WRESTLING, and in fact many of these sorts couldn't wrestle well at all, but Vince was in charge and he would tell people what they wanted, and once again, luck served him and for a time, it was. (Hulk Hogan, Rock N' Wrestling) Thing is, Vince never changed while his audience did. I'm sure that he didn't intend to be around for when the bottom dropped out, though. He'd succeeded in revenging himself on his hated father (joining the company, leveraging him out of it) and rebuilding the business in his own image (which is sort of like saying Alexander the Great conquered the whole world). Now he would use it to actually get into proper circles of entertainment. If he had to burn the WWF to the ground to do so, fine. He wasn't a wrestling promoter, he sure as gently caress wasn't a WRASSLIN' promoter, and this business could go hang for the 'wrongs' it did him. Except, much like his so-called friend Donald Trump, it was a futile gesture. Just like Trump would always been seen as a wannabe upstart by the minted rich he wanted so badly to be a part of, even before it became clear just how vastly that understated just what a failure he was, the larger entertainment world would never see Vince as anything but a wrestling promoter. This would be made clear when everything he tried outside of wrestling according to his vision failed. He tried bodybuilding with the WBF: it failed. He tried the XFL; it utterly failed, and at the tail end of the WWE's biggest hot streak ever, which really says it all (and it probably would have failed a second time if COVID hadn't strangled it in his crib). His wife tried running for senate: failed repeatedly. WWE Studios didn't exactly FAIL, but it hardly set the world on fire and that's what Vince would have wanted. Time and time and time again, the world told Vince: you're a wrestling promoter. That's all you will ever be. That's why Vince never stops, I think. He thinks if he does, his chance to finally break through will slip him by. It also means that he needs absolute control over everything and will never accept anything less. He's so determined that sometimes it even manifests in good or impressive things, like being willing to be destroyed on his own show (something that Triple H and Stephanie never really, wholly learned, to their and the product's detriment) or the whole 'blew out his quads, walked backstage anyway' thing, which has a follow up: twin muscle tears like that usually take a good six to eight months to fully rehab so you can walk properly again. Vince was utterly determined to be able to walk out at Wrestlemania, which was about 2 1/2 months away, and rehabbed so hard and thoroughly that he did just that. People say the writing at WWE is terrible and has been for years if not decades: I think it's less that it's terrible and more that anyone who works in that field eventually gives up and just goes through the motions because you never know when Vince is just going to show up and tear everything up and demand something brand new: would you feel like trying if that was constantly happening with no rhyme or reason to it? It's why I take any rumors of sale with several grains of salt: the WWE's is Vince's, no matter how much he subconsciously hates it, and no one is going to take it from him. He will never, EVER again feel like he's not in control. In all honesty, Vince would probably have had a happier life if his efforts had flamed out in the mid 80's. Maybe, MAYBE he would have been forced to do some self-introspection: I think he had that possibility, unlike Trump. As it is, this is a man running on a hamster wheel with his fingers in his ears and his eyes on a hallucination of a brass ring, thinking that soon, very soon, he'll show them he's not just some wrasslin' promoter. And much like 'everyone' knows Aquaman is lame and talks to fish, or anyone who likes Star Trek and D&D is a pimpled, bespectacled virgin failure at life, it won't ever work. He will die as he lived: a wrestling promoter. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Feb 6, 2022 |
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Feb 6, 2022 04:30
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Vice President posted:I haven't really watched wrestling since the early 90s so I appreciate all the effortposting catching me up on all the trainwreck of nonsense and intrigue I missed out on. That was the point. That and all the best known 'Vince is a loon' stories were mentioned already. You have to dig some if you want more. Like him and Virgil Runnels, for example. Runnels is better known under his wrestling stage name, Dusty Rhodes, the American Dream. Rhodes was the 'South's' Hulk Hogan type (if we consider the WWE the 'North'), in the sense he was their superhero, though while Hogan was presented as a larger than life superman, Rhodes was presented as a everyman who had been through all walks of life, and his sheer charisma and poetic promos (most famously, "I have wined and dined with kings and queens, and I've slept in alleys and dined on pork and beans.") made up for the fact that in terms of appearance, he was a rotund blonde with a generally sleepy expression, which isn't exactly the traditional concept of a 'man's man tough guy' (despite that, he was actually in great shape, as he had more than a few 60 minute draw matches in his heyday). Dusty also often worked as a writer and booker, and while he was very hit or miss (and his hits and misses tended towards the extreme: in terms of 'hits', he created the popular 'War Games' style of match, which was 'two rings, in a cage, ten men, released one at a time, match can't end until all are in the ring". And in misses, he tended to use the "someone wins a title, then the win gets overturned immediately or almost immediately later for some reason" result so often it became known as "The Dusty Finish"), when he hit, he hit. Wrestling, in the end, would have been poorer without all his efforts. So, as Vince is destroying the territory system and growing the WWE, Dusty and the NWA (later WCW) basically ended up last man standing in terms of serious competition. Vince decides just fighting in business ain't enough, oh no. He never grew out of the schoolyard bully mindset. So he signs Ted Dibiase, a talented and charismatic wrestler, and basically gives him the gimmick of "Vince himself, idealized", the "Million Dollar Man, Ted Dibiase", an ultra rich "What my victories won't get me, my money will" (Ex: He offered to buy the WWF title from Hulk Hogan. When Hogan, of course, refused, DiBiase hired Andre the Giant to beat Hogan instead, and then paid him off so Andre would give the title to him when he did, and on top of that he hired the twin brother of an established WWF referee to impersonate him and cheat Hogan out of said title), and they decided to give him an 'aide', which was presented with strong hints of "This is actually a manservant, wink wink." Who do they pick for this job? Black wrestler Mike Jones. And what do they name his "aide" character? Virgil. Who would often bear the wrath of Dibiase's foes when Dibiase ran away, but then again, that might well have happened no matter what his ethnicity was. (And one story claims that Mike Jones was very well endowed and got his job by pulling out his dick for Pat Patterson, who was gay. That's as far as the story went from what I read, so I have no idea if he did more or let Patterson do more or if he just went "Hey, LOOKIT THIS" as a way to get an edge on being hired) But the nature of wrestling is that even those most associated with one territory will come to work for the 'competition', and so in the mid-80's, due to Dusty getting fired*, Vince hired him for the WWF. Now, considering it seemed like Vince really didn't like the man, he could just have, you know, not hired him. Or he could have put aside his bad feelings and taken advantage of the fact that he had one of the biggest stars he hadn't already had or formed now in his service and could book some dream matches that could draw large gates, ratings, and PPV buys. But oh no. None of that matters to Vince. He don't care about what the fans might want. He cares about showing the world who has the power, even if 99.5 percent of it are completely oblivious to that fact. But in the end, 9 times out of 10, Vince will do it because Vince Wants To. So Dusty gets debuted by a series of videos where his 'everyman' gimmick is taken to the logical extreme and he's shown plunging toilets and working as a garbageman. He gets dressed in a full torso suit covered in yellow polka dots, and he comes out dancing to a song talking about how he's just a common man 'working hard for the man' and that he's 'redneck funky'. He's kept firmly in the midcard, given a valet who's a middle aged black woman, who Ted Dibiase 'steals' by 'corrupting' her with money, and in general, he's made to look like just another goof. Never mind that he could be used to make money. To Vince, all that matters is going "This is a false star and you are stupid for liking him". And just to drive home Vince's delusion, Dusty's so innately charismatic that he manages to 'get over' (become popular and cheered) ANYWAY, even with how ridiculous his presentation is. In the end, Vince basically let Dusty resign, unable to wholly 'destroy' him, and Dusty went back to the NWA/WCW, So, all that, just so Vince can feel in control. * Showing that Dusty might have been closer to Vince than he realized, Dusty's firing came about when the NWA/eventual WCW was purchased by Turner Broadcasting, who decreed 'no more on screen bloodletting' (see: Blading, per the Randy Orton/Brock Lesnar story above). Dusty, furious over being told what to do, immediately booked and presented on TV a bit where he would be attacked and beaten up by the Road Warriors, who would promptly 'jam a spike into his eye', causing a very large bleeding wound, which promptly got him fired. (And just for some further symmetry and irony, Dusty's last angle with the WWF was based around Mike Jones-Virgil, whose character, after being abused by the Million Dollar Man for years, finally snapped and turned on him. This actually got him 'over', ie, he got a storyline that was popular and people wanted to see him fight and beat DiBiase, which lasted throughout 1991 and was basically the pinnacle of Mike Jones' career; it had cooled off by 1992 and Virgil spent the rest of his wrestling days being a midcarder, lower midcarder, or general lackey. The last ironies were when he left WWF for WCW to be part of the famous NWO angle, he got renamed. To Vincent. And after a few years as Vincent, he got renamed again. To Shane. So Mike Jones basically made a career out of two wrestling companies taking childish 'inside' potshots at each other) (And as I'm sure some people will post, Mr. Jones seems to have a BIT of a delusion about just how popular and influential he was in his years as DiBiase's lackey and being part of the NWO, but I'll let others show that glorious/sad nonsense) Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Feb 10, 2022 |
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Feb 7, 2022 02:50
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Ad by Khad posted:Lita is wrestling the champ at the next Premium Live Event, idk who Cryme Tyme is They were a tag team of two black THUG LIFE wrestlers whose whole gimmick was being PG thugs and stealing stuff and sometimes selling it to the crowd. They even got fired for it by going off script at a house show, 'beating up' a ref, stealing his belt, and auctioning it off to the crowd. After a bit (I think eight months? A year at most) they came back, but eventually they broke up because one of them was Big And Muscular and hence Vince decided he wanted to push him. Then he got bored and the big one, Shad Gaspard (his real name, actually)'s push vanished and he got released within eight months, whereas his partner, JTG (real name: Jayson Paul) remained, and after a while became an internet wrestling community running gag that he kept being used on house shows and whatnot as opening match talent for YEARS while other, bigger wrestlers got fired; he even got a website that listed how long he had been employed. But eventually his luck ran out and he also got released in one of WWE's oft-yearly release bunches. I think the website is still up with the exact amount of time JTG spent employed listed. Then Shad died saving his son from a severe riptide on a beach, just one of the many reasons 2020 utterly sucked, but at least he died a hero instead of overdosing in some run down hotel like so many of his peers. ---- Bogus Adventure posted:Man, Lita ruled so hard. She was head and shoulders above all the other women wrestlers in Attitude Era WWE. She got done dirty in her last appearance having *sigh* Cryme Tyme come out and sell off her panties and reveal her yeast infection cream. Yeah. It's considered 'tradition' that if a wrestler is leaving or retiring, they 'go out on their back', ie lose to make someone else look good. But WWE is run by perverts and misogynists like every other business, so not only did Lita lose her final match as 'per tradition', afterwards she got humiliated one final time. I can even see the logic of it; Lita's 'betrayal' of Matt was 'never forgiven' (but wait) by the fans and she was 'forever' the Treacherous Slut, and every crowd would let her know it, in a weird mix of mark "She is bad and we will call her bad names!" and internet types "She loving betrayed Matt and I am going to make sure the whore knows it, no never mind it takes two to cheat and Edge never got this nasty real life aspect for his part as part of his 'heel heat' but she's the woman so she's A WHHHOOORRREEEEE". She's retiring, might as well get in a final boot stomp from the fans so she can know how bad it was that she did Those Bad Things. But if it makes you feel any better, afterwards her friends took her out to a quiet goodbye party, and when she returned for a guest appearance a few years later, the absence had made the fans forget their stupid (and inconsistent, and misogynist, and taken too far) grudge and she was cheered as any returning 'legend' would be, which has remained the case ever since. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Feb 7, 2022 |
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Feb 7, 2022 06:16
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Kuato posted:I rewatched Wrestlemania 31 for some reason, and am now particularly despondent about the years long effort to destroy Bray Wyatt’s heat. Why would they mess with that entrance song and gimmick? Ugh Vince didn't come up with it. That is the answer 95 percent of the time.
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Feb 7, 2022 06:24
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PicklePants posted:to a rubber hand. And then, on WWE Raw's 1000th episode anniversary, this happened.
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Feb 7, 2022 09:49
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Pennywise the Frown posted:Ok I turned on WWE for 10 minutes and it was two people slowly talking in the ring the whole time. It was boring. Back to AEW. And that's the ultimate curse of it. We can tell the exceptionally crazy stories, but it's very much like the loot box system in games. Sometimes you might get something amazing, but most of the time it's generic crap or useless crap you don't need. ESPECIALLY with WWE, which as mentioned, Vince dearly wants to be anything BUT wrestling. Wrestlers talking to each other is a core part of the business, but generally, short bursts works best. Unless you've got someone with intense charisma and ability to read a crowd like the late Roddy Piper, odds are you'll get...whatever you saw. But Vince wants it to be anything but wrestling, so... Nature of the beast. A lot of the time you'll get dull stuff or filler, sometimes you'll get good stuff, sometimes you'll get an unexpected bit of great or amazing stuff like the "Pipe Bomb" promo... And sometimes, you'll get stuff like this. Though you generally need to be paying attention; wrestling is good at cutting away very fast if members of the crowd decide to run into the ring. Occasionally it leads to hilarious little bits like this. 
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Feb 8, 2022 03:30
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AEW has its own issues, of course. One I feel is that since WWE is very sanitized and as a result certain moves are banned (the piledriver has been banned for 15 years, which means whenever someone actually uses it it's a big surprise), AEW perhaps leans a little too hard into "WE'RE NOT LUKEWARM AND MILQUETOAST, WE'LL CURSE AND DO BLADEJOBS AND ETC." and one of the subtler ways this manifests is that AEW wrestlers tend to do a lot more 'big' moves than the average WWE match. Not INHERENTLY a problem...except they do it so much it breaks suspension of disbelief. If in the concept of a match, the two participants have battled for 10-15-20 minutes, and worn down each other's endurance and energy, and then one hits a move like say, the Pepsi Plunge... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl4tVE1T4ng&t=85s That should be it. Done. Finito. Only in very specific circumstances should a pinfall for the 3 not happen there after being 'struck' with that move. But in AEW, it's every other match. Even finishers tend to be kicked out of, which really makes it weird when someone can't get a pin off something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKxlFu2t-LU&t=9s But can get a pin off something like this... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mATMMnGR9BQ Or this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzcEiZghNoI Because they're 'higher on the card'. And hence their moves 'do more damage', or something. And if you give a move a NAME, it does even MORE damage! If some other wrestler does a flip into the ring and then delivers a clothesline, then...it's a leaping clothesline, you won't even get a count of 2. But call it the "Buckshot Lariet" and now it will defeat your foes 8 times out of 10.
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Feb 8, 2022 03:46
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Pennywise the Frown posted:That's pretty great. I don't know what would compel you do attack a 250lb athlete, but it ends just as well as you think it would. Every time. I suspect the answer every time is "Too much alcohol."
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Feb 8, 2022 03:48
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To paraphrase Animal Farm... "All fans of anything are degenerates, but some are more degenerate than others."
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Feb 8, 2022 04:05
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Oh yeah, you know why WWE announcers are so bad? Because Vince is backstage yelling in their earpieces what to say. Constantly. For every. drat. Show. Just like he is liable and has, many a time, gone into the writer's room and ripped up everything they did and demand they start over, maybe even just before the show goes on the air. Which might be more tolerable if the WWE did a bullet points type of script, but no, Vince HATES WRESTLING and wants it to be as Hollywood as possible. You try writing a quality or even passable TV episode script with an hour's notice. Oh yeah, and if you're good at your job and even keep notes and do storyboards so that what you're handling makes sense, Vince will mock you as a nerd, get others to mock you, and then fire you, probably because you're a nerd. No idea if AEW has a similar setup with annoucers with someone talking in their ear, but it doesn't have Vince, so... (You want a good example of what removing him does? At Wrestlemania 30, after the Undertaker match where he was severely concussed, Vince went with him to the hospital and hence wasn't there to direct the final two matches. As a result, the commentary for the final match, which was probably the last big 'true moment' the WWE has ever created, actually sounds competent. Like I said. In spite of himself)
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Feb 8, 2022 06:03
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Bogus Adventure posted:WWE is usually bad, but when it is good it can be really loving good. It probably peaked with Stone Cold cracking Vince across the head with a bedpan, though. The thing I always remember about that was a subtle detail that was probably wholly unintentional: Austin taking a moment to beat on Vince's injured leg. Just before the bedpan shot, actually. It really drives home that in the end, you really shouldn't be rooting for this man. It's one thing to be wronged and angry and seeking revenge, and all the other nonsense (him punching him, the bedpan, zapping him with paddles, giving him an offscreen enema) is almost kind of slapstick. But sadistically going after an 'injury'...this is not a man you can trust, even if he's doing stuff you like. Probably way overthinking it. The skit is also an example of how Vince was willing to play the absolute fool if he felt like it. Which is more than I can say for virtually all other psychopath businessmen.
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Feb 8, 2022 08:40
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bagmonkey posted:I'm also trying to remember more about Al Snow's Head character storyline but I'm drawing a lot of blanks. Was that actually a good storyline or did it suck and I was young and dumb? Basically, Allen Sarven had gone through a few gimmicks that had not worked at all, and after his last one as "Leif Cassady" of the "New Rockers" with infamous "wayside faller" Marty Jannety, was sent to ECW, which the WWE had a business relationship with, to give them a body and for him to 'improve' and maybe find something interesting for him to do. Whether he himself, Paul Heyman (who in his day was really good at gimmicks), someone else, or a combination of them, came up with it, one day Snow was shown in a video where his character had clearly gone a little 'crazy' and he muttered that he was spinning his wheels and that he'd heard the only way to get ahead was "give a little head'. Which he took literally, producing a plastic mannequin head named, well...Head. In the way some things do, this caught fire (the same way football fans will paint their faces or whole upper bodies, you know how it goes) and for a time Al Snow was the most popular guy in ECW and returned to the WWE, where for a time there he was the crazy over (re: really popular) midcarder, but between a glut of talent and how one note the Head gimmick was, eventually fans did get bored of waving around their own mannequin heads. Much like Val Venis, he was very much part of the late 90's "we're so edgy lookit sex jokes aplenty" wrestling period; it wouldn't have worked in any other time period. Though speaking of time periods, beyond that, Snow's biggest contribution to the business was probably being part of maybe the most ridiculously evil Saturday morning cartoon heel run of possibly all of wrestling history, which was the Big Boss Man's run in the latter half of 1999. Now THAT is a story for this thread, and if someone else doesn't tell it I will return to do so.
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Feb 8, 2022 19:52
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Okay, so this is madness even before we start. As said, Al Snow managed to get really over by being nutty and carrying a mannequin head around. What does everybody want? HEAD! Yuk yuk yuk.  But every gimmick runs its course, so after a while Al Snow had a falling out with Head and started trying to bring other 'friends' to the ring. His first try was a reindeer trophy bust named Pierre.  That didn't work, so he started bringing a chihuahua named Pepper instead.  Now the other half of the equation. This is, was, Ray Traylor.  As tragically, he died of a sudden heart attack in 2004. For further irony, in real life Traylor was said to be one of the nicest people in the sport, which makes the point of this story even funnier, in a way. In any case, Traylor's career started under the name of "Big Bubba Rogers", working as a bodyguard for Jim Cornette in the 80's southern territories. The thing about this start I also have to note is that the 'biggest thing' he was involved in was a scaffold match... (And what is a scaffold match, you might ask? Why, it's a match where the wrestlers fight on a scaffold. Yes, the sport-performance that generally requires a very free range of motion would have people have matches on a narrow piece of bridge a legit 10-15-20 feet above the ring, hence ensuring that all they were really doing was carefully moving around and maybe exchanging a few punches. A scaffold match's purpose, of course, was for someone to get tossed off of it; it was generally presented as a feud ender, the match broken out when two or more men just had to go the extra mile to destroy each other. Or in Jim Cornette's case, to see him 'get hurt.' See, Cornette was one of the best heel managers of all time, playing a general gimmick of a mamma's boy wimp (with hints of homosexuality) whose rich mother bought him everything he wanted and who would use his tennis racket to ensure his team would win through treachery, which pushed all the buttons of many, many southern crowds, and Cornette has plenty of stories about how he managed to get the fans to hate him so much that he literally had to fight his way back to the locker room with his team wielding chairs, putting a horseshoe inside his tennis racket so if he really had to use it it had impact, and generally a lot of "To the old boys these are fond memories of stuff that 'just doesn't happen any more', where if you examine it with any sense of clarity you realize Cornette was one bad luck turn away from ending up like the warden of the prison at the end of Natural Born Killers". Frankly, it's a level of 'true heat' this business is better off without.) Anyway, in this match, with Traylor, playing his bodyguard, and with Cornette going to be up on the scaffold and get his just desserts by falling off it (never mind Cornette was not a trained wrestler or stuntman, nor was there any padding for him to fall on), said he would catch Cornette. And he did try. But between his sunglasses and the unexpected sheer intensity of the lights, Bubba completely missed his catch and poor Cornette landed on his feet after a legit 15 foot fall and wrecked the hell out of his knees. He'd recover, but it's a story of just how lunatic the business can be even without Vince McMahon. In any case, Traylor would head to the WWF in the late 80's, where he was given his most famous gimmick, the Big Boss Man.  A former prison guard from Cobb County (which Traylor had actually been), so fittingly he started off as a nasty heel who would handcuff his opponents and beat them with a nightstick; he swiftly made an enemy of Hulk Hogan and would be a thorn in his side for months and months (even playing a part in the famous 'Mega Powers Explode!' angle). But Traylor, despite being a stout, bulky man, could really move well despite it, and that ability eventually got him cheered (fans are weird that way: do your job well, even if you're a bastard, and they'll start liking you for it, it's a story as old as pro wrestling itself), so he turned face in 1990... (By refusing to accept a payment from Ted DiBiase to get the Million Doller Title back from Jake Roberts, because see, Traylor was a-ok doing it when it was presented as a man helping to get his rightful property back, but as soon as it was revealed Dibiase had paid Traylor's manager Slick off to get Traylor to do it, Traylor flipped out, declared 'he couldn't be bought', took the belt away (never mind Jake technically HAD stolen it) and became a good guy. Because beating the poo poo out of people who are helpless because of handcuffs and trying to destroy the great hero Hulk Hogan is all morally justified, but taking money for a task is a bridge too far. Eh, that's the story of, that's the glory of...) And remained that way until he headed to WCW in the early 90's. He spent several years there, and eventually returned to the WWE in late 1998. With the WWE's Attitude Era in full swing by then, he updated his look so that he was now in all black tactical gear.  Unfortunately, despite having lost weight, the years of wear and tear and injuries were starting to break Traylor's body down (and who knows what drugs and steroids did, I suspect it's why he died young), so he was nowhere as good as he'd been several years prior. This is perhaps best shown in his Wrestlemania 15 match with the Undertaker, which took place inside the special "Hell In A Cell" cage...and is considered the absolute worst Hell In A Cell match in history. The only real notable thing about it was after Undertaker won, he had some of his minions rappel down to the cage's roof, pass him a rope, and then in front of the whole Wrestlemania and PPV audience murdered Big Boss Man by hanging him.  Yes, this happened. I saw it happen live on TV as it unfolded. Traylor was then sent to a hospital, where he was pronounced 'alive', and he walked off this attempted execution (he was actually lifted by a harness hidden in his shirt). However, it seemed like the process gave him brain damage, because he would become the most evil, vile, horrible heel in all of Saturday morning shortly thereafter. And I ended up getting way too sidetracked, so I'll end it here and get to the actual story in a bit. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 9, 2022 05:12
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Right, so after Wrestlemania we have events where Al Snow now has a dog called Pepper and Big Boss Man walked off being executed. At the time, the WWE had a secondary title, the 'Hardcore Championship', which was meant to basically be a vanity title for Mick Foley as part of a storyline, but since 1) Mick was getting on the hottest streak of his career, and 2) His past as being part of all sorts of 'legendary' dangerous and garbage matches led to the title becoming official: Mick lost it to, surprise surprise, the Big Boss Man, and from there the belt was defended in hardcore matches, ie matches where the wrestlers used weapons and left the ring and so on. Big Boss Man lost the title, went through his brief murder experience, and then a few months later, tried to get it back, targeting then-champion Al Snow. He beat Al for the title at the July PPV, then Al Snow won it back at the August PPV, in a match where "Just prior to the match, Snow had set Pepper's pet carrier near the entranceway; minutes into the match, Boss Man picked it up, taunted Pepper, struck Snow with the carrier and carelessly tossed it behind him; commentator Jim Ross immediately apologized to viewers for the act, and stated that Pepper had been removed from the box before the match." It would not surprise me if Vince heard that and didn't like it, because losing the match seemingly drove Bossman insane. So he promptly kidnapped Pepper. And tried to ransom him back to Snow. Snow agreed to meet Bossman at a hotel to get his dog back, but before he did, Bossman served Snow some steak. Which Snow, like an idiot, ate without question.  As you may have guessed, the storyline was that Bossman had killed the dog, ground it up into meat, cooked it, and served it to Snow. Or that was the implication; Pepper was never seen again, so...anyway, Snow, disgusted and furious, decided only a certain horrible match would settle this. A match of immense risk of mauling and injury, a match that could end both their careers...a KENNEL FROM HELL MATCH.  The ring would be surrounded by a classic WWE blue steel bars cage (which they basically stopped using around this time: what a match to go out on) and around that would be the larger "Hell in A Cell" cage. And between the two cages, at ringside, wild, vicious Rottweilers would roam. It would be a match of great danger; nowhere was safe! Could anyone escape this match without severe injury? Well, uh...problem. As said, Bossman was a wreck by now. And Al Snow, while he could be a decent worker, was no 'carry-er', ie someone who could hide a wrestler's weaknesses and get a good to great match out of them (There's a term for some called the "Broomstick Test/Award" given to wrestlers who are so talented at such a thing that it's said that they could wrestle a broomstick and have a good match with it. To see this taken somewhat more literally, please have a look at renowned wrestler Kenny Omega, hailed as perhaps the best of the 21st century and one of the GOATS, in his younger days, having a 'match' with a nine year old girl.) https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=909496465830782 But hey, you can save a bad match with overbooking, and nasty dogs between the cages had never been done before. Well, turns out there's a reason for that. As the saying goes, never work with children or animals, because the savage, dangerous dogs, were, uh...   Not. Whether they were just naturally good boys or had been drugged to ensure no accidents, the dogs, rather than seem like a threat that both wrestlers had to avoid, spent their time peeing and pooping around the ring, and in one case, trying to mate, which the cameraman was slow to realize and cut away from. And hence, what should have just been an average bad match became...well, the Kennel From Hell match. At the end of it, Al Snow pulled out Head again, whacked Bossman with it, pinned him, and that was that. If you don't believe me, then by all means, see it for yourself. You'd think that would be the pinnacle of cartoon heel evil, but no. For Big Bossman, it was the warmup round. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 09:38 on Feb 9, 2022 |
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Feb 9, 2022 09:36
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Trollologist posted:While all these stores about how old people can't tell a good story are funny, there's something you need to know about wrestling that isn't really touched on. The thing is, they're not exactly WRONG. The generic insult is 'wrestling is fake', which is basically a whole kitchen of pots making color accusations for a kettle. Virtually ALL entertainment is 'fake'. The proper goal of it is to make you forget that, to lose yourself in it, to suspend your disbelief. We all know that men and women aren't actually duelling with laser swords in a galaxy far far away, or people are being brutally murdered in a dark ages style land called Westeros, or that we're not actually a super spy named Naked Snake becoming so disillusioned over his first great mission that he will become the villain in chronologically later games over just how badly his mentor was hosed over. The whole point is to get people to just forget that, not think about it, be in the story. Yeah sometimes it goes wrong: see Jack Gleeson basically retiring from acting because he was SO GOOD at playing a villain that too many people basically associated the villain with him. But it goes right enough so that if you want to find some words that inspire or fit a situation, you're just as likely to turn to fiction as to real life works. In the end, the core of phrases like "There is nothing to fear but fear itself." and "Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot..." is the same. The days when wrestling was solely a way to scam people out of their money had more or less died by the time that the likes of Thesz and Hackenschmidt were young. It had become like any other entertainment exchange: you give money, you get entertainment. Hell, in many ways it's an unfair exchange: the absolute worst thing fans will get 99 percent of the time is a bad show, while wrestlers run the risk of injuring or killing themselves, or being so good at poking fans' amygdala's that the fans will outright try and kill them, or just the fact that even if it is all prearranged, these men and women are tossing their bodies down onto the ground and landing jumps and so on over and over and over, the whole process acting like erosion. In many ways, pro wrestling is far more 'real' than, well, just about any other form of entertainment. But, as the old saying goes, things change. A bit from Other People's Money comes to mind, where Danny Devito's character talks about how once, many companies made buggy whips for horse drawn carriages, but automobiles came along and eventually supplanted such methods of transport, and while the very last general buggy whip company probably made the very best buggy whip money could buy, it just was not needed, and by that logic, being an investor in such a company would be a waste of time and money. Wrestling's no different, hell, it's gone through plenty of change. Vince and co might get enraged over the idea of people knowing what's behind the curtain and try and spite us for it, but it doesn't matter. Barn door's open, horses are long gone, and they smashed a bunch of genie bottles and stepped on a bunch of toothpaste tubes on their way out. The final irony is, any wrestling fan, deep down, WANTS to be a mark. We want to lose ourselves in a good match, or some silly psychodrama. Vince is, for the most part, not only tilting at windmills, but tearing them down and throwing the bricks at us. It's not needed. Forget this stupid mark/smart/smark distinction, just do your job and the rest will fall into place. I mean, in a few ways, real stuff in wrestling sucks. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 10, 2022 03:34
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Now, in relation to the whole 'reality bites' thing I was talking about, and to explain some of the extra beyond crazy stupidity of this story about Big Bossman, Ultimate Villain, a side story of ripple effect. This is the late Owen Hart.  Owen is one of the tragic stories of wrestling; he was immensely talented in the ring, a pretty drat good talker, especially when playing the heel role, and backstage, one of the most liked/loved members of the roster and a legendary ‘ribber’, ie a prankster. Unlike some ribbers, whose ‘ribs’ tended to be far more hazing-oriented or just outright mean bullying (another very talented wrestler but utter failure of a human being, Tom Billington, nee the Dynamite Kid, comes to mind), Owen’s tended to be harmless, like prank phone calls, or goofing around in the ring. However, within the brightest life, a little rain must fall, and Owen has one very odd black mark on his life as a wrestler. As said, in WWE, piledrivers and head drops in general have been banned for years, with a few exceptions, like the Undertaker being allowed to still do his Tombstone piledriver. It’s likely what happened with Owen is one of the reasons why. The Tombstone piledriver, which just happened to be named that before Mark Calloway took it as his finisher (the irony), is basically a piledriver ‘in reverse’: a normal one will have a wrestler’s chest pressed up against his foe’s back as he drops him, whereas a tombstone is done ‘chest to chest’. A visual aide.  As you can see, Undertaker’s holding him firmly and there’s plenty of space to ensure that the move is ‘safe’, along with the illusion that it is a head drop, like any good magic trick. Head drops in general are risky because while you’re supposed to use your shoulders to take the impact if you don't have cover like the Tombstone provides, people have kept trying to come up with more and more dangerous looking ones over the decades, especially in Japan. Like the Ganso Bomb. Or the Tiger Driver 91’. Or the Vertebreaker. In any case, Steve Austin’s rise to being one of the biggest wrestling names in history had three steps. The first was winning a wrestling tournament where afterwards he cut his ‘Austin 3:16’ promo. The second was calling out the then considering leaving the company Bret Hart, and being his first opponent when Bret did return. At the time, Austin was himself a very talented WRESTLER, capable of having an excellent wrestling match, and he and Bret synced well and did just that, several times. His feud with Bret would end with them switching alignments; Bret to heel, Austin to face, and after Bret formed up his own heel group in turn, Austin would be one of their primary opponents. Things shook out that Austin would end up facing Bret’s brother Owen at the August PPV, Summerslam. And so, as the story goes, while Austin and Owen were planning out their match, Owen suggested that he perform a tombstone piledriver on Austin. Austin asked how he did it: Owen said, allegedly, “I fall on my rear end.” The story generally goes that Austin didn’t like this, but as all such stories, who knows how much is true. Whatever the case and however he felt, in the match, Austin did let Owen do the tombstone spot. Owen did, as he may have said, do it by falling on his rear end. And unfortunately, he botched it.  As you can probably see via his head sticking out from beneath Owen's legs, Austin does NOT have some nice safe space. In fact, he has the opposite. The impact legit broke his neck and actually induced brief paralysis, which Owen managed to cover just long enough for Austin to do a weak roll up and end the match. It is this piledriver that is the oddity in Owen’s career: if he was so nice, and Austin didn’t like the idea of taking the move if Owen ‘fell on his rear end’, then why did Owen do it? Austin did have to allow him to do so, so Owen, at least, failed in his duty to protect his opponent. It’s very strange, and I don’t believe a solid answer has ever been given for his actions and reasonings. The neck injury, unfortunately, wholly changed the course of Austin’s career. The doctors basically told him “Retire”. Austin didn’t want to; he could sense that he was on a rocket, and drat, he was. The next suggestion was “Get neck surgery and take a year off to recover”. Same issue: Austin was on a giant hot streak and it would only get hotter, he didn’t want to. So the doctors grudgingly gave him a third option: have a smaller surgery NOW, and it would hold until he had the PROPER surgery later, which he was basically told he HAD to do. Austin had the minor surgery, returned to initiate the third and final step by ‘stunning’ Vince McMahon on TV when he didn’t like his answers, and the rest is history. But that piledriver would define the rest of Austin’s career, shortening it by years and forcing him to completely rework his style as a brawler because he now was at more risk doing and receiving certain moves. Now what the hell does all this have to do with the Big Bossman’s super cartoon evil? Well, this happened in mid to late 1997. By late 1999, after becoming maybe the biggest star in wrestling’s history and riding that wave for 18 months, Austin could no longer put off his need for greater neck surgery. The minor issue was that the WWE hadn’t exactly planned for this all that well, and didn’t have anyone who could replace him on short notice. Wait, you say, wasn’t the Rock around at the time? Yes, but he had just turned face some scant months ago, and he’d been sidelined with some lackluster feuds. Meanwhile, Triple H was being pushed into being a main eventer and headliner, but most fans didn’t buy it yet. So when it became clear that Austin, the WWE Champion, needed to get his surgery, he was written off TV on the night of his November PPV title match. Yes, so if you paid for it to see Austin wrestle, you got ripped off. And how did they write him off?  They had someone hit him with a car. That left the WWF championship vacant, and instead of just having Rock and Triple H, the other two men in the match, compete for it by themselves, the WWE decided that since they had to write Austin out, they would throw in another surprise entrant. Who turned out to be “The Big Show” Paul Wight. Who won as a second surprise. And why did he get into the match to begin with? Why, in "honor of his late father." And it was THAT storyline reason that the Bossman’s ultimate evils would revolve around. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Feb 10, 2022 |
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Feb 10, 2022 03:41
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Okay, so we come to the climax of this crap. This is Paul Wight, ie the Big Show (also known as the Giant). He is, as Jameson mentioned, very big. How big?   That's Shaquille O'Neal he's standing next to, to give you a size comparison. In any case, Wight was born with the same condition that made Andre the Giant so...well, giant, but unlike Andre, they caught it early, and Wight received medical care to fix the issue before it became irreversible and terminal as it did for Andre. End result, a very very large man, and amazingly, WCW got to him before Vince. The fact that "The Giant" debuted as part of the infamous Dungeon of Doom, where he was presented as being the ACTUAL son of Andre the Giant, seeking revenge, was more or less a harbinger for the many, many dumb storylines Wight would find himself in in his two decade plus career. Seriously, I could end up on another post wide tangent about the sumo truck wrestling match, Giant no selling a multi story fall, THE YET-TAY, him smoking while the announcers screamed about how it would stunt your growth, IT'S NOT HOT...but I really should stop. Anyway, after a few years with WCW and the war between them by then swinging firmly back to the WWE, Wight saw that the grass was greener and left WCW, and WWE promptly picked up Wight and renamed him 'The Big Show'. Vince was said that WCW had no idea how to book a giant. He would proceed to book Wight 100x times worse than WCW ever did for decades. But as of this 'now', Wight had only been in the WWE for eight months. He'd debuted as a heel ally of McHahon with his war against Stone Cold, teamed up with the Undertaker where Taker cut one of the most infamously strange promos of all time, won the tag belts twice, and turned face when Undertaker left to take time off to get surgery and rehab. See, Big Show's father was terminally ill. In storyline. In reality, Wight's father had passed on years before. No, I don't mean Andre, that was also storyline. In any case, Big Boss Man heard about this and decided that it was a great idea to target a very large man going through a grieving process, because he was evil. So Wight's father supposedly died, the WWE cheapened the 10 bell salute for this fake death, and then out came Boss Man. To read a poem, as many wrestlers like their poetry. It was about as subtle as a brick to the face. Fired out of a cannon. I mean, wrestling feuds have started over getting coffee spilled on a person, over shampoo commercials, and over the right to have a wrestler's mother as their valet, so you don't need much, but Bossman had decided that there was no rock bottom. Because he then showed up the next week at the staged funeral of the Big Show's father. And attacked it. And stole the casket. Which Wight tried to stop by jumping on top of it. It did not work. https://i.imgur.com/Wx2NYOZ.mp4 Thanks X JAKK. So oh boy, was Show EVER mad. So mad that he challenged Big Bossman to a 4 on 1 traditional Survivor Series PPV matchup in November, where Bossman would have three allies and Show would be alone. When the WWE said Show 'couldn't do that' and gave him some undercarders for partners, Show beat them up on the night of Survivor Series and then headed out, utterly smashing Bossman's three allies and spurring Bossman to flee. But then, as a surprise, Show got inserted into the world title match in the main event of the same show, and won. You'd think he'd try to get some credibility by facing some top stars. Instead, Bossman grabbed his newest shovel and kept digging: Show's lone feud as the champion would be with Bossman. It's said that in wrestling, a good heel plays 'mind games'. So what would ultimate cartoon evil Big Bossman do? Why, break into Big Show's (supposed) mother's house. And tape himself confronting her to 'have a conversation'. About a secret about Wight. And what was that secret? Why, see for yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfvPUJQXbrI So yeah. Bossman got 'Big Show's mom' to admit that he was illegitimate. While filming it. And he put it on live TV. Alas, even the most extreme of things has its limits, and "Big Show, you're a bastard! Literally!" was the pinnacle of it. There was no more 'nonsense gold craziness'; Show destroyed Bossman in a quick squash on the December PPV, lost the title to Triple H at the start of 2000, and would go on to be part of even more very dumb and embarrassing skits over the course of the next 15+ years. And that was the story of the greatest evil heel in all of cartoon villainy wrestling heeldom. (And on one final note, a few years later Big Show would get a shirt that declared he was "A Big Nasty Bastard", so good on him for turning his weakness into a strength, or something). Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Feb 10, 2022 |
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Feb 10, 2022 05:33
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FogHelmut posted:Video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_Fs0pk3bjk Relevant parts: 6:15 to 7:05, and then 8:55 to 9:25, namely for the announcers attempting to cover that this man seemingly fell of a five story roof no less than two hours ago. There's also a bunch of other lunacy, but that's the relevant part.
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Feb 10, 2022 06:12
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Time_pants posted:Speaking of jobber tag teams/stables, does anyone have any clips of badly dubbed Kaientai? Those are so loving hard to find but Taka Michinoku and Funaki were amazing. I especially loved when Taka forgot to hold the mic up to his mouth when it was his turn to "speak," so his dubbed voice reminded him to hold up the microphone. Let's get funky on the dance floor. Always Neither part of a great alliance or evil. He-roes? No. Evil. Must have been on a coffee break. One of my regrets as a wrestling fan is I never was able to get my hands on one of these shirts. 
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Feb 10, 2022 06:25
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Outpost22 posted:What was the story with the guy who fell out of their harness from the rafters? Didn't he die? Ugh. Yeah, that was Owen Hart, who I talked about before. But there's nothing funny about that story. Basically, when Owen first appeared in the WWE at the turn of the 90's, he was dressed up in a mask as "The Blue Blazer". After 1997 and the 'Montreal Screwjob', he was the 'last man standing' of the heel stable that his brother Bret had put together; Bret and his (and Owen's) brothers in law Davey Boy Smith and Jim Neidhart broke their contracts with WWE and went with him, and the fifth member had tragically died the previous month. He'd be used semi decently over the next 18 months, compared to how some had and would be used, but in mid 1999, they decided to resurrect the Blue Blazer and have him portrayed as an out of touch goofball lame-o who did stuff like tell kids to drink their milk. Since this was now the ever so adult Attitude Era, this was lame and he was a heel. But he was a comically entertaining heel, something Owen was very good at in general, and it became a joke that "Owen is not the Blue Blazer" despite being unmasked as the Blue Blazer by having his tag team partner (Jeff Jarrett) and at one point, D'Lo Brown, who is black, dress up the Blazer to prove he wasn't the Blazer. Never mind he'd already been unmasked as the Blazer, but at least in this case it was part of the joke. In a sick tragedy, that joke got Owen killed. Owen got a title shot at the May PPV, and to continue the "The Blue Blazer is a superhero and lame" joke, Owen was scheduled to be hooked into a harness and 'fly' down to the ring from the rafters, only for him to pratfall and fall on his face just before he touched down. Ha ha. The problem is, normal harnesses did not, would not, allow this. Wrestlers had been rappelled down to the ring before, in fact over in WCW it had become Sting's trademark to do so, and Shawn Michaels and Undertaker had done it to make big entrances at PPVs, but if you watch them, especially Sting, after they landed, they had to take the time to unhook the main harness and the backup harness. This sort of thing would become very obvious with Sting, who would make his harness entrance often into a ring filled with heels, who would all just stand there yelling and pointing while Sting removed the harness, only attacking him when it was off. To do a pratfall, Owen would need a specialized harness with a quick release mechanism. Since normal harnesses didn't have that nor could they be altered for that, Owen was strapped into a juryrigged harness that normally was used for air surfing on sailboats. So not only was it not being used like it was intended, it had a quick release mechanism, and as a result, not as strong a clasp as a normal harness would. Owen was hesitant, but he was a good company man, and that just extended to him apparently doing one trial 'flight' down before the show and declining to do a second. But on the show, something went wrong, we'll never know just what, maybe he hit the mechanism by mistake, or the first practice run warped it, but while they were playing a video package to promote the match and Owen was hanging ready to 'fly' down and then make his superhero pratfall, the harness broke, and Owen fell 70 feet to his death right in front of the audience, and had it been a little later, would have been right in front of the PPV audience as well. Then in a moment of supreme psychopathy, Vince decided to continue the show. And the wrestlers were, for the most part, just too in shock to process what had happened and went on autopilot and did just that. We could argue they should have walked out en masse, quit for this sheer callousness, beaten Vince to a pulp, but who knows just what was going through their heads? Some say Owen would have wanted the show to continue, but we'll never know. It was pretty much the darkest day in wrestling history until the Chris Benoit murder-suicide. At least Owen, as his last act, yelled for the referee to look out before he landed, hence at least lessening the chance someone else would be harmed by this. Which was just Owen, and the world, wrestling and in itself, is poorer for his absence. Edit: Well that was one heck of a snipe. Here's Big Show dressed up as the New Year's Baby dancing. 
Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Mar 17, 2022 |
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Feb 10, 2022 06:46
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bagmonkey posted:I would loooooooove this, I totally missed TNA as Attitude Era WWE's tail end kinda turned me off to wrestling for a while Ho boy. To really understand TNA, you need to understand WCW. And to understand WCW, you need to understand this thread's title man, Vince McMahon. And also, for an allegory, opera. Specifically, the operas of Richard Wagner. Wagner, once he hit his stride, wrote his operas according to his concept of "Gesamtkunstwerk", or "Total work of art", which "he sought to synthesize the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama." In other words, he added a poo poo-ton of exaggeration and bombast to his works and hence to opera: if you picture opera as a fat woman in a horned helmet singing so loud she shatters glass, you're picturing Wagner. Wagner's critics, however, called his operas boring, all style, no substance, all sizzle, no steak. His fellow opera writers would often agree...and then they started writing their new operas more in how he did so anyway. Because in the end, artistic integrity is almost always tossed aside for money, and Wagner drew the crowds and got the attention. It almost spoke of an inferiority complex, of men too afraid to chance failure by trying to let their works stand on their own merits. They say history is written by the winners, but Vince didn't even wait for history to really happen before he started rewriting it. If you heard him tell it, wrestling was damned to be in smoky bars and high school gymnasiums forever until he came along and 'made it big'. Like 'wrasslin', this is nonsense. Even if we ignore the original boom periods of wrestling in the 1920's and in the 1950's, when it was one of the first big draws at the start of the television era, wrestling was still drawing sold out crowds in large areas in the decades since. Hell, the super big star in the then WWWF before Hogan, Bruno Sammartino, sold out shows wherever he went in the States, and wrestling could sell out arenas in Canada, Japan, the UK, and elsewhere. It was just quieter, lesser known to the world at large. But it existed: look no further than heroes of Texas the Von Erich family, specifically Kerry Von Erich, selling out the 45,000 seat Texas stadium a mere three months after Hogan won his first WWF title and kicked off the era of 'Hulkamania'. And as said, Vince hated, and hates, wrestling. And many 'wrestling' fans equally disliked (and that could be mild) Vince's vision, seeing it as a slow, clumsy, freakshow of men who should not have been that muscled, who even if they could wrestle, were discouraged not to. Rather than collect the fans under his banner the same way he was collecting wrestlers and territories, Vince's success came a lot from creating new fans, who were drawn to the way he did things. It was the 80's, and excess and bombast ruled the day. It affected all of entertainment; look at what happened to the Rocky and Rambo films, or the Death Wish films, or heck, even Star Wars (You don't like the idea of the Empire being beaten by hordes of teddy bears with spears? That's part of the 80's as much as anything else). Vince caught lightning, and hence attention, and hence he was free to tell the story as he wanted to do it, and that story was he was the golden god who had raised wrestling from its wretched roots and hence his vision was the pinnacle of the sport-performance. Yeah, maybe the likes of Dusty Rhodes and Ric Flair and Giant Baba and the Freebirds and the Harts had been selling out stadiums before Vince had even started drawing up his plans for conquest, and had Vince been hit by a car in 1981 and died, they would have continued to sell them out, but what 'mattered' was that Hulk Hogan was a household name, just like even now, those not in the know will refer to any video game system as "a Nintendo". So, much like Wagner's fellows, the NWA, which eventually became WCW, even as much as they disparaged Vince's take on wrestling, started trying to write their shows like his instead of just presenting their own version of the product and letting the cards fall where they might. There was even validity in letting their product speak for themselves and that getting them places; in the mid 80's, Vince did a sneaky end run around an arrangement the NWA-WCW had to product a Saturday evening wrestling show and got his show inserted in its place. It was a disaster; as said, the NWA fans poured in letters and calls telling the station to get Vince's 'crap' off the air, and when said station arranged for another NWA show to air on the same channel and it got great ratings, it ultimately forced Vince to swallow his pride and sell the TV slot back, lest it just get taken away from him due to low ratings. That was likely the first part of why Vince would come to hate WCW so much, but despite this initial setback, the ball was still in his court. Vince, you see, had gotten in first with the fledgling market of PPV, which really allowed wrestling to reach a wide audience. Before PPV, there was 'closed circuit TV', which was basically 'put a big projector in a very small arena and people pay to come in and watch it". Which served, but nothing could get you numbers and eyeballs if you could do stuff in the comfort of your own home. He promptly used the fact that he had been first and had used it well (Wrestlemania 3 had been purchased by a staggering 10 percent of the then-available PPV audience: even in the Attitude Era it was considered an insane success if 1 percent purchased a show) to gently caress with and gently caress over NWA-WCW. NWA-WCW had a Thanksgiving tradition super show, Starrcade; when they decided to finally put it on PPV, Vince created his own Thanksgiving event, Survivor Series, and told the PPV carriers that they could either carry Starrcade or Survivor Series, and if you picked Starrcade, you didn't get to also air Survivor Series (so no putting one show on in the afternoon and one in the evening and having the PPV companies make bank by having wrestling fans purchase them both and spend half the day watching wrestling) and you ALSO didn't get to air the next Wrestlemania either; the PPV companies mostly went with the established business and Starrcade on PPV the first time was such a disaster that WCW was forced to move it to December the next year and from then on to avoid competition (which, considering it was a Thanksgiving tradition for THEM, made it extra humiliating). When WCW tried a standalone PPV the next January, the WWE countered it with a free show on their cable channel, the very first Royal Rumble. WCW did learn from these dirty tricks however, and countered by having their own free show on cable on the night of Wrestlemania, the Clash of Champions. The fact that the PPV still sold well and Clash got a very high rating was more or less proof there was room for both visions in wrestling... But like I said. Hogan was the Nintendo. The number of businessmen who can be content with a devoted market that products decent profit is very low; they'll always see the already overcrowded bigger market and say ME TOO. So WCW tried to ape the WWE, in both booking and business, to try and get some of said success. As the saying goes, do not argue with an idiot, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience. Worse, by the time they really started trying this, the bottom was falling out of the first WWE boom; Vince might have created many new fans, but most were the type who would eventually want something new and move on, whereas the long term permanents had been completely driven away. It would have been a good time for WCW to play 'well stocked for the winter"...if they hadn't already burned through craptons of money doing stuff like buying private jets and trying to get over their own stupid cartoon gimmicks like the Ding Dongs. Heck, there's a fair argument that for all the extra attention and solidification of wrestling Vince managed to do in the popular zeitgeist, he ended up doing worse long term damage to wrestling in the process: he drove away the legions who had been selling out the stadiums beforehand by taking over all those territories, and the new legions didn't stay. But, despite that, and Vince flushing a bunch of money away with his first attempt to succeed outside wrestling, the WBF, the WWE still endured on its own merits, whereas the NWA-WCW had to be purchased by Turner Broadcasting (and by Ted Turner personally) to save it from completely dissolving from all the money wasted trying to ape the WWF. Supposedly, after doing so, Ted called up Vince and (bombastically) said "Hey Vince! I'm in the wrasslin' business!" Vince, as he tells it, replied "That's great Ted. I'm in the entertainment business." And what he probably didn't say or indicate was the seething hot rage that fell over his vision hearing that word. Once again, that drive would help propel the business, in time, to amazing heights once again...but in the long term, would do even more damage. But we'll get to that. --- Animal-Mother posted:Evidently, the network did not take issue with his entrance music lyrics declaring that he is, indeed, an rear end man. What's really funny is that this gimmick spun out of the fact that ol' Monty Sopp was performing under the ring name of "The Bad rear end" Billy Gunn, who was part of the tag team The New Age Outlaws, who got folded into DX, who were big on juvenile sex nonsense that was adult and edgy, and that if you listen to the song and watch how Sopp performed, it was less about a man who really appreciated a good (female only? Unknown) derriere and more about a man who was completely obsessed with his own rear end. --- stratdax posted:How's Billy Corgan's wrestling thing going You know how there are bands that have a one hit wonder, and then 20 years later, you're shocked to discover they're still together and still doing shows, even if it's just in tiny venues, and are still releasing music, even though you 'haven't heard a thing' about them ever since that lone hit? Just somehow eeking on when you think they should have dissolved a long time ago? It's going like that. Edit: Actually, a better analogy might be Coolio. Who went from Gangsta's Paradise and making cameoes in sitcoms to rapping about Pornhub. We're at the rapping about Pornhub stage. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 11, 2022 04:54
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Right, so now we're at the 90's, and WCW is officially WCW. And I'm going to bring up another analogy, in this case the famous black satire book Catch-22, and the movie made of it in 1970. There's several lines going through the piece, and while 'Catch-22' has become shorthand for 'two bad choices where there is no winner' (which is inaccurate, but again, Play it again Sam, while you beam me up Scotty), one of the other things is how the army allows certain goings on because they're the means that justify the ends, but by allowing it, the means gradually grow more and more cancerous until not only are they not justifying the end, they're actively working against it and creating a new, much worse end. This is primarily demonstrated with the Milo character, who starts off doing some black market egg trading, which the army allows because why not, only for it to be taken to the logical extreme by the end of the story where he's having his own side's planes bomb their own base because he bought up all the Egyptian cotton in the world, can't unload it, and the Germans agreed to take it if he blew up his own base, his 'businesses' having become so grotesquely grand that he's now actively killing his own side's troops just to keep it going, and in the book, he gets off from doing it because all the money he made lets him hire a super expensive lawyer which basically uses the logic of "He was a great capitalist, America was built on capitalism, America is the greatest country in the world, ergo what he did was actually good. Also look at how much money he made." And as part of the satire, the army basically shrugs its shoulders and agrees. The point of this won't become clear until later when it comes to WCW and by extent, TNA. So the first half of the 90's wasn't good for either company. The Hulkamania boom had ended, and Vince's attempts to find a new muscle-god kept coming up short, not helped by Hogan himself (more on that later). Then the steroid scandal hit (a tempest in a teapot situation if there ever was one...well, maybe a tea SET), and hence Vince basically had to clean out all the steroids from his company, shrinking some of his wrestlers so much that people thought they'd been replaced by a new person (the Ultimate Warrior) and also ensuring his bodybuilding federation died even if business wasn't already killing it and forcing him to focus on smaller, more natural sized (albeit still large men) wrestlers. Except parts of the fanbase that had stuck around had been conditioned to think big=best, and all it really did was make more fans drop the product, even as the actual WRESTLING improved a great deal (this was my personal favorite, Bret Hart, 's glory days). Now handcuffed by the fact that having every other man be one large mass of ham would be an admission of guilt, plus, you know, actually being on trial, and topped off by Hogan going on the Arsenio Hall show and saying he never used steroids (he was not believed), only to take that back and testify at Vince's trial that yes, he did, and Vince just could not find his new lightning in the bottle, combined with the fact that the fans who HAD stuck around were telling him they were fine with the average sized (for a wrestler, especially in the world Vince made), average at best talker but phenomenal wrestler Bret Hart as the top guy, but oh no, Vince had to have his giants, so he tried to push first very well musculed Lex Luger to the moon, and when that failed, he saw that the very tall Kevin Nash was getting over and made him leapfrog several steps of growth and tried to push him to the moon, which backfired even worse. And all the while, the WWE just kept pumping out the cartoon gimmicks, because it was all they knew. The fans told them they wanted something else? gently caress 'em, Vince said, what would fans know? In any case, the steroids trial turned into a giant bust, with the government presenting a case so full of holes and hearsay and other issues that it was an easy walk for Vince. However, that didn't help the business. Over in WCW, they had their own set of issues. Now owned by Turner Broadcasting, they had a large pool of funds to dip into, but they also had executives and other businessfolk getting involved, often knowing exactly jack and crap about the business. The people who helped kill WCW like to hoist all the blame on these types, and they played their part, but it wasn't entirely their fault. But, as said, they played their part. The first to take the reigns was Jim Herd, who among other things, told Ric Flair, their top draw, that he was too old and that he should shave his hair, get an earring, and go by the name Sparticus, and he wanted to create a tag team called the Hunchbacks based around the fact that their humps would keep them from being pressed firmly to the mat by their shoulders and hence they could never be pinned, and in general had a massive ego and wouldn't take no for an answer. Eventually he was tossed, and a guy called Kip Frye took over for a bit; while he 'got' that giving wrestlers motivation to perform well would get that, he didn't have anyone who could book or come up with compelling storylines. So WCW promptly went too far in the opposite direction and hired Bill Watts, a super old school guy who knew wrestling very well (and had had large drawing shows and highly rated syndicated TV shows in the past to prove it)...but only knew wrestling HIS way. Things changed, he refused to. Which meant he promptly did stuff like pulling away the safety mats around the ring so...it would make the wrestlers look tougher if/when they took bumps on it, even while he was also doing stuff like banning jumping off the top rope, or throwing your opponents over the top rope, which crippled one of the unique things WCW did have, their lightweight high flying wrestlers, because to Watts, that wasn't wrestling and he wasn't going to have it, even if fans liked it. What Watts liked, and wanted was old school super tough men, and while he wasn't wholly wrong (this was when Leon White, best known as Big Van Vader, or just Vader, came into WCW as part of becoming one of the biggest and best monster heels in US wrestling history), it was wholly a case of 'too much water, you drown'. In a perfect world, Watts could have balanced his preferences with what had shown to be popular, but as you might have guessed, the people in this business who get put in charge tend to be stubborn, at the very very least. Also, Watts was an old school southern man. Which meant he was a racist and after giving an interview where he basically said "If I run a business and I don't want to serve a black man, I should be allowed to not serve them." and that immediately got back to the corporate environment of Time Warner, who had on their higher staff Hank Aaron, the baseball home run champion. As this was 1993 and not, well, these days, Watts was swiftly ashcanned, which meant the job was open. People thought it would go to a guy called Tony Schivone, a color commentator and someone who'd spent a fair amount of time in the business. How well would he have done? We'll never know. Instead, it went to Eric Bischoff, who was a third string announcer in WCW and was basically one or two steps up from being a coffee boy. It came as a surprise to many, but Eric was the definition of slick corporate hustle, and after the headache of 'Bill Watts, way too much wrasslin man", Turner wanted to go with someone who had more of a foot in their world than the wrasslin one, and Eric had gone around schmozing and butt kissing to the right people as Watts was on his way out, all the way up to telling Turner that he had surefire ways for WCW to beat the WWE. As it turned out, those ideas were "take the stars that were made in the WWE and have them perform for WCW instead". Eric's solution was that they needed the Nintendos, namely, Hulk Hogan, instead of all these southern wrestlers that only the devoted fans knew, after all, they'd be there no matter what, right? And since Eric pressed on just how important Hogan was, Hogan got a truly ridiculous contract, part of which included complete creative control. Which meant that he would only do stuff like lose if he wanted to. This was, as you might have guessed, a VERY BAD IDEA. Though that fact wouldn't really become clear until things were far too late, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. Worse, it didn't even pay immediate dividends. Hogan was brought in and hailed as the greatest thing ever, but the WCW fans didn't buy it. Hogan promptly crushing Ric Flair, telling Eric that the best thing to do was hire all his buddies with their own great contracts, who promptly began beating up all of WCW's homegrown talents (perhaps most infamously, after having a great feud with Ricky Steamboat, also an amazing wrestler, Steve Austin was beaten by Hacksaw Jim Duggan for his United States title in less than a minute and failed in both attempts to regain it. While Hacksaw had been a very popular midcarder in the 80's, had charisma, and was a decent wrestler, at best he was already past his prime in 1994, so...) and taking all the big paydays, best shown with Starrcade, where, after spending the latter half of 1994 beating Ric Flair to a pulp in every match they had, arranged a storyline so he could wrestle his best friend Ed Leslie in the main event of it. Leslie was an average wrestler at best, Hogan was Hogan, and this was a PPV series whose main events had included matches like Harley Race vs Ric Flair, so, needless to say, it went over as well as a lead balloon. Hogan, not being done, turned to killing Vader's credibility (part of which was doing his no-selling schtick for Vader's powerbomb, which was renowned as being utterly devastating, to the point where Vader had actually, albeit accidentally, broken an undercarder's back with it. The powerbomb, in the wrestling world perception, was LETHAL, if he hit it you were DONE. Hogan promptly popped right up, and just like that all of Vader's heat was gone) and then, resorting to ye old cartoon nonsense, had WCW put together the 'Dungeon of Doom', which was full of terrible gimmicks (albeit hilarious ones nowadays), most of which were played by Hogan's friends. And all the while, Eric (and Hogan) were spending Turner's money hand over fist. And not getting results. So in early 1995, Turner eventually went "We brought in Hogan and all these WWF people, why are we not beating the WWF?" Eric, put on the spot, said "We need prime time TV", thinking there was no way he'd get it. WCW was syndication, that was where it belonged. Turner instead gave Eric two hours on his TNT network. On Monday Night. Right across the same time slot as the WWF's prime show, Monday Night Raw. Eric was now semi cornered, and had to put up or shut up. In the end, he just looked at what he did, realized it was more or less part of what Vince had done in the 80's with the territories, and basically went "gently caress it, I'll steal the rest of his playbook and then some." And so he did. When Nitro began, Bischoff proceeded to do some very good counter programming, if not outright amazing. First of all, Nitro was all 'wrestlers fighting other wrestlers', whereas before that was generally saved for PPVs - WWF shows were either all 'wrestlers fighting no name jobbers' or at best, wrestlers fighting the lowcarders: the names only fought on PPV. Eric said nope, we have wrestler vs wrestler matches all the time. He did stuff like hire away Lex Luger without Vince finding out and having him show up on Nitro the night after Luger had appeared on a WWE PPV. He would do commentary and keep a TV under his desk to keep an eye on Raw, and counter program via doing things like making sure his show was on air during Raw's commercial breaks, or even rewriting the show on the fly to respond to what happened to Raw. And he then took it one step further. See, Nitro was always live. Raw was live one week, taped the next. So Eric just found out the taped results, and then when his show came on the air first, as it was two hours to Raw's one, he gave away the results of the taping. Why watch if you knew what was going to happen? Nitro was live, you never knew what was going to happen. This was probably Part 2 of why Vince ended up irrationally loathing WCW so much, but if he knew what Part 3 would be, he probably would have been happy with Eric breaking this 'inviolate rule'. Even still...it didn't help them beat the WWF. At best, it was going back and forth in the ratings. But "ATM Eric" wasn't done yet. So he made overtures to hire away more WWF people, namely two of their biggest stars, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash. Offering them more money for less working dates AND creative control. How could the men resist? But that wasn't all. Eric looked at the two, and decided, forget repackaging them, or even introducing them, people know who they are. I'll use THAT. So one night in May 1996, Scott Hall just walked out on Nitro, grabbed a mike, and went "Hey where's all the competition? I'm here for a war." Eric had committed his last and greatest theft of WWF, his biggest opera rewriting. He would take the two big WWE stars, and act like they were still working for WWE. That they were invading, to actively destroy WCW. Oh, he legally covered his rear end by having them state on air they did NOT work for WWE, but things were in motion. It was the Marvel Cinematic Universe of its day. And the final piece came into play when these two 'Outsiders' fought on the July PPV against three of WCW's headline stars, saying that they would be aided by an unknown third man...who ended up being Hulk Hogan. Having only been appearing sporadically for the last several months, Hogan legit shocked the wrestling world by joining the two men and becoming a bad guy for the first time in 12 years, as he'd been the heroic golden god for every day of his rise to being 'the Nintendo', and hence 97 percent of wrestling fans had never seen him play a heel. The NWO was born. And WCW finally had their rocket and they reaped the benefits. Just like the army reaped the benefits of Milo's black market business dealing. And we know how that ended. With him bombing his own base. But that was yet to come. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 09:52 on Feb 11, 2022 |
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Feb 11, 2022 09:37
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To contrast the WWE career of Bryan Danielson, who I'm also very fond of, let's again go completely off course with the whole 'Hey why did TNA fail so hard' by talking in depth about the past deeds of one of the main reasons: Terry "Hulk Hogan" Bollea. If there’s a phrase that comes to mind with Terry Bollea, it’s “Be careful who you pretend to be, because you are who you pretend to be.” Let’s be honest. I don’t know Terry Bollea, nee Hulk Hogan, at all. I have never met the man. I don’t know what goes on his head, or what drives him to do what he did, and does. All I can do is guess and make assessments based on them; they could be completely and utterly wrong. It’s not 2+2 equals 4 here; it’s more ‘this, this, and this definitely happened, and people say how this, this, this, this, and this happened, and other people say this and this about the first people saying those this, ergo we can try and make a rough calculation that I think the story is this.’ Hulk Hogan was not the first man to let the fact that the entire thing was a staged show corrupt him; in actual sports, the best naturally win, barring certain things of course, but wrestling follows the rules of fiction, where nothing happens unless the writer wants it to happen, and too often, there’s bleedover between who’s doing the performing and who’s directing the writing. It’s not always bad, but the failings often sink deeper than the successes, like Dusty Rhodes getting a finish named after him, or Verne Gagne playing a part in Hogan’s design by basically using his own wrestling company, the AWA, as his personal ego feeding vanity projecting, ensuring its title was either always around his waist or on his ‘favourite.’ Which we'll get to, in a moment. Neither was Hogan the only one who let the character completely overwrite the man; hell, it happened to a lot of his 80’s peers. It has been said that Jim Hellwig, who you might know better as the Ultimate Warrior, when he started out in the business was backstage a quiet, almost shy man who utilized an extraordinarily over the top character to get around that, only for the fact that he grew to spend more and more time in that character to ultimately supplant his actual personality entirely; there was no more Jim Hellwig, only ‘The Warrior’, and to paraphrase one of Warrior’s most unfortunate statements, “Warrioring don’t make the world work.” Likewise, while I suspect that Randall Poffo, nee Macho Man Randy Savage, probably would have been an aggressive and paranoid sort even if he’d spent his life being a baseball catcher instead of a wrestler, but wrestling sure as poo poo turned up those negative aspects of his personality and probably ensured he went through a lot of pain he could have otherwise avoided. And Ric Flair so utterly lived his gimmick of being a “limousine riding, jet flying, kiss stealing, wheeling and dealing son of a gun.” that it ended up destroying his finances, repeated marriages, drove him to alcoholism, MIGHT have played a part in his son’s premature death, and as of recently has gotten him erased because of his sex pest behavior being re-examined in the light of the post MeToo era; the man literally could not function not being ‘Ric Flair’, Richard Felair having long withered away to nearly nothing. Hogan is well known as a liar, if one uses a blunt term; in fact, he lies and exaggerates so much that it almost comes off as brain damage delusion. He’s claimed things like having been scouted as a guitar player for Metallica, doing a proto version of MMA in the 70’s, that he was also scouted to be the star of “The Wrestler”, and even stuff like that Elvis Presley was a huge fan of his work (Presley had been dead for several years before Hogan had even stepped into a ring for his first match). He would also exaggerate his famous Wrestlemania III moment repeatedly until it had become that he had slammed Andre the Giant’s 1500 pound body in front of 700,000 fans and Andre had died a few days later, which you can read almost as something that starts as comical exaggeration but ended up being another case of Hogan gaslighting himself. As a result of this, it can be very hard to parse out any exact reason for why he would choose to have the career he had; one can only make some educated guesses. So here’s mine. Terry Bollea was defined by three events in his life, which would led to him being one of the fulcrums that WCW’s demise and TNA’s near utter ruin would swing on. Number 1: How he was trained. As he tells it, the very first training session he had resulted in his trainer intentionally breaking his leg to ‘show him his place’ and ‘see if he wanted it’. This is somewhat true. What might not be mentioned is that Hogan, who came to wrestling because while he was playing band gigs around in Florida, and worked out at the same gym that many wrestlers in Florida frequented, where he was noticed by the Brisco Brothers, who initially pitched to him the idea of becoming a wrestler himself, came in full of himself, and at best horrendously erred in projecting confidence by saying he could and would become the biggest wrestling star ever etc etc. Hence, his leg was broken to ‘humble’ him, and even so, that’s too much an overreaction, but wrestling, despite shedding the carny money theft angle, had never and still has never shed the carny roots it came from. As the Dave Schultz story (told by Trollologist back on Page 15) said, it used to be that you always protected the business, and you did it by trying to utterly break your trainees and then, if they stuck around, ‘smartening them up’ that this was not a pure combat competition like boxing. (And despite stories like Schultz and Hogan giving the impression that they had no clue that ‘wrestling was fake’, I really do think they and most anyone else who aimed to get into the business from the 60's onward knew more than they realized, even if just subconsciously. Because if you take wrestling completely at face value, this is a sport where you are engaging in vicious, painful, damaging combat, often night after night, risking all sorts of injuries up to including death, and lacking even the protective rules that sports like football and boxing have. Wrestling, once it had evolved out of being more than ‘sort of like actual wrestling, with maybe a little more color and a few more bells and whistles’ and was ‘smashing people violently into the ground over and over, fighting them in steel cages, and actively trying to cripple them by doing stuff like jumping on their neck from an extended height via the ring corner’, taken at face value that it was ‘all real’, was basically gladitorial combat, and there were very few actual, willing gladiators; they were nearly all slaves being forced to kill each other for other people’s amusement. You look at the sort of man that Terry Bollea and many other wrestlers are, and then look at this concept, and you tell me that they didn’t know on SOME level it was primarily a show. But who knows. People are stupid and weird.) So, according to Hogan, he went through several months of hard training where he was stretched and abused and basically taught things like joint locks instead of how to 'take bumps', and then one day someone else finally pulled him aside and went “Terry, it’s actually all a show.” Which to Hogan, meant that his trainers had been abusing him and not teaching him what he really needed to learn, all for the sake of a lie. To ‘protect the business’. Who knows how true this is, but if we assume there’s SOME truth to it, and Hogan got fed a line on just how much reality there was in this show, he came away with it with the same lesson that Vince did from his possible abusive childhood: no. This is unacceptable. I will not allow people to have this much control over me. I will have the control. Though this was just seeds, ones that were shared by many. For Hogan, the second defining thing was his second lesson in not having control and how those who did have the control abused him with it. Hogan wasn’t an immediate explosive success when he broke into the business, but his size, look, and charisma did pay dividends, and back in his starting days, he actually could wrestle semi decently (check one of his early 80’s Japan matches for an example). So he began moving his way up the cards of the various promotions he worked with, but what REALLY did it for him was getting cast in a minor role as the wrestler ‘Thunderlips’ in Rocky III. Between the exposure from the film and his charisma making the fans ‘override’ his tended to be heel character by cheering wildly for him despite him returning to the States acting like a heel, which led to him swiftly jettisoning that and leaning into it, it seemed like it was time for him to climb to the top. The problem was, he was in the AWA. Run by Verne Gagne. Who was incredibly old school, and, as said, had more or less used the company as an ego stroke. While Verne HAD been popular in his day, he had complete control of the company and hence he made sure the world title was almost always around his waist. Once again, the audience changed, but Verne didn’t. He thought the old school way of wrestling matches all being an hour plus with 30 minutes spent lying around in a headlock was still the true blue heart of the performance, and that big charismatic men like Hogan were at best a side show to led to this ‘actual valid wrestling’. Between that, and stuff like winning the AWA title in 1968 for the NINTH time (having won the title the first time in 1960), and then holding the belt for SEVEN YEARS, only losing it in 1975 to his ‘favourite’, Nick Bockwinkel, who would proceed to hold the title for five years himself…before losing it himself…back to Verne Gagne. Who was by now, 64 years old and looked it...  Yeah. Gagne proceeded to retire as champion, so he never actually lost it the last time, and handed the title back to Bockwinkel. No match, no tournament, he just handed it back over like it was a book he'd borrowed instead of the supposed symbol of the best in wrestling. This happened right around the same time as Hogan arriving in AWA and becoming a face through sheer presence, and not only that, a top face. The logical thing would be to ride it. To make money. But Gagne did things his way. And to him, the giant muscleman was not the person who should hold a federation’s top title. Let’s leave out that the one who ‘should’ was inevitably whatever he wanted. Hogan began working his way through the company’s top heels, led by the late great Bobby Heenan, and then began a lengthy chase for Bockwinkel’s title, as Gagne tried to have his cake and eat it too. He would draw the crowds with Hogan, but have him come up short, and after a while of that, began doing Dusty finishes where Hogan would seemingly win the title, but then someone would come out and say something like “The ref got knocked out so that didn’t count.” “His feet were under the ropes so it didn’t count.” “Hogan didn’t read the fine print in his contract so it didn’t count.” and so on. In a vacuum, this isn’t necessarily wrong; one of the reasons that Kevin Nash failed as WWE champion was likely that the WWE jumped him past several steps of ‘growth’ that would have given him credibility. But eventually, they should have let Hogan actually win, and hold the title. And Gagne wouldn’t budge on that. Hogan’s accounts of talking to Gagne made it clear that Gagne was never going to change. Perhaps worse (and this is pure hearsay, I have zero proof it actually happened, so take it with a whole salt pile, but it is, as the saying goes, juicy), Gagne may have floated the implication that Gagne might make Hogan the champion if Hogan married his daughter, acting like an old school European monarch attempting to form loyalty bonds through marriage. But even if that last one is nonsense, to Hogan, it was just like when was trained. He had no control. And the ones with control were loving him over. Even worse, this time he had support that he was in the right, in the form of the large crowds he was drawing. It didn’t change squat. He was the headline attraction for Gagne, and he wouldn’t even put his fake title on him for a week. He had no control. Then, even as he was going through this long period of being jerked around, Vince actually purchased the WWF from his father (and then promptly leveraged him out) and, having seized on Hogan as just who he could make his prime musclebound golden god, did his best to get Hogan out of Gagne’s employ and into his own. It wasn’t that hard a get. Gagne, despite it all, let Hogan go thinking he was a flash in the pan, just a brief hot thing. He was wrong. Vince promptly put the WWF Title on Hogan when he arrived in the company, Hulkamania was born, the WWF rode the rocket into the third boom period of wrestling, and the AWA spent the 80’s falling apart until it went out of business entirely in 1990. And that was the third and final step in the ‘damnation’ of Terry Bollea. He’d gotten what he wanted, and more. Not only was he the champion, the top star, but he was ascending heights that only the biggest wrestling stars had ever climbed, if not further. Everything was bigger in the 80’s, after all. It was all him, and he was the greatest. He’d gotten his control…and he’d learned his lesson. Never give it up. Never let anyone get anything or take anything from him. gently caress absolutely everything and everyone else. There was one thing that was important, and that was Hulk Hogan. In normal sports, the very essence of time would have forced Hogan out of the top spot. It was inevitable. Muhammad Ali was the greatest, but eventually, he wasn’t. Wayne Gretzky was a man you could win Stanley Cups off the back of, but eventually, he wasn’t. Tiger Woods didn’t spend his whole career winning victories like the one he won the 1997 Masters with, and neither did Michael Jordon take every team he played basketball for straight to the championship whenever he was on a team and playing. But wrestling is all prearranged. In theory, the fans will tell you who they want to see, but it’s ultimately decided by the writers, the show runners, and those that have control. Being on such a height and making the sheer amount of money Hogan was making hardwired him to do his damndest to get as much control as he could and hang onto it even if it meant he rode it right into the ground and then straight down six feet. All that mattered was that HE had it. Everything else, all the consequences, even the fact that he was ultimately kneecapping himself? gently caress all that. They broke his leg. They tortured him for a lie. They used him for money and tried to bind him to their ‘service’ via a marriage. gently caress that. Never again. Again, all very dramatic and possibly a complete load of poo poo. But piece together the accounts of Hogan and many others, along with actual historical events, and it certainly rings true. Hogan’s life once Hulkamania was born was basically doing everything to ensure Hulkamania never ended, even if no one else cared. He would refuse to work with and put over wrestlers like Curt Hennig and Bret Hart, constantly claim he was going to retire and then come back and force his way into the main event again, and sabotage, if just subconsciously, the pushes of others by doing his best to get the attention the crowd was supposed to pay to them (if you want a strong example, watch Hogan's performance in the 1990 Survivor Series, when the Ultimate Warrior was champion and hence the main spotlight should have been on him, and see all the little things Hogan does to grab that attention) This was not helped by the fact that while Hogan had become the biggest superface in decades in the mid 80’s, in a lot of ways he never stopped wrestling like a heel, being fully willing to interfere in matches, use dirty tactics, do heelish moves like back rakes (does a noble sort strike you as the type who would hurt an opponent by clawing at their back with his nails?) and in general, being a sore loser, even if said loss came through treachery. By the time the 90’s rolled around, even the fans were noticing; when Hogan was tossed out of the 1992 Royal Rumble by Sid Eudy, nee Sid Vicious/Psycho Sid, the crowd cheered, and when Hogan threw a tantrum over the (perfectly fair, yes he struck while Hogan’s back was turned but THAT WAS FULLY OKAY WITHIN THE RULES OF THE RUMBLE) elimination and yanked Sid out, costing him the match and getting into a brawl, the fans in the live feed clearly sided with Sid, only for re-shows to dub in cheers for Hogan and boos for Sid instead. By 1993, with the steroid trial forcing Bollea to give up the roids and causing him to shrink, and Hogan politicking his way into winning the WWF title for the fifth time in the main event of Wrestlemania 9, then basically taking three months off and playing more games with Vince and Bret Hart over Hogan first agreeing to put Bret over and pass the torch to him in Summerslam 1993 and then going back on his word, and eventually even Vince had had enough; Hogan dropped the belt instead in June to the giant sumo wrestler-pro wrestler Yokozuna, who was actually Samoan instead of Japanese, and Vince, depending on who you ask, did anything from just ending his business relationship with Hogan to firing him and his two main friends Ed Leslie and Jimmy Hart and basically telling them “Don’t come back. Ever.” That might have let Hogan have time to come to a realization about his choices…and then along came Eric Bischoff, reinforcing all of Hogan’s worst traits, willingly paying him an utterly absurd contract and giving him complete creative control, and letting him romp all over WCW just like his glory days. Except this time, it wasn’t being wholly supported by giant crowds selling out arenas night after night or in front of nearly 80,000 fans facing another legend in Andre the Giant. Hogan was, more or less, tolerated, and that toleration vanished fast, with the fans going to sour to outright hostile and booing Hogan so bad that even WCW’s attempts to cover it by giving away free merchandise and editing crowd noise couldn’t cover it. Maybe, MAYBE, if Hogan had been allowed to fail, maybe he would have come to a realization. Become a better person. But then Eric Bischoff had the mother of all broken clock ideas, and tapped Hogan to be the third man and heel turn in the NWO angle, an angle wholly based around the illusion that this was a WWE vs WCW war. Hogan was suddenly back on top with a rocket, again. That was it. There was no going back. What ‘Hulk Hogan’ was was set in stone. There was no learning any lessons after being so enabled, once more. As his later TV show said, Hogan Knows Best. And what was best for Hogan was the same way that Milo from Catch-22’s businesses were best for the army. You remember how that ended? If you absolutely had to pick a sole singular reason that WCW failed, you wouldn’t lose any money hanging it all on Terry Bollea. And TNA, much like WCW, completely refused to learn that fact. Though we still need to cover a bit more of WCW. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Feb 19, 2022 |
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Feb 12, 2022 02:41
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In this post, I proceed to ignore pro wrestling and talk about something else entirely. But there's a purpose! Pro wrestling is, at its heart, no matter what you do with it, very basic. Two people (usually men) don’t like each other, people pay to watch them (pretend) fight. That’s hardly unique to it, hell, it’s the basis of all sports. Plenty of real sports have their rivalries;, the Pistons vs the Bulls, the Canadians vs the Maple Leafs, the Yankees vs the Red Sox, Arnold Palmer vs Jack Nicholaus, and I could surely look up a lot more. And they’re ‘real’. What does pro wrestling have that they don’t? Well, for one, there’s no way to cheat in wrestling. It kind of sours a sport’s big accomplishments when the doers of said accomplishments have stuff like getting all their bike race wins taken away for blood doping, or breaking the home run record and then basically disappearing because by then it was an open secret he did it by roiding himself to the gills, doesn't it? But the main thing is that just because real sports has rivalries, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to get a quality product out of it. That’s the downside of it being real; reality just is, there’s no surefire pattern, and you have no control over whether you’ll get a good competition, a bad one, an average one, a great one, or something like the Red Sox coming back from a 3 game deficit to beat the Yankees before finally winning their first World Series in decades in 2004. Or something utterly terrible, though I don’t know the sport equivalent of that. Maybe that World Cup game where Brazil lost 7-1? However, the strongest example of the ‘strength’ pro wrestling has, in my personal experience, comes from pro wrestling’s brother from another mother, mixed martial arts. Now, my MMA knowledge is fairly limited, and I’m sure there’s people who could come in and tell me I got all the details wrong, but going solely off my memory and some wiki-ing, and assuming there are people here who know even less… UFC, as most people would probably think was the ‘start’ of modern MMA, was a very different beast from what it would become, even within five years, let alone now: if modern MMA is a FN MAG 58 machine gun, that very first show is someone who tried to attach a slingshot to a crossbow and managed to not wreck both, but that was about it. Presented as an eight man elimination tournament between singular fighting styles, with very different rules that encouraged bloodshed, and details were so vague that Ken Shamrock didn’t realize it was going to be a legit fight until he’d arrived, the event had begun, and he’d seen the first matchup. That, and it was basically a platform so that the Gracie family could show off the ‘superiority’ of their particular style of ju-jitsu; it had, according to Wikipedia, developed out of a more local ‘open challenge’ system from California. Despite being promoted as a clash of styles, several things immediately became apparent in this no weight limits, no holds barred (save biting, groin kicks, or eye gouges) start of UFC/MMA. One was that grappling in this style of combat was far superior to striking, and that size didn’t matter if you couldn’t properly use whatever you were trained in, as the very first match had a sumo wrestler who weighed twice as much as his opponent get flattened by a kick to the face within 30 seconds. The Gracie entrant of the tournament, Royce, ended up fulfilling ‘his part’ and won the tournament, beating Ken Shamrock in the second round. Why do I bring this up when it happened in the second round, not the final round? Well, in the next event, the second UFC, Royce Gracie would again win the whole tournament, while Shamrock did not complete. The first time I ever heard of UFC? Was seeing a PPV ad of Shamrock cutting a pro wrestling style promo about how he lost to Royce in tournament 1 and watched him win tournament 2, but he was entering again in the upcoming UFC 3, and he was going to DESTROY him. Followed by Royce Gracie introducing himself and saying “Some people never learn.” UFC was going to learn that if you insist on ‘reality’ for your ‘pro wrestling grudge matches’, reality would have other ideas. Royce and Shamrock would be in the UFC 3 tournament, but things would end up a giant mess; Royce would win his first round, then withdraw due to ‘fatigue’, and Shamrock would win his first and second matches, making the finals…only to have to withdraw because he’d injured himself. The final of UFC 3 ended up being the guy who got a bye because Royce withdrew, and a guy who replaced Ken Shamrock for the final round, an alternate who hadn’t fought at all that night, and hence, being fresher, won swiftly. The grudge match refused to happen, but Royce continued to show off his skills by winning UFC 4, though he had a harder time of it (and ironically, the guy who won UFC 3 because Shamrock got injured entered as well, won his first match…and then HIMSELF had to withdraw due to injury). So UFC went “Screw it” and arranged their first personal one on one match for UFC 5 alongside the tournament that was their ‘tradition’: Shamrock vs Gracie, a harbinger of the format that would eventually replace the tournament and become MMA’s staple. Except…as said, this was a very different creature than what UFC would become. There were no rounds, no judges, and for the first time, a time limit of 30 minutes. You’ll pay for your whole seat but you’ll only need the edge, and so on. And so the match occurred. My memory is fuzzy, but I remember the gist of it. The fight barely started before Ken Shamrock got Royce Gracie pinned to the ground…and that’s where they stayed. For the whole fight. There were no ref stops in those days, no ‘okay the fighters have been on the ground too long, break them up and stand them up again’. Shamrock had Royce down, and the two ended up in a defensive deadlock, neither one wanting to risk even the slightest opening. What had been promised to be a grudge superfight ended up being, in essence, a softcore exhibition on seeming homoeroticism. The only offensive move I can remember is Royce trying to kick Shamrock’s side with his ankle. The whole 30 minutes went by, with Shamrock pinning Royce down, until the time limit expired. Annoyed, the fight runners declared a five minute overtime period. Within seconds of it started, we were right back to Shamrock on top of Gracie. The five minutes passed, and the fight runners were forced to declare it a draw. People used to poo poo on Mike Tyson’s super short boxing matches not being ‘worth the PPV money’, but I’ll take a vicious knockout in 35 seconds instead of two men laying around doing nothing except staring at each other and trying to get the other person to blink first, with neither doing so, for 35 minutes. As far as I know, Shamrock and Gracie never did have a proper grudge match, and it ended up as one of the what ifs of the sport. That’s the thing with reality. You’re tossing a dice on whether you’ll be entertained or get something entertaining (as that can be very eye of the beholder. I'm sure plenty of people would give very strong opinions for both sides of say, Superbowl LI between the Patriots and the Falcons, and just how 'entertaining' the events of that game were). With wrestling? Oh sure, you’re tossing a similar die…but at least if it comes up snake eyes, you can blame someone for it, rather than a whole bunch of nebulous factors causing something to come out the total drizzling shits. Of course, pro wrestling has its own issue that the people who are allowed to arrange the results. The usual bad one is that the people who can do it are working counterproductively to what the fans want to see. Like Hulk Hogan. And the Clique. And that’s yet ANOTHER story. My god, there are so many moving parts to why a wrestling company I haven’t even talked about failed, isn’t there? Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Feb 13, 2022 |
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Feb 13, 2022 09:12
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Gavok posted:Meanwhile, the police found holes in Elizabeth's story, realized her claims were unfounded and let Goldberg free a little too late. Oh, it's better than that. What makes it even stupider (but funnier, unlike the suggested rape idea) is that once the 'police' clued in that Miss Elizabeth was full of poo poo and this had been a purely prejudiced and agenda-driven act (on top of being, well, a storyline, of course), they were shown to release Goldberg, and the on show storyline then became, CAN GOLDBERG MAKE IT BACK TO THE ARENA IN TIME BEFORE KEVIN NASH HAS THE MATCH WITH HOGAN INSTEAD? Fine by itself...except that this release happened at 10:00 PM at the latest: it's been a while, but it might have happened even earlier than that. Which meant Goldberg had at LEAST an hour to make it back...and WCW's camera shots from earlier in the evening had shown that the police station, or what they were using as a stand in, was more or less right across from the street to the arena Nitro was happening in. Which means Goldberg could have gotten down on his hands and knees and CRAWLED there and still arrived in plenty of time to get his title shot match back. As the Death of WCW book sardonically noted, "Perhaps the crosslight was broken."
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Feb 14, 2022 18:20
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Trollologist posted:Just remember that for every hot political take he has, you can watch him get bashed in the face with florescent lights. Which is a far sight better than Ben Shapiro will ever experience. It would not surprise me if all the blows to his head with all his stupid garbage matches is WHY he's a right wing idiot. --- Yeah, we STILL need to keep digging into side piles to even get to TNA. So. As said. Pro wrestling is very basic. People like McMahon might both equally view their audiences as idiots who will like what they’re told to like, while resenting the concept that pro wrestling fans are viewed as low IQ folks with whatever stereotype you want to attach, but in truth, we do at all our cores just want the most simple of plots. Good vs evil. Underdog vs the unbeatable. The good guy wins. The redemption story. No matter how smart you might consider wrestling fans, trying to weave a complex analogy into the storylines of wrestling is akin to trying to bake a cake only using a stovetop’s burners. Yeah, maybe it could be done…but you’re swimming against the tide, and with the actual oven right there, you’re better off just putting it in. Like the veto'd Goldberg rape story, or the infamous Katie Vick angle, to which Vince tried to fend off criticism for by saying they were trying to go for 'edgy, genre-shattering' entertainment like then-popular show Six Feet Under...except pro wrestling is NOT an HBO show, and it can't do these sort of things. It has its own unique aspects, and that ain't one of them. So what is? Well, an interesting thing about pro wrestling stories, if you think about it, is that the bad guys CAN actually win, in a sense. Most entertainment would stop dead if the bad guys actually won. Trollogist was talking about Breaking Bad a few pages ago; if during the start of Season 3 Walter tossed a pizza on the roof of some house which happened to be owned by some unknown criminal who immediately stepped out and then shot him dead, Breaking Bad would have screeched to an immediate, abrupt, and very bad feeling halt. It would have been the Sopranos ending all over again, and worse. But in pro wrestling? There’s no guarantee that the good guy will win. They might lose, and the bad guy will go onto another challenge while the good guy has to do something else. The 'show will go on'. A good example is Wayne Farris, nee the Honky Tonk Man, who, despite being the most classic of cowardly, cheating heels, had the longest reign as WWE’s intercontinental champion to this day, fending off challengers like Ricky Steamboat, Macho Man Randy Savage, and Brutus Beefcake before he finally did lose the title. A more recent example would be Kenny Omega, who, after winning the AEW title and turning heel in the process, defeated Jon Moxley as he tried to reclaim the belt, then fending off challengers like Christian Cage, Orange Cassidy, and Jungle Boy, all of whom could have credibly beaten him, only losing the title to his ex tag team partner in a long time coming grudge match before he took time off to heal injuries. So yes, while the bad guy did eventually lose, they won more than most fictional villains do. More amusingly, even in losing, a bad guy can win. Roddy Piper is a great example: in his infamous segment with Jimmy Snuka, Piper’s character mocked the man, pulled out a bunch of race-baiting items to further insult him, and then smashed a coconut over his head and beat on him more. Why did Piper do this? Because he was a giant rear end in a top hat, basically. He paid for it, as Snuka kicked Piper’s rear end in matches up and down the States, but despite being beaten and bloodied so many times over, Piper came out of it with the higher star; his next big feud would be against Hulk Hogan, playing the first bad guy of the Rock ‘N Wrestling era, and he’d go from relative high point to high point for the next fifteen years, whereas Snuka’s career basically peaked with the feud, with his importance dropping and the biggest thing he accomplished afterwards being the first victim of what would become the Undertaker’s Wrestlemania Streak. (And yes, it is VERY likely he murdered his girlfriend and got away with it just before this Piper feud happened, but that’s another dark, not funny at all story) Or, if you want a closer to our time example, just look at Steve Austin losing to Bret Hart in November of 1996 and in March of 1997 in the two big matches the pair actually had, and coming out of it a far bigger star on his way to maybe becoming the biggest in the history of the business. My point, as I do ramble, is that wrestling works best with simple good vs evil, or face vs heel in wrestling parlance, setups and matches. Anything else is adding more dice to the roll. Face vs face matches are risky, because whoever wins is also likely to lose as they beat part of the crowd’s favourite. And heel vs heel matches, in the logic of wrestling are ‘Why should we care if these two bad guy assholes are beating each other up? Let ‘em.”, though if said heels REALLY do a good job trashing each other (see: Steve Austin vs Mick Foley in the fall of 1996, when both were still technically ‘heels’), you can get the fans to care, though this will always result in the crowd assigning one of them the ‘face’ role. Now, you can sometimes have some wiggle room: there’s a term in wrestling, a ‘tweener’ who is neither pure face nor pure heel; basically, they lean more towards one or the other based on who they’re trying to beat up, but they might do so without changing any aspect of their methods, tactics, or talking points (again, see Steve Austin, who was basically ALWAYS this when he wasn’t a straight heel). However, there’s another ‘in between’ role that can be played, but one that’s far more likely to have long term negative consequences: the ‘cool heel’. Heels in wrestling do tend towards certain archetypes. The two biggest are the ‘cowardly heel’, who flees from danger, cheats to win, will do anything to keep his whatever (usually a title belt), and generally makes the promotion money by people paying in the hopes he’ll finally get pinned down and beaten horribly (the Honky Tonk Man, as mentioned, was this kind of heel, and he didn’t have his record breaking title run by pinning his opponents, he had it by running away from his matches to get counted out, or attacking the ref to get disqualified, or smashing his opponent with a guitar, or a dozen other dirty tricks), and the ‘monster heel’, who basically smashes everyone in their path and requires a plucky face to summon up the willpower and skill and all that to overcome his strength and merciless wrath. Of course, there’s other variants; trying to force heels into playing just one of the two roles (usually the cowardly heel) is almost always counterproductive. Mick Foley said it best in his first book, commenting on such square peg and round hole nonsense… “Goliath in the bible wasn’t a heel because he was a coward, he was a heel because he was so drat big. Apollo Creed from Rocky I wasn’t a heel because he was a cowardly cheater, he was a heel because he was the best and he knew it. The shark in Jaws didn’t need cowardice; he got his heat by eating people. The mother hated the shark because it ate her son, not because it attacked while the sheriff’s back was turned.” But of all the roles, the ‘cool heel’ is the one akin to trying to, and yeah, this is a terrible stretch for an analogy, but it’s the only one I can think of, that scene in the less than great Double Dragon movie where the heroes, being chased, and with a special car that seems to run by throwing random items into some sort of fusion engine, and out of other items for fuel, decide to toss in a canister of something that explicitly says DO NOT COMBUST. It promptly gives them a giant burst of speed…and reduces their control so much they almost immediately crash, only plot saving them from the villains that then corner them. In this case, being a cool heel is ‘toss the canister in, get a brief superboost, then crash’. So what is a cool heel? Well, it’s just that. It’s a heel that can’t fully commit to being a bad guy; they insist on doing stuff like having a catchphrase that the crowd can sing along to, or trying to be funny, or generally stuff that clashes with the actual heel deeds of violently beating up people, or hitting them with pipes, or running them off the road so they’ll be injured and unable to complete. In essence, it’s a wrestler that can’t live with the crowd just booing them, they need some of both. Two issues arise from this. One, if a heel does their job well, they will eventually get cheered regardless of what they do. They can betray their friends, smash cinder blocks over people’s heads, steal their opponent’s personal pictures and burn them, and punt a puppy or two, and if they perform well on the mike and the ring, eventually the fans will start supporting their success, especially if a new flavor of nasty heel comes along. Seriously. There’s more than a few heel turns and actions that should have been irredeemable, but like I said, wrestling fans are a sucker for a redemption story. The other one is the problematic issue. Playing a ‘cool heel’ means that the people who run the shows can start interpreting ‘we like to hate these people’ as ‘we like these people’. And make business decisions based on it. While Hulk Hogan’s ways might have been the main corrosive that ate away at WCW’s underpinnings, his fellow “Outsiders” would definitely contribute in their own way. Then again, maybe it was inevitable. It was what they had learned. --- So, what was the Clique? In 1992, Michael Shawn Hickenbottom, nee Shawn Michaels and Frederick Martin Jannetty, nee Marty Jannetty had undergone perhaps the most famous tag team breakup of all time, likely because it became the archetypal example of a tag team breaking up, and one member going on to larger stardom and the other falling into mediocrity or worse (A hint on who that was: It was not Shawn Michaels)... (It was probably aided immensely by Bobby Heenan firing off one of the best 'heel color commentator rewrites reality' lines ever made just after it happened. If you're knowledgeable about wrestling, you probably know the one. If you don't, it's after poor Marty gets defenestrated) ...and Shawn was building up his heel cred as as a cocky bastard who had famous female manager Sensational Sherri following him around like a lovesick teenage girl, and Scott Hall, entering his 8th year in the business, signed with the WWF in mid-June. Hall was a good package: large, muscular, good movement, and a good talker, though it took him some time to get his look down; He infamously began his career with a huge head of bushy hair and a giant porn star bushy moustache. By the time he came to the WWE however, he’d worked out the kinks; his hair was now dyed black, straight and slicked down, and the mustache had been replaced by near permanent five o’clock shadow stubble.  Taking his WCW gimmick of “The Diamond Studd” and changing some aspects of it (the diamond motif were exchanged for razors) and adopting an imitation of Tony Montaya from Scarface as his gimmick, Hall debuted as “The Bad Guy” Razor Ramon, receiving a strong push from the start, pairing with Ric Flair to help him fight his enemies and getting a world title shot in January 1993, though he lost. Shawn Michaels, meanwhile, captured the Intercontinental Title, lost Sherri’s services, and as 1993 proceeded, the WWF decided he needed some backup, a bodyguard character of sorts. Hall suggested a man he’d worked with in WCW, a very tall but not exactly skilled at wrestling man who had had one of the most infamous gimmicks of all time in “Oz” ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAeGyTbn_ko ...and after somehow surviving that with an intact career, had been working as an undercarder named Vinnie Vegas before he left WCW. So, Nash was hired, repackaged as ‘Diesel’, a tough biker-esque fellow, and the three men became friends and started travelling together. Right around that time, a skinny but very talented (and agile, ESPECIALLY in the lands of the WWF giants) young man named Sean Waltman got a break and was signed by the WWF; his first big storyline was getting destroyed by several other wrestlers over a few weeks before having a match with Razor and getting a shock upset pin when Razor underestimated him and paid for it; the upset would make Waltman’s career, as he would name it himself after it (The 1-2-3 Kid) and Razor being mocked by Ted Dibiase for losing to a nobody would lead to Razor beginning a face turn that he’d have for the rest of his WWF career. Waltman would soon end up as part of the trio, making it a foursome. And hence, the Clique was born. Probably the first sign of what was to come was the 1994 Royal Rumble. Nash, as Diesel, had had few in ring matches, mostly just standing silently behind Michaels and looking tough and cool, and he hadn’t exactly set the world on fire with the few he had. But, as Royal Rumble matches tend to happen in ‘blocks’, and Nash was such a big guy, they decided what the hell, let’s have the first block being him eliminating some smaller guys. So Nash entered at Number 7, with four other people in the ring, and he swiftly tossed them all out. Then along came a new guy at no 8, and Nash swiftly tossed him out, the character then prowling around the ring and indicating ‘bring on the next challenger!’ Along came No 9: out he swiftly went. No 10? Bye. Nash had now eliminated seven men in record time, and the crowd was now chanting his name. Number 11, Randy Savage, proved too ferocious to eliminate with ease, and Diesel would ultimately be eliminated by a group effort (aided by his so called friend, Shawn Michaels), but the moment had happened, and the WWF took notice. The second was Shawn and Razor having their legendary Ladder Match at Wrestlemania 10, a classic example of a match with zero losers and the first notch on the belt of Shawn’s “Mr. Wrestlemania” honorific. With the hype of the match, and Diesel getting over basically by standing there, looking cool, and having done one impressive thing, and the Kid attached by proxy by being Ramon’s buddy, the four had been steadily gaining more TV time, and hence more backstage clout… And they had realized that they could keep using each other to keep getting each other over. And ONLY each other. This was best demonstrated by a late October match shown on one of the WWE’s ‘B-Shows’: the expectation would be it would just be ‘a match’, but with the four friends willing to do absolutely anything to make each other look good, it produced an explosive gem that was one of the ‘hardly seen brilliant matches’ back in the early internet wrestling fan days. And in terms of a group helping each other, it was a drat good package. Razor Ramon was a great talker and a generally good wrestler, who could be great or amazing with the right opponents. The Kid couldn’t really talk, but he was an amazing wrestler with a style that stood out like a sore thumb in the mid WWE 90’s. Shawn Michaels was the complete package; an amazing wrestler, talker, and things like a bumper (he could make other offense look good) that other great wrestlers can be weak in. And Diesel? Well…he was tall. And he looked good. And he was good at looking cool. And he was big. Take a wild guess who got the moon push. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Apr 14, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2022 04:38
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forcedstealthlevel posted:Who commentated with Vince on that match? I know it wasn’t him but all I could picture was Mike Tenay Todd Pettengill.
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Feb 15, 2022 05:42
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Gavok posted:As much as "Rosie" vs. "Trump" was hated, they still pulled the same bullshit a year later by doing "Obama" vs. "Hillary." At least in that case, they had some entertainment by having someone playing Bill Clinton at ringside who interfered and then did stuff like "I did not just interfere in that match!" He did a pretty good impression of the man, all things considered.
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Feb 15, 2022 07:11
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If anything defined the misstep that was Kevin Nash, WWF Champion, this picture is a thousand words. Something that Vince never learned, it seemed, was that one of the things that made Hulk Hogan was that he basically emerged on the high stage as the noble, superhuman superhero; yes, he’d worked mostly as a heel before then, but back in those days only the most hardest of hardcore fan would remember things like Sterling Golden. Lex Luger, and Nash, on the other hand, had started in the WWF as heels. Having their personalities abruptly turn from ‘arrogant prick’ and ‘big mean bastard’ to ‘smiling champion of the people’ simply did not work. Of course, what was a problem, the people involved made worse. The Clique’s influence finally hit critical mass (or maybe turned cancerous would be a better analogy) in November of that year, when Diesel and Shawn Michaels finally ‘exploded’ at the November PPV, and less than two weeks later, Diesel beat new heel world champion Bob Backlund (crowned on that same PPV) in NINE SECONDS on a house show to become the WWF Champion out of nowhere, as Vince, Hulk Hogans AGAIN in his eyes, tried to remake the Hulkster in Nash in the same way he’d failed to with Lex Luger. It turned out that just because you were tall, menacing looking, had a good head of hair, could look cool standing around, and with the right setup to hide your weaknesses could do some neat things in the ring…didn’t mean that you could actually draw money. Nash’s run as WWF champion, which lasted nearly a year, ultimately ended up a disaster, made worse by the fact that without a very talented wrestler in the ring to carry him, like Bret Hart or Shawn Michaels, Nash’s matches were subpar at best, and often the drizzling shits. Which, again, after several years of Bret Hart, Wrestler Supreme, being the top guy, was VERY noticeable to the fans who had continued to stick around. How bad were they? Even Vince, who had always hated the ‘wrestling’ aspect of wrestling, was so offended by Diesel’s last big title defense in October of 1995 (before he lost it in November) that he literally threw down his headset when it was over and basically yelled at Nash before they were even backstage that he was done as champion. When your wrestling is so bad it offends McMahon, you know you done goofed. Unfortunately, Nash’s failure as champion didn’t slow down the Clique, who had by now fully transitioned from ‘group of personal backstage friends’ to ‘THAT group who causes all the trouble’. With the fact that they could strongly influence themselves getting the high on the card spots and paydays, and by extension, since they were the stars, who got to work with them to also get those paydays, they promptly did everything to do so. And if they didn’t like someone, or they felt someone was a threat to their spots, they would get in Vince’s ear, or haze/harass them, trying to get them to quit, or at least let them know that the pecking order was set in stone and where their place was on it. And when I say ‘The Clique’, 80 percent of the time what was really meant was first-among-equals leader of the group, Shawn Michaels. Michaels, like the briefly mentioned Dynamite Kid, was another case of a man who had one in a generation talent, and acted in such a way that that fact became an argument that this is not a universe with a just god. Wrestling has seen plenty of backstage prima donna pot stirrers, tantrum throwers, and backstabbers, but Michaels stood out; he was incredibly talented, and he KNEW it, and his ego had expanded beyond even where his talent was. Michaels could, and did, have great to amazing matches with just about anyone, but they were matches on Michaels’ terms, filled with all sorts of little details that you likely didn’t notice unless you were looking for it, but subconsciously perceived in such a way so that Michaels looked just a little TOO good, at the cost of his opponent. And if that wasn’t enough, Michaels would just go running to Vince to bitch things out over the smallest things, and how he didn’t want to work with X/Y/Z. Never mind that correctly working with X/Y/Z could draw money; The Clique, and Shawn, knew who they wanted to work with. Themselves and the ones they liked. To make it worse, by 1995 Michaels had developed a bad drug habit, mainly based around tranquilizers and ‘downers’, so that when he wasn’t acting like a spoiled five year old, he was strung out of his mind and needing to be carried out of the arena. Bret Hart, in his book (and yes, Bret Hart would end up being one of Michaels’ real life ‘mortal enemies’, and hence this information might be incorrect, possibly to an extreme or total degree…but I am biased towards Bret, as I am and will always be a mark for him, so again, take this with a chunk of salt) claimed that Michaels’ real issue was that he was terribly insecure, always questioning himself and having little panic attacks, and that he grievously overcompensated via his backstage crap and his pills. And worse still? In the 1990’s, with the WWE in the doldrums, Michaels was one of the few wrestlers who could potentially draw, and was quite over. Too over. Perhaps what truly sealed Kevin Nash’s fate as WWE champion was that it came out of his long term partnership with Michaels dissolving, with the story being Michaels had been exploiting Nash for their whole partnership and Diesel finally had enough. Ergo, after a (great) match with Bret Hart (which was 90 percent Bret) at the January 1995 PPV to try and give Nash some ‘credibility’, it was only logical for his first big feud to be with Michaels; Michaels won the Royal Rumble the same night, penciling him in for a world title match at that year’s Wrestlemania, and the WWE made sure he looked credible by having the man beat some big men clean to show he could, as well as giving him a new bodyguard, Sid Eudy… Except this did the job too well. The idea was that Diesel, despite his size, would have his back up against the wall, but his babyface fire and determination would see him through and Michaels would be punished for his ‘evil manipulations’ via losing. Except by trying to give Michaels credibility, they accidentally went and made Michaels MORE over than Nash. Rather than “We want to see this guy get smashed”, the audience started coming around to “This guy is awesome, we want to see him win the title.” Like I said. Do your job well as a heel and sooner or later you’ll become a face by sheer inertia. Which meant that instead of his big tall Hogan replacement, the fans were telling Vince that they wanted the belt on the ‘small’ ‘bad guy’. Needless to say, this was Just Not Done. As one final insult, Shawn made it clear through ‘inside insinuation’ during his promos leading on to the match that he was going to have his ‘working boots’ on and do everything to show that he did deserve to be in the top spot, even if it meant kneecapping his friend. When you’re willing to do that sort of stuff with someone you considered a FRIEND was all you really needed to know about what sort of man Michaels was back in those days. And that was more or less exactly what happened. Shawn, like Bret, pulled the inexperienced and more limited Nash to a great match, and ‘won’ even though he lost. When Vince tried to manipulate the audience by having Sid turn on Shawn to get Diesel vs Sid, the fans refused: they wanted Shawn. Cue half a year of Diesel having terrible matches with other big slugs and Shawn getting repeatedly sidelined as Vince fought like a rabid animal to do things his ways, which is one of the reasons that the WWF in 1995 is considered the worst year in the company’s history. You might have felt bad for Shawn, if he wasn’t being a total piece of poo poo backstage and making things harder for the boys. Like Bret Hart, who, being the guy who basically carried the company through 1992/3/4 when it was dropping like a rock, got sidelined via the Clique’s influence into dumb, pointless feuds and storylines, including fighting Jerry Lawler in a “Kiss My Foot” Match (though I’ll swear by it in that my 13 year old self was immensely entertained by the ending of it), then fighting Jerry Lawyer’s evil dentist (Glen Jacobs, who would eventually change gimmicks and become Kane), then fighting the evil pirate Jean Pierre Lafitte because Lafitte stole his jacket. Needless to say, the Bret Hart/Shawn Michaels relationship would only get worse, especially when Vince finally decided to pull the plug on the Nash experiment and had Bret win the title back in November 1995. Except Bret had just won the title so that his reign could be used as a side story to set up an Undertaker vs Diesel match for Wrestlemania 1996, where he would also lose the title to Michaels, who Vince had finally turned face and decided to put in the top spot. Bret really didn’t like this whole ‘have title solely to set up match and give title to another man’, and after the Wrestlemania, took an extended leave from the WWF, while considering jumping to WCW. His reasoning being sound is best demonstrated by how when the match between him and Bret was done and Michaels was now champion, he was reported to have said “Get this piece of poo poo (Bret) out of my ring! This is MY moment!” (Really, if you want a single moment to define what Michaels was back in those days, look no further than his match against Vader at Summerslam 1996, when Vader would get mildly confused and get his spots mixed up: Michaels was, later in the match, supposed to drop an elbow and Vader would move. Michaels decided to go for another elbow ‘before’ the one they had a rough plan for, Vader figured Michaels wanted to hit him with it, but Michaels was indeed going for the ‘drop elbow, move’ spot. The end result. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8vV8jmF-qc&t=776s It does show Michaels’ talent that you probably wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking for it, but that is Michaels legit kicking Vader in the head while screaming “MOVE! MOVE!” You can even vaguely hear Vader say “Jesus!”; it might have been even louder originally and the WWE might have tweaked the audio. Now, yes, it’s human for Michaels to be aggravated a mistake was made, but Michaels basically yelled so loud that the first several rows heard him, completely disrupting the match and breaking the suspension of disbelief. And why did Michaels do this? Because despite playing one of the most brutal monster heels in the ring throughout his career, backstage Leon “Vader” White was generally considered a big teddy bear and Michaels knew he could get away with it. Trust me, had Michaels been working with renowned legit tough man Ron Simmons, he would NOT have done this. But he knew he could get away with it, with who it was, so he did, and then after the match he would bury Vader, saying he was fat, couldn’t work, and Shawn wouldn’t work with him any more, cutting out the legs of any WWE career Vader could have made) Nash, having lost the title, swiftly semi-turned heel again and added some ‘tiny peek behind the curtain’ elements to his character by claiming that the WWF had neutered him and reduced him to smiling padlum because he was the face of the company, ie, they’d tried to turn him into another take on “Say Your Prayers, Take Your Vitamins” Hulk Hogan, as demonstrated by that WWF cover where he was wearing a poo poo eating grin when he should have been looking menacing. This reworking gave his character an edge again and might well have led to Nash eventually getting freshly over and becoming WWF champion again, someday…except it was right around then that Eric Bischoff came calling with his higher money, less dates, less travel, and creative control contract offers in WCW. All said and done, Nash would have to be an idiot devoted to the business to turn it down. And that was not who Kevin Nash was. No. Nash had learned well what really made the wheels turn in the business. It wasn’t about how hard you worked; it was about who you knew backstage and what levers you could control. The fans? They weren’t hard to please. Just stand around, or say something like “We’re just TOOOO SWEEEEETTT” for them to sing along with, and they followed like Pavlov’s dog chasing their bells. Hard work? That was a sucker’s game. And as a point in his defense, Nash was trying to look after himself with this attitude. Nash, as said, is very tall and very long legged. In his youth, as I am sure you will be surprised to know, he played basketball, and had actually begun playing professionally in Europe in the early 80’s before a knee injury ended his career. As it turned out, said knee never quite healed properly, and hence Nash basically performed his whole wrestling career, more or less, on one leg, as demonstrated by these before and after pictures after his retirement (maybe mildly NSFW in that it shows a man in boxer-briefs and shirtless in one case) where he had a complete knee replacement and stem cell therapy. People make fun of Nash for an infamous moment where he tore an arm muscle, came back after four months, and on the very first match that he returned in tore a leg muscle doing the VERY FIRST MOVE HE DID that required him to be taken off TV for ANOTHER six months, but between that picture and the fact that tall people’s legs are vulnerable in general, and I can understand why Nash wanted to take it easy. It’s one thing to be like Jeff Hardy, whose body seems to be made out of rubber and has endured decades of jumps and impacts where most people’s bodies would be an eroded half-functioning wreck that could barely move around their bedroom after half that amount of time and abuse, and it’s another to be a tall man with a bad wheel. Doing more with less is just smart. Nash did, in university in his youth, major in psychology. But, as it is in wrestling, Nash just couldn’t stop there. Some called, and call, him the smartest man in wrestling for getting as much for as little as possible, but others called him lazy, half assing through everything and using his backstage clout to be allowed to keep doing it. He couldn’t even properly devote himself to being a heel; despite being what was considered an outside invasion force that was trying to basically destroy the company so they could rule the ashes, Nash had to toss in little things so he would come off as ‘cool’. But okay, fine. Hogan was still the centerpiece of the NWO, and HE was more than enough of the traditional heel…except he was Hogan. drat it. But, at the time, none of that mattered. At the time, WCW had suddenly gotten two of the WWF’s biggest stars, and had them align with Hulk Hogan in an earth shattering heel turn. While Vince had a crop of cartoon characters and a small man as champion. In essence, he had nothing and nothing that could be developed as a counter. Eric Bischoff had seemingly masterfully repeated history and turned it into a fatal blow, and now Vince had been metaphorically kneecapped, disemboweled, and had a foot stomp his face into the dirt. WCW promptly began winning the ratings war and kept doing so for a year and a half, straight. Without the deep pockets that Ted Turner and Time Warner had as padding for any mistakes WCW had, and nothing to counter this red-hot NWO angle, it seemed like Vince’s time was over, and a new king was going to have a years long reign on the top, as Vince and the WWF shrank into irrelevance or insolvency, just like so many of the territories had under Vince’s predations. Except… It’s a story that shows you never know just what history will turn on, or how things will ripple. And it would turn on the actions of Paul Levesque, a big muscular blonde who had switched from WCW to WWF in mid 1995. Given the gimmick of ‘Hunter Hearst Helmsley’, a Connecticut blueblood snob pastiche slash stereotype that was likely Vince insulting the ‘old rich’ who would never accept him, a jumped up carnival con man (again, he and Trump, man, it rhymes). Paul swiftly noted the backstage foursome of the Clique and the power they wielded. Now, whether Paul, or Hunter, actually wanted to become legit friends with the Clique, or he saw opportunity and went for it, he promptly tried to ingratiate himself with the friend group and join them, doing things like carrying their bags and fetching them donuts, you know the type, I’m sure some people have been part of a friend group with a similar member. Whatever his exact motivations, it worked, and by 1996 the Clique officially included Hunter. But the group of five wouldn’t be five for long, as Nash and Hall were due to leave for WCW in late May. And so, with Waltman being in drug rehab and hence not being around, Nash and Hall would have their then-final WWE matches at Madison Square Garden on May 19th. Hall would face Hunter, and lose. Nash would face then WWF champion Michaels in the main event, and lose. And that should have been that. Except instead of Michaels celebrating alone in the ring, Nash would get up, and the two men would hug. …whereas in the storyline, Michaels and Nash were engaged in a super bitter feud where Nash had repeatedly harmed Michaels, powerbombed him through the announcer’s table, and been so determined to beat him in their lone PPV match of the feud that he attacked retired wrestler “Mad Dog” Vachon in the crowd and PULLED OFF HIS ARTIFICIAL LEG TO BEAT SHAWN WITH. It was Diesel’s final feud, and he was presented thoroughly as scum, with Michaels being the righteous knight putting him down for his ‘crimes’. And now they were hugging. And then out came Hall, and Hunter. They raised each other’s hands and basically took a bow before the crowd. It would come to be known as the Curtain Call, the final example of just how important the Clique thought they were. Yes, it was 1996, kayfabe was more or less dead. And it was in Madison Square Garden, which was generally one of the most ‘smart’ audiences when it came to wrestling. But just like Hannibal Lector didn’t say how much fun it was to work with Clarice and that they’d made a great product in his final scene, you just Did. Not. DO. That. Maybe kayfabe was dead, but you didn’t piss on its corpse and then dance on it. And you didn’t just completely shatter the face/heel dynamic back then, even if cameras weren’t officially rolling. But they were the Clique. They were King poo poo, and they wanted to say goodbye together, and so they did. Hell, if you believe Bret Hart, the group had actually been bragging backstage that Hall and Nash were going to ‘take over’ WCW, and with Shawn being ‘in charge of’ the WWF, the Clique would rule the entire North American wrestling world. Despite their thought process, there would be consequences. But, as said, Nash and Hall were off to WCW, they couldn’t be punished. Waltman was in rehab and never returned to WWE, instead ending up in WCW himself shortly thereafter, so no go for him too. And Michaels was world champion, the guy the show was built around. It would just be too much trouble to punish him, or at least, that’s what Vince thought at the time. As the Vader example showed, his behavior didn’t improve. So that left one person holding the bag: Paul Levesque. And boy did Vince fill it with poo poo, as Hunter spent the next six months jobbing to everyone under the sun. But the biggest thing that happened was, before the Curtain Call, Hunter had been penciled in to win the June 1996 PPV tournament, the King of the Ring. This was not happening now, so they needed a new winner. Hmmm, who would work best…hey, this Steve Austin guy would also make a good winner. So he did. Which meant he got to cut a promo while being ‘crowned’. In those days before WWE tried to script everything like a TV show, Austin was likely told to maybe mention one thing and otherwise improvise, and sink or swim. Austin, mocking his opponent’s ‘faith made me better’ gimmick, came out with the line “You talk about your bibles and your Psalms, and your John 3:16…AUSTIN 3:16 SAYS I JUST WHOOPED YOUR rear end.” So yes. In leaving the WWF as they had, and despite how much the ball was in their court, the Clique, a key part of the NWO, had sown the seeds for their own destruction before they’d even started. But, again, it didn’t HAVE to be that way. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 15, 2022 18:53
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cardedagain posted:i do remember some squirrelly dude named Jameson. You are correct. At the time, Vince was just presented as an announcer and play by play man (and not a very good one; Vince had a bad habit of repeating phrases ("Unbelievable!" was a go to) and not knowing moves, which he'd cover by saying "WHAT A MANEUVER!" But there have been worse, before or since. Art Donovan comes to mind...and considering he did it a grand total of once, that should tell you all you need about how well he did). The on screen authority figure (and hence, implied to be the owner of WWE) during that time was played by Jack Tunney, who was in reality the president of WWE's Canadian operations. I remember when I heard small details about the steroid trial that it was the first time I discovered that the man who actually owned and ran WWE was Vince, and I was like "What? No. He's an announcer! That can't be right." While that curtain would be peeled back in things like the WWE's official magazine as the 90's progressed, it wasn't until The Montreal Screwjob (and maybe a little earlier when Austin 'stunned' McMahon for the first time) that it became out and open everyone was expected to know or learn that it was Vince in charge. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 08:36 on Feb 16, 2022 |
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Feb 16, 2022 05:15
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Rhodes as Golddust was 'popular', in that he got a lot of attention, and was basically a forerunner to the Attitude Era as he was supposed to be a boundary-pushing character...but unfortunately, it was the wrong kind of 'popularity' or 'heat'. Because Golddust's gimmick was to utilize androgynous, homerotic actions to (in theory), get into his opponent's heads and bother the fans. The sort of heat that taps into insecure men's fears that 'gayness' is akin to some sort of spreadable disease and that such people can 'convert' you into being a homosexual against your will. The sort of mindset that leads to gay bashing and men being murdered. The kind of heat I think the business is best without; it's all fine and good to get lost in the show, but there's a thin line between 'a really hot crowd' and 'an out of control mob'. --- But, back in the other company around those times... Hindsight is 20/20, and hindsight bias is one bitch of a cognitive bias and trap. I really think that a lot of the problems of modern day first world living have come from trying to make assessments and reactions in turn based on events that have only happened days if not hours ago in the same way that it took older decisions and actions years to really understand. In other words, what seems blindingly obvious now just didn’t at the time. I keep mentioning Trump; how many people on this very site in 2016 were loling at supporting him under the ‘he’ll burn it all down, LOL LOL, but really he’s never gonna be president LOL LOL oh god he said grab ‘em by the pussy LOL LOL’? How many of these theorized folks regret their choice and viewpoint? But that was then, this is now. You can only do what you can do in the time with what you know and understand. Trust me, I'm pretty sure if there had been, or was, people on this forum also posting "You are helping enable a monster who will do monstrous things, because in the end it doesn't matter if you're supporting him because of nihilistic irony, you are still supporting him', the response would have, or was, composed mostly of more "LOL LOL LOL". Many theorize just when the NWO angle began its change from ‘the kingmaker of WCW’ to ‘the end of WCW’. Some say it might well have been the moment it started recruiting new people into the group, ‘watering down’ the elite unit. And while this assessment’s not WRONG, I think it’s far too premature to be placed at such an early date. Namely for two reasons. One; the initial duo and later trio of Hall, Nash, and Hogan were booked IMPOSSIBLY strong for those first months; the Outsiders came in and basically treated WCW as their own personal playground, attacking whoever they wanted seemingly with impunity. When Hogan joined, it only increased; the now-officially-dubbed NWO spent their Monday nights beating the crap out of anyone backstage they could find, including a very famous spot where in one of the fights, small and light cruiserweight legend-in-the-making Rey Misterio Jr tried to jump onto Nash in an outside brawl in parking, only for Nash to grab him and throw him headfirst into the side of a truck like a lawn dart. There was at least one show where the WCW announcers had armed guards to protect them from Hall and Nash; when you think the heel threat is so dangerous that you need men with GUNS to protect you, you know you’re being presented as a danger. But, it was still just three men, who were trying to fight an entire promotion of wrestlers. Eventually, it should be obvious that while these ‘elite invaders’ could destroy people if they ganged up on them or were even numbers with them, they could not fend off a group of a dozen, or twenty, or more. Of course, considering the general ‘inferiority complex’ that would fester throughout WCW’s history and ultimately kill it, it wouldn’t surprise me that if they’d decided to do this in story, the initial three man NWO would have beaten up 20+ men at once. It’s telling that decades later, when WWE was presenting the November Survivor Series PPV as a ‘brand vs brand’ show, ie Monday Night Raw vs Friday Night Smackdown, and Smackdown ‘invaded’ Raw to send a message and play some mind games, that the showrunner for Smackdown brought essentially the entire Smackdown locker room to ‘invade’ and beat up Raw guys in small groups, instead of just bringing three or four of their top stars and run the risk of having the opposite happen to them. (And I suppose if I was going to place the very first sign of how this red hot, rise to the heavens angle was eventually going to chain itself around WCW’s neck and yank them back down to earth and then into hell and oblivion, it was the PPV following the NWO’s formation, where Hogan challenged the Giant/Paul Wight for the WCW Title (possessed at the time by the Giant). Wight, in wider logic, didn’t owe the traitorous and dangerous Hulk Hogan a title shot, in fact it made more logical sense for no one to even have matches with the trio, let alone for titles, but wrestling runs on its own internal logic, and since this was the massive red hot angle, in THAT regard it made perfect logical sense to have the belt put back on Hogan, and also that it made sense that he won said belt due to aid from Hall and Nash. The subconscious clue of what was to come would be just what happened at the very end of the match: Hogan got ahold of the WCW belt and smashed the Giant in the face with it to get the pin. Fine, that’s a classic heel foreign object cheat-to-win move. Except the Giant remained flat on his back for 20 MINUTES after taking the hit, utterly helpless and defeated, even as the trio spraypainted the belt, and Giant’s back, with NWO. No rising up in a rage after a few minutes to maybe get a little of his own and WCW’s back, a ‘you won this day but you didn’t win the war’; nope, the Giant, a literal giant of a man, laid there like he’d been forced to snort ether for an hour straight. As the Death of WCW book commented, “They must have replaced the gold (on the belt) with lead.”) Ergo, to keep credible, the NWO would need secondaries and goons to better attack and defend as a unit. And for the most part, even if the (second main batch) people who joined up were ‘midcarders’, they mostly followed the same theme. Because shortly into September, Ted Dibiase showed up in the WCW crowd, and was revealed to be the ‘money man’ (storyline wise) for the NWO. Then Waltman joined up with his two Clique friends, and in a bit of cleverness uncommon for wrestling, since he was the sixth member of the group (and because 1, 2, and 3 add up to make six), he was called Syxx. (Which eventually became the term of endearment among his friends of “Syxx-Pac”, so when he returned to the WWE in mid 1998, he was dubbed…X-Pac. Ha ha.) And of the midcarders that joined in that second group, two of them, Mike Rotunda and I-have-spoken-about-him-before Ray Traylor, were best known in wrestling under their WWE gimmicks of IRS and the Big Boss Man, making them more ‘WWE invaders’. The only two who were ‘WCW home grown’ who joined were Marcus Bagwell, who turned on his tag team partner, Scotty Riggs, to do so (and some would argue to get away from being attached to what is considered maybe the worst theme song in all of pro wrestling history)... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69krWixkl0o …and the Giant, who joined the NWO less than a month after being beaten so badly by Hogan and co. It was never made super clear why he did that (they may have mentioned that Dibiase had basically bought him somewhere); in reality it was because Davey Boy Smith had been making arrangements to jump to WCW and be the actual fourth/new member, but at the last minute he decided to resign with the WWE instead, hence forcing WCW, who had already promised a ‘big surprise new member’, to throw in the Giant as the last second replacement. So yeah. I don’t think that was the first sign. What I do think was said first sign was already demonstrated with how Giant, who was also ‘wholly WCW grown’, was treated in that title match. Ric Flair had swiftly stepped up after Giant had lost, and fought Hogan at the last Clash of the Champions, winning by DQ, but shortly thereafter suffered an injury that necessitated surgery, forcing him into a more supporting role until the next spring, so he couldn't really lead WCW in the story. However, before that, he would team with his old friend Arn Anderson…and his bitter WCW rivals, Lex Luger and Sting, to challenge the NWO at the fall PPV in a Wargames match. As said, the NWO was trying to ‘destroy’ WCW as a whole, and hence even old enemies had to stand together. The NWO took advantage of this by claiming that Sting was actually on their side, sowing doubt between the four men, and a doubt that really should have been logically dismissed. Sting was WCW to the core, the only one of the team who had never left WCW for the WWF, he was, and should, have been above any sort of suspicion, even when the NWO added to their ruse by getting an imposter to help sell their story. Ultimately, Team WCW fractured, and the War Games match ended up as a 4 on 3, with Hogan, Nash, Hall, and Imposter Sting on one side, and Flair, Luger, and Anderson on the other, and when the actual Sting came out, he beat up the NWO, then flipped off his teammates for so quickly losing faith in him and left, leaving Team WCW to be defeated, fittingly, by the Imposter Sting using Sting’s Scorpion Death Lock to make Luger, Sting’s long time friend and tag partner, submit. Sting, meanwhile, washed his hands wholly of WCW, the NWO, and everything. Having with the last year stopped dying his hair and letting it grow out as his natural brown color, he redid his face paint (the first take on which was so much like the Crow that I’m amazed there was no lawsuit threatened), began growing out his hair even more, dressing up in black, and generally playing “Masque of the Red Death” and brooding in the rafters as he watched WCW be ravaged by the NWO. However much of this was planned both in storyline and backstage and how much of it was a lucky series of story breaks, the NWO had removed Sting as a threat to them, and real life had removed Flair. So, um…who did that leave to stand up and face Hogan and co? Why, Macho Man Randy Savage…who had made his career in the WWF…and jumped over to WCW as part of Hogan getting all his friends hired. And when Hogan bested him through treachery at the October PPV, from the crowd afterwards came…Roddy Piper. Who, again, was pure WWF, now fighting for WCW. Um…what about Lex Luger, who was far more WCW and not injured? Well, he was also fighting the NWO, but mostly their second stringers. The people fighting the heart of the beast? They were all WWF guys, more or less. That, IMO, was the start of it. WCW could have, should have, had their own stars, the people most associated with their company, step up. But just like with the late 80’s, and the signing of Hogan, and hell, the NWO angle itself, WCW was just not secure enough, it seemed, in its own identity, needing to try and instead build off the work of their opposing company. If Flair was sidelined and Sting and Luger couldn’t do it, it wouldn’t have been hard to have other people step up. This was WCW vs NWO, ANY WCW star could have been booked into a newly risen leader figure. Could have. Because this is discounting who was on the other side. That being, Hulk Hogan, and the Clique. At least Wagner didn't have the power to alter other people's operas. And really, you couldn’t blame them for thinking that the sun was shining solely out of their asses in those first months. The ratings kept climbing. NWO merch became gigantic sellers. The group even experimented with radical new styles of videotaped promos that came off almost as militaristic propaganda at times, which got a “this is new and it rules” reaction. They were the bad guys, but drat were they cool. But, AGAIN…wrestling works best as good vs evil. A strong villain needs a strong hero to oppose them. Just like kids who play Star Wars would always want to be Darth Vader instead of Luke Skywalker, but in the end, Luke Skywalker still won. It was what let there be more Star Wars movies (commentary on whether that was a good thing aside). But to Bischoff and his backstage crew, it seemed like it all came from the NWO. They’d interpreted “we like to hate these people, and also sometimes they do cool things” as “we like these people and are paying money solely on their actions”. And to be fair, it was an easy mistake to make…once or twice. WCW never stopped making it. They never could find the courage to let their own product speak for itself. And as Eric Bischoff’s early actions showed, in the end, he didn’t really have anything to say either. Not that had worked. WCW had lost $23 million in 1994, when Bischoff took over and began signing all the WWF guys and feeding WCW to them. And when he finally rewired it and hit a jackpot execution of such a thing…it was all he could think of to do. Just like Vince tried again and again to recreate Hogan, Bischoff could only think to present the NWO, again and again. Why was this? Did he fall under Hogan’s sway? Did he drink his own flavor aid like so many others have? Whatever his reasons, again, it didn’t have to be this way. That showed most of all across the whole year of 1997. First, the NWO got their own PPV, which ended up being a dud. As much as people seemed to love them, they weren’t about to purchase a show that was entirely about the NWO cool heeling and beating up every WCW star and cheating them out of wins. If that hadn’t been enough of a warning, later in the year Bischoff tried to do a ‘NWO Nitro’, part of an idea that WCW would literally ‘retreat’ to another show’s night and let the NWO run the show as their own little kingdom. The ratings dropped, huge; WCW’s famous 82 week winning streak came with a few hairs of only being half as long as it was. Wrestling fans couldn’t, and chose not, to live by NWO alone. They wanted, NEEDED, a strong WCW to oppose them, and, in theory, ultimately rise to the occasion and strike the NWO down. And hopefully, in the process, they could make a bunch of their own personal stars that could stand for the WCW brand in and of itself. Two things best demonstrated this. One was a big, bald man who debuted in September, who had enough strength to do some great power moves, enough agility to do a standing backflip, and having come out of an amateur football career, was capable of delivering a tackle strike that looked utterly devastating. In a bit of luck, things shook out that this man didn’t lose, and after a brief moment where that could have fallen apart (he started doing some flunkeying for a WCW heel woman, which might have put him on the losing end of the feud, but in the end, he won that lone match, which he very well could have lost), WCW realized that the fans were getting attached to his quick, brutal matches, physical charisma, and stripped away all miscellaneous details to reduce him to a man who came, saw, and conquered. His name was the simple Bill Goldberg, or in the end, just Goldberg. The man who COULD have become WCW’s pure standard bearer. And the other one was after watching the NWO grow, continue to dominate through numbers or treachery, beating every WCW person who tried to take a serious swing at them, and sitting and watching like a brooding gargoyle the whole time for months, Sting finally returned to the fold, with shoulder length hair, a style of facepaint that was more original and hence ‘his’...and a baseball bat, rappelling from the ceiling at the end of the March PPV and destroying the entire NWO before threatening Hogan. WCW had a money match, and Bischoff, in his last gasp of brilliance, was going to make them wait for it. Build to it. For an entire year. Until December 1997. Until Starrcade. It could have been WCW’s finest hour, in storyline and out. In reality, it was the beginning of the end. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Feb 21, 2022 |
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Feb 16, 2022 11:12
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SilvergunSuperman posted:If only a couple hundred theoretical people hadn't posted lololol we could have saved the world. Eh, no, but as said, you never know what seems wholly insignificant will snowball into. Hell, look at these very forums. They were created to 'push boundaries', but some people had a very different idea of what that meant, and they were expunged, so they decided fine, we'll just make our own board, and copied a Japanese one, and 15 years later there's a fair argument that that snowballed into things that will help propel the possible downfall of Western democracy. Now, I'm not saying it was WRONG to kick off the pedophiles back then, but if you told the Something Awful of 2004 that they had played a role in events akin to when Harry Truman said (according to newspapers) on August 12th, 1945 (the day after V-J-Day) said "Today, Nazism is forever dead", you likely would have been laughed out of the forums if not banned for one reason or another. Or, hell, what ended up being the truth of, and fate, of Lowtax.
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Feb 16, 2022 19:11
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So, if you're wondering why Nitro having wrestler vs wrestler matches all the time was considered such a big move...this show will demonstrate handily. Also, pretty sure Helen thought Lawler asked her how many kids she had, or got confused. She's a normal 69 year old woman up against one of the best heel talkers in the business, doubt any of us could do better. Also, for those not in the know, OSW are a group of people who review wrestling shows (big surprise, I am sure), and they noticed that Bret Hart used the second rope so much for his leaps and bumps and other things they eventually dubbed it "Bret's Rope."
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Feb 17, 2022 03:46
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Maybe in another timeline, you could work for WCW. Why can't you in THIS timeline? Well... --- In “The Unreal Story Of Professional Wrestling”, one of the analysts said something that stuck with me about the unique blend of sport and entertainment wrestling has. “If you go to a movie premiere, and you shake hands with Tom Cruise, you’re shaking hands with Tom Cruise, not Jerry McGuire (at the time, that was Cruise’s most recent hit film: nowadays he probably would have said Ethan Hunt, Cruise’s Mission Impossible character). If you go to a wrestling event and shake hands with Ric Flair, you are shaking hands with the Ric Flair who will be in the ring, who cut the promos before it, and who will be on the shows after it.” I’ve thoroughly shown the downside of wrestlers being made, or choosing to, live their gimmicks 24/7, but it offers something I think no sport or entertainment can match. Even if Robert Downey Jr was sitting incognito in a midnight debut of Avengers: Endgame and heard the crowd in it roar at his final “I am Iron Man.”, he was still separated by layers of…well, separation. He’d already filmed that months ago, he had taken off the Tony Stark identity to be himself and likely step into other roles. It wouldn’t be Tony Stark sitting in that theater. But standing in the middle of a ring, surrounded by thousands of people, roaring so loud that your ears are likely suffering low key damage, and they’re cheering for YOU…yes, other legit sports have that as well, but they have no guarantees of it. Football players may do little dances or bits when they score a touchdown as their way of interacting with cheering fans, and noted early UFC star Tito Ortiz would put on a custom shirt of his making after his victories mocking his opponent, but they still have to actually SUCCEED to do it. They don’t KNOW they’re going to, no matter how much confidence they may have. But pro wrestlers do. That leaves them the job of focusing to get the crowd into it, which is, I am not saying, any way easy. But under that spotlight, in front of a giant crowd, and you are the character who everyone else is celebrating…I can’t imagine the thrill. I talk about people wanting the top money spots, but in reality, I think that spotlight, that adulation and the symbiotic relationship a wrestler has with the fans, is far more important to them; if you offered a wrestler a set deal that paid them enough to just make a comfortable living and travel around without a hassle that came with a guarantee of constant fan response, I think 8/10 wrestlers would turn down the chance to be millionaires and live their later lives in comfortable retirement in exchange for that. Most probably would barely spare it a second thought. But…much like a drug addiction, that first high will always be the best. Though while drug and other addictions are based around needing more to try and get as close as you can to that initial high, and eventually just needing the product to function at all, the craving of the spotlight can very easily shift into a ‘good enough’ substitute, that being, that you’re at the top of the card with the lights on you at all. Whether the fans cheer, boo, despise it, love it, or don’t react at all (the worst ‘reaction’, most of the time), it don’t matter. You’re there and the spotlight feels ever so good. Until your actions ensure that there’s no spotlight for anyone, because it caused a knock on effect that led to the company shutting down. But no matter. Like any good parasite, you’ll just look to find a new fresh sack to suck dry. Maybe, even if you TRY, it’s like swimming against the tide. This thread has talked about what, at the moment, seems to be Cody Rhodes leaving AEW, a business he more or less helped found, and possibly going back to the WWE, where odds are he will be treated about as well as his father was when HE jumped companies in the late 80’s. And it was discussed that Cody seemingly tried to not be Triple H, that he had the control, the ‘book’, and he went against it. He booked himself so his character couldn’t challenge for the main AEW title. He lost a feud to his understudy, MJF, a good choice as MJF is of at the start of TYOOL 2022 maybe the best heel in the Western wrestling business. Hell, as said, in the main event of what would become AEW’s first show, he smashed a throne as symbolism. He seemed to at least be TRYING. And yet… He would make himself his own title, the TNT Title. He would book himself to do lengthy promos. He seemed to be operating on his own wavelength, no matter what the fans indicated. He let his wife form her own stable. He got other shows on TNT. And in the end, he fell out with Tony Khan over how important he thought he was, to the point where he decided he’d go back to the company whose misuse of him put him in a position to do all that to begin with. It seemed, as of the time of this writing, that even TRYING, Cody couldn’t help himself. He repressed the urge to put himself under the spotlight, and like a person’s sexual feelings, it just came out in different, maybe weirder ways, but it still came out. (Ha ha, wordplay). Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe no wrestler who has the control, the book, can resist the urge to use it for themselves. Cody’s father couldn’t, the Clique couldn’t, Triple H who learned at their feet sure couldn’t, and Hulk Hogan drat sure couldn’t, and didn’t want to. You can’t hold water in a sieve. Of course, in March of 1997, no one knew this, probably not even Hogan himself. After all, they had to build to this, and that would require Hogan to both look strong, and keep in the main spotlight. Which is exactly what happened. From March to December, PPV’s would generally revolve around other NWO members fighting WCW members; of said PPV’s, Hogan only wrestled on three of them, out of eight, and never with his title on the line. Ironically, one of those matches was Hogan fighting to REGAIN his title; Lex Luger had finally gotten back into the front line of the ‘WCW forces’ and had won the title in a shock upset win on the last Monday Nitro before the August PPV…in which Hogan won the title back, making Luger’s reign last less than a week. This quick loss and win back was endemic of the issue WCW faced during this year long build; even when WCW won, nothing seemed to change. The NWO would just win on the next PPV; they didn’t seem to lose a step, or have cracks starting to form as they just couldn’t seem to finish off WCW. In essence, the WCW vs NWO storyline was spinning its wheels; the plan to build up Hogan vs Sting all year was going to have its downsides, but again, the people involved made the downsides worse. The Luger win, in retrospect, had been a bad idea, probably done to ‘pop a rating’, a sign of the flaws that would begin rotting out more and more of WCW. But, even so…the build was still happening, as in storyline Sting kept refusing to get back in the ring with anyone except Hogan, for the title. And the undercard of WCW, flush with talent drawn from Mexico, Japan, and elsewhere, would often have great matches in the opening hours of Nitros and PPVs, while the main events would have plodding, half-baked matches that were supposed to be carried by the story. No more was this demonstrated with Halloween Havoc 1997, whose main event was Roddy Piper, in his THIRD crack at Hogan, wrestling him inside a steel cage (which was the tail end of a small story I might tell later if people care), the two at this point in their mid 40’s and having been doing the wrestling thing for nearly 20 years, and it showed. The undercard matches featured, among others, Rey Mysterio vs the late Eddie Guerrero in a match so amazing most considered it the best ‘lightweight wrestler’ match ever seen in United States wrestling. So yeah. The main events were at best, passable, and the NWO never seemed to suffer a true loss, but WCW had lots of talent, and they had just found this guy Goldberg, and it was all about December 1997. Sting vs Hogan at Starrcade. And then, in another seeming giant get, one of the WWE’s top stars also jumped to WCW, that being Bret Hart (sort of. That’s another, longer story). If that wasn’t enough, Bret’s last match in WWF would end up being so infamous, even at the time (The Montreal Screwjob), that it seemed like the WWF had finally broken and that WCW would now crush them for good. Then the ratings for the first show after Bret’s departure came in, and the WWF’s were up. A lot. People were attracted to the controversy. Okay fine, a temporary surge…except the WWF had finally gelled together a semi-strong product by late 1997, the Attitude Era’s very beginnings having happened just a few months before, and all they needed was something big to get some extra viewers. And Vince McMahon, who after the events, decided to just lean into the immensely negative attention he was getting and turn it into storyline fodder, would find out that yes, there was definitely something in a storyline of the evil controlling boss vs the rebel hellraiser. After all, how many people reading this have wanted to beat up their bosses? But that was still to come, the barest sprouts from fresh dirt. WCW still had Starrcade. Sting vs Hogan. They’d managed to keep them apart, keep both healthy, and make the fans want it more and more and more, and now they were finally getting it. Unfortunately, the one who needed to ‘get it’ the most…wasn’t going to. Even in the face of all common sense. — Wrestling is, and always will be, a two person show. You need to let yourself be lifted, or aid the lift, for most of the moves the wrestlers' do. You need to have someone who can sell for you, or beat you up to get sympathy, or at the very least, do moves so that neither they or you will get hurt. Those that fail in these facets are either very green, or the type of person that Hulk Hogan or Shawn Michaels was. It was all about them, everything else be damned. There’s a giant amount of arguments over how the Starrcade show should have been booked. Despite all the built that indicated ‘the final battle of WCW vs NWO’, the NWO still won most of its matches on the PPV that night. Hell, the only WCW winner got their win through a DQ victory. But all of that was meaningless. They were here for Sting vs Hogan. There’s all sorts of further arguments for how the Sting vs Hogan match should have been designed and executed. Sting should have had a more dramatic entrance. Sting shouldn’t have taken so much offense from Hogan. Sting should have come out and no sold everything and beaten Hogan’s rear end in three minutes. And so on. But for all the theorizing, the THING that actually happened played out as such. You might have noticed before the match that Hogan was having a somewhat extended conversation with the referee, Nick Patrick. What they discussed, I don’t know. But it could be interpreted as Hogan and him going over something that was due to happen in the match itself. It didn’t stand out TOO much: in storyline Nick Patrick was the evil heel referee allied with the NWO, and him being ref was just typical heel stacking the deck against Sting. But as the match seemed like it was going to build to a climax, Hogan slammed Sting down, ran the ropes, and dropped his trademark leg drop. He covered. 1, 2, 3. Sting didn’t kick out. All that, all the build…and Sting didn’t kick out. Based on who you talk to, the plan had been for Nick, being the heel ref, to do a ‘fast count’. Except it wasn’t a fast count. It was more or less a normal count. Oh, maybe the man just screwed up, people are fallible… Or maybe Hogan had made it clear to him that despite what the plan was, Hogan wanted him to count normally. He had complete creative control. Matches happened as HE wanted. And while Hogan was not so up his own rear end as to actually WIN this long term blow off match, he certainly was going to make sure he looked as good as possible. Maybe this was demonstrated best by how, even if it had been a screwed up fast count, Sting laid there afterwards, flat on his back, when he should have just barely managed to ‘not make’ the count and then been immediately back on his feet, full of utter rage and ferocity. Instead, he lay there, broken, fallen, the hope and champion of WCW, laid to waste. He didn’t even have the cover that Giant and his gold-lead belt had. The subconscious message was clear. This company sucks. We rule. And if you don’t get that, you’re stupid. Now buy our shirts. And never, EVER, EVER, EVER will Hulk Hogan look even remotely weak. EVER. Of course, the match didn’t actually end there, and who knows, maybe hairs are being split. Maybe they just hosed things up. It happens. What did happen as followed was Bret Hart running out, getting on a microphone, somewhat muffledly saying “This isn’t going to happen again!”, referencing the real life events that had sent him out the WWF’s door, then he punched out Patrick, took over as referee (because he could), restarted the match, and Sting, finally back up, pounced on Hogan with his trademark corner splash and then locked in his submission hold, which Bret declared Hogan surrendered to and called the match for Sting. Never mind that for at least a year by now, wrestling had adapted the MMA ‘tap out’ gesture to indicate a wrestler was submitting, which was a much better visual indicator than referees just sort of standing near where the wrestler was when in a submission hold and indicating they said they gave up. And Hogan didn’t do that. Bret just said he did. ...Fine. Sting had still won. Hooray. WCW wrestlers poured into the ring, Sting got the on the shoulders treatment, balloons fell, fireworks went off, good had triumphed that night. And Bischoff was laughing all the way to the bank with the biggest PPV buyrate WCW had ever done. ….except, in the end, when the next show went on…nothing had changed. The NWO should have been broken. Instead, it kept dominating more often than not. Hell, on that very first Nitro, Hogan demanded a rematch, got it, and the same thing more or less happened: a screwy three count from Patrick, the match being restarted by another referee, and Sting winning, only for the belt to be ‘held up’ due to the screwiness. They’d taken a simple ending and broken it into a thousand pieces, maybe because WCW just didn’t know when to stop sucking at the teat, or maybe because in the end, the people who had to lose…just really didn’t want to. I have theorized that if you somehow went back in time and jumped into Eric Bischoff’s body in say, August 1997, and around then made it clear to Hogan that while he was gonna get plenty of spotlight all the way to the match, he was going to be destroyed in it, and the NWO would finally break, and he would be taken out of the main event scene a bit to let it breathe, and refused to budge on Hogan’s attempts to get around it, I honestly think Hogan would have taken his ball and went home, completely ruining the storyline. It’s sad when people learn the wrong lessons from having wrong done to them. It’s even sadder that Hogan embraced those wrong lessons so hard that he likely could have had an even more brilliant career if he’d learned to give some back. To recognize in the end, there was no glory for Hulk Hogan in the ring without a Roddy Piper, an Andre the Giant, a Sting. It takes two to tango, and Hogan never learned that. Was it because of a broken leg and being told he’d get a title if he married some girl, or was Terry Bollea just naturally a selfish piece of poo poo with zero ability to instrospect, instead being an expert in manipulating things to get his way? I don’t know. None of us will ever know. All we have is how things played out. In November 1997, the WWF seemed to have one foot in the grave and WCW’s own foot posed over their heads to deliver one final stomp or two. A year later, the two now had a pure competition once again, with combined numbers that dwarfed anything the business had had before. Ratings that tended around the vein of 6.0 for one show to 5.5 for the other, for a combined 11.5, a giant audience that both could have thrived on for years to come even if it shrank some. Key word: "Some". By March 2001, WCW had fallen so hard and so far and so fast that they managed to follow AWA’s path in one third the time, going out of business with a whimper. And if you examined the corpse of the company and the bootmarks on it, you likely would have found the marks were size 12 boots with HULK HOGAN written on them. --- Later Edit: Comments from the Wrestling Observer of the time, including one with redundant info that I'm including anyway for posterity. quote:"Starrcade destroyed WCW's all-time gate records and also set the companies all time one-night merchandise record. The paid attendance was a company record...The show was bad" - The Wrestling Observer Newsletter: December 29, 1997. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Mar 30, 2022 |
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Feb 18, 2022 10:34
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But, as it keeps being said, even utterly fumbling Sting vs Hogan could have been recovered from. WCW’s ratings were still strong; the WWE was more growing its own ratings again than taking WCW’s. Maybe too strong. As 1998 began, not only did WCW expand its Nitro show’s length from two hours to three, which meant that it now not only had an hour lead in to Raw (Raw aired 9 to 11, Nitro aired 8 to 10, and now 8 to 11), but started up another show, WCW Thunder, which ran for two hours. Great if WCW had decided to experiment with different foci and maybe figure out a new main story angle or two…except, of course, it just ended up being the same focus on the same people, now just more. Hell, it’s arguable that Thunder was created because of the still persistent idea that the NWO would take over WCW’s prime show Nitro entirely and force WCW to ‘retreat’ to Thunder. But, as said, for the time, ratings were good on both sides. WWF, however, had the momentum. As 1998 began, Steve Austin won the Royal Rumble to set up his official crowning as the top star of the company at the next Wrestlemania. The WWF got some real life attention by bringing in Mike Tyson to be a ‘special enforcer’ for said match, and Austin immediately getting in his face and causing problems. And Vince continued his slow transformation from Vince the goofy play by play man to what would be known as Mr. McMahon, the evil head of WWF who wanted absolute control over his empire, getting angrier and angrier at Austin’s antics. When Austin won the title as planned (and Shawn Michaels, having suffered a back injury at the same Rumble Austin won, would end up on the shelf for years and end up missing, more or less, the entire Attitude era that he helped found), McMahon confronted him on the Raw after Wrestlemania and said “In the end, you work for me, so you will do what I say and we’ll be good.” Austin flipped McMahon off and stunned him for what I believe was the second time. The ratings kept climbing. WCW’s win streak was in danger, but it just managed to beat Raw in the ratings that week. But next week, it was still close. And finally, the week after that, where Vince challenged Austin to a match himself to ‘teach him a lesson’, the streak finally broke, as Raw beat Nitro in the overall nightly rating for the first time in over a year and a half. And Eric Bischoff promptly lost his drat mind. Now, on some level, I get it. No one likes to lose. And being on an extended victory streak can make losses that inevitably happen suck even more. I can imagine the fact that the Patriots’ perfect season ending with a shock Superbowl loss in the last minutes of the game in 2007 stung even more if the Patriots actually had lost a game or two before that one, for one example. It’s insanely rare to go all the way and never suffer the law of averages, and odds are, like Floyd Mayweather, eventually people will think it was more avoiding and delaying and picking his spots than boxing skill that let him end up with a 50-0 record or whatever it supposedly is. But, unfortunately, much like Hogan, by now Eric had long drunk his own flavor aid. He’d come to see himself as the new empire builder of wrestling, and all the greater because he would beat the one who himself did it, Vince McMahon. He’d helped WCW (eventually) turn a profit and reach its greatest heights: for all the things Dusty and Flair and others who came before, they’d never even come close to being ‘a Nintendo’, while the NWO had, albeit on a smaller basis that didn’t match Hogan in the 80’s or, ironically, Steve Austin to come. And now, the Monday Night Wars winning streak was over. You know these sorts. They had to find someone to blame. But who? Maybe actually sit Hogan down and tell him his actions were becoming unacceptable? No, of course not; if anything Hogan’s actions had made Bischoff’s viewpoints that was now causing him to flip out grow even worse over the years (after all, even WITH total creative control, Hogan would not have been able to pull off his ‘fast count that wasn’t’ and not be punished afterwards if Bischoff on some level didn’t support it, or get talked into supporting it). Maybe someone in Hogan’s orbit, as a misplaced ‘punishment’ done because Hogan was off limits, like his good friend Ed Leslie? No. Maybe one of the lesser problem-causers, like Kevin Nash, who was starting to flex his own creative control muscles in the same ways that had caused the rating win streak to end, stopping him before it started? No. Instead, Bischoff went after Ric Flair, the heart of WCW along with Sting, who had had nothing to do with the storylines or matches that were just starting to make WCW’s decline begin. Flair had given notice that he would be taking a show off (A Thunder) to watch his son Reid participate in an actual middle school Greco-roman wrestling weeks in advance. Bischoff pretended like he had no showed with zero advance warning, flipped out, and actually filed a lawsuit against Flair for it, resulting in Flair disappearing from WCW TV for months. It was complete horseshit and would be a shining example of just why WCW would fall apart, the whole inferiority complex constantly inherited by those who ran WCW taken to its logical extreme. It wasn’t even like it started a cascade of losses: WCW won the next week’s ratings and it just began going back and forth like it had back at the start of the Monday Night Wars. But the end of the streak scarred Eric, and would lead to numerous terrible business decisions to come. And it wasn’t just him. Even as the Nitro ratings win streak was ending, the Goldberg on air win streak was growing, as was the man’s overness. People have made jokes about how both companies ended up with their biggest stars being bald, goateed men in simple black trunks, and how if there had been a ‘dream match’ between late 90’s Austin and Goldberg, it would have become a confusing mess because people wouldn’t be able to tell who was who, but those are all jokes; it’s akin to saying Lebron James and Usain Bolt are identical because they’re both lanky black male athletes. Jokes aside, in late April Goldberg claimed his first singles title, the US Title. On the June PPV. Goldberg would claim his supposed 100th victory, making his streak 100-0. With an upcoming Nitro due to happen in the now-demolished Georgia Dome, Hogan, who was AGAIN WCW champion after six months of nonsense (Sting beat him again to win the held up title in February, only for Sting to lose it to Randy Savage in April, making him a side character in what had ended up being a splitting of the NWO, more on that later, only for Hogan to beat Savage immediately afterward and win the title back, and then Sting ended up joining one of the two NWO factions rendering his whole crusade against Hogan more or less moot and a waste of time), saw the possible crowd numbers for the Nitro, and Goldberg’s popularity, and the fact that this was going to happen in Time Warner’s backyard and people from the company were likely going to be there, and came up with an idea. He’d have a match with Goldberg (originally just an off TV non title match, I believe). The Time Warner folks would see the giant crowd and believe Hogan drew it, and Hogan would be in a strong position to keep negotiating his contracts to have way too much money and creative control and etc etc. In negotiations, though, this offered match grew even bigger, until it became Goldberg’s defining moment. Hogan would not fight Goldberg off TV non title: he would face Goldberg for the WCW Title in the main event, and lose, making Goldberg WCW champion less than a year from his debut…in exchange that several months later, Hogan would be the one to end Goldberg’s winning streak. Bischoff and WCW went for it, and Hogan dropped the belt in front of Nitro’s biggest ever crowd and popping a giant rating. Of course, it could have made far much more money if they'd done the match on PPV with build behind it instead of just springing it on the night of that Nitro. But fine, whatever. It still happened, and seemed like a fix and a new direction after the failed Sting vs Hogan match. Goldberg was young, fresh, and could finally be the spear (ha ha) to put down the NWO angle and let WCW move on. So what happened? The Clique happened. Again. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Feb 18, 2022 |
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Feb 18, 2022 16:54
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So I said the Clique happened again. Not exactly true. Rather, Kevin Nash happened. By now, Shawn Michaels was seemingly retired, Waltman had returned to the WWE, Hunter was starting to rise in the ranks alongside him (Waltman), and Hall, who had had long time substance abuse problems, was getting to the point where they were interfering in his work. But the lessons Nash learned had never gone away, and while Nash had played second fiddle to Hogan ever since the NWO formed, the storyline that led to the NWO breaking into two factions finally gave him a chance to pull the man down and take his place as the guy running things backstage, his way. I have noted how the ‘cool heel’ is a troublesome and often short term gain, long term detriment problem, and when the NWO broke in two, this problem compounded itself. Nash had been ‘cool heeling’ on and off during the whole NWO angle, and the split allowed him to switch to anti-hero face, forming the “NWO Wolfpac”. While popular... (I remember the very first time I ever joined a wrestling chatroom on the internet, people kept asking for a recording of the Wolfpac’s new entrance music, which is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYwXUxgszF0 Indeed, pretty cool for the time, I guess.) ...the Wolfpac was still the same problem of “The NWO just will not go away and won’t get out of the top spots on the card”. Bill Goldberg might have been the champion now, and immensely over, but the NWO was still taking the big storylines and the main events. Of the PPVs that followed Goldberg’s win in July to December, Goldberg main evented approximately one of them. He didn’t even get booked to wrestle on two of them, and the rest had him appearing in the semi main event, while the focus was on things like Hogan fighting Jay Leno, or the Ultimate Warrior returning and turning a three way War Games match into a glorified (and bad) magic show. But even then, Goldberg was over. He was drawing. People were buying tickets to see him, buying merchandise, chanting his name. The WWF had Austin vs McMahon in full swing, with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson starting taking his first steps to his own top star and beyond status as well, and WCW had Goldberg. Things were far from perfect, but they were still good. In November 1998, two things happened. One was Hulk Hogan appearing on Jay Leno (not holding a grudge over Leno beating him in a wrestling match at a PPV, good on HIM, I guess) to announce he was retiring from pro wrestling, AND running for President of the United States. Why in the hell would he do that? Well, to fake people out for what happened later, perhaps, but most likely because Jesse Ventura had, in a rather shocking turn of events, managed to win the governorship of Minnesota and Hogan, who had a rather POOR relationship with Ventura to say the least, did it to get attention on him instead after Ventura had succeeded in something Hogan had never managed to do. The other was that Kevin Nash joined the backstage booking committee. Nash now had creative control over how storylines would go. Nash, as was said back at the time, HAD THE BOOK. And with Hogan seemingly retired, and for all we know, he actually HAD meant it at the time, that left an opening. A big one. The inevitable happened. Nash promptly (ie booked himself to) won WCW’s Royal Rumble equivalent in November 1998, and at Starrcade, one year after the first giant mistake, the second and more fatal giant mistake happened. While it was done through numerous cases of interference and Goldberg literally being zapped with a cattle prod, Nash defeated him to claim the WCW title and end Goldberg’s winning streak at 173-0. Once again, as Death of WCW says (I am drawing a fair chunk of my posts from it), it shouldn’t have been this way. Goldberg’s streak should have ended if he was cooling off, to give someone else a rub. And it wasn’t. Goldberg was hot. There was no sign he was going to cool down any time soon. He was making WCW money. He was their future. But, as the book quotes someone who had worked for WCW at the time, whose bitterness leapt off the page, “Some people didn’t care about that.” — “He beats the big guy with three superkicks.” The days when Eric Bischoff was brilliantly counter programming WWE and breaking all the rules to get an advantage were long gone, as was the time when doing something like saying that Shawn Michaels was going to win his brief feud with Sid in 1996 via the above sentence on Raw would do anything for WCW. But, for some reason, as 1998’s last days passed, Bischoff decided to resurrect it. While Austin and Rock were getting the spotlight in the WWF, Mick Foley had slipped in and was rapidly gaining on their side in the last quarter of 1998. By the last weeks of 1998, Mick was so over that the WWE decided to give him a brief world title reign, taping his triumphant win at the very end of 1998 for the first Raw show of 1999. On that night, with Bischoff likely speaking through him, WCW play by play announcer Tony Schiavone would say something along the lines of “No need to change channels, folks. Mick Foley, who used to wrestle for this company as Cactus Jack, and now wrestles as Mankind, is going to win the competition’s world title tonight.” That would have been bad enough, but in a pure tempting of fate, Schiavone, or rather, Bischoff, because I am CERTAIN he was feeding the man the line, would follow this ‘reveal’ by adding “Wow, that’s going to put a lot of butts in the seats.” When the ratings were broken down after the shows, it revealed that as soon as the announcement was made, thousands of houses, possibly 100,000 or more, switched off Nitro and moved over to watch Raw instead to watch Foley get the biggest win of his career. But because hubris is still sometimes punished, what happened also that night combined to signal the end. It’s been spoken about before. Goldberg was going to challenge Nash for the title again, only for Miss Elizabeth to make claims that got Goldberg ‘arrested’. Nash claimed Hogan, who had been off TV for weeks, but was now backstage again, seemingly just because, was behind it and said he would challenge him instead, the leaders of NWO Wolfpac and NWO Hollywood/Black and White clashing in a finally happening battle of leaders and warriors. So we thought. The match began, and Hogan poked Nash in the chest. Nash acted like he’d been shot with a cannonball and fell over like a broken toy, and Hogan pinned him to win the WCW title. Because after ending Goldberg’s streak, after all they’d done to kill Starrcade 1997 throughout 1998, the answer for what would be done in WCW now was…the NWO. Again. It was all Bischoff ever had. And it wasn’t even a good buggy whip product. That was more or less it for WCW. The ratings war as a competition was over: they'd started to slip some, but after January 4th, the slip became permanent, and WCW would never even win a quarter hour ratings match with WWF for the next two years and change, let alone a full night assessment. Even when Raw would be delayed for things like tennis or dog shows and air at midnight, the show's overall rating would STILL be higher than WCW’s running in their normal Nitro time slot unopposed. The ‘twist’ would be fittingly dubbed the “Fingerpoke of Doom”, originally just for the ‘match’ itself, but later gaining the greater secondary meaning that it was WCW’s doom. And for months afterwards, the WWF crowds would be full of signs that all said more or less the same thing: MICK FOLEY PUT MY BUTT IN THIS SEAT. Of course, you know what happens to the average body when it dies. Its bowels release. To be cruder, it shits itself. And ho boy, did WCW have a full lower intestine.
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Feb 19, 2022 02:28
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Trollologist posted:Also, WCW question: wasn't Hogan's contract so nuts that he got a piece of ALL merch sales? Like if Goldberg sold a shirt, Hogan got a cut? A quick Google search doesn't turn up anything THAT ridiculous, but he did get a 50-50 split of any merchandise with him on it, including anything associated with him, like the NWO. And he got paid to promote it as well. So he was getting paid thousands a month for wearing his own merchandise, for example. --- And speaking of wasting money... When things were getting bad in the WWF in the mid 90’s, you can see all the mistakes Vince made in his initial panic pretty clear, beyond the Kevin Nash experiment. Stuff like re-signing Ultimate Warrior and giving him free reign, which ended up being such a bad decision that Warrior barely lasted three more months even with this incredibly loose leash. Or letting Shawn Michaels bury Vader when Vader had been WCW’s biggest and best heel and could have done something similar for WWF. Signing Mark Henry, an Olympic power lifter, to a 10 year (!) guaranteed contract and then giving him an immediate push, when he was at least two years too early to even start getting a midcard push, ie he was greener than grass. None of it worked, WCW got Hall and Nash, started the faux invasion angle that became the NWO, and WCW kicked WWF’s rear end for months and months, and seemingly seemed poised to drive the company out of business. Now the shoe was on the other foot, and we can see all the things that Bischoff, and others, would try to do to arrest the decline, and get the exact same results as Vince. With one key difference. Vince’s buffer zone for financial no goes in that 90's crisis period was very thin, while WCW had Ted Turner and Turner Broadcasting/Time Warner’s deep pockets to fall back on. As John Tenta, who wrestled in the WWF as Earthquake and in WCW as several silly gimmicks and under his own name, and had been one of the Hogan Friend Parade brought in, once commented that he thought it was insane how much money WCW blew, giving an example of Hogan and Bischoff going out for lunch and spending something like $2000 on sushi, because it wasn’t their money, it was Turner’s. And that was before the NWO and then the long fall afterwards. Having super expensive lunches was the least of it; Turner/Time Warner’s money let WCW do stupid things like buy plane tickets for every single member of the roster for every Nitro (and maybe every PPV and other shows, I’m not sure), even if there was no chance they’d actually be used on the show. Yes, they were buying 150+ plane tickets every week,two-thirds of which tended to go completely unused. I think some wrestlers even had a brief racket where they were returning the tickets for extra money. And then there were the people they hired and then didn’t use at all: Lanny Poffo, the brother of Randy Poffo nee Savage, whose most famous gimmick in wrestling had been the poetry spouting Genius in late 80’s WWF, got hired on a $125,000 per year guaranteed contract, and then never got used at all: Poffo just sat at home collecting a paycheck. Hell, I think there were stories that there was a wrestler or two who were doing nothing, being paid for it, and the paperwork side of WCW was such a mess that they forgot to actually cancel the contract, meaning it automatically ‘rolled over’ for another year of guaranteed pay. Chris Jericho tells a small story that WCW once sent him an expedited package with nothing in it, a funny show of just how sloppy and panicked things became and kept becoming more of. (Not so funny was Chris Jericho’s then girlfriend going to a store and purchasing a combo package of Jericho’s WCW action figure and a fellow wrestler, I think it might have been Dean Malenko. When she looked at the receipt, she saw that according to it, she had purchased a Sting/Hogan action figure duo package. Oh, she actually had her boyfriend’s toy in her hands (ha ha), but the official records would mean that the residual would go to Sting and Hogan. Because denying them a chance to advance up the cards and making them eternal fodder for their egos just wasn’t enough for the likes of ol’ Terry Bollea, it seemed. Maybe there was something to that 'get a piece of all merch' question after all) ATM Eric just doubled down on that giant pile of other people’s money. With Goldberg kneecapped and the usual suspects STILL dominating the main events, WCW instead tried gimmicks like hiring various bands to play at Nitros and PPVs. This included doing stuff like hiring lesser known rapper Master P and even some of his entourage (Swoll, a giant with zero wrestling skill or talent, was signed for $400,000 a year, and later was shown to be ducking out on Child Support payments despite this very generous contract) and having them form a group called the No Limit Soldiers, who feuded with several WCW midcarders who called themselves the West Texas Rednecks who declared “Rap Is Crap”. Ostentatiously, the NLS were the faces, but 1) Between outnumbering the Rednecks 3-1 with all the nameless goons Master P brought along as his entourage, along with a few wrestlers like Rey Mysterio joining them, in their fight with the four man Redneck team, which resulted in fans cheering them for standing their ground against such odds, and 2) WCW being southern in general, it ended up getting the Rednecks over instead. Their ‘insult song’ even saw some play on actual country music stations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-riL5A4eiWQ So WCW promptly killed that angle, of course. Deciding he could top this poo poo, Bischoff then negotiated a large deal to have legendary power metal band KISS play at a Nitro. Raw obliterated the show by 2 ratings points, hence showing it was all a waste of money, but Bischoff, supposedly, thought so much of it that he began drawing up tentative plans to have a millennium eve PPV show that would be both a wrestling show and a KISS concert that would run for something like seven hours. As Death of WCW comments, this seemed to indicate that, under the pressure, Bischoff had finally gone totally insane. (And in ANOTHER example of wasted money and time, WCW decided to license the “Kiss IP” to create a wrestler, the KISS Demon, for…some reason. Because it had worked so well when Kevin Nash was Oz. Oh, did I mention the exact context of that gimmick? Well, see, TBS had acquired the rights to MGM’s film catalog, which let them, among other things, have freer reign to show the Wizard of Oz on television; back in the earlier days, it was almost a yearly event that different channels would run the whole movie. So to cross promote, they decided to do a Wizard of Oz gimmick on WCW. So yes. The whole Oz gimmick was to promote the fact they could show an old classic movie on a specific cable channel more often than usual. Still better than the time Rick Steiner got into a feud with Chucky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz1DHgdVKeE Oh right, the Kiss Demon. It, of course, totally flopped, but they couldn’t just drop it because the deal with KISS said that the gimmick had to be used in a certain number of main events. So WCW started putting the man forced to wear the getup into third on the card matches and announcing them to be ‘special main events’. Yeah) It finally became too much even for Turner-Time Warner in September 1999, and Bischoff was relieved of his job as WCW showrunner and president and sent home. Put in charge were a pair of men named Bill Busch and Brad Siegel, who I mostly mention for what Busch did shortly after he took charge. Looking at the utter mess that WCW had become, Busch made his own bad decision, though I don’t blame him for not realizing it. With WCW’s guaranteed contracts having made it so the WWF started doing the same, hence ‘locking up’ their wrestlers and preventing shock signings like Luger had been, Busch instead hired WWF’s two main writers, Vince Russo and Ed Ferrara. They had been the ones in front of the writing and storylines that let the WWF come back and overtake WCW once again. Maybe they could swing the pendulum back for WCW. What Busch didn’t understand was while Russo did have a few good spots in his writing work, namely trying to give everyone on the card something to do, in truth he was only capable of doing said good spots as part of a whole, with a filter in place to toss aside all of his ‘chaff’ ideas, namely, Vince McMahon. But here, Russo would have no filter. He would be given free reign. And the thing was…Russo was not a wrestling fan. Russo was more a fan of trash TV and human drama; if he could have gotten rid of the wrestling aspect entirely, he would have. He was the type to watch Jerry Springer and use the show for ideas; in essence, if the WWE’s ‘sports-entertainment’ had long been cancerous on WCW’s ‘wrestling’, hiring Russo was akin to injecting a massive dose of poison. And that’s what it was. Russo took over and altered Nitros to be more like how the WWF programming was run. The ratings kept slipping. Russo, after saying he wouldn’t put himself on air as a character, did so within two weeks. They started showing bits like a pair of wrestlers arguing over how one was going to win, or having another wrestler who thought Russo liked him immediately jump up after a TV loss and get a mike to say “Did I do a good job, boss?” Because that was another thing about Russo: he assumed that every wrestling fan was the type to not only know the show was ‘fake’, but would spend all their time scouring the net to find out every single bit of real life backstage ‘truth’ they could. In essence, Russo not only exposed the business, and did it under false assumptions, but he did it in a way that went “How can you be so stupid to react to any of this being real”? (It may not surprise you that Jim Cornette absolutely, utterly, unfathomably DESPISES Russo and thinks he killed the business as he knew it, so much so that he’s claimed he’s worked to be healthier because he is utterly determined to outlive the man so he can piss on his grave. Which does speak a fair bit of unfortunate aspects of Cornette’s character as well, but you can see where it comes from, even if the degree is lunatic) Oh yeah, and these ‘reality slaps’ did nothing either. By now, wrestlers in WCW were cluing in that no matter what WCW tried, they themselves were never going to get anywhere, and had begun to depart for WWF. The first to go was Paul Wight, and while he’d have an even greater amount of stupid poo poo happen to him, he still ended up with a two decade long career in WWE afterwards, barring some time off periods. Next to go was Chris Jericho, an immensely entertaining heel who could do comedy and scumfuckery, and while he’d also have his share of ups and downs in WWE, in the end he did a lot more for them than WCW ever allowed. One story claims that Bischoff in a mid 1999 meeting claimed that no one beside Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper (and maybe Kevin Nash?) could draw, and told the locker room that if anyone wanted to leave, to go ahead. Wrestler Scott Levy, who’d made a semi decent career for himself in WCW playing the Raven character he’d pioneered in ECW, the ‘third man’ in the 90’s wrestling battle, promptly walked out and went back to ECW; he was legit that sick of WCW’s nonsense and was willing to go back to a much smaller pay contract and audience exposure to get away with it. Apparently Bischoff failed to recall when he was doing his own ‘worked shoot’ bit with Brian Pillman a few years previous, and Pillman told him to send him a real-life release from his WCW contract to ‘really sell’ the angle; Bischoff indeed sent a real, legit, legally binding release, and Pillman used it to get signed to the WWF for a larger pay grade. Oops. As 2000 began, several other wrestlers gathered together and said they also wanted to leave, tired of being in the midcard, getting no chances, or getting their legs cut out from under them by the WWF people. WCW even tried to keep one, Chris Benoit, by having him win the WCW title on their first PPV in 2000. Benoit went out, worked the match, returned backstage, gave the WCW belt to management, and walked out with his fellows, essentially quitting. Nash would say it didn’t matter; the four were just ‘vanilla midgets’ that couldn’t draw. About six weeks later, those four, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Dean Malenko, and Perry Saturn, having signed with the WWE as a unit, would be wrestling in the main event of Raw in a match that drew one of the highest ratings Raw ever drew. And while Malenko and Saturn ultimately wouldn’t amount to ‘much’, Benoit and Guerroro would end up being some of the top WWF stars for the first half of the Aughts…before horrific tragedy would consume both of them, but I’d rather not talk about that. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Feb 19, 2022 |
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Feb 19, 2022 05:06
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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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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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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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