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This @EN090 renaissance is the shits.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one in the world that recognizes that wrestling has always been at it's hottest when the characters and storylines of the program align with current cultural climate/themes. And it's also not a secret that almost every single person walking today thinks that there are two groups of people in the world and that one side is trying to gaslight the other side (and their own) to gain power. And somehow this company has a character that is a "cult leader" in Bray Wyatt and they can't figure out how to make that work. And that story doesn't have to be political in the slightest. Whatever.

Oh man...Bryan setting out to steal everone's mask and keeping them all as trophies only for El Idolo to step up and put the La Sombra mask AND his beautiful hair on the line against Bryan's title and hair would be amazing.

Problem with that is that WWE doesn't do nuance, and that kind of thing is required for storylines that reflect current events. Exhibit A: "We're two American-born men of Middle Eastern descent who are fed up with how our people have been portrayed since 9/11!" TITLE CARD: Two weeks later... "Alalalalalala death to American infidels! Where are my pointy toed boots and kaffiyeh!? Let's round up some dudes to do some clever gang attacks that look suspiciously like those beheading videos!"

Holy shit, yes! I saw your first sentence and was coming to post about Muhammad Hassan as the perfect example of WWE's butchering of nuance. Such a wasted opportunity!

In that case, we're never seeing him again.

Maybe he could do Squirrel Girl instead.

Just to be clear, I thought that Raw segment where they go after Renee Young for her Ambrose relationship was awful. And yeah, pretty much what Technico Support says. They should never have acknowledged on TV that Ambrose and Renee Young are married IRL. Because now you have all these dumb awkward moments on TV where Corey Graves is "confronting" her about her relationship with Dean Ambrose, and Renee Young doesn't know how to respond. Because 1) when Renee Young is in love with a man who proudly proclaims that Roman Reigns deserves to die of leukemia and having almost no reaction to that, it sort of makes her look like a scumbag or 2) it makes her look like a bleeding idiot when she is married to Dean and has no idea what's going on with him and never talks with him about it or 3) it makes her look like a poor abused victim of evil Dean Ambrose like Miss Elizabeth and Macho Man.

A prime example of fans doing harm is when the crowd chanted "You deserve it!" to Kevin Owens after he became Universal Champion. Keep in mind he only won because Triple H pedigreed Reigns, followed by backstabbing Rollins and allowing KO to get the winning pin after a pedigree to Seth. KO did nothing to deserve the victory. He didn't even cheat on his own to win. The championship was handed to him by the evil Authority figure. But because Owens had worked his way from the indies to ROH to WWE, fans wanted to show their appreciation. And they did so--in the worst way possible. It undermines the entire story and ignores how spineless the KO character was at that point. This happens all the time. And fans keep doing it, then wonder why WWE doesn't concern itself with alignment so much anymore. If we as a collective fanbase don't care, why should they?

I don't know who that is. He probably needs a compelling introduction.

I'd go even further. I'd reintroduce everyone every single week just in case new people are tuning in. Don't progress characters too much ever because it would risk alienating new viewers. Maybe even break things down and over-explain the rules of basic professional wrestling matches so people that aren't familiar with it can follow along. The key here is holding viewers' hands as much as possible. Definitely end the shows on a big cliffhanger to keep people tuning in every week. But don't address it too much the next week. First-time viewers won't know what's going on. Man, storytelling sure is hard. I don't know how these inexperienced newcomers will manage. Maybe they need someone with real proven experience in episodic television?

My 9 year old saw that live and asked, "Daddy, why don't more wrestlers do that!?" "They aren't as smart as Joe, son."

The problem is the WWE itself is the heel to a lot of these fans. They see the WWE as anti-Bryan, so they cheer Bryan. I think NJPW has a grasp of how to handle it right on the modern era. There's like a sliding scale of face to heel, and you have to accept that fans are gonna like who they like and you can't manipulate it too much with established guys. Folks were going to cheer Tana over Omega, but cheer Omega over Okada. I don't think a strong face-heel dynamic is needed to draw money- you just need to have a compelling reason for feuds- whether it's style, prestige ,or just personal dislike.

And now I want Heath Slater working a Moses gimmick.

"And at WrestleMania, I'm going to take a 70% marginal tax out of your ass!"

Agents - and I specifically say agents because Harper being a Boras client - are working off the "Well player X got this contract so my client, player Y, deserves a big better deal" is a big reason. Because teams have gotten smarter - in regards to analytics, etc... they are changing the marketplace and obviously the players and agents feel like it should be the way it always has. So the ask - which used to always be like 7 years - has now stretched to 10 years. (Which BTW is the Marlins fault. Yeah I said it!) No one not named Mike Trout should be locked up for 10 years. (Harper has a little bit of an injury history that would give me pause. And GMs are clearly scared by Machado's attitude). Also you could argue that Harper plays a position(s) that are easier to fill with cheaper options. (Kinda like how you really shouldn't pay too high for a 1B) Why Harper and Machado (and to a lesser degree some of the other big names) haven't realized that they should take like a 3 or 4 year deal (where they are still getting between $25 - $30 million a year) and wait and see how the knew CBA shakes out is beyond me. And Craig Kimbrel thinking he should get 6 years is still my favorite. How the Chapman deal hasn't blown up yet is beyond me.

Today's edition of "stuff from 1964 that people should steal:"

You know there's no one in the back capable of writing a line like that. That's why Joe is awesome. He straight up ethers people on the mic. Give that man a fucking championship run already.

"Pretend this is an AA meeting and keep your mouth shut while I'm sharing with the group." Joe is a SAVAGE

SMH. It isn't brain surgery. Becky/Ronda, Asuka/Charlotte. This fucking company.

hey, anybody want to apply Marx's model of overproduction to pop music well too bad Cover songs that hit all the wrong notes are, if nothing else, a distinct product from the original. We as a world have created too much music to possibly listen to in a hundred lifetimes and the deconstruction/rebuilding (or outright cannibalization) of the previously written and recorded is unarguably inevitable and probably moral in the long run. I'm not saying a death metal cover of "Aguas de Marco" is in the same boat as the Bomb Squad cutting up Uriah Heep to make a PE track, but at some point you have to admit doing a straight-up remake of a song that was already fine is a lot more evil than trying and failing to change the flavor of a pre-existing text. No failed genre experiment in this thread is ever going to approach the evil of Pat Boone's "Tutti Frutti".

Dammit, Rick, it's an upper body business.

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/dick-miller-dead-dies-gremlins-terminator-1203124265/ 182 acting credits on IMDB. Not near the most by a long shot but I'd wager one of the highest percentages of amazing and recognizable roles ever. You know him and love him whether you know it or not. He was so great in A BUCKET OF BLOOD Obviously his name and face go hand-in-hand with Roger Corman, but there are also the super famous roles in GREMLINS, TERMINATOR, EXPLORERS, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, THE 'BURBS, CHOPPING MALL, AFTER HOURS, THE HOWLING, and on and on and on. If a genie came to me and said I could either have Tom Cruise's career or Dick Miller's career I would go Dick all the way.

Because the WWE has spent 20 years training its fans to see it as the heel, with the unending succession of Evil Authority Figures perpetuating the Austin/McMahon paradigm years past its expiration date. A generational turnover has come and gone with the only constant being "oh, the company itself is the bad guy. We're supposed to boo the Office's Choice for top guy because they're the evil corporate champ who's stealing the spot from the anti-establishment anti-corporate hero guy we really like) In historical context it's odd for a wrestling promotion to book itself as the heel, but it's not necessarily doomed to not work [for a while, in fact, it worked extremely well, which is why the WWE is still in this rut of trying to do it. And, when Daniel Bryan was the "Yes Movement" babyface, it was working really well again.] You, as the promoter, just have to remember to adjust for for how you've reversed the polarity. That's been the curse afflicting Roman Reigns. They've tried to sell him as the anti-authority anti-establishment rebel babyface, but unfortunately the internet-savvy audience already knew he was "The Office Choice" off-camera. So the audience did what they've been trained over 20 years to do: Boo Who The Heel Promoter Tells Them To Cheer. The problem comes when Vince stubbornly tries to push someone with the old Face Promoter rubric instead of accepting (and giggling to himself about how he's worked the dumb marks again) that he has to, but easily can, work backwards. Tell the fans they're supposed to hate Cena, or Roman, (or Becky Lynch), and they'll fall in love with them.

It's a grimy, grimy bubble, my friend. Would you really want to see in if you were on the outside?

Only 114 days to go...

So apparently Golf has the Saudi Arabian Open happening this weekend. Lots of Golf fans are not happy about this, and are saying that the big name Golfers should have boycotted the event and refused to go to Saudi(understandably so). But there's been a backlash from within the golf world, saying "Why are you singling us out, when the Italian SuperCopa was held there two weeks ago and nobody had a problem with that? Why single us out, when WWE has run two shows there and nobody complained about them?". The Wrestling bubble has two sides. You can't see the outside world from inside. But people on the outside can't see in either.

He's a TV exec speaking on a conference call--his words are very carefully chosen, and mirror those used in the press release. He said sport because he meant sport; the other execs and Vince said sport because they meant sport; we all basically know what that word means. This isn't a lesson in semiotics; we can fall endlessly down the "ah but what do words really mean?/can anyone ever be perfectly understood?" tunnel, but that's an exercise in futility. Maybe they meant something totally other than what they said--but probably not. And he compared Smackdown to a weekly novella also, so it's not like anyone wants to abandon narrative. Sports broadcasts are built on characters and stories too; this isn't some combative binary choice. Anyway, regarding ratings, Meltzer (our only source on this) has reported FOX wants 3.3 million viewers for Smackdown, which is doing just over 2 million right now. The expectation is supposedly that the switch to broadcast will mostly result in that increase just by being in far more households, but of course, we will have to wait and see. I suppose a supporting argument would be that lefty/vegan/antifa twitter has had a lot of fun with Bryan gifs lately. I don't think many are watching necessarily or are more likely to suddenly become wrestling fans; but among those who are, Bryan is absolutely treated as a face. My guess is WWE wagers Bryan's Straight Veg Society is too fundamentally fringe to be divisive--most people aren't vegans, after all--and they'll try to keep vaguely political angles in that realm, but we'll see. It may also be that they've seen the demographic data suggesting their audience leans pretty heavily liberal, and are thus happy to let people cheer Bryan (because he's right enough in their minds) or boo him (because he's an elitist jerk about it).

I did bring up the issue of compelling introductions to quite a few people. It was suggested to me that my repeated insistence on compelling introductions diminished all meaning the words have. Eventually, people got wind that I was the guy who kept insisting on compelling introductions and they started avoiding me. I think a lot of people were doing that because of what Dave was saying. Edit: Sorry for not being clear. Dave is a recruiter for one of the big new firms in the industry.

Apparently Bryan wants to wrestle Gran Metalik in a hair vs mask match.

They should run Nagata vs Ernest Miller so Nagata can get his win back 21 years later.

It was so good it even made Jeff break. Another time where I would love to be a fly on the wall when they all got to the back. They all had to be high fiving and hugging each other for that line.

I remember when it came out that Kane was super into politics, and was a Libertarian, I wanted them to repackage him, and incorporate that into an angle. Something like him using his real first name, and doing a Piper Pit parody of The Glen Beck Show. Then somehow moving it into a story where Glenn runs for Mayor of Death Valley, which results in him winning, and then you can have years of angles where they use topical political stories to fuel it. Also re-elections, impeachments, etc... Too late now!

Oh come the fuck on that was just Meltzer trying cover his one of his boys for his drunk tweeting mess this weekend. In order to Brock (and Heyman) to leave the WWE for AEW he would have to double the value that UFC and WWE give him. If they did that even Dixie Carter would laugh her ass off at that level of money mark

NJPW Los Angeles show ended up being a fun house show, nothing more, nothing less. I wouldn't say there is anything worth going out of your way to track down if this shows up on NJPW World. I could see maybe being a little grouchy if you paid $100 for ringside, but it seemed once the bell rang on the opening match that the crowd was receptive and into the show all night. The only time the crowd really died was during the main event whenever Tracy Williams went on offense. His presence compared to the other three competitors in the match was sorely lacking, and the crowd went spooky quiet whenever he took charge. He is competent but there's definitely a charisma black hole issue going on with him. Favorite match of the night was Marty Scurll/Brody King vs Killer Elite Squad. They had great chemistry with each other and Archer was damn awesome at working and goading the crowd whenever he was on the apron. Finlay and Chuck had a fun plunder-filled WWE-style hardcore match, and Jeff Cobb had a great Techwood Studio-level competitive squash against Karl Fredericks. But the biggest takeaway is that Shibata is doing a damn fine job with the LA Dojo Young Lions. The level of intensity and crispness of move execution of the Young Lions in ring is night and day compared to other US indy guys of similar experience level. Crowd reaction for the opening Young Lions match - Alex Coughlin vs Clark Connors - was polite at first but the crowd was on its feet by the end of the match due to the intensity of their ring work alone. You can tell Shibata is making them train and work hard at the LA Dojo. If they and Fredericks can stay injury free, it's going to be damn fun watching them develop these next couple of years.

As far as the quality of the match goes, Charlotte vs Becky vs Ronda would be ridiculously great. But after how hot the crowd has been for Becky to have her moment, I don't know how Charlotte doesn't come off like a 3rd wheel. And that's nothing against Charlotte. She's awesome and deserves a prominent spot at Mania. I'm not a big fan of a champion challenges her competition story, but you could do worse then Asuka calling out Charlotte wanting to avenge last year's WrestleMania and generally being pissed off that everyone is talking about fighting Ronda when she's right there waiting to kick someone's ass.

Also,

Reduce and Recycle Litter and they'll find you There's no place to hide The Planet will get you organic matter is all that remains

If they are the trashmen, I demand they pay for surfin bird

It's obvious Renee's non-answer is because they have no clue how to reconcile a heel character who is IRL married to a babyface announcer, and no interest in dealing with it in any creative way.

She's a witch! BURN HER!

When you see it...

To think the original Rude Awakening was a shitty looking DDT at one point.