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Showing content with the highest reputation on 05/07/2019 in all areas

  1. Let's b real, you can watch this for 3 hours or you can watch Firefly Fun House clips on YouTube for 3 minutes. Everyone knows the correct option.
    8 points
  2. I have harped on this before but I would kill for a televised wrestling program in 2019 that started exactly like Saturday Nights Main event, with four or five rapid-fire 30-second promos that are short and to the point and let me know exactly what Seth is going to burn down tonight. And 100 percent agreed on the multiple two-to-three segment matches per show. I am not saying we need to go back to the Russo era where three minutes is the average bell time, but there are certain wrestlers where when you see them come out you know it's going 20 to 25 minutes including entrances. And that would make the monthly PPV/Network specials mean more because why should anyone really get THAT hyped to see Finn Balor vs Bobby Lashley in a 20-minute PPV match when each of them have been in matches of that length every week for the last month?
    8 points
  3. This is going to go well. Prepare all of your popcorn.
    7 points
  4. You kicked my leg out from under my leg
    7 points
  5. I really dug these in-depth posts from OSJ and SK. One problem I see that sets apart this modern era from your more traditional (say) NWA/WCW shows is that the workers are under contract - they are always there. Rotating in monster heels (Abdullah, Killer Tim Brooks, The Great Kabuki) is not done anymore. When someone gets stale, well, they're still there. Terry Funk comes in, runs roughshod, has a series of championship matches of escalating stipulations and fails to win the big one--- and then he moves on for a while. That worked. Keeping everyone on the same level (50/50 booking) makes no one special. A hierarchy (that changes) is good but requires a finesse that no modern booker has shown to possess, let alone a group of often vetoed writers. Heck, even the bookers used to rotate out. Switching shows, enforced sabbaticals, "injuries" - I honestly don't know what would work but it is time to try something new. - RAF
    7 points
  6. Found a picture of who harpooned poor Rhaegal:
    7 points
  7. Christ I hope she busted into meetings like Owen holding his Slammys. I also hope every disagreement ended with her brandishing the Emmy like, "oh yeah? Well Mr. Emmy here agrees with me."
    6 points
  8. This was...this was just dire. Really really bad. Like so bad that you could foresee it being taught in classes in the future after USA/Fox find ways to cancel their TV deals and WWE is reduced to a small touring brand that can only run shows on their own network with Vince having to wrestle his son in the main events every night to save on costs as what NOT to do with your billion dollar company. It’s honestly baffling. You could quite literally hire someone off the street who had never watched wrestling before and ask them to write the show and it wouldn’t be as bad as this was. I guarantee said random person would not script something as straight butt as that Revival segment. The only reason to watch that segment is to experience the sound of thousands of people NOT laughing at something being presented to them as humour. You could have had the Usos come out and read the dictionary entry for comedy and elicited more laughter than that “funny” segment. I think that’s it for me for a while. Might check back in a month or so but might not
    6 points
  9. I'm pretty sure I know where they're getting ideas for these Revival humiliation bits. Vince finally saw the highly-underrated 1990 Charlie Sheen/Emilio Estevez classic Men At Work. I eagerly await the segment next week where the Revival find an airbag in one of their lockers only to pop it and end up covered in shit.
    6 points
  10. The companies pushed their own backstage politics by the mid-90s. WCW did it, WWF did it (that's how we got Vince McMahon, all-time-great heel, after all), and on top of that, both companies booked with obliviousness or hostility toward fans at numerous times. Combine those two things happening for a couple of decades now, and that's why you get fans who are more concerned with backstage goings-on than anything on screen...though the on-screen stuff is also still bad, I guess? I mean, I say this as someone who enjoys @SorceressKnight and their posting and who likes that SK will put forth reasoning behind their stances, but I'm arguing that SK's focus on "oh, it's the smarks, they've really sort of forced the company to go in directions where they acknowledge the backstage stuff" is really not fair. It's the other way around. And I argue that when the booking is hot AND focused on the ring action, fans are very quick to get sucked into that because most wrestling fans enjoy that more than anything. I go back to 2014-2016 NXT as my example. Didn't matter whether you had a lengthy NJPW run or if you were pretty much unknown before your NXT run, you could get over and make people believe in you in no time. The booking and focus on the in-front-of-the-curtains action got everyone over who could hang. It rehabilitated Tyson Kidd as a character, it got the big signings over from the American indies or from Japan, it got people over with minimal pre-NXT buzz like Tyler Breeze and Bayley, and it even got over the prototypical Vince McMahon signings like Charlotte. I will never find it fair to blame the fans for what the company is doing on screen because there are plentiful examples - and especially an example from the same fucking company - where they were able to re-focus the fans and get them to invest in the in-ring stuff and the promos and not what the booking team was doing. And NXT didn't treat its fans like they were the enemy! Faces actually got big wins! If you got over with the fans, you got a push commensurate with that overness! That approach allowed the fans to trust the company and that the company wouldn't pull the rug out from under them or troll them, and look what they got: An immensely popular show with a number of big shows/PPVs that people will talk about as classics years down the road. I don't believe that most smarks even like being the wrestling fan equivalent of Comic Book Guy, and I think it's easy to prove because you get a building full of smarks at Full Sail in 2015 or the ECW Arena in 1995 or wherever, and the booking and the storylines have emotional payoff, and they lose themselves in the show just like the purest-hearted kid fans do.
    5 points
  11. This goes into the “State of the Roster” discussion. Steve Austin was in WWE for about 8 years. That’s everything from The Ringmaster through to being GM & retiring. If, like me, you hadn’t seen him in WCW or ECW you saw his whole career play out from talented lower card lackey through to potential GOAT. 8 years. Dolph Ziggler debuted as Kerwin White’s caddy FIFTEEN FUCKING YEARS AGO! There is an argument to be made that Ziggler’s character hasn’t changed (outside of feel/heel turns) in the last 8 years. The same period of time that Austin had an entire career in. I know Vince doesn’t want to be giving away talent to AEW/NJPW/Impact but really, outside of the Reigns/Rollins/Bryan/Cena pillar type main event stars there is no reason to hang onto people so long. Let Harper go become a star in Japan then bring him back for a 1-2 year upper mid card run with that much more heat behind him. How much money did they leave on the table by doing NOTHING with a Balor/AJ/Good Bros stable & eventual fallout. The “Balor Club” could have been huge & then when Finn goes solo the “Balor Club is For Everyone” slogan makes that much more sense. I fucking hate being so invested in this shit & never seeing anything resembling a fully formed, cathartic storyline realised... Bryan was sheer force of will from an audience that was at breaking point. Kofi was something they fell into backwards & even then they nearly blew it. I honestly think I need to step away for a while...
    5 points
  12. Apparently my DVR revolted and didn't record the show. *Checks recap* Good job failed technology.
    5 points
  13. The idea they aren't getting more shit for doing a gay baiting angle with the Revival in the year 2019 is just amazing.
    5 points
  14. This. We know what it's going to be - Cole says "Welcome to Monday Night RAW" then someone's music hits and away we go with a promo. Someone interrupts and we get 1 of 2 things - an immediate 1 on 1 match for RIGHT NOW or a 3rd party coming out to make this "Our main event" in a tag match. Imagine starting the show by cutting halfway through the intro to go backstage where Joe is choking out Mysterio and people are trying to break it up. Cut to the ring and a women's match has just started but we missed the opening sequence/top rope move because of the backstage chaos. Now you have a reason to show that replay later on for everyone who missed it. I remember an idea I had when they announced Nakamura vs Cena taking place on SDL - It should have started just before the 2nd hour like every other TV semi main event. Maybe the announced main event is a women's or tag title match and they also have an announced segment for Miz TV. Cena v Nak gets to the 25 min mark and Graves announces that Miz TV will be pushed back to next week. They keep going and hit the 45 min mark. Now the 'main event' has to be pushed back a week as these 2 keep fighting. We hit the end of SDLs TV time and they are still going! "Everyone log into the WWE Network/App to see the conclusion of this insane match!" Break that mould and really push a boundary once in a while. Fuck it would be interesting. It's the same angle I see people bring up with a possible return for the 24/7 Hardcore Title. Imagine getting an alert on your phone saying "Switch on the app, Baron Corbin is being attacked by Lars Sullivan for the Hardcore title right now!" and this could happen half way through a show or even better, use it to disrupt other programs. "Velveteen Dream has attacked Hardcore champion Buddy Murphy! Stop watching the AEW PPV and tune into your WWE App to see it go down live right now!"
    5 points
  15. This is why I love my wife. I asked for pipe clamps for woodworking, the Beastie Boys Book, and a couple other things and that's exactly what I got.
    4 points
  16. I have a fuckton of movies in physical media. Love movies. I've dated girls who, when gift giving holidays arrive, have told me, "I'm not going to get you movies. I'm going to get you something you'll really like." WWE is like those exgirlfriends. "I know you enjoy movies and want to see more movies. Here's a 12 piece cookware set, happy birthday."
    4 points
  17. Omega's win over Okada in the G1 was basically a perfect example of how you pull of selling cumulative fatigue/damage against a dangerous opponent, while still delivering a main event the in-house crowd won't feel cheated by.
    4 points
  18. 4 points
  19. Has no one in the office thought to congratulate her and be glad she is on their team now? The older I get, the more I hate the WWE office.
    4 points
  20. I assume she walked around like Owen with his Slammy? Edit: beaten by seconds!
    4 points
  21. If Cole didn't say "We are hearing Sami was sent to a local sanitation facility" then that's a bad job by them.
    4 points
  22. The egg was impregnated by Muta's mist, Kabuki was Muta's father, so Kabuki is Akebono's grandfather. I actually spoke about this with Kabuki and he started laughing.
    4 points
  23. Equal snippage as well, so... 1. Honestly, this ties to another problem that WWE has as well: They don't follow through with the things they promise to let us see and why. Today on the Twitters, a stat came up: In the last year, WWE's social media had 237 announcements of what would happen on Raw and Smackdown, and only 95 of those things actually took place. Even if it'd be better to say it on the actual show, WWE's fanbase is social media-friendly, so in theory, WWE giving people the announcements of what would happen on social media could help things...IF WWE FOLLOWED THROUGH ON THOSE THINGS. As simple as "WWE promises you will see these things on Raw/Smackdown this week on their social media, and they GIVE YOU those things on social media" would do far more to get fans hyped up, and even be BETTER than your plan would be (you can hype the match up for up to a week in advance, and you don't need to waste too much time getting the fans on TV what they want. You can use that five extra minutes to show the Tweets leading up to the match, a short vignette to get people hyped. 2. The concept of everything being about money doesn't work, because ultimately, the fact we're still going with evil McMahons vs. pissed-off employees in 2019 is partially because money-wise, the toothpaste is out of the tube. The very nature of "I care about how much money I can make in this industry" is inherently a heel position to take, and "I don't care about the money, I just love wrestling. If these asshole McMahons don't like it, they can fire me, and I'd happily go wrestle for a hot dog and a handshake somewhere else just so I can wrestle for all you great fans" is inherently the face position to take. If you take the position that everything should be about the money, then by WWE's ruleset, you just turned every single superstar on the roster into bad guys (and no matter what the smark 'turn them heel, they'd be so much better!' argument is...ultimately, another problem WWE has is that the heroes' side of the coin has been weak for a long time, and casual fans- especially kids- want to cheer the heroes for doing heroic things, not cheer the villains for being really, really good at their job.) 3. To follow these, this ties to another problem for why the W/L column needs to mean something without the money factor. You still need the titles, but you need to find a way to make the W/L column mean something...but that ties into 4... 4. Luckily to that, this is a benefit where fans are just too smart for their own good now, because it would be incredibly easy to play into the fans' real-life dissatisfaction ("My favorite wrestler isn't getting enough opportunities to wrestle! I know that they could be a megastar if the big mean WWE only gave them a CHANCE!") and turn this into a way to make wins and losses matter. A simple "if a wrestler has a win streak of a certain length of time (say, 5 match win streak for the US/IC/Tag/women's titles, 10 for the World Title), then they can demand a title shot" is really all you need to blow that out of the water. Now, every wrestler is desperate for a chance- ANY chance- to wrestle on the show. Even if it means wrestling in a match that has no real stakes and is just there to eat up some time, the stakes are there: Both these wrestlers are getting a chance to wrestle on the show, and if they win, it will inherently get them closer to a title opportunity. Every match matters. Even this throwaway match is a chance for your favorite to get one step closer to the title...and if you're doing it, it may have to do something gutsy and have the "Open Challenge winner" win the title, in a "someone like a Cedric Alexander randomly shows up on Raw about once a month, but when he does, he happens to win, and no one notices- and finally a friend of Alexander's says "wait a second. You won five matches in a row! You can challenge for the US Title now!"...and Alexander does, and he wins...and suddenly he's gone from an afterthought to the champion....and in the process, you make sure that every level of match has to be watched, and people have to try and make sure no win streak is going beyond their notice. 5. I agree with this, but ultimately I think that the "tag teams need to mean something" thing needs to be a little lessened. Personally, I'm not asking for much in the "tag teams need to mean something": Just give me "the team has a name, the team has a tag team finisher, the team tries to dress alike" and I'll recognize them as a tag team. Just do that little and I'll recognize the two as a team. 6. This is a problem, because I'd say making it the announcers' job for most of this stuff is the problem. The wrestlers have to show why people should cheer them...and right now we see the different problem: If everybody in WWE is a really, really good wrestler, then no one is. You can't just use "you should cheer this person because they're a good wrestler" because even the worst wrestler on the WWE roster is still at least pretty good, and even "you should cheer them because they're an indie standout who finally made the biggest stage" doesn't matter since the majority of the roster had some good indie experience (or at least solid NXT experience, which is WWE's super-indie.) When that happens, you NEED more backstage and in-ring interviews, because now we have to find those things that make this person, in particular, special. Leaving that stuff to the announcers just leads to the problems of the announcers adding character traits to wrestlers and trying to make it their gimmick when it has nothing to do with their in-ring style or how they act as a performer outside the ring...and at the worst cases, can lead to "this wrestler was a heel last week because the announcers hated them, but this week they say they're good people so they're heroes now, I guess." Tying into what'd effectively be 7: This is also the problem. Again, having a bunch of long matches doesn't work- because it ignores that "not all matches SHOULD be long." Again, it boils down to: If everything is special, then nothing is. If you say "okay, this match needs to go 12 minutes because it's a match and should go 12 minutes", then it's more static than anything else. If someone like Roman Reigns is going 12 minutes with guys like The B-Team, that's not going to help anyone. The B-Team won't look like more of a credible threat to Roman Reigns in the future...but Roman Reigns will look worse because he couldn't put these losers away early at best, and look like kind of a dick who was toying with these guys out of a perverse satisfaction in beating them up at worst.That's an example of "it's long for the sake of being long", and that's not a good thing. If someone's better served beating some jobbers into a gooey paste like Roman is, then he should be getting very short, quick squashes, and make people wait to see him face someone who can make Roman break a sweat. Throw in that, by and large, one of the common threads about people's dissatisfaction about the show is "we want WWE to explore the room more. They have this great roster, we want to see them USE THEM", then more people should be used on the show as a result.
    4 points
  24. Lots of good stuff, excuse the snippage... The most egregious problem can be summarized in the phrase "twenty-minute promos". Lost in the welter of McMahon-land nonsense is the concept that the ONLY reason for a promo of any length is to build interest in an upcoming match. Having done a good bit of public speaking wherein the idea was to get your point across succinctly we had a saying that "Anything over two minutes is flattering your ego, anything over five minutes is bullshit, and anything over ten minutes will be forgotten as soon as you sit down." Harsh, but there's a good bit of truth to it. Can you imagine a baseball game starting with having the two starting pitchers jabbering on for twenty minutes? Of course not. There's a lot of stuff that JCP/WCW gets demonized for and rightly so, but a lot of things they did right. Let's look at The Main Event show as an example. You knew that you were going to get two (more often three matches) in a one-hour show, or basically three segments of around twelve minutes a match. Your announcers kicked things off with a re-cap of what you were going to see and why and the opening segment was never more than five minutes including the necessary soundbites. We don't need wrestlers reciting Prospero's soliloquy from The Tempest; we need to know who is fighting who and why and that's it. Despite Kevin Dunn's babbling that RAW and SDL are not "wrestling" programs, I fully believe that the vast majority of viewers are tuning in because that's exactly what they want to watch, a wrestling program, with, ya know... wrestling as the focus. Hopefully AEW will correct a lot of the mistakes that WWE seems dedicated to repeating ad nauseum. Here's part of what I think makes for compelling television: 1. Let us know what we're going to see and why. Five minutes at the top of a show is all the time that you need to catch everybody up including viewers who have never seen the product before. Here's a fun experiment, get a casual US fan to watch NJPW for the first time, by the end of the show they'll have a pretty solid idea of who everyone that participated is and what the issues are. 2. To follow the thought from (1.): Everything should be about $$$, championships = $$$ (endorsement dollars, public appearance fees, yadda-yadda-yadda) yeah, I know that the "endorsement dollars" is bullshit, but it sounds good on TV and lends gravitas to the proceedings. You pretty much need your World title, your secondary title (I'm very fond of the TV title with the stipulation that it is defended every week or at least every month on TV with a fifteen or twenty-minute time limit. I loved the feature on WCW as you always new that you were going to get a decent-length of a match even if their twenty minutes was more like twelve in real time. 3. To follow (1.) and (2.) now you have reasons why the W/L column means something. Is anyone trying to sign a guy with .253 Batting Average as their spokesperson? I rather think not. So you have your top belt, a secondary title that should be used the way that the IC belt was back in the day, the holder of the IC belt was automatically the #1 contender. To go for the championship, you have to vacate your belt, opening the storyline to a scramble for the spot. A loss sends the challenger back down the ranks to rebuild. 4. If the W/L column has meaning, you enhance it by actively ranking your top-ten. I played top-level competitive darts for a lot of years, I didn't get to just waltz into a tournament and challenge Phil Taylor or Adrian Lewis (I'd have gotten my ass handed to me, but that's neither here nor there), if you're going to have one of your top-ten or champs in a squash match, formulate a REASON as to why this person is getting a shot. Winning a Battle Royale is always a good and believable scenario. 5. Tag-teams need to mean something and not be hastily thrown-together pairings that mean nothing, (though there's a lot of mileage in milking the "guy suddenly needs a partner" trope. 6. Backstage and in-ring interviews. Less is more. Refer to (1.), we know the motivation, we know the stakes, we don't need to hear any of that re-hashed by the wrestlers, that's the announcers' job. What we need to hear from the wrestlers is WHY we should be rooting for X as opposed to Z. None of that takes more than a minute or two to get across. Follow this general outline and you can easily get in three quality matches and several interview/promo segments to build up interest in next week's show. One of the big things that has been almost lost in these days of the WWE stranglehold on the business is the art of selling the next show. Again, we have to look back to the JCP/WCW days to see how this was done right. Dusty Rhodes gets lots of flack for his more egregious sins of pushing himself, holding down younger talent, cronyism, etc. but one thing that he did very, very well was to never lose sight of the primary goal once you had the audience seated: Get them to buy a ticket to next week's show on the way out. You need to keep that same focus in mind for a television show, we can laugh about phrases like "must-see tv", and yeah, they sound corny, but the idea is fundamentally sound. This isn't a daytime soap opera where you can tune in Monday and Friday and not feel like you missed anything. You need to stress that if you miss an episode, you are missing something IMPORTANT. Will AEW follow any/all of these guidelines? I suspect that they will, they've proven that they are a fairly sharp group of entrepreneurs with a great deal of experience learning what works and what doesn't. A national wrestling program that is actually focussed on wrestling first and foremost is something that I think will do surprisingly well versus RAW is Talk. What the braintrust at McMahonland has failed to understand is that without someone like a Rock, Austin, Punk, etc. you can't get away with long-winded scripted promos. The performers who are capable of carrying a lengthy talk-segment are very few, it's really foolish to try and pound people into a square-peg round-hole scenario like that. What's outlined above is do-able by even the least articulate of public speakers.
    4 points
  25. Sullivan has no interest in protecting Asgard, get the fuck outta here!
    4 points
  26. I don’t know that there’s another woman whose as good of a promo as Tessa without even discussing her wrestling!
    3 points
  27. Let's not kid ourselves, it's always been in the toilet. A handful of bright moments over the years ever since that hashtag trended on Twitter isn't enough to get the stink off how they treat the women's division. Give them their own show. Bundle it together with 205 Live (like they do with SD/205 currently), move it to Florida. Anything to get them more time, because it's just not fair. I love the cruiserweights, but Carmella is more over than the most over person on 205 Live. But yet, they have their own show.
    3 points
  28. To be fair, in Vince's coke addled brain, there's only one Uso. He just moves extremely fast.
    3 points
  29. Damn it missed it. Anyway that guy in the crowd needs to be on RAW as part of the Wild Card Rule
    3 points
  30. That's exactly what a highly sentient robot would say to avoid suspicion.
    3 points
  31. If you posting here, its too late for you. RIP
    3 points
  32. "You don't need to hire a graphic designer. My nephew knows photoshop, he can throw something together."
    3 points
  33. I’ve been sliding in this direction for a while now but this is finally the episode that made me think I don’t want to watch Raw anymore. Not lower on the priority list, but pretty much off the list. I was going to skip it last night but my friend had to bail on our plans so I watched and that first hour killed my interest. Two promo segments back to back (just cause Vince didn’t leave the ring doesn’t mean it’s the same promo) and then a looooong tag featuring Crowd Killer Corbin? Bryan/Kofi was enough of a hook to get me to stay but as good as that match was I could’ve watched it the next day without the commercials and been much happier. I did LOL at the Revival diving head first into these dumb skits and essentially robbing them of their intended purpose. Are we supposed to think less of the Revival from this? Because I only think less of the company for doing that to them. At any rate, time for me to step away from this show for a while.
    3 points
  34. They should just give everyone a trophy if this is going to be a issue. WWE just seems to hate any success they can't take credit for. It's all rumor and speculation but time and time again we've seen this is how the company thinks and behaves.
    3 points
  35. You know what's weird? With this whole humiliation angle for the Revival, the people coming out looking even worse are the Usos. They've completely lost any kind of edge they once had. They used to be one of the most over acts in the company because of how different they were and now they're playing practical jokes and just being clowns. Anyway, WTF is the point of this wildcard thing if they break the rules of it in the very first night? And they wonder why people are tuning out in droves. Nothing matters. Nothing. Wins and losses don't matter. Continuity doesn't matter. Their own rules don't matter. To make matters worse, you have Big E on twitter roasting WWE for this completely unimaginative booking by saying "Everyone loves rematches!!!" We're really already running back Roman and Drew and Kofi and Bryan, and on free TV? With no build?
    3 points
  36. Yes, the newest shakeup was... Are you ready... So they have the "Wildcard" now, which means that in every Raw, up to 3 people from SDL can appear and wrestle. Same for SDL. So last night in the opening segment we got Daniel Bryan, Roman, and Kofi showing up. And then they broke their own new rule in the same fucking night they introduced it when later on Shane, Elias, and Lars all showed up. NOTHING MEANS ANYTHING Other than NJPW, I'm damn near close to torrenting Impact and MLW to watch those instead, although I think MLW is on YouTube. I can't take WWE's shitty production values, programming, format, and total disregard for rules.
    3 points
  37. @OSJ mentioned Dunn claiming that they're not making "a wrestling show." That's a huge part of the issue. The company is lead by Vince and Dunn, two guys who are deep-down ashamed of being involved in "rasslin" so they do all they can to make it not feel like wrestling. The problem is that people like wrestling. You take away all the conventional stuff and replace it with bullshit and it's no wonder fans are tuning out in droves. Instead of making a good wrestling show, they're trying to make a piss poor comedy/drama/variety show. I can get far better programs in all those categories literally anywhere else. Many people have said in the thread the same thing I believe -- nothing is going to change unless they completely revamp the show. They have been doing the "long promos and authority figures" thing FOR OVER TWENTY YEARS. I haven't listened to Meltzer yet today but I'm assuming they tried some sort of shakeup at Raw last night. Sight unseen, I'll tell you it's going to fail like the last one did. Nothing short of replacing the producer (Dunn) and head writer (Vince) will make a bit of difference. Fish rots from the head.
    3 points
  38. This makes sense, but honestly it's also weird since on paper, WWE should be able to do that now more than ever, even with them under contract. Between WWE having four recognized brands and multiple promotions (EVOLVE/SHINE, PROGRESS, wXw, Sendai Girls, possibly STARDOM now, etc.) who are recognized as good friends with WWE, they should theoretically be able to bring that concept back for a while. It'll never be truly the same because national television has killed a lot of the aura of the rotating monster heel even more than being under contract ever could, but you could conceivably have someone like, say, Killian Dain be "he shows up on NXT and runs roughshod there. When he finally gets toppled by the NXT champ, he goes to NXT-UK and runs roughshod there, and the same happens- then he gets the call and goes to Smackdown, then goes to Raw, and you get more time." By the same token, if someone like, say, Jinder Mahal has fallen to the point he's meaningless on the main roster? Demote him to NXT and let him have some time as the "he's a former WWE Champion, and this NXT guy beat him!", send him to NXT-UK for a while and do the same thing running roughshod there...hell, even be willing to try Jinder Mahal in EVOLVE and let the fans riot about it. Same token for the women- if Dana Brooke seems like she's ready to scratch the surface, but there's not as much she can learn by a return to the Performance Center? See if she learns a bit more and gets some street cred on a tour with STARDOM or Sendai Girls.
    3 points
  39. The opening segment is the perfect example of something going for too long. The crowd was hot for Vince/Roman, stayed interested when Bryan and Kofi appeared, but started to die when Drew showed up. Get to the point and move on to the next thing. Seth/AJ vs Lashley/Corbin was solid, if predictable. Samoa Joe walking behind Dominick was scary. The women's reaction to Lacey's peach cobbler-scented stationery was pretty funny. Firefly Funhouse got even darker. Dead bunnies and possibly sedated children, oh no! Roman vs Drew was good, expected the Shane/Elias interference. Charly chasing after Shane for an interview made me chuckle. The Miz getting a few licks on Shane was nicely done. Kofi vs Bryan was another good match. Ricochet vs Roode was fine, and they did try to patch the hole of Ricochet getting into the MITB match so soon after a loss. LHP and Viking Raiders/Hawkins & Ryder matches were just there. Mixed feelings on the Revival/Usos bit. On one hand, it was childish and demeaning. But it's in keeping with Attitude Era-style skits, and some fans want to see that sort of thing return to WWE. The Revival doing the dog poop slide should have been funnier, but they're not selling this as well as they should. I can appreciate if they rather not do this, but they're hurting the Usos in the process, who like the Revival, are just doing their jobs. I thought this show had good content, but it felt all over the place, no doubt because of the hub-bub surrounding it. Which has been Raw's biggest problem IMO. Individual segments are often very good. But the overall show has an outdated, slapdash presentation that weighs down everything.
    3 points
  40. Why are the Uso's fun loving babyfaces anyway. The whole reason for their success was the yin to the New Day's wacky fun loving yang and ultimately earning each other's respect for their different approaches to success. They are dying out there.
    3 points
  41. Wild card rule my ass. There like 5 Smackdown talents. I made a joke to my buddy about they were gonna get The Revival manscaping each other and damn if I wasn't close. Also are they still milking Roman's cancer? I might've heard the commentary wrong. Man Mercy did you have kill Rambling Rabbit? And one last thing. About one of the commericals, if some random guy comes up to me and suggests I should get more testosterone while I'm with my lady I'm knocking him the fuck out. Ok that is all.
    3 points
  42. I prefer close thread.
    3 points
  43. People get on my case when I call this company TNA instead of Impact. And while the product is better than it has been in the last 3 years, nothing says TNA more than what the 4th reboot/resurgence of the ECW idea in this company. I mean seriously who in 2019 is riding the ECW train besides Tommy Dreamer and everyone from PWInsider.com
    3 points
  44. WWE definitely needs a revamp and now. And not a shake up or some new call ups but serious, infrastructure changes. Their presentation is tired, their touring is an unsustainable grind, and the independent contractor system is an embarrassment that they should be ashamed to still be pulling in 2019, but on top of that you have baffling booking decisions and morally bankrupt business deals being struck despite their very clear PR downsides. Long story short, WWE is burning through any good will they might still have with fans and industry types and eventually that shit comes back to you. The frustrating part, and the thing that keeps fans from abandoning them entirely, is that they do get it right every now and again. Sometimes the fans force them to, sometimes they just know they've got something. But those moments are becoming less and less frequent while disappointments are the norm now. Literally the whole internet shit on Corbin being chosen as Angle's last opponent with good reason and they did it anyway. So they're either incompetent or they just don't care, neither of which is a good look for an entertainment company.
    3 points
  45. "Hey pal, I hear this meth stuff will make you shit your pants! Have Walter White, Jesse and Tuco all shit their britches while driving around! It's gold, I tell ya! HAHAHAHA!"
    3 points
  46. My brother and my sister-in-law made this documentary and are currently making the rounds on the festival circuit with it. It's good. Try to catch it if you can. Hopefully it gets picked up at some point and can end up on a major platform somewhere so everybody can see it.
    3 points
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