Leaderboard

That *you'd* want to avoid.

Maybe everyone is at fault and who gives a shit.

So NJPW builds their USA expansion around The Elite, then The Elite announces that nah, we are leaving and starting our own company that will operate in USA... Why would NJPW be happy with that and continue promoting them past WK?

That is ridiculous that they had a #1 contender win a match for a date she wouldn't be able to make. I love an AEW defense but that is so bad.

The Elite leaving pretty much sank the possibility of a successful American expansion, and Omega and the Bucks used their NJPW-created stardom as a launching pad to start a rival organization that helped to kill the aforementioned expansion. And NJPW is supposed to promote and thank them? Ridiculous. Also, the answer to "who gives a shit" here is always "a board full of devoted wrestling fans," so I'm not sure why that ever gets rolled out.

That pettiness came from Omega and the Bucks, not NJPW. NJPW were the ones that wanted to put Omega over Tanahashi then run Omega/Okada at MSG, Kenny turned it down then pouted on Twitter for weeks about NJPW not catering to his artist self whining because he didn't get his match with Ibushi. The Bucks blew off the Tag League, then touted on social media how it wasn't worth their time and bitched about the money, then politicked their way into the Tag Title match at the Dome anyway with an angle that was so well recieved that you could hear a gnat fart in the building. Those three hampered the western expansion with getting NJPW to book the entire thing around them, resulting in shows that were largely panned as being glorified RoH shows because RoH was already booking every show around The Elite. They used NJPW's exposure and talent and RoH's talent and production to kick start their promotion they and their fans act as if NJPW and RoH owed them a Heroes sendoff when they should've gotten the Giving Watts notice treatment, and now people want to act like AEW would be doing NJPW and RoH a favor by daning to work with them. The idea that NJPW and RoH are the petty ones is some high end revisionist history.

I know objectively that's a real wrestler and I've seen match footage with my own two eyes but every time I see someone mention the wrestler named "Big Daddy Yum Yum" my first response is still "that sounds made up."

Exactly. Its not even completely a pettiness deal. Bucks and Omega expecting some kind of nice sendoff was arrogant bullshit on their parts. FFS they shit talked NJPW to Meltzer before they even left. Why the hell would they be given a nice sendoff?

Great photo. Liking how Zelina Vega's covering Rey's face up with her hand. Never break up Andrade and Zelina.

Simple explanation they should've given: Kris's visa had expired and she had to go back to her home planet to get things straightened out.

I have a hard time writing an obit on NJPW's "golden age" when they still have Tana, Naito, Jay White, etc. etc. etc. Okay, maybe the plans for major US expansion got back-burnered, but that's hardly the end of the world. I'd venture to say that they didn't lose a single hardcore fan as a result of the aborted expansion. And before anyone jumps in babbling about the casual fans, that isn't NJPW's market in the States and never has been. The hardcores (like me) are the ones buying merch as fast as they can get it, NJPW is just fine as a Japanese promotion with a strong niche fanbase in the US.

Forget Tana. Shooter Stevens vs Yano is the match.

Oh yeah, 40 minute matches between Nick Aldis and Hiroshi Tanahashi is what the people really want.

NJPW and NWA. Shooter Stevens vs Tana.

Pro wrestling should always offer variety in styles. Might be the single biggest problem I have with WWE, how samey so many matches are.

I now want Britt Baker to squash Riho AND Statlander just to read the online meltdowns here afterward.

The rankings are a joke and should be abolished.

I mean, a group of authors managed to keep consistent story points and knowledge of what each were doing through 381 books, why the hell did Lucasfilm and Disney let 5 movies get out of control?

They really need to get this shit straight.

I believe you mean they are working out every wide receiver that was once on the Patriots roster at any time this season this morning in anticipation of a possible Super Bowl matchup. At least the Saints steal opponents game plans the old fashioned way. 2 weeks of Patriots/Saints Super Bowl hype might legit make me quit football if it happens.

The other thing that may have sunk NJPW conquering the US is that while there are undoubtedly a contingent of real fans, a lot the "New Japan fans" in the States are actually "the last half of WrestleKingdom" fans. What I mean is, having a big show in the states or putting big matches on someone else's show is a what most people want. They want Okada/Omega or Tanahashi/Ibushi or Ospreay/Takahashi. Some fans want the G1, but most fans just want the finals. An actual touring promotion with all the meaningless 6 and 8-man tags is way harder to sell without more developed TV (or online) presence. Even with the Elite on the roster, that's still only maximum two matches a card they could carry as names and I'm not convinced NJPW would have got them as over as AEW did to support that anyway. That being said, a full on NJPW:USA with a dedicated roster and team may have been another story and if that's the thing that AEW kiboshed I'd be pissed too. I wouldn't blame anyone though. Everyone saw the hole in the market, it was just a matter of who got there and New Japan tried but didn't quite get there in time. That's business, baby.

NXT: 831,000. AEW: 0. ?

Whoa, that's one helluva comparison that I think we can all agree on. And to tie it together you have Bully Ray working there in some capacity with them doing some shows at the 2300 Arena. But I would argue that the lowest of lows for ECW while still bad were still not as bad as it is for ROH.

That just accentuates the parallels between ROH and ECW even more. Both gained their original cult followings during a relative down period during the main U S. players tenure on top (93-96 for WWF and WCW, and then post-Attitude/pre-Cena in the main event for WWE). And then as both upstart promotions rise in prominence, the largest player in the game starts to scoop talent up, the house style changes to slowly integrate more and more elements that got the upstarts noticed to begin with, and then the upstarts become less special and husks of their former selves.

This might well be an age thing... Recall just how bad 1990s WWE was. Suddenly, there was this little fed in Philly that was the coolest thing most of us had ever seen... With the benefit of hindsight it's easy to say that ROH delivered a superior wrestling product, but those of us that remember the early days of ECW will never forget how it made us feel.

I for one am shocked, just shocked, that a wrestling promotion would bury talent on their way out of the promotion.

They aren't indentured servants. They took a far better deal as any reasonable person would. They gave proper notice unlike Styles, Gallows, and Anderson by the sounds of it. Those three helped their western expansion tremendously. Instead of gratitude or graciousness, there was pettiness in how they handled the Omega/Tanahashi build and the NY Dash show. They along with ROH then refused to work with AEW to their own detriment. ROH is a husk of its former self and NJPW basically just announced the death of their own US expansion by saying they're done with TV in that market. There is little chance they build on what they have in a meaningful way without tv. They can run all the rinky dink shows in America they want now tho.

That is why you can never go wrong with gift cards.

Reunited and it feels so good...

Those people were hanging from the rafters and I won't hear different.

Honestly, I think there are more threads picked up from TLJ than dropped. Various thoughts: Kylo Ren: I think he spends most of the movie pissed off about Palpatine. His entire character arc in TLJ was to hit the point where he (they) could and should move on from everything that came before, and here, after all that, is not just Palpatine back, but Palpatine revealing that he was behind everything from the get go. Moreover, he has a fleet that dwarfs the First Order's. He chafes under this (and probably the realization that even if everything goes well, he'll just be saddled with all of the Sith spirits within him) from the get go, and you have to figure that the understanding of the futility of what he thought he had been attempting, as much was what Leia ultimately does, drives him away from his current path. On Your Left: This feels fairly wonky relative to everyone NOT showing up in Last Jedi, especially since Leia had been so sure, to the point that it had been the crux of her plan. They just had to get to Crait so everyone could reach them. No one shows up. So what changed? Lando's persuasive? Nah. What changed is that Palpatine came back. The people who thought the First Order might not have been so bad (there sure were a lot of Separatists back in the day, after all, etc.) didn't want to deal with the Final Order. General Poe: he learns his lesson from the last movie. His ultimate plan is basically Leia's from TLJ but on the offensive instead of the defensive. Sure, fine, whatever. Luke: Again, the biggest shock to me is that they didn't retcon his screw up and make it all Palpatine forcing fear into him or whatever. In a lot of ways, what he experienced that was revealed in TLJ and what he experiences in TLJ set him up to give Rey the speech she needs to hear.

Look...You can get the possibility of Matt Taven vs anyone from NJPW or you can have Cage, Moose, Callihan, and various tag teams mixing it up with dudes from NJPW. Personally, I'll take SANADA giving the Skull End to Callihan and becoming Impact world champion. No matter what though, they're still on access so nothing is going to improve business that much, but at least it's better than what ROH is now.

Not to mention that Nyla Rose's suspension is up on 1/1 and now she immediately gets a title shot.

Its been pretty damn fun, but it doesn't quite go that far for me. I have at 3 with the average girl show (that title is too damn long). Ascendance of a Bookworm and Kemono Mask were the best isekais to me this season. Both of those are great shows and well worth checking out.

Well, if anybody wants to read it, at least we've got this thread for 20 pages worth of drunk-ass reviews I did of AXS

Isn't that what they usually do tho? Like when Bryan won the title it was straight into the Kane feud.

Wrestling is already an incredibly niche product here in the US. NJPW would be even more niche than that. If you're already more niche than wrestling itself then the best thing you could do is stick to your guns, deliver what your US fans want to see, and not give a shit about trying to have a white dude at the top. This all also ignores that US wrestling hinges on weekly TV, which NJPW doesn't do or book for. They're not going to double their roster just to have a core American roster and they weren't going to be flying their Japanese stars back and forth. That's why the US expansion was doomed from the start and always half baked. It was always contingent on working in tandem with ROH, which is just asking for trouble. Whenever something gets announced without any additional details chances are they haven't worked everything out or enough things out to be successful. And none of this even touches on how contracts used to work with NJPW. Doing contracts year to year is asking to one day be bitten in the ass. In fact, they were already bitten in the ass by Styles, Gallows, Anderson, Nakamura, and Devitt. No one is beholden to any one company and the Bucks, Kenny, and Cody all saw a bigger opportunity running their own promotion than doing whatever it was that NJPW was trying to do, which apparently was going to be cards that didn't even get promoted that well. Plus, they still wanted to work with NJPW, it would have been better for NJPW to co-promote their shows with AEW than ROH, and NJPW still chose ROH. The backbone of the US expansion was always going to be co-promoting with a US promotion. NJPW could have still had their relationship with Omega, the Bucks, and Cody, but because they didn't pledge fealty or whatever the fuck, NJPW stuck with ROH. EDIT: One final note about pettiness, NJPW could have gone back to working with Impact, but they still chose not to because fucking YEARS AGO with an entirely different leadership and booking committee they chose to make NJPW stars look like shit. For Christs sake, you don't even need to co-promote with AEW. You could do something with Impact!! And yet, no, because of shit that happened when it was an entirely different company. Hell, working with Impact would probably get NJPW stuff promoted on AXS again.

Yeah, I've got some bad news for you...

Safe to say that City is the only thing to worry about at this stage.

Whilst it is possible to state a theory that Black Panther is very much an American film made by Americans, projecting a fantastical American vision of (a fictional country in) Africa that would be meaningless to most actual Africans... Gilliam is doing a pretty shit job of making that point. And as far as I know, most African people who watched Black Panther thought it was brilliant. It's one thing to go all 'cultural studies professor being contrarion' on matters such as these, but considering how much that movie meant to millions of people all around the world, criticising it strongly and without caveats is kind of a slap in the face to a lot of people. And when those people have spent a lot of their lives being patronised, marginalised or under-represented, to go after the one thing that says to them "These stories can be about people who look like you" kind of implies you have little or no respect for them personally. Which I would hope was not Gilliam's intention.

I went halfsies with my daughter's stepdad on the cost of a 2009 Saturn VUE that was literally driven to the grocery store and back since it has like 12K miles on it. We got it from a local auto auction for a pittance, but it needs a little work He is an auto-mechanic so I will foot the cost for parts and he'll provide the labor. My daughter will be a licensed motorist very soon with a vehicle of her own.

Dude spent most of his early life in Minnesota. How has he not learned how to do that yet?