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You are not a juicy person in the juicy house, you son of a gun.

Sid just looks like a star. Some dudes just got "it" and Sid is one of those guys. He always seemed like a cool dude, even when he was in the horsemen he had these little mini feuds with Motor City Madman, Big Cat and the Nightstalker and he was over like a MF. Sid rules.

Call me crazy, I don't think Alexa would be working an angle where a YouTuber dweeb said the kind of things that he said in that clip.

Hahahahahaha, holy shit.

Other favorite thing is that led to the incident later that year where The Sandman was dressing down Jamie Dundee for some sort of ECW locker room etiquette breach, and Dundee's response was "I was on Wrestlemania, bitch! What the fuck have you done?"

He accepts quite a few bookings for conventions and meet and greets still. I mean, he doesn't actually show up to any of them, but he accepts the booking.

Everything about the main event was solid gold. Wow. Including the very beginning

Congrats to Apollo Crews on finally getting his first title in WWE. Hoping this leads to bigger and better things for him. Also... Congrats to Malcolm Bivens on making his Monday Night Raw debut.

Arizona or Arkansas. In other words, Sid is from anywhere he darn well pleases?

Hawk and Animal did an autograph signing at my local mall that year, and my mom was less than pleased when she saw the 8x10 they signed for my brother and I.

Softball leagues run in the winter.

He was so fun to the point that it's been hard for me to get into heavier, bloated Rey with a history of bad knees. Rey Mysterio vs Psicosis from Bash at the Beach '96 is like some shit from a different planet.

Poor Apollo has no idea of the amount of paperwork is in his near future. Heavy is the head that wears the crown...

Patrick Ewing was discharged from the hospital today. ?

Ya'll fuckin' up if you don't watch the funeral for Vanguard-1. Shit is hilarious.

@MavsFan77 most of the guys on that list aren’t genuine NXT developmental talents. The Shield, Big E, Bray...spent the vast majority of their development in FCW. McIntyre was a 16-year veteran by the time he went to NXT. He was hardly developed there. On the female front, Asuka had a decade in the business before going to NXT. Not a developmental talent either. Among the guys you listed, only Otis and Corbin are true NXT developmental “success” stories. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that’s something they should hang their hat on. Now, the 4 Horsewomen are a genuine developmental success story, and a pretty fantastic one. Bayley, Sasha, and Flair had little to no experience beforehand, and Becky was coming off a long layoff. NXT deserves a lot of credit for them. But as time moves on, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that they were the exception and not the rule.

If Ortiz is Wyle E. Coyote, then Sammy is Daffy Duck. You can pin him, submit him, decapitate him, run him over, and spike his neck off a three story fall. The guy is still a star when it’s all said, and done.

Still hard to believe David was only 25 when he died, one of the most fiery babyfaces ever. You know the world was at his feet when Harley Race wanted to do the honours for him

I was not a big fan of the holographic chrome look he sported in WWE. He looked like a special #2 pencil you would buy at your school book fair.

Him mumbling that it's softer and realizing how dumb that is to bring up was so good. I'm laughing just thinking about it. Another guy with a strange, great career. Sometimes it appears he spaces out by missing a point made or whatever but that's okay. He is reformed Tony Schiavone and we have time for him. Commentary team was great all night I thought. Excalibur has toned down the "whoaohooooh" deals. He still doesn't feel entirely comfortable but I enjoy his work a lot.

I'm watching Great American Bash '89 a couple weeks ago. In the middle of the match w/ the Dynamic Dudes, they're chanting for Sid to the point where Sid kinda breaks character and does the N64 wrestling video game get on one knee and gesture with both your hands pose to the adulation of the crowd. If Ric Flair wasn't the champion at the time, someone would have ran out with a belt and put it around Sid's waist at that very moment. He was like a year and a half into the business and that over doing nothing but being a giant man with boulders for traps and a dry ass Jheri curl perm. That's why I cannot even be mad at him in shoot interviews where he thinks he was better than everyone else. He was working with and against guys who had been in the business for several years and struggled to get half a pop. He came in and became a star very quickly and didn't have to have a big feud or a series of awesome matches to do it or any other pre-requisite of paying dues.

Surprised he isn’t wearing pooka shells.

Two spots in a row. First an escape of the sort we've seen a bunch but that is always entertaining: Taverne immediately follows this by stalking after Hunter and trying for a dropkick: This escape to a top wristlock is amazing:

We interrupt this thread to bring you the greatest thing in the history of the world:

From Mad Magazine #271. I remembered this after seeing that "2020 Presidential Election" Chess Set commercial this morning. If this had been a real thing in the 80's, I would have thrown a massive temper tantrum until my parents bought it: (You probably couldn't get away with the Adrian Adonis joke today. Ugh.)

Hangman had me dying when he started his speech in that funeral scene. Lots of amazing quotes from everyone in that segment.

What the hell did they do to Arn?!?

I remember back in '06-'07 People were saying that Finlay was Vince's favorite wrestler at the time and that he would've gotten a World title run if it wasn't for his age. Finlay is one of my all time favorites and I wish he had a run. It never appeared to me that he was 50 or close to it at the time. Looking back, especially after watching the Taker Documentary, he was light years ahead of where HHH and Taker have been in the past 5 years as workers. It's bad enough that both Taker and Hunter get to work 25 to 35 minutes or more for the matches they do have where they are quickly blown up and have to resort to melodrama for storytelling. Finlay was working a full time schedule and never seemed out of place, in fact he was steps ahead of everyone and made Batista, Lashley and guys like that better worker being in the ring with them. His ECW title run was cool atleast

I definitely think there has to be a distinction between talent that is genuinely *developed* by the NXT/Performance Center system and experienced talent that already knows what they’re doing but gets shined up by being pushed on NXT TV. Because these are very different things. Going back to Asuka for an example, NXT didn’t develop her, but she clearly benefitted from being pushed as an ace on NXT for a year prior to going to the main roster. (That said, there doesn’t really seem to be an consistency, as far as “push on NXT=you’re instantly over on the main roster.” Plenty of pushed NXT acts are met lukewarmly on the main roster.) I think the issue, long-term, is that if you look at the recent history of NXT, their “success” stories have come far more from the latter category than the former (especially on the men’s side). So...what’s the point of throwing huge amounts of money into the actual developmental system if it’s not working? There’s a significant problem with developmental that’s being covered over by all the Indy signings they’ve done over the past few years. And you have to lay that at the feet of the guy who engineered the whole thing.

Holy shit, one pup born almost a week late. Guess single-puppy litters are rare and high risk (especially since it’s a first time mother), but if this little fucker survives, he’s ours!

Very true, he seems to take the pin more than anyone else in that group, gets his ass kicked repeteadly and loves playing a fool yet I want to see more of him every week. Kid’s got a bright future and he pretty much won the wrestling lottery by being chosen to be right next to Jericho for this past year.

That reminds me of this scene though I think this one had more to do with how much the character was hated by viewers than any problems with Diana Muldaur.

BATB 96 was the first PPV I had ordered since WMVI. My friends and I had moved away from wrestling for a while. I happened to catch the Nitro where Hall debuted, and started watching again. So, we were all intrigued who the third man was going to be (my friend who never really watched wrestling called it as being Hogan) and decided to watch the show at my house. We were still kind of getting settled and chatting and stuff when the Rey/Psicosis match started. A couple minutes in, we were transfixed on the match and losing our minds over the shit they were pulling off. Hell, even my dad stopped in the room and couldn't look away. He's always hated wrestling. You are so right that it was like something from another planet. An hour later, we were still trying to figure out what we'd just seen.

The knee injury was real. Now the severity of it...yeah, that can be questioned.

@supremebve That was a really good review! Glad you enjoyed it. @Smelly McUgly I've got a ton of preconceived notions about modern WWE and their go-go-go big bomb overkill dozens of kick-outs main event big match epic epic epic style. I was expecting this to be that and I was kind of looking forward to complaining about it while trying to keep an open mind. Imagine my surprise when this match turned out to be built around old-fashioned body part psychology! I was not expecting that at all. And these two young ladies did a tremendous job of working in that style. There was remarkable athleticism, a blistering but not frenetic pace, stiffness, stuff that looked like it really hurt, some pretty damned good selling... Here's a kind of pro wrestling hipster complaint you often see online: Why do all that limb work just to blow it off at the end? or maybe Why do all that limb work for it not to lead into the finish at all? And I get it, I really do... but starting a match off with some limb work before building to bigger spots has been something that wrestlers have been doing since at least the 1950s and probably since the very beginning of pro wrestling itself. How many matches are there, really, where the limb work is sold until the end and really leads to something? Well, lo and behold, Sasha and Becky sell the limb work even after the match is over, and it leads to a great false finish and ties into the ending of the match. And it's just lovely. I can see why people wish it would happen far more often. It was a very well-worked and enjoyable pro wrestling match. But, yikes, all of the stuff around it that had nothing to do with Sasha and Becky... For example: The often unnecessarily hyper-kinetic camera work. It wasn't as bad in this match as it is in a lot of other big WWE matches (maybe because this match was not about big bombs and near-falls), but it was still there and I still can't get used to it. The dueling chants that seemed disconnected from what was happening in the ring. Sasha was putting on a great heel performance, but the crowd essentially wasn't reacting to that. How I wish they were booing her. The commentary. They were really good at getting over the story of the match and explaining the moves and the psychology, but any time they tried to inject emotion into the match it felt forced and phony. "Ladies and gentlemen. This... is passion. This... is determination." with zero sincerity and all the enthusiasm of reading the laundry tags on your new t-shirt. It took me out of things every time When they were reacting to what was happening in the ring? Good. When they were disingenuously reading off pre-prepared talking points? Very, very bad. The ref constantly drawing attention to himself. Look at me in here, reffing up a storm! The backstory. Hey, you know those two wrestlers who were close friends? ZOMG! One of them turned on the other! Anyway, none of that crap is on Becky or Sasha. They were great. If there was some grainy hand-held footage of this match where you couldn't hear the crowd chanting, I think I'd like it 5000 times more. It's like WWE is a giant machine meant to turn me and people like me off of pro wrestling, even when the work itself is beyond reproach.

It's probably just me, but I hate hate Rey's cosplay gear. All of them. I hate when he would bust them out at Wrestlemania. That purple monstrosity actively takes away from the Halloween Havoc match for me. His regular WCW gear was sweet though.

I imagine much of life comes easy when you look like he does.

Ultimo's pink gear was better than Rey's Spiderman gear, FIGHT ME

After a shitty week, I needed this.

Great news, because the problem with that title is definitely that it was silver instead of gold.

We should have a thread where we just bitch about WWWF stuff the way we do current wrestling. ”Fellas, ya hear about this phony baloney tournament in Rio de Janeiro? Who’s Toots Mondt kiddin’? The audience hears about that little chestnut and they’re gonna 23 skidoo.”

So Okada wasn't there?

Dude, next time you get in an argument on here about WWE booking or whatever, please DON'T bring up Hana Kimura's suicide.

And thus I became an obnoxious smark who cheered all the heels and booed all the faces. The more WWF went all-in on sweeping Bret under the rug and trying to tell me I should be happy about the ascent of HBK, the more I rejected him and by extension every other face on the roster (didn't hurt that Foley, Vader, and Austin had all just come in and were all clearly cooler, nevermind better, than the tools in the midcard and especially HBK, who I was already inclined to think was a much more natural heel and sounded insincere phony every time he tried to cut the "top babyface" style promo a WWF champ is expected to cut. Even The Undertaker became somewhat Guilty By Association; if he was a WWF face there had to be something wrong with him). It was extremely easy to start liking WCW better, especially once the NWO angle started up. For the first time, but surely not the last, the WWF seemed to be telling me that my fandom and my fan dollar Was Not Wanted. HBK coming in on zipline while Bret got his usual entrance didn't make HBK cool or exciting, it made Bret look disrespected that even as champ and company torch bearer for 3 years he somehow wasn't seen worth of his own special Wrestlemania entrance. Ditto to having it end 1-0 which, on top of what I mentioned in my previous post, I also interpreted as disrespectful and/or a strain of my credulity (I wasn't quite internet-smarky enough to know "burial" as a term but if I had I'd probably have been using it in my dismay over this result. You're telling me Bret, who's been beating Michaels consistently over the last 3 years and successfully defended championships against him several times before, suddenly can't get a fall on him in 60 whole minutes? Bret somehow isn't WORTHY of the respect of at least going down 2-1? Get the fuck outta here! Gorilla Monsoon wasn't fan friendly for spontaneously adding sudden death over time to ensure a definitive winner, he was ratfucking Bret by arbitrarily & spontaneously changing the rules of the match after the fact to sabotage part the traditional Champion's Advantage (retain the belt on a draw). For Gorilla -- 1/2 of the primary reason I even got in to watching wrestling regularly in the first place -- to do this to my favorite and the first top guy I ever embraced (and almost the last) was like a betrayal. Imagine Mr. Rogers flicking a cigarette at a child and telling him to eat shit for being so stupid as to believe everyone is special. That's Gorilla Monsoon going in the tank for HBK, for me. I don't think I even saw the "get him the fuck out of my ring" stuff because I turned it off rather than subject myself to Vince McMahon spazzing about "the boyhood dream" as if a WRESTLER wanting to be the WORLD CHAMPION OF WRESTLING is somehow such a unique fuckin' aspiration. And then, I guess so Bret couldn't overshadow HBK from the under-card and remind people who was really the best like he'd done during Diesel's reign, Bret was just off TV entirely for six months, effectively retired, unable to be an antidote to Michaels being shoved down my throat. The more Vince tried to tell me I should LOVE Shawn Michaels, the more determined I became to despise him forever. And I pretty much did. And it all started with Wrestlemania 12, which I'd bought with my own money, recorded with a tape I'd bought with my own money, blew off phone calls and did chores early so I'd have the afternoon clear and free to watch interrupted, and before it was even officially over I never wanted to see it again.

Frank Costanza would be proud.

Woah woah woah, we're putting McMichael sub-Roma now? Gotta disagree sir - "naturally charismatic big dude that is sloppy and dangerous in the ring" was already a defined Horsemen archetype and Mongo carried himself like a Horseman in a way more legit way than Roma. Roma to me is an early version of the 10.0 Perfect Execution Guy in the ring and had go away heat. Give me Mongo dropping fools with sloppy tombstones and talking shit into the camera over Roma every time.