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I AM assuming this means that they offered to give them 8 super rare wrestling action figures for the TV deal.

I'm definitely into this card. I think in some ways Garcia is the perfect MJF opponent right now. One big Sports Entertainment spot, strengths that are more grounded and mat based as opposed to over the top high spots, really "gets it." White vs Briscoe is a really compelling singles match. I know it was meant as an insult but White being tofu means that he can mesh with a lot of different people in a lot of different ways while still expressing who he is and serving the overall match. Briscoe is obviously a great character to play off of in ring. I don't know if it's Danielson going down but Sting is suddenly added to a bunch of cards as part of his final run. Keeping him in six-mans or tags against entertaining undercard acts isn't a bad way to use him as an attraction right now. PENTA vs Swerve should be so dumb but in the best way possible. I prefer Swerve's stuff against someone else who's equally ridiculous as opposed to trying to fit him into a square whole. It's the RVD vs Benoit thing. Benoit kept trying to get RVD to sell the leg and it made for terrible matches. You'd rather see RVD vs Sabu. I'd rather see Swerve roll around against someone else who is going to be goofy and just take the whole thing over the top. It feels a little bit weird that the build to Keith Lee vs Shane Taylor led to Keith Lee vs Samoa Joe instead but you know they're going to make every point of impact awesome. Julia needs to get some heat back after Skye sprayed her. Velvet is coming off of injury and either can make an impact or can be Kiera Hoganed to ROH. I think she'll have something to prove here. Best overall Dynamite card for me in ages. Most of the usual suspects I try to avoid aren't booked for matches and I much prefer Penta in a singles match and Swerve in situations where I've already thrown my hands up anyway.

A Danny Garcia v Chicken full gear main event!

Samoa Joe vs Keith fucking Lee

Matt out here with flowers and a box of candy looking for the tapes.

Are you secretly the Houston wrestling library tapes?

I’m so down on pretty much every AEW story, but so up for all of these matches. Dave needs to introduce the Tony Khan Award for Matchmaker of the Year.

DAMMIT, DOLFAN!!! Amazing job on the thread title this week. Edit: Limitless vs Joe has the potential to be maximum BMMSM Switchblade vs Briscoe has the potential to heat the crowd up to a boiling point. I am pretty excited for this episode of Dynamite.

I did NOT expect the show to start out with Max vs Garcia! Figured that meant a big MJF angle to close the show. Friedman opening and closing shows works pretty well. Max did the dance better than Garcia, in my opinion. Body part psychology! These young guys have learned from fighting Bryan Danielson. That old footage of Jay White! OUTRUNNERS! Great squash. Luther looks great in black and white. I LOVED Timeless calling Shida "Hick-ah-roo" Nana added a spin to his dance! 91-55 record for Penta. According to the chyron. Penta's gear looked great. Probably not his intention, but BC Lions colours. Go Lions! Penta and Swerve tried to legit kill each other and I was entertained. GOLDEN JETS vs YOUNG BUCKS!! I am excited about that, and also amused because I know people (on these very boards) who are the opposite of excited (either bummed out or angry) about it. It will be crazy. Also the video game street fight. EXACT same notes for that one. The Portland crowd absolutely RULED during the Limitless vs Joe Match. "MEAT!" " Holy Meat! " Meat Forever! " and "Slap That Meat!" chants. Nice work there, Portland crowd. Also, Gordlow agrees with you in all four cases. Why. Joe. Serious-ah??? (That one's for you, Natur-Paul). Serious Orange, too. Orange you glad he didn't say Cabana? BOLLYWOOD BOYS! Damn. They drove all the way to Portland for THAT. Hope it was a decent pay day, at least. The gurv of some people. Harv you ever seen such a thing? HAT vs CAKE! Then the ex-alien/spooky witch/nice colour/tree bird standoff. All good. As was Switchblade vs Kung Foo Chicken. I am getting tired of thumb-typing on my cheap tablet. Are you getting tired of reading? FTR vs VIKINGO & KOMANDER!!! I LOVE RAMPAGE!!! I LOVE AWESOME RANDOM MATCH-UPS!!!! MOX & YUTA vs ORANGE & HOOK next week. Yowza.

A couple of things about the week previous: Penta v Kommander v Vikingo got awesome by the end, and I figured that Vikingo's AAA title was on the line, so Penta winning was a big surprise. RUSH still wrestling like an absolute dickhead despite getting hot tags and shit in the main event was funny. But he wanted to point out that "no, I haven't gone soft" and that point was certainly made. I also thought, hey RUSH could go after Eddie and the ROH title, too! Archer vs Darby was very entertaining, and Jake leading The Righteous and Archer makes for a pretty cool, albeit absolutely unnecessary faction. There was also bunch of other stuff happening. Trent vs Garcia was very good. No surprise there. This week has matches scheduled and a few of them will most likely rock. Hopefully Lee vs Joe gets enough time before Shane Taylor butts in, because no way is he going to let Lee succeed where he just recently failed.

ROTFLMAO this is so stupid. What does that even mean? IF THIS IS EVEN TRUE (spoiler, it’s not): Networks give out TV deals over a few years — like four or five years. NXT is for five years. So an “eight-figure deal” sounds really impressive. But that breaks down to $10 million over 5 years or $2 million a year. So that’s impressive but not as much of a “WOW” as that headline makes you believe. Also: Come on. Keller is getting that information from Billy Corgan or the guy who works for Billy Corgan. It’s not anything at all that would pass any level of smell test. CW’s biggest sports property is LIV Golf. Now, LIV has a lot of problems — backlash because it’s Saudi owned, ridiculous team format, distracting war with the PGA, etc. But it has some of the biggest names in golf (people my wife has heard of and she knows nothing about golf.) And golf gets the most coveted audience members — the worst people alive (ala rich white people.) Even with crappy ratings the people watching are still wealthy. LIV was actually looking to buy time from TV networks like an infomercial before it found a deal with The CW. So knowing that, I doubt that the CW even paid LIV and “eight-figure deal.” Let alone a fly-by-night wrestling company no one cares about even among wrestling fans run by the very dependable businessman/Zwan lead singer Billy Corgan. Let’s also use some more logic here. The WWE is a really big deal. It’s a massive corporate entity. The CW wants to make a splash and is building out its programming around sports and sports-ish stuff. Getting NXT from the much more established USA Network gives The CW some of that rub and reminds people that it used to have Smackdown years ago. On top of possibly making them money, it’s good for putting its name out there to the world. A TV deal between any company takes a really long time to put together. If it is between two companies with stock the general public can buy and sell like the WWE and the CW’s owners, then it becomes even more complicated because of government regulations. And one thing that was absolutely included in the negotiations and The CW agreed to without any hesitation at all would be: “You can’t have any other wrestling on your network” and also very very very certainly “You can’t negotiate with any other wrestling company while we hammer this out.” Who at The CW was going to go out and say “You know what? Let’s risk this whole WWE relationship by going behind their back and against well-established official negotiating practices to give $10 million to a wrestling company even wrestling fans don’t care about that is owned by the guy who made life hell for Guitar Center employees in 1992 when every teenager in the world came in and tried out the opening line to ‘Today’ on a Fender they had no money to actually buy. None of this NWA stuff is even remotely true. Is there any actual reporting on what AEW gets? The only thing I saw was from wrestling journalists and hahahahahaha about them writing anything knowledgeably about the actual business world.

If AEW did that I would sell all my worldly possessions, shave my head, and hand out pictures of Tony Khan in the airport while wearing saffron robes.

@Greggulator pretty much nailed it. I have a friend who’s involved with a wrestling company who’s been talking to CW. He said a couple weeks ago, when the news of an NWA deal broke that it was for a reality-type show. He said CW was fishing for wrestling content. He also felt that they were most-likely talking with WWE and were holding off any decisions on adding any in-ring wrestling programming until they knew what they’d have with them. Now, the cocaine thing may have lost Corgan his deal, but it was in no way related to NXT ending up there. That was in the works for a while before that.

The week before All In at Wembley, Saraya appeared on a few UK morning shows, did a full media blitz for the British press and, along with Paul Wight, did a "compare UK and U.S. snacks" video for a YouTube page. Yes, Saraya is British, a good speaker and has the "riches to rock bottom and back" story that sells, but this is something AEW needs to be doing with their wrestlers regularly. The NHL airs on TNT -- why isn't Chris Jericho (son of an ex-NHL player) or even Anthony Bowens (whose father was "America's foremost hockey fight expert") dropping by the pre-game show to give predictions and whatnot? Why not make 1-2 AEW regulars part of a team of celeb prognosticators for March Madness (one could be a legend like Sting or Jericho, while the other could be MJF or Britt Baker)? Even if it's not TV, you could do something similar with the streaming crowd, those who watch everything on TikTok or YouTube.

Lots of really good in ring stuff tonight. Title matches delivered, but where does the ROH TV title go next? Always a treat to see Sting on TV. Swerve is so freaking good. Really looking forward to him and Hangman with the ratcheted up level of aggression and violence. Mark Briscoe is someone I could watch every week. Will Mariah May be Mickie James to Toni Storm's Trish? Really really interested to see where they go with The Devil. 2 pretty great hours of pro wres! And we're getting FTR vs Kommander and Vikingo on Rampage! Colour me EXCITED.

There was definitely a deal with Corgan and CW. It was for a reality show. I’m not going to pretend to be some insider, but I did hear it from someone who would know. And no, I am not secretly James Iha.

Really looking forward to tonight...it's been a bit since I've been pumped for a Dynamite card and I'm home to watch it.

My guess is White-Briscoe leads to Chicken teaming with MJF at Full Gear.

I have a deep emotional connection to the Houston wrestling tapes he currently has rights to and is doing absolutely nothing with and that he's certainly not continuing to convert so that the half that's left doesn't rot away into nothing. That's kind of like having feelings about James Iha.

I’m looking forward to Sting facing two guys who are basically doing a parody of his early Blade Runners stuff.

I could probably recall something special from every show I've been to. Dates would be fuzzy, but wrestling is all about the memories. Here's part 1: Some WCW House Show in 97 - I was 10, and less than a year into wrestling at this point. I made signs because I didn't know what a house show was. I legitimately thought I might see Sting. I kinda figured out this wasn't gonna be that kind of show when my mom drove through some dingy parts of KCK and we did not end up at Kemper Arena. Oh well. I did see young Goldberg padding his streak against Mongo and Luger beating Scott Hall in the main, which was awesome because when did a WCW guy ever get a clean win? Nitro 5/98 - Ok, now I made it to the big time. My dad got tickets through work and I got to see the show from a suite. Bret Hart cut a whiny promo and The Giant joined the NWO for the second time. Raw 9/04 - After a long hiatus of live wrestling, my dad once again came through with tickets (this time aisle seats). Had an up close view of HBK, Gene Snitsky's in-ring debut, and Randy Orton's failed babyface run as he got beat down by Evolution. SD - 3/06 - This was the first show I bought my own tickets for and went with one of my best friends who you can assume is at every show from here out unless otherwise noted. I got a kick out of Paul Burchill doing his Jack Sparrow gimmick, who also busted out the avalanche C4 which was fun live. This was the last show before Mania 22, and Kurt Angle beat Mysterio in the main. I was obsessively tracking my WWE.com fantasy points because I had a legit shot to win the grand prize which was... Summer Slam 06 - My knowledge of WWE booking patterns finally paid off, as my first place finish in WWE fantasy netted me 2 front row tickets to Summer Slam with airfare to Boston, hotel (a nice one too), and limo transport from the airport and to the arena. Being 19 at the time, we couldn't enjoy everything Boston had to offer, but we were within walking distance of the city and got to spend a couple days wandering around before the show. The show itself was incredible, mainly because it was my first true front row experience. Absolutely blown away by the size of everyone and the sounds. Seeing the Big Show up close was something. The Flair/Foley I Quit match was super violent and crazy to see up close. I could've probably grabbed a couple tacks if I really wanted to stretch. Safe to say this experience will never be matched, but I can say I "earned" it lol.

This wasn't watching wrestling because it was before the show started. This week I went to Shinjuku FACE for The Great Kabuki's festival for his retirement from his restaurant. An announcer and Genki Misae were on the mic welcoming the fans and said someone came from America to the show, said "where's ka-to san?" and I waved to everyone.

This is a safe space, right? We're all friends, right? We can make embarrassing confessions, can't we? I had a crush on James Iha. In fairness, I was 13 and hadn't realized what a colossal dork Billy Corgan was yet, or how much more of a dork James Iha was to be bossed around by him, or how my tastes needed to develop, but... look we all make mistakes when we're 13, right?!

A mere 10 days away from Full Gear and... our main event may change!! I mean, *I* for one would prefer Friedman/Briscoe, but they did (allegedly) pay the Switchblade a lot of money. Oh well. Enjoy the week.

I'm not one for foul language but that was a darn fine wrestling show.

I'll be the first one to say that I hated Ghostbusters Ii. Probably the reason I did not go see Afterlife in the theaters, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Afterlife despite wanting to punch Finn Wolfhard in the face really really hard every time he appeared on screen. I think I was spoiled by the quality of the stories in The Real Ghostbusters, especially episodes like The Boogieman Cometh and The Collect Call of Cthulu. The guys writing for that cartoon knew what the fuck was up. There was some humor in the stories, but they were also as creepy as you could get for a Saturday morning kid's show. I expected GB2 to be on the same level only to find out (like others have said) that folks were mailing it in for a paycheck.

He gets so many replies on twitter I figured I'd post it here where he's more likely to see it.

This is a genuinely amazing spot and props to John Silver for selling it like he got maced. https://x.com/BranCutler/status/1721970836222165119?s=20

They didn't pay them anything https://www.golfdigest.com/story/liv-golf-tv-deal-beall-2023

I want the James Mitchell cocaine bit ruins NWA on CW and WWE snakes it away to be as true as anyone else but there is absolutely no way that happened. WWE and CW are both owned by publicly traded companies. The CW is 75 percent owned by Nextstar if you want to quibble and Nextstar is a soulless media company (and not some religious group.) Have you ever bought a house or a car? Do you remember how much insane work goes into all of it before you and the old owner come to an agreement on the price and who has to pay for what things need to be fixed while the real estate brokers and a bunch of other people are involved? NXT going on CW is going to be that but about 500 times more complicated. And, also, since both companies are on the stock exchange (publicly traded), there are also all kinds of regulations you have to tend to for these sorts of deals. If the rules aren’t followed it’s really easy to get sued. The announcement came out the same day TKO (the WWE’s corporate owner) made its first public statements telling everyone how much money they made the past few months. That is not an accident. Timing big announcements on the same day a company tells the public how it is doing financially (earnings call day) is pretty commonplace. It is a sign that this has been in the works for a really long time. Billy Corgan is an idiot. And a narcissist. Sure, I like a few songs on Gish and Siamese Dream like anyone else who went to high school in the 90s and had exposure to an alternative rock station. But he’s not a business owner. He is not an executive unless you count bossing around James Iha or seeing how much Zwan merchandise is left in the warehouse as an executive skill. My very strong hunch is that Corgan had a meeting with a CW executive who is a fan of his music, since the CW exec knows they want to get into sports and they had a possible thing going on with NXT, and they nodded and smiled and wished Corgan luck and since he is a maniac without any experience he went and told some wrestling journalist they had a deal in the works and whoever wrote up the article has no clue how any of this works (or how to call the Nextstar media relations team so they could say ‘this is not true’) and wrote it like it was fact and not some insane Billy Corgan delusion.

For Uncle Buck to work, you definitely need him to be able to believably carry some of the melodrama. I think Candy is someone who absolutely could have had a John Goodman type career if he was a little better at choosing some of his roles.

Just want to be specific about the sticking point, from the Hollywood Reporter article. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sag-aftra-ai-protections-for-high-earning-members-sticking-point-1235638247/ This wording doesn't mean they want to "Scan dead actors" and bring them back from the dead. It's about how they can re-use a scan after the performer, whom they paid to be scanned, has died. Example: I book a big series gig and they're going to pay me above scale, which makes me a Schedule F performer. (Sweet) They pay me extra to scan my appearance. (Sweet) I die after I finish shooting the episode. (Shit) There's no language suggesting that they have to compensate, or ask for permission from my family, when they use my likeness in a future episode that I wasn't booked for. Because I'm dead. (Shit) So it needs to have better language for sure.

Went to the gym for the first time in a few weeks today as my third abscess this year has done me in. Did 20 minutes on the treadmill, biceps/triceps 60lbs/27kgs 2x10 (10 reps twice, have I written that right?) and leg press 70lbs/32kg 2x10 (10 reps twice, have I written that right?) I know I definitely have BEEP at least for a year so from January 2023-January 2024 giving me unlimited gym/swimming/gym classes at a reduced rate. I think you can a year or two after. Bloody hope so as it's really helped me mentally and physically in 2023. Gym for the first time in 15 years, Swimming for the first time in 25 years and Pilates for the first time ever.

Mariah May should be a great addition to the roster. Her interacting with Toni could be fun. Nice to see Red Velvet back. And I see that she is still not afraid to die for our sins. I am going to need them to figure out where this Stat/Willow/Skye/Julia thing is going though. It feels interesting but directionless

upon thinking about it, I'd describe the WWECW entrance as being shaped like a bit of a slash (or maybe shaped like a 7). One more CW/NWA/NXT note. WOW isn't airing in primetime on CW, so I could see there being a line of delineation where the WWE won't boot WOW off CW but they'll also tell CW not to air WOW in primetime or air WOW on the same night as NXT. Not immediately whacking WOW is a helpful move for the sake of the WWE's current legal situations with certain companies accusing them of monopolistic practices "That Court Bauer is full of it, look, we didn't make the CW murder WOW" Also, I remember channels in like 1998 that would air WCW Worldwide and Shotgun Saturday Night in the same Saturday Afternoon block so back in the glorious days of syndication, the WWF wasn't insisting that their affiliates not air WCW programs too.

I don't disagree on Afterlife capitalizing on the Stranger Things vibe of precocious tweens getting involved in supernatural adventures (see also the It remake) but I still liked it a lot more than I expected to. This may veer into personal Hot Take territory, but I thought it provided the fan service nostalgia the new Star Wars trilogy tried to capture. I'm not sure what to think about the new movie just based on that brief trailer. It kind of reminds me of a plot of a Real Ghostbusters episode, but not something that would work as a full length movie.

Lmao @ Jon Hamm also, this

I’ve seen the original more times than I can count, but it’s not the hilarious, constant jokes movie people always make it out to be. It’s a lot of dry humor and dry, normal reactions to the absurd and it’s all done perfectly with the perfect cast at the perfect time. It’s like how friends would talk to each other except we’re all in on the humor. Where 2016 failed for me was that it was the equivalent of Paul Feige thinking he could just let everyone do whatever they wanted and what we got was the equivalent of Dee Reynolds doing stand up comedy. I also really love Afterlife and thought it was a really nice goodbye to Harold Ramis. It has nowhere close to the situational reactions the original had, but it was still funny and as a fan of Ghostbusters lore, I fucking loved seeing final closure to Ivo Shandler. It was about as close as possible to making that awesome Ghostbusters video game canon. Loved Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd in it, but I love them in everything, the daughter was great, and Finn Wolfhard was, well, himself but tolerable. I’m all in on this and if the reigns get handed over to Coon, Rudd, Patton, Kumail, and the kids then I’m down for more as long as this one is good. Plus, it looks original! It reminds me of when the Real Ghostbusters would have some new, evil or spooky entity to defeat each week. Now do a third movie where someone opens up that doomsday gate that turns all the subway trains into monsters.

Aren't Ghostbusters movies supposed to be you know funny?

I made the mistake of sleeping on the last one and it turned out to be pretty good. Should've gone to see it in a proper theater. Won't make the same mistake again.

My kid will be out of college by the time 6 drops so at least I won't have to choose between games and tuition knowing that tuition will always win.

Knowing what we know now, at least one of the UWF/World Class/AWA was not long for the world going into 1987. So even if the UWF had a more stable local base, would they have been able to buy one of the other also-rans before JCP did? The Between the Sheets mention of Jarrett possibly buying the AWA, and Jarrett going on to buy World Class, inspired some of this post. UWF was probably too close a name to the WWF to really stick for long. I wonder if they would have been better off as a brand to buy the AWA just to use the name and focus more on Mississippi plus west of the Mississippi with most of the cards in the Mid-South while hoping JCP gets the hint and focuses more on East of the Mississippi. Instead of having JCP and UWF overexpanding at the same time and JCP eating UWF. By 1987, the AWA was pretty much spot shows in Minnesota and their Vegas residency and ESPN. Not sure if UWF buying AWA could have made them the non-WWF alternative in Chicago but.

I feel like Keith Lee is going over tonight. It's his birthday, he has an already-set first feud with Shane Taylor, and it frees up Samoa Joe for the MJF stuff. Being a big fish in ROH instead of just a guy in AEW feels like a good way to go for him.

I feel like there's probably a joke about the TK ROH purchase in here somewhere but I haven't finished my coffee yet

I guess it's just not the same once you know that Billy Corgan can barge in at any time and ruin things for you. (Also, since he got rid of his very cute mid-1990s long hair with the blond streaks.)

The show where triple H offers people money for Andre’s boots or what ever? Seems very scripted like a lot of “reality “ shows

I know a woman who went out on a few dates with him. They lived in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn and they were on the same dating app. She said he was kinda dumb but really nice and she could not resist the ability to tell people “You know that guy James Iha from Smashing Pumpikns? Well…”

Can relate to that when I used to run. Barely run now, replaced running with indoor cycling. I have a mini bike under my desk at home. That really shed the pounds.

I think Ghostbusters 2 was the first time I was legit disappointed by a movie in a theater. That came in 89? So I was 9 and, yeah, man, as a kid who loved everything Ghostbusters and I left that movie wanting to believe it wasn’t disappointing.