SirSmellingtonofCascadia

Man, Razor and FUBU-wearing nWo Scott Hall were dope as fuck, and then you find out IRL he's basically a lame like his Big Scott Hall character with the inexplicable mustache from the AWA. What a total letdown.

No no, you're thinking of NHB when you talk about a Hogan production and bad smells.

When it comes to the Hogan Cinematic Universe: Rocky III > Suburban Commando > Mr. Nanny > No Holds Barred I should note that this is shameful because if your movie has Tiny Lister, it should be much better than NHB ends up being. Also, I know he did other movies, but I'm not ever watching Santa With Muscles, so rank at your own risk/desire.

The last time I saw that late Nitro stuff, a lot of it was still mediocre, but it felt like a wrestling show again and not whatever it was while Vince Russo was in charge. They also pushed guys who I thought of as WCW guys, which helped. Booker/Steiner/Page on top the last few months was alright. Not all of it connected, but there were gems. Chavo being a surly shithead heel that Helms had to chase for the Cruiserweight belt was really fun, for example. But for every angle or match with those two as the focus, you'd have to watch a Shawn Stasiak angle or match, so it evened out, I guess. Scott Steiner was also a legitimately awesome lead heel, and that's pretty much common knowledge even though people had fled WCW by that time, which I think is meaningful.

I have been, too, but I prefer keeping color variants of both clothes and appliances, and even though I don't have *that* many extra supplies saved, I'm still pretty much at the breaking point for storage. On another note, I really do hope that the update also allows me to upgrade the villagers' houses on my island that were built in the early game before the island got to three stars. It's Fall and Deirdre should have her Autumn-themed house already, dammit!

I sure hope that the update including Brewster's Roost a) happens really soon and b) includes another extension to home storage, maybe by 1,600 rather than only 800 spaces. I've just about managed my storage as well as I can without having to get rid of stuff that I want to keep if I want to store something new. It would also be great if I could build a second room top-story so that I can place more furniture.

I think you accidentally spelled "Falcon's Crest" incorrectly there before the word "rerun."

The UK has some good ones. Someone should bill their next pushed seven-footer as from The Giant's Causeway.

Did his run as a gladiator go on and on and on well past viability even though his whole character aped Nitro except with less charisma?

Welp, Bryan showing up will have me tuning into AEW to check it out on Wednesday. Hopefully, they'll have Miro throw some mook across the ring while I'm watching. Draw me back in, dammit!

This is awful. All I can think about other than being so sad that she took her own life are a couple of the head impacts that I've seen her take. Just fucking awful.

Show #19 - 8th January 1996 "The one where Vince must have pissed Bischoff off" Yep...this is gonna take me like the rest of the decade. Savage and Hogan up against Flair and Anderson tonight as the desk hypes the show. Bischoff and McMichael enjoy shitting on the competition, but Heenan (as usual) deftly sidesteps any such talking down of his former employer. Chris Benoit comes to ringside, accompanied by Brian Pillman. He's facing off with Alex Wright. Benoit gets straight to jumping Wright and pummeling him for a long time. Then he dumps Wright out of the ring so that Pillman can pummel him. Then it's back in the ring for Wright so that Benoit can pummel him some more. Finally, Wright gets a bit of offense and slingshots Benoit out of the ring. Lots of high-impact offense later, and Wright has a Boston Crab on Benoit while Bischoff excoriates "Titanic Sports" for raising the price of their PPVs and charging fans to take pictures with the Winged Eagle. That's good timing because this match has slowed down a bit and Alex Wright's not really able to string together interesting offense for more than a couple of minutes. Eventually, Wright goes at Pillman, and it allows Benoit to gather himself and, after struggling to hit the Dragon Suplex for awhile, Benoit hits it for three. This was perfectly fine television, though it probably could have been a couple minutes shorter. Wright's face control segment got real boring after he finally turned the tide with a few well-paced moves. Lord Steven Regal is out to face off with Eddy Guerrero in a battle of wrestlers in Smelly's all-time top-ten. They start with mat exchanges and Regal is peeved by Eddy's ability on the mat. Did Vince McMahon do some shit that irritated Bischoff in the week before this broadcast? He's now going at the "Royal Fumble" (eh, the '96 Rumble was alright). I just read the Nitro book about a month back, but I can't recall if Vince called out Time-Warner shareholders in early January of this year or what. Anyway, this is a solid match predicated on Regal realizing that Eddy's just as good on the mat as he is, so he'll need to press his size advantage to win. He grinds Eddy down, lays his weight on Eddy in holds, relies on strikes more, and hits a couple of nice suplexes as he controls the match. He also WRECKS Eddie with an elbowdrop to the side of the face. I'm surprised by how much of the match that Regal takes, and Eddy only wins when Regal slips on a banana peel and can't get out of a backslide. Fun match, but I'm not sure that Eddy should have worked that match with Regal considering Regal's position on the card. Like, if he worked Flair like that or something, okay. Haha, now Gene Okerlund is out here shitting on recent WWF signees that he says are "ready to collect Social Security." It can't be Jake Roberts since Roberts didn't debut again in WWF until the Rumble itself on the 21st. Austin showed up on the 1/8 show, but he's not old. Maybe Gene's just pissed that Scheme Gene debuted on the opposing RAW that night. He's here to mediate a Lex Luger/Sting dispute about the end of the triple threat match at Starrcade. Apparently, Luger sabotaged Sting and cost him a chance to continue the match. Luger is claiming a bum knee. Honestly, I think we're getting to the point where we go on cruise control until the nWo forms, but Luger and Sting are going to make up by tagging together. Speaking of Sting, he's up against Diamond Dallas Page. Page is looking exceptionally scummy tonight. They're pushing the "DDP has lost everything" angle, and honestly, this is one of the very few times that giving someone a "loser loses a ton" angle has worked. Sting is back out to faux-Bonnie Tyler. Bischoff cracks me up when Heenan talks about compassion for DDP by shooting back "What the hell do you know about compassion? Is that a word you looked up this week?" Quality jibes there. The delivery was excellent. Sting dominates until DDP headbutts Sting's nuts on a leapfrog, which, yeah, that's a pretty good transition to a heel control segment. I like that Page hits a series of moves and taunts, but can only get a one-count and sort of freaks out. He really thought he had done more damage than he did. Great facial expressions all match from Page, whose development across these shows as a worker is really fun to watch. Now he's working a headlock and cheating like a bastard while yelling SHUT UP at the fans who are cheering Sting on, just good old heel shithousery. You know what happens eventually: Sting works out of the headlock eventually and annihilates DDP. However, DDP gets to the ropes on the Scorpion Deathlock attempt, and Heenan does a great job of putting over that DDP is getting much better and understanding where he is in the ring more proficiently than he was in past years. DDP scraps and fights, but Sting corners him and catches him away from the ropes with the Deathlock for the win. This was really good partly because DDP lost again, but he's getting put over by the commentators as clearly rebounding a bit and putting in good work even in a loss. Fun match as well! It's main event time! Ric Flair and Arn Anderson are out first, followed by Randy Savage and Hulk Hogan. The crowd seems somewhat more excited about Savage wrestling Flair in comparison to Hogan wrestling Flair to begin. Hogan goes first anyway. Flair chops the ever-loving shit out of Hogan at one point, like that shit had to HURT, and honestly, this is a solid opening exchange overall. Hogan beats up both Horsemen on his own because, hey, it's Hulk Hogan being super-insecure in 1996. Savage gets his licks in too, though Flair eventually shifts the tide by interfering (and mooning the unfortunate crowd after Hogan pulls down his trunks while chasing him). After that, the match is basically Savage as FIP, and since he sells pain so well, it obviously works just fine. Hogan gets the hot tag, no sells everything, and gets three on a legdrop to Anderson. Pillman and Benoit come out, but the Dungeon of Doom is also out. While Zodiac and Sullivan attack Pillman and Benoit, LE GEANT~ is free to annihilate Hogan and Savage, which he does until Zodiac pleads for mercy. The show ends with Hogan, Savage, and the Four Horsemen down as the Dungeon stalks away from the ring. Pretty good show! Lots of good matches. The main event was fine. 4 Stinger Splashes out 5 for me.

Yeah, my bad. I did have it backwards. It was fantastic. @Technico SupportI, too, somewhat enjoyed Brawl For All!

I saw some clips of Charlotte/Nia on Twitter. It looked AWESOME from what I saw. Charlotte shouldn't have slapped Nia because she took it as disrespect. I would love to see those two reckless dopes slap the shit out of each other and perform wild reckless head-drops on one another for fifteen minutes. Sign me up for that shit. That's the first match WWE could show me in years that I'd be hyped for. It reminded me a bit of Vader straight coldcocking Ken Shamrock for being too stiff mixed with a bit of "should we fuck each other up frfr" body language like John Tenta throwing defensive kicks at Koji Kitao. I loved what I saw on Twitter. More please.

"Small-time" is true, not a shot at those indies. Most indies are "small-time." I tend to agree with @NoFistsJustFlips though. I don't think the WWE house style is all bad, and I would guess that most people posting here would agree. It can produce great matches. I do think that wrestlers working their styles into that house style makes it more interesting, at least when it comes to big-time matches. If their focus is on people with no previous experience, it's going to take away from that. But the other issue is stale match layout, which is really only one aspect of the house style. WWE TV hasn't been worth watching, match-wise, since before I stopped watching in 2016. The way they work around commercial breaks is awful. I will say, as an aside, that at the arena, some of the guys are more creative during those breaks and so the matches are better live. One example I'd give is Kevin Owens shit-talking the crowd and changing up the restholds while he shit-talked the crowd was entertaining. You could have been fooled into it not being a commercial break based on his staying active and doing good pro wrestling shit instead of just laying there for three minutes or w/e. But man, was the obvious layout of TV matches on RAW and Smackdown terrible back in the mid-10s. That's part of the reason that NXT weekly was such a breath of fresh air. The match layouts seemed more varied.

To do an LGBT+ angle properly, I think the company should take one of their old angles and just play it straight with wrestlers who are portrayed as LGBT.. Like, do the Mega Powers exploding except all the wrestlers are women. Play it straight, have it be an angle about friendship and dominance that is ended by the jealousy of the Women's Champion over her partner/the sneakiness of the Women's Champ's tag-partner and friend in trying to break up the couple. I guess a lot of my ideas are relationship-centered (Flair/Savage "I had her first" except everyone is a single gender is another one that immediately sprung to mind), and maybe that'd eventually be regressive if it went on forever, but as a way into these sorts of portrayals, I think it might be decent. Plus, you can recycle those angles, they're so old, and recasting them as same sex/gender/gender identity would be pretty daring, especially for this company.

Not a bad historical pull here.

I had thought that it well might have happened before since they're around at the same time, but I couldn't remember off the top of my head if it did. Good pull.

Please put me on ignore. Thank you.

Bam Bam Bigelow vs. Bam Bam Gordy - THE BATTLE OF THE BAM BAMS It's been long enough, so I hope someone is using "Bam Bam" as a nickname again in pro wrestling.

They probably hear it enough in these general discussion threads, tbh. I don't read the RAW or Smackdown or NXT threads, typically, though they tend not to have many posts in the first place from what I can tell. I think the last one I read was when Bobby Lashley became champ, which I found out in the general discussion thread in the first place. I haven't seen a WWE show in five years, so I'm in your lane, @christopher.annino . While I don't watch individual shows, I do know via osmosis what the company is up to, and I feel as though I can comment on that without having to watch the product closely. I will say that I actually don't have a problem with people finding places that are more enthusiastic about the product to post at. It makes sense! People want to share their joy with others! I just feel the need to push back at a) the idea that people are attacked for liking WWE here, and b) that this board is some vortex of completely negative hivemind toward WWE programming. People here still get excited about different workers on the show all the time. In fact, I have unpopular opinions re: AEW, which is loved here, and while people challenge those opinions, they're not shitty about it. Being challenged on your takes =/= some sort of heinous attack. This is a discussion board. Formulating and defending a position is part of discussion.

(OK, I'm sure it's happened, but it's not been a regular thing here whatsoever and the mods here are pretty on top of cracking down on abusive behavior. What's happened is that people who like WWE have gone to places who are also enthusiastic about the current product, though people here have been enthusiastic about the product plenty - The Hurt Business, Drew McIntyre, Roman Reigns, etc. When it's an act that is generally thought of as good, *gasp*, people praise it! Any migration away from here re: WWE is just people who hate their favorite company being criticized.)

Of course wrestlers borrow from one another all the time. That was never in question. I never said that borrowing is bad in and of itself. But if you borrow, you'd better be able to pull off whatever elements that you're borrowing, which is a whole different argument that I don't care to get into re: Mox. I don't like his act, people disagree. I think that's fine. Like (or don't like) what you like!

I don't think that I ever said that there are only two possibilities, "niche" or "mainstream," and therefore since wrestling isn't mainstream, it must be niche, so I'm not sure what your post is trying to assert. Are you just disagreeing with me that wrestling is niche and that you would classify it otherwise? OK, sure, that's cool. Agree to disagree.