SirSmUgly

Man, I'm sorry, but I felt that if we are going to go down that road, your sentence needed a slight tweak.

SMW exposed some cultural ugliness in particular, but at the same time, they were the second promotional example that I thought of. Actually, my second-favorite act in all of SMW was Tammy Sytch can getting over by doing a "liberal women's college graduate from the NE" heel gimmick. Try that today in WWE, and a not-unsizeable portion of the WWE audience would be predisposed to like or cheer for her. Though in honesty, I'd love to see Lana basically do that same gimmick: Wellesley College grad with a M.A. in business management and a proclivity for supporting liberal causes. However, it just wouldn't get the heat that it would in another time and place. Too much of the audience would cheer for her fighting back against people who oppose her, even if they tried to make her as self-righteous as possible. I almost certainly would.

Modern fans = 1985 Mid-South fans who turned Jake? That's a comparison that I didn't think of, but yeah, that's a good historical comp for modern fans. Just a hunch, but I think one of the things that helped in the past was that fanbases had clear culturally-driven moral codes that would determine why they booed or cheered a wrestler. JCP is the easiest example; those fans had a very specifically Southern sense of what is right or wrong so that wrestlers could easily violate that moral code if they needed to get booed. Modern fans don't necessarily have this sort of uniform cultural moral code; we're grappling with a re-evaluation of many of the ways that we think and act, and so in this current time, fans are instead interested in just booing or cheering people based on how entertaining they are more than anything else. I think territories made it easier to have heels that violated a specific moral code because territories were based on regions with very particular ways of life. WWE, on the other hand, is a worldwide company catering to a fanbase that has a whole lot of different ideas about what makes a moral act. Sorry if that seems too obvious a thought.

I'm excited for 4/21/97. It was really great. I'm back on 11/25/96, and already these shows have just escalated into really awesome television, with Austin trying to Pillmanize Bret's ankle, Owen trying to help him, and Bulldog coming out to stop it before Austin clobbers Bulldog with the chair out of frustration to the anger of Owen. This is really awesome foreshadowing of the Austin vs. Hart Foundation feud that will be coming in a few months and was captivating television. Sure, they followed up with an Executioner vs. Freddie Joe Floyd match, but hey, they're not quite all the way there yet.

I think TND is starting to get over as faces too, though. To modern fans, charismatic = cheer for them until they become defacto faces.

All fair enough, Twiztor. I did watch the show out of context and years later. What you say makes sense. And yeah, losing Sabu for Hardcore Holly was a total bummer.

Nah, Roman's pretty much over with the crowd as of the last show I watched (Battleground). It helps that Bryan is completely out of the way. They really should have kept Bryan out until after the Rumble. I have no clue why they damaged Reigns like that.

I think they boo her in NXT more for what she represents to them than for anything she actually does. She's pretty much a slightly dopey, inoffensive personality who can't work very smoothly. If the perception wasn't there that she wasn't kept hired pretty much for Total Divas instead of because she really wants to be a great wrestler, no one would care about her. Compare her to Dana Brooke, who was also getting the "fitness model" heat from the crowd at the beginning, but who now gets heat because she's rounding into a solid little heel character.

You're not the topic. The topic is these silly assumptions that people make. You can stop posting attention-starved posts about how much you hate being the topic now. I don't think Roman is good, but he's not terrible. He's just sort of mediocre. The match with Show that everyone loves was passable, but Show is still pretty good anyway (just really overexposed). The Bryan match is probably still his best singles match. However, he's pretty much in the Sheamus/Orton/Neville mold where he's having competent matches that aren't particularly good or bad, just forgettable and somewhat dull. He's definitely a step above his Shield mates, two guys who actively turn me off in ring, for what that's worth, but he's definitely not as good as guys like Rusev or Cesaro or Big E. Honestly, they should run Reigns/Rusev and Reigns/Big E because I bet those matches would be awesome and Reigns might get better by osmosis.

Two guys =/= the whole of DVDVR. If Gregg wants to bait people with that, he should go do it at Wreddit where it wouldn't actually be a strawman. I totally agree. However, saying things like "Disliked because of no indy cred" is just as pretentious. How about if, in general, we don't make claims about why people like or dislike things for them? How about if we wait until they explain their position rather than saying incredibly pretentious garbage about how people underrate Reigns or Charlotte because they didn't spend time in New Japan's dojo or in Shimmer?

Had a weird wrestling dream, which I don't typically have. Flair and Sting were having a heated match when almost the whole crowd looks away from the ring and starts going nuts. Rick Rude, wearing the Big Gold Belt, storms down the stairs in the crowd and makes a beeline for the only person in the crowd not paying attention - a ten or eleven-year-old boy wearing Sting's facepaint and cheering on his hero, the Stinger. Rude comes up to the kid and puts him in a Million Dollar Dream. The kid immediately starts to pass out, but is able to croak a "Sting...help..." out which Sting somehow hears. Sting has Flair down, but he runs over to the ramp to swing at Rude. Flair follows Sting out and then he and Rude beat the piss out of Sting, Flair cracking Sting with the ring bell like fifty times, while the whole front row tries to get at Rude to tear him apart. Then I woke up, and I was groggy enough to be like "Man, fuck Rick Rude" for a few seconds before I got my bearings and realized that I was dreaming. That's what happens when I sleep on my back, I guess. Had vivid dream after vivid dream last night.

I decided to watch December to Dismember because I wasn't really paying attention to the ECW revival at that time, and early on this show had an angle to take Sabu out of the Chamber. There was a chance to have Sabu in a Chamber match and WWE ruined it of their own volition?! I feel robbed of something that I didn't know I wanted until it was (briefly) offered to me and then taken away. Sabu in the chamber would have been nuts. EDIT: The Chamber itself was pretty well-paced and had good spots. Test's elbow off the chamber onto RVD and Big Show stalking Lashley with the bat felt really monster-movie-ish, for example. What killed it is WWE's insistence on paying off Show/Lashley when everyone wanted Punk or RVD to win. But it was a good match and I thought Show's facial expressions were great in particular. The show had a good tag match, a bunch of mediocre-to-bad stuff in the middle, and a main event that was really fun, but poorly-booked. So kinda like the typical current WWE PPV. Don't know why this PPV has a rep for being particularly bad when that's standard fare for current WWE.

Yeah, that bummed me out. This show had all sorts of good wrestling. Bálor is the most dull face around. Baron Corbin, Smirking Dickhead is a vast improvement and I enjoy his continue development.

Look, I'm into people having their own opinions and all, but that doesn't mean that you should take opinions borne from ignorance seriously. Shit, that's why when I give my opinion on "Best Ever" type lists, I know it's shitty - I have no concept of wrestling in Mexico and little concept of wrestling in Japan. If I want to be taken seriously, I should learn more about the wrestlers in those places. Same thing with Wreddit's list. It's out there for public consumption, and I can tell that their list is even more ignorant than my top twenty list would be. This idea that all opinions are equally valid is terrible. Also, we should totally do a top-twenty tag teams list. I'll watch stuff outside of NA if it's a worldwide list just to contribute less shitty opinions.

That list should also have the High Flyers on it. WGTT is probably the most overrated tag team in the history of ever.

I bought Mutant Mudds Deluxe last week for a couple bucks, and it made its money back. I am an absolute sucker for 2D platformers and brawlers centered around moving between the background and foreground. I've been waiting for Nintendo to give me another Wario Land Virtual Boy (except without the Virtual Boy stink on it) for years, but Mutant Mudds Deluxe will do in the meantime.

I love that the article dropped Foucault and Jeremy Bentham in it. Makes me want to bust out my trusty Foucault Reader.

All the '97 Raw eps made it up? Welp, keeping the Network then. Ready for the Bret Hart show in '97. Dude was amazing.

'87-'89 NWA for life. It's the most fun that I've ever had with wrestling. I'd put '96-'98 WWE, '91-93 WWE, '92-'96 WCW. and everything I've seen of '84-'85 Portland on that one dude's YouTube channel up there, too. Oh, and '77-81 WoS. No particular order after '87-'89 NWA. They're all tied for second.

There is always backlash to anything that becomes popular, for certain, but I also think that having a tastemaker like Dave Meltzer explain away faults in NJ matches while hammering other companies for the same faults is part of it too. Not that I blame Meltzer for this because he's a fan, and as fans, we all forgive our favorite wrestlers or companies for faults that we don't forgive in others, but people are really starting to notice/make jokes and memes out of Meltzer's bias toward NJ. I enjoy what I see. I've been watching G1 matches from this year, and most of them have just been okay, to be honest, but it's nice to have another company that can put forth some intriguing matchups on a big-time stage. Now if only they'd do a NJ World app in English on Roku/PS4...

Ringside confessions? Who would even-- Oh, Tumblr, right.

Edited because I have the wackiest phone.

I read PWO for their projects and podcasts. They are wonks about pro wrestling, and I mean that in a purely complimentary way.

Since we're talking about them, one of my favorite random matches is NAO/LOD at the 1998 Rumble. They were way played out by 2000, but in 1997 and 1998, they were a fun tag team.

As an aside here, I am bummed that by the time I got old enough to enjoy wrestling, Portland was dying as a territory. Born just a handful of years too late. I wish I was able to see what OSJ was able to see.