SirSmUgly
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Posts posted by SirSmUgly
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Random observation: Roddy Piper in '96-'97 has the most cringe-inducing, terrible promos I have ever seen. I'm cool with randomness, but his terrible jokes, goofy insults, odd choices of pop cultural reference, and sometimes aimless ramblings are just painful.
Even guys that are bad at promos ("And this will be the moment, starting now, from this moment on..."), usually I can at least appreciate the badness. These Piper promos are just somehow otherworldly awful to me. Maybe it's because Piper was a really great promo in the '80s so the decline here sucks to see or something.
Anyway, this is just to open a random topic for discussion: What are some of the consistently most difficult promos for you to sit through or find any value in, even if that value is in enjoying the awfulness of them? Like, I have to fast-forward past Piper in '96-'97. Are there any fast-forward type guys because the promos bug you so much for you all?
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I like the matchup for the Seahawks. The Broncos ran up yards on a bunch of awful defenses this year. The best defenses they beat are Baltimore (seventh in weighted DVOA on defense) and Kansas City (ninth in weighted DVOA). Looking at the list, the best team defense they beat after that is Houston at 17th, I think.
On the flip side, the Broncos are 15th in defensive DVOA. The Seahawks are still a top ten team in offensive DVOA (seventh). Note that Denver has only played a couple of backs that can do the power game like Lynch, and both (McCoy, Morris) went over 4.5 YPC in their games. Other than that, the best backs they have played are Charles (amazing) and then guys like Blount, Matthews, Tate, the corpse of MJD, the corpse of Ray Rice.
Which is not to say that the Broncos cannot or will not win, of course. Manning is awesome, they have a great WR/TE group, Ayers can play, Holliday is dangerous on ST. But just looking at it statswise, the matchup favors the Seahawks, I think.
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It's hard for me to even fantasy book Bryan because I'm such a fan of the guy that it clouds my judgment. I want him to win the belt and hold it for a year, winning cleanly over whoever they throw at him.
However, in my heart, I know that would be BAD FOR BUSINESS.
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The second-best WWE-related thing that happens later on this month: The Royal Rumble.
The BEST WWE-related thing that happens later on this month: We get a new Rumblemetrics post!
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It's nice to know that the crowd, like me, really wants to see Bryan succeed.
I get a real Bret Hart vibe from Bryan: Undersized fighting champion who can mat-wrestle you or outsmart you. As a kid, I totally loved Bret Hart (and still do), so Bryan is really working for me right now. I bet if I were nine years old again, I'd really be into him for that reason.
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I can't be rational about DDP. I love the guy. Even the scum stuff seemed like something the actual DDP would say if he were disgusted with someone in real life.
The corny insults and cliche sayings were part of the experience.
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More like DDP if DDP was able to cut an entertaining promo.
DON'T YOU DARE SPEAK ABOUT DDP THAT WAY DON'T YOU DARE
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Enzo Amore is like the best thing on WWE-affiliated television right now. He's basically DDP except if DDP was off his meds.
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Man, if I could go back in time and tell eight-year-old me, "So, in a few years, you will be able to see every show from WWF, WCW, and some wrestling companies that you haven't even heard of yet as often as you want for ten dollars a month," eight-year-old me would have flipped his shit. Sort of like I'm doing now. This is something I dreamed of as a kid.
I hope they eventually just drop every NWA/WCW Worldwide on there because Worldwide from like '89-'94 is one of my one or two favorite weekly shows ever.
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Everyone has already said it, but ten bucks a month for all that content...wow. Between that, Netflix, Crackle, PBS, and Nick Reboot, I pretty much have all the entertainment that I will ever need on my television. It's cutting out one lunch a month for me if I really want to make sure that I balance my budget. Total no-brainer.
I am watching all 1997 RAWs as soon as I get this thing.
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Rikishi was awesome and Too Cool was fun. I didn't even know this was a point of dispute.
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The wrestling is very strong to be sure, but after seeing a high amount of very good matches in the same style over the past two years, I sometimes have problems delineating between them.
Don't get me wrong, I love the in-ring work on in-ring merits alone as much as anyone, but what separates 2014 WWE from, say, 1985 NWA is the fact that the weekly wrestling was good AND everyone had motivation besides, even if it was just "I want to be the champion really badly." Does Kofi want to be champ? I don't know. He has the belt and has these non-descript matches and loses it and marches on. Maybe he gets a few rematches before then, but there's no buildup of "I lost and I desperately want that belt back because I'm getting paid less and because you cheated to win it from me" or anything like that.
As I have posted often, I'm watching WCW from the mid-90s. Take something like DDP's character arc which spanned four years. He was a scumbag with a hot valet that he took for granted until Johnny B. Badd beat him and took his title, his money, and his woman. DDP, at this nadir, goes off TV for a bit and then comes back re-focused. He gets the support of the crowd as he starts to find success again. Then, the nWo comes around, and DDP is now a changed man who appreciates the crowd's support, part of (not all) of the reason that he decides to stand against the nWo for the fans of WCW. This gets the crowd even more behind him, and eventually, he gets to the top and becomes champion...before reaching that goal turns him back into the petty, jealous, cheating shit that he was before.
Meanwhile, here in 2014, we have a bunch of midcarders that interchangeably win and lose solid wrestling matches with one another and never change, ever, unless there is a jarring re-shaping of the character out of nowhere.
Now, take the Shield. These are guys that are mercenaries and violent people, which they have been since they got here. They won a lot of six-man tags, and now they lose some, but that's about it. What are they doing with the Shield except putting them on autopilot until the inevitable Reigns turn? Align them with someone or give them a motivation to focus their attacks on someone. Hell, even if they just decide they want to be champs and annoy everyone by invoking the Freebird Rule because they like money, and titles equal money, that would be an improvement.
WWE wrestling in this day is great to watch on YouTube. In isolation, there is great work there. But as a whole show, it's a bunch of guys having similar good matches over three hours for little discernible reason for the most part.
This brings me to another point about the WWE's specific ring style, which is that watching the same style of match with the same "the faces are on fire, can they keep it up?!" breaks in every tag match and the same your-finisher/my-finisher kickouts in every "WWE epic" really makes every match the same special type of match at one point, which is to say "not so special at all." Even early-mid '90s WWF had cool wrestlers like Doink the Clown doing mat wrestling and stump pullers and guys like Hakushi doing random awesome flippy stuff. Going further down the road in the post-Attitude era, why was Tajiri so over? Well, he has incredible charisma, but also, he did visually interesting stuff like the mist and the Tarantula and didn't wrestle like Regal, who didn't wrestle like Austin, who didn't wrestle like Jericho.
Now, we have guys who don't get to show any real personality wrestling the same segmented WWE-style match on like eight hours of television a week. When FSW or other people say that this is boring, I totally get it because I feel the same way, even though I love great in-ring action as much as anyone.
This is just my thought on it, and anyone who disagrees and really focuses on the in-ring action, I absolutely do get where you are coming from.
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Big E is funny as hell in a quirky way. Well, off television.
Which leads me to what I think the problem is. If Big E is charismatic when he does his own thing on social media, but is boring as shit when doing whatever the WWE's writing team asks him to do, it indicates that the problem with being boring (which FSW is dead on about) is not really on the wrestlers. Well, most of them.
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Wade Barrett is great at being a smarmy asshole.
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Where things really started to go cattywampus with the nWo angle is when Savage inexplicably turned heel in early 1997. They had a perfect angle to end the nWo forming before this happened: Sting and Savage were hanging out together with Savage having finally cracked after all the Flair stuff and now Hogan turning on him too.
At the same time, DDP was being harassed by Hall and Nash for not going nWo and Eddie was in a feud with Syxx over the U.S. Championship. Both these guys were over and would have been cemented by getting a rub from fighting alongside Savage and Sting. You have those four guys come together to ultimately end the nWo by defeating all the major members. Maybe add the Steiners, who were unfairly stripped of the tag championships, in there along with them (or Luger/Giant, as they were also unfairly stripped of those titles). It ends the nWo story definitively and elevates DDP and Eddie Guerrero at the same time as new main event players. Furthermore, this is a logical group of people that had reason to come together and finally end the nWo.
So, yeah, sorry for the fantasy booking, but I'm going through 1997 WCW right now, and it's pretty frustrating how logical an ending to the nWo story Bischoff set up for and then failed to actually book.
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I'll have to find the promo, but he went beyond that to call Regal gay for calling people sunshine and insult him for drinking his tea in a feminine way and not being a man, saying "we don't breed American men that way". I just saw it a couple months ago and pretty vividly remember it. It wasn't the contract-signing, where he does just ask Regal not to call him sunshine, but it was the promo Sting cut on the night of the match.
I could be wrong/oversensitive, but I remember thinking it was pretty ugly when I saw it.
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John Tenta is really awesome. He's definitely in my top fifty of all time.
My favorite work from Tenta is as one-half of the Natural Disasters. They were such an awesome fat-dudes tag team and are the best thing about that early-'90s WWF tag team scene, to be honest.
Is his early work in AJPW worth seeking out in your opinion? If I was to watch one or two matches of his from that company, what might you suggest?
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Sting vs Avalanche was good.
Sting and John Tenta (as The Shark) also had a really fun three-minute match on Nitro, too. Sting is one of those guys who I love, but beyond Ric Flair and Vader, I don't remember many of his matches specifically as must-see matches.
On the other hand, you were pretty much never going to get a stinker out of him or even a boring match. He would always do something really enjoyable and get the crowd into it. Sting had a fun run of matches before he was taken off TV to get Crow/Sting over. I forget the PPV in early '96 it was on, but he had an underappreciated match with Steven Regal (that is only marred by an embarrassing homophobic promo he cut before the match, so feel free to skip that part).
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True, RandomAct. There were some good Nitro matches between the cruisers, however. Heck, the first Nitro kicked off with Liger/Pillman.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the "Luger is a heel and everyone knows it except for Sting" and Pillman/Horsemen vs. Sullivan/DoD quasi-feud that Benoit got slotted into within the Pillman role once the latter left for the WWF. Those were both hot angles looking back at those shows, and I liked how everything was interconnected.
Flair was busy dicking with Savage, but he also was dicking with Sting while at the same time trying to hold a Horsemen/DoD alliance together to take down Hulk Hogan.
Sting was backing Luger as a changed man and was tag champs with him, but Luger was running with Jimmy Hart as manager right after Hart turned on Hogan and joined the DoD. Was Luger fooling Sting (probably)? Was Sting going to get turned to the DoD with Luger? Was Luger just dumb as a sack of rocks and making bad choices?
Savage and Flair were at one another's throats, but Savage was also asked by Hogan for help against the DoD.
The faces didn't know whether they could trust one another and there was some in-fighting, but the same was true of the heel alliance. It made for some damn fine pro-wrestling drama.
Add to that the juniors and some good undercard wrestlers doing their own thing like Alex Wright, Badd, DDP, Paul Orndorff getting a nice little push before he got hurt [see Badd/Orndorff on the 9/18/95 Nitro for a pretty nice TV match].
Plus the tag ranks were great because the Steiners and Road Warriors both came back around that time. I like bomb-throwing tag teams beating the shit out of each other with dangerous moves, so Steiners/Road Warriors/Harlem Heat/Public Enemy was basically pure joy to me.
Some of this stuff happened in '95, so '94 and the first part of '95 did have some serious problems, but by mid-to-late '95, there is good stuff all over the weekly shows. Nitro in particular really saw a step up in game of both in-ring action and entertaining booking. It's total hindsight, but watching that stuff again, I was really sad that some of the ongoing angles got dropped abruptly (and others pushed to the side) for the all-encompassing nWo angle. I know that's just because the nWo thing didn't turn out very well in the end, but the pacing and development of the shows beforehand were hitting such a stride by early 1996.
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I hate to sound stereotypical, but everything involving Hogan sucked. The rest of it was pretty entertaining.
Flair/Savage was definitely great overall, but whoever said Johnny B. Badd was dreadful is wrong. That dude was pretty good, and Badd/DDP was a really fun feud with a bunch of good matches. As for DDP, one of the pleasures of watching WCW in the mid-'90s is watching DDP get better with each match and start getting himself over with the crowd organically.
Once Nitro hit in September of '95, they started working Malenko, Rey, Eddie, etc. into the shows so that the undercard gets really fun in a hurry, too. Lots more good matches than bad.
It's just that the bad was comically bad (Hogan vs. Dungeon of Doom being the prime example).
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God! The romanticism of JJ. Amazing. One of the best con artists in pro wrestling's history. Racist, doesn't want to pay the boys, doesn't want to take care of medical bills unless the injured party is a STAR, etc. Simply Amazing. The reaction around the web has been halirious and some people are taking it to a SAINT level with the guy.
Like I said, he came out of the Konnan lawsuit looking pretty despicable and practically proud of his warped view of the world.
If you have sources, would you mind helping me source this? I knew of the lawsuit, but I am not able to find any transcripts or summaries of what was said in deposition/at trial online. I would just love to read it and research more about the topic.
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what's the general consensus on Madusa?
i've only seen her US stuff, but loved her WWF run in '94-95. Felt she was completely underused during her '96-97 WCW run (the women popped up once every 3 months for a match or two then disappeared altogether again).
maybe it was just the other girls they brought in to wrestle with her, but i always felt her matches added to the program. thoughts?
One of my fondest WCW memories was her against some fat sexist. Mainly because I watched it when my friend's grandmother. My friend refused to give a shit about the show, but her grandmother wanted to order the PPV but didn't want to watch it alone. So, I volunteered. The visual of an 79 year old black woman jumping out of a rocking chair to yell "THAT FAT BASTARD CHEATED! THAT HONKY! I OUTTA WHOOP HIS ASS MYSELF!" while her dog, a couple of kids under the age of 10, and the cat stared at her in shock was worth it.
Those are moments I miss in wrestling. That is why in 2013, I still rave about the Wade Barrett Nexus. My own grandmother had a similar reaction to Wade antagonizing Cena. I miss it and I miss her.
This reminds me of my grandma, who is from the south and probably had ingrained social reasons for Harlem Heat being her favorite wrestlers to watch because "they're just two big, bad black dudes that take care of business."
This also will explain why I may seem irrationally high on Booker T or Harlem Heat if they ever come up in conversation in the future. I'm a fan from watching WCWSN with my grandma. She is the best.
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Well the obvious difference between Punk/Brock and HHH/Brock is that Punk sold like a mad man and Brock destroyed him like a madder man. It's why the comeback is great because it was a desperate one.
Brock/HHH didn't work because HHH never looked like he had no chance. The match wasn't built like Punk/Brock and Cena/Brock which seems off because EVERY Brock match should be that way.
I absolutely agree with this. In the end, no one should have a long control segment where they beat down a guy like Brock, Goldberg, Henry, or monsters like that while the monster is selling a beating. It makes no sense.
The reason these guys got over in the first place is that everyone from job guys to main eventers spent a lot of time eating their offense and desperately trying to find a way to survive. There is no need to deviate from that formula unless two monsters are wrestling one another.
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Re: Brock Lesnar, the bloom was off the rose no matter what because he had lost too much by the time he wrestled Punk. Punk doing the typical babyface comeback that is in every WWE match isn't the problem so much as WWE almost never books a heel monster properly anyway. Who is the last heel monster to shrug off the typical babyface comeback and win with any regularity? Mark Henry? Before then, who was it? This is a serious question. WWE doesn't get that not every heel needs to stooge for a bunch of babyface finishing-run offense.
Furthermore, if I'm bringing back Brock Lesnar, he's going over Cena and HHH so that whoever actually beats him gets something out of it. Cena beating him out of the gate sort of killed that, though the way Cena did it made the damage minimal. Those HHH matches, even the one Brock won, finished him off, though. I hate to mindlessly hate on HHH, but HHH control segments just suck the life out of a match and end up with him beating down guys like Brock and Goldberg for minutes on end whom should instead be shrugging off punishment and throwing attempted killshots on a regular basis.
Re: The Cena/Lesnar match, I agree with people that in a vacuum, that match was an awesome "plucky babyface overcomes monster's onslaught." In fact, I think Cena got in less meaningful babyface offense in that win than Punk did in his loss to Lesnar. In terms of telling a story, however, they really screwed up months of booking where Cena gets destroyed, gets a break until Summerslam or so, then comes back and fights his way back toward the title, including a win in a rematch over Brock and then the win over The Rock.
Frankly, I would have put Cena over in the first matchup with The Rock in the first place, but that gets into another topic altogether and fantasy booking and such.
JAN 2014 WRESTLING DISCUSSION REBOOT THREAD
in The PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING
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King Booker speaking in high-toned English, then getting flustered and speaking like he normally does after something bad happened to him, was a pretty funny running gag.