SirSmUgly
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Posts posted by SirSmUgly
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I was reading some old DDT Digest reviews and one of them mentioned a WWF special called "WWF: The Way We Were" that was airing after RAW on 7/14/97. I did a cursory look up on the old YouTubes and on Daily Motion, but to no avail. Does anyone remember this special and if so, would you mind letting me know if you think that it is worth trying to more actively track down?
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Writing from an academic standpoint about wrestling is fantastic and gives an enjoyable added texture to why certain things in our fair sport become popular. Wrestling is pretty much a reflection of the power fantasies of the fans, and those change based on social, economic, and political issues, like concern about foreign powers invading America, the economic elite cheating their way into the champion over more honest and hard-working people, or some dude getting jealous eyes and stealing your girl so you have to elbowsmash the shit out of him.
The problem with The Masked Man is that he sees himself as Roland Barthes, but he writes more like Barthes after a severe brain hemorrhage.
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The return of Hollywood Batista as a roadblock for Bryan would be amazing.
I read this as "The Return of Hollywood Blondes" for some reason, and I was all prepared to get behind Zombie Brian Pillman vs. Daniel Bryan.
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Dolph is the Kerri Russell of pro wrestling.
In that case, what would be Dolph's match equivalent of "Running Wilde," a surprisingly delightful show that could not possibly live up to fan expectations?
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This is such a TNA personnel move that it's almost mean to point it out.Am I the only one who thinks the older girl is a dead ringer for RVD?Also, 46-year-old Riddick Bowe wants to get into wrestling.
"Looking into get into pro wrestling partners. Contact my manager [email protected] if u can help. I want to be first heavyweight boxing champions and heavyweight wrestling champion. I have trained hard with those bumps."
Yep. One "We know who THAT is!" later, and Ortiz and Rampage are turning on the Main Event Mafia to form a new stable called the R.A.F. ("Real-Ass Fighters") that cuts shoot promos on how they have actually been in actual fights unlike the rest of the TNA roster.
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Bill Simmons is an idiot. Like they would need to create a new weight class to contain his stupidity. How did this guy get into a position that anyone values his opinion?
Aw, I enjoy Bill Simmons. I get why people wouldn't enjoy him, but he is pretty entertaining when it comes to basketball and football. I would enjoy him more if I didn't have to skip three-fourths of his columns because they are about the NBA.
Simmons is more of an '80s WWF cartoon character wrestling fan, so that explains his "Bret Hart is boring" stance, I think
He also said, in the same column, that he would like MitB to be the fourth PPV to make up the Big Four over Survivor Series. Personally, I prefer Elimination Chamber to MitB by miles, but I don't even think there is a traditional Big Four anymore, really. There is everything along the Road to WrestleMania and SummerSlam as far as what gets promoted like it is special.
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Owen was really over doing the Sole Survivor thing. He should have at the very least had that title match at IYH: Degeneration X with Michaels instead of having it on RAW. I get that Michaels probably refused to work much with him, but the crowd was popping big for Owen at the time.
Speaking of which, what about Ken Shamrock?
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He blew his knee out later in 98, and the heel turn in '99 was confusing, somewhat pointless, and didn't take off. He eventually got over it, and got over in a big way.
Post tearing his quad in 2001, he's been significantly less consistently good, but 2000-2001 he was damn good in the ring, Dylan's list aside.
I remembered the knee injury, but you know what? I forgot about the heel turn, and now that I consider it, I think we can point to the confusing turn on DX and joining of the Corporation as a big de-railer. That and Austin not putting him over clean at Summerslam '99.
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As I recall, while HHH had sustained pushes except for during the MSG-incident punishment, he was WAAAAAAY over for most of it, too. Around Summerslam '98, he was clearly a future World Champ.
I think what happened, as I recall correctly, is that people took a lot of time to buy him as champion by the time he got to the main event scene for good in '99. It took a lot of pushes and ultimately the Cactus Jack series to get him over. Even then, though, I don't know how much people ever bought him as the heel ace. It probably does not help that his Race/Flair hybrid character that he likes to portray as an ace is a number of steps below either of those guys' actual work.
This is probably dumb, but watching HHH in, say, 2003-2004, I always feel like he reminds me that I could instead be watching 1987 Ric Flair and it would be pretty much what he is doing except far more entertaining.
Anyway, I cannot remember if something happened to throw him off track between Summerslam in 1998 and Summerslam in 1999, but my remembrance is that he was a surefire world champ in '98 after that ladder match judging by crowd reaction, but a year later people weren't fully behind him and it took some convincing booking to get him there.
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That strongman spot with Cesaro countering the tornado DDT into the uppercut was SO COOL.
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Somebody is posting old mid- and late-80s AWA shows and old Global shows as well as all the WCW Nitros and PPVs from 1995 forward over on Daily Motion.
I have discovered the awesomeness of Rick Martel, AWA Champion. I think I was into AWA maybe in '87/'88 as a very young child when it was on ESPN because I had AWA figurines of the Midnight Rockers, Nick Bockwinkel, and Larry Zbyszko, but I do not remember any of this Rick Martel stuff.
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I don't know how people generally feel about ICP around here, but I actually enjoy them lots of the time. They are decent garbagey/high-spotty type workers and they always at least try really hard. They aren't bad, man.
I am about two-and-a-half years behind this thread in my WCW re-viewing, but man, I am not looking forward to crazy misogynist Randy Savage. He's my favorite wrestler of all-time, and I just hated to see a broken down Savage resort to pushing women around to get heat. I mean, he always had that streak to his character, but it's just too much for me in 1999. Just unenjoyable to watch in all facets.
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Actually, HHH was pretty right about his comments to Foley. The dude didn't put his hands up. Who the hell wouldn't put a hand up (or flinch) on instinct when someone is swinging a chair at your head, unless it's by a complete and total surprise?
Why would Triple H continue across the ring when Irish-whipped, only to rebound back toward his waiting opponent?
The answer to your question, my question, and really to any question about the mechanics of pro wrestling, as always, is "Because it's pro wrestling."
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Chikara, for different reasons than some may think, quite possibly could - for better or worse - be/have been the next evolution in pro wrestling. But fuck if it's on TV, or will make it on TV anytime soon.
I enjoy Chikara precisely because it deconstructs pro wrestling's tropes, but I don't know if that's something that would appeal to a massive audience of people. I think that in general, audiences are more satisfied by seeing tropes held up and used really, really well over having them deconstructed with a wink and a nod.
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Someone said in another thread that their favorite version of Hulk Hogan was 2002 "over the hill but could still bring the 85 out sometimes" Hogan and that's my favorite version as well.
That was me. It was the most compelling that Hogan had been in forever.
I look forward to John Cena's version of this character in 2024.
I was just watching a ton of '90-'93 WCW, and Rick Rude is like the coolest dude ever. He's impossible to root against. The goofy-yet-catchy "Simply Ravishing" theme, the awesome tights, the Rude Awakening which is one of my favorite finishers ever...everything about that era of Rick Rude was so great.
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I think back to late-'80s/early-'90s WWF storytelling, which was targeted toward the same audience, and I just think the narratives have better arcs. That could be me being charitable to something that I liked very much as a child, but if you look at something like the Mega-Powers arc, that had a definitive beginning, middle, and ending that I think a lot of big angles in the WWE don't have. They just seem to peter out most of the time in this era, like the Nexus storyline as one big example.
The Nexus storyline didn't peter out. It ended when Cena beat Barrett at TLC.
This is a fair point; I was not as precise as I could have been with my wording.
The Nexus storyline started out as this group of NXT upstarts making a statement by taking out John Cena, Edge, Justin Roberts, and a referee and declaring war against the whole WWE. This is a pretty wide-spanning narrative, potentially, that sets up to have the Nexus take out the whole WWE and declare themselves as the leaders of the company. They attacked multiple wrestlers, not just Cena, after all. The simplest way to capitalize is to have guys try to take Nexus on alone because they don't trust one another, and then when that fails, reluctantly band together to take out Nexus.
Then, it was scaled down to Cena vs. Nexus, complete with a "John Cena is fired" angle that didn't even lead to a Midnight Rider-like angle where Cena shows up under a hood and the Nexus tries to un-mask him. It did have an ending, but it certainly was not what it probably could have or should have been. They went from crashing WWE title matches and group mugging WWE guys backstage to the WWE effectively beating NXT in a group match like two months later at Summerslam to Cena finishing off the group entirely by beating Barrett at TLC.
I guess that's what I mean by "petered out." We had a nWo-lite angle that began by spanning the whole company and ended up concluding on a B-PPV. Maybe this is what the WWE planned all along, but man, they missed lots of narrative opportunities along the way.
I hope that better explains what I mean.
I wish people would stop comparing things to the Nexus angle. That angle wasn't so much botched or blown as it was completely cursed from the beginning. Everything went to shit after the debut, guys got injured, Bryan got fired, they almost killed Steamboat.
This is also a fair point, but even so, they had a chance at recovery after that merely by bringing Daniel Bryan back at Summerslam on the side of Nexus (and having Nexus win as a result) or, at the very least, milking the "John Cena is fired" angle for all it was worth.
Anyway, I don't want to get caught up on this specific example of an angle except to say that my point is that, even with some of the stuff that happened during the angle, the WWE never booked the NXT guys the way that was needed to spur the narrative along in an interesting way. Cena never felt in any danger past that first night on RAW where Nexus took him out, for example. Even when he lost and was forced to be in NXT (and then fired), he didn't have to sacrifice anything or do something daring to get reinstated and to finish off Barrett.
I think that this juxtaposition between the booking and the narrative direction doesn't help the WWE tell satisfying narratives at this point, and if (like me), you are a narrative-driven watcher, it's quite possible that these things make watching the weekly show not very satisfying as well.
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WWE have been on fire this year & have been great in the last couple of months in particular. Do I love everything? No, of course not...but I never will. But we're half way through the eighth month of the year & I would already put 2013 above the last several years.
I'm on the other side of this, as WWE has finally gotten me to stop watching after over 25 years.
I watch matches out of context, but I don't honestly find the storytelling to be consistently very good, though Greggulator's assessment of Daniel Bryan as a character was really excellent, and as someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest and appreciates our weird little hippie-ish culture that D-Bry embodies, it's good to see a Granola Guy get to the top of the Wal-Mart of professional wrestling. If this story does end with him going over HHH/HHH's Corporate Champ at WM, that will be an amazing thing.
I think back to late-'80s/early-'90s WWF storytelling, which was targeted toward the same audience, and I just think the narratives have better arcs. That could be me being charitable to something that I liked very much as a child, but if you look at something like the Mega-Powers arc, that had a definitive beginning, middle, and ending that I think a lot of big angles in the WWE don't have. They just seem to peter out most of the time in this era, like the Nexus storyline as one big example.
The middles are also squishy. For example, the Shield came in and seemed to be mixed up with Heyman and Punk. Then they sort of disattached from that storyline and broke up Team Hell No, but after that, they have just floated around the midcard lately. What happened to their story with Heyman and Punk? I know that we can interpret an ending based on what happened, but logically, they should have been somehow involved in Lesnar/Punk, which I have not seen (so if they were, I take this back).
Characters tend to drift in and out of narratives in their middles in current WWE, which is one issue that I have with the shows.
The other issue that I have with long-term storylines is that they are not backed up with proper booking too often. For example, the "Cena has lost his fastball" storyline should probably have him lose to The Rock, lose to Brock Lesnar so badly that he is kayfabe-injured, and then leave television for months before having to "prove" himself by beating Brock in a return match at Summerslam or Survivor Series, winning the Rumble, and winning the belt back at WM. Instead, Cena stayed on TV and looked pretty good, beat Brock in a great match that just wasn't booked to fit the storyline, and never really seemed like he'd lost anything at all. Instead, he just looked like a dude that screwed around and lost to The Rock but that otherwise probably would have won if he'd kept his head on straight.
That isn't to say anything bad about the matches. Cena is consistenly awesome and that Cena/Brock match is just fantastic in its brutality. But where's the storyline? I got why Macho Man thought Hulk Hogan was hitting on his woman and why he ended up getting driven to attack him on SNME. I wasn't getting why Cena thought he needed to prove anything to either himself or The Rock, however. The dude was money. He did something The Rock never did - beat Brock Lesnar - the month after losing to The Rock at WM.
This is long and rambling, and I apologize very much for that, but I have read other people say that the WWE knows how to start a hell of a story, but not how to finish it. I agree broadly with this, and I also think that the WWE has a hard time with the middle of the story too. The booking too often does not match up with the narrative that they appear to want to tell.
EDIT: And while I enjoy matches out of context, as do many of the posters here, what compels me to watch each week is to see everybody have great matches while also carrying out some basic, compelling narrative. This is why, even though '95 WCW is not as consistently good with the in-ring product as '13 WWE, I much, much, much would prefer to watch a 1995 Nitro over a 2013 RAW.
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Worse trend started by audiences: Fans chanting "what" during promos or fans throwing trash in the ring with every nWo beatdown?
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Watching "Best of Nitro" vol. 2, and what a harsh reminder of how ... just ... the depths of foul judgment lies just out my grasp ... to describe how awful Zybysko is in booth. It seems as if every match he's on, he's on about the "human game of chess," as opposed to the "robot game of chess" or the game of human chess (which is what I assume he really means ... ass).
At least he answered the question that we all yearned to have an answer for: "If you call the nWo the 'New World Odor' enough times, will it ever be either clever or funny?"
No, of course, being the answer to that one. Definitive no.
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For his level of experience he was good. But I think WCW went to more trouble to protect him, than the WWF did Mark Henry. Who had as much raw potential as Show, but was being hung out to dry.
I would agree with this. The WWF was generally unimpressive at booking, protecting, or developing super-heavyweight types around the time Vader showed up. Vader, Henry, and Show immediately come to mind as poorly-booked superheavyweights. It's even more pronounced if you look at how they protected, say, the Undertaker's typical super-heavyweight opponents two or three years back. Kamala and Gonzalez were treated worlds better than Henry or Show. I wonder what caused this seeming change in Vince McMahon's booking philosophy over that couple of years.
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Show was nowhere near "immediately good".
Maybe I'm missing something, but watching all these 1995/96 Nitros and PPVs, the dude knows how to use his size effectively and eventually figures out when it is worth it to do something physically crazy for his size instead of just doing those things routinely.
I'm not saying he's at the all-timer level that he was by the time he had that match with Floyd Mayweather Jr. or anything, but I am going to have to disagree - he's a good young wrestler at this point.
Edit: I agree that Hogan was fantastic in that Havoc '95 match. In '95/'96, The Giant basically benefits from wrestling on a routine basis guys that know what they are doing like Hogan, Flair, Sting, Savage, etc.
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I love the Road Warriors. Them murdering poor Eaton and Lane was awesome. Generally, it was always awesome when they yelled a lot and then murdered dudes. I could watch them squash jobbers on NWA Worldwide all day.
So would you say that the Road Warriors aren't unlike Mark Henry in that they were given a role and performed better than just about anybody could?
Seems pretty obvious that the Road Warriors are the Mark Henry of tag teams.
The real difference is that it didn't take the Roadies 8-10 to figure it out, unlike Henry (and the bookers,really.)
Thinking about those super-heavyweight types, doesn't it usually take years and years, like eight to ten years, for them to figure it out? The only super-heavyweight that I can think of that was pretty much immediately good is The Big Show. Even Vader needed some time with the AWA and Japan to figure things out, though that was maybe only four or five years.
Otherwise, it feels like most really huge guys aren't good for a long, long, LONG while. I could be wrong, though.
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I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about Kevin Sullivan matches worth watching. I have seen lots of his WCW stuff, but not much of his Florida/Army of Darkness stuff. I just enjoy him so much as a squash match wrestler, and I have always liked the Varsity Club stuff and even some of the Taskmaster stuff that he did (particularly in feuding with the Horsemen and Pillman).
What are Sullivan's best matches worth tracking down?
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I just watched the Nitro in which Rey Mysterio infamously is lawn-darted into the side of the production trailer by Kevin Nash, and that isn't even the craziest thing that happens in that whole segment. The craziest thing would be Savage diving onto the limo and trying to punch the nWo through the moonroof as the limo speeds away.
Segment-for-segment, a surprising amount of early nWo stuff is just as exciting as it was when it first aired. The one thing that aged the worst about it was Hogan as a heel. Back at the time this all happened, I was too young to remember Hogan as anything but a mega-babyface, so heel Hogan was an incredible novelty to me. Looking back on his work without that freshness of him being a heel, he's really terrible. It's two incredibly cool guys in Hall and Nash hanging out with this dork that still has the cheesy voice and who hams it up like a total goof.
I think my favorite version of Hulk Hogan is "over the hill, not what he used to be, but can recapture 1985-level performance on some nights" Hogan from 2002. I can't wait for a fifty-year old Cena to inherit that role at some point in the future.
Sept Wrestling Jibber Jabber Thread
in The PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING
Posted
Thank you very much. I might try to look for it some more just to see how 1997 Vince's VOs talk about all these guys that have left for WCW and made Nitro such a hot show.