tbarrie

You mixed up "bare" and "bear".:) But seriously, many thanks for this and your subsequent posts. Your explanations on subjects like this are always engaging and informative.

Interesting. I thought works owned by individuals rather than corporate entities entered public domain a certain number of years after the author's death rather than a fixed number of years after creation, so all of the Holmes canon would have entered at once. And the number of Holmes films, TV shows, and other adaptations that come out backed up that belief. Do they all make deals with the Doyle estate? Or are they limited in which stories they can reference? Or some of each? I'll have to look into the Holmes precedents. Thanks for the pointer, Blitz and Brtian.

I don't know, other companies and (especially) independent artists being able to legally fork the Superman mythos seems like a pretty big deal to me. And aren't we all kind of just guessing what will and won't be allowed when? I don't think there's a lot of precedent established regarding characters who've been under copyright, published, and slowly evolving for almost a century before becoming public domain. The inevitable Mickey Mouse lawsuits will probably establish some things by the time Supes goes public, but until judges start making rulings it's all (possibly educated) guesswork and speculation. To engage in some of that speculation - I'm unconvinced you wouldn't be able to have Superman fly for the first few years. I mean, if I wrote a Sherlock Holmes story where Sherlock could fly for some reason, would I be able to claim copyright infringement on anybody else who wrote about a flying Sherlock? I doubt it. Adding a simple power - one that humans have fantasized about for millennia at least - to a public domain character doesn't strike me as creative enough to count. I would think you'd need to copy other elements of my story before I'd have a case. Similarly, if you were to give Supes the full suite of powers DC eventually gave him in your story, you're almost certainly over the line, but just flying? That seems iffy to me.

My understanding is that the Continental Championship will be put on the line in each year's Continental Classic, yes. Note that the Continental "Crown" has already been split up. Okada won the Continental Championship, leaving Eddie with just the RoH title and the Strong Openweight championship.

Important update! I turned to Google to listen to said music again, and learned that the DOS version's sound was COMPLETELY ASS. The C-64 ruled, though.

Yeah, and think how much better modern indy wrestling would be if that were still true.

That game didn't even come out until 1989! SIR, I DISPUTE YOUR RIGHT TO THE TITLE "Old". Bop N' Wrestle was awesome. I can still hear the music.

But wrestling is different from an office job, in that wrestling is physically dangerous and the performers need to be able to trust each other to ensure one another's safety. ...wait, which side was I on?

I don't agree. Pro wrestling is at its absolute worst when they try to work real-life shit into the storylines. I'll concede enough people are inexplicably interested in the backstage crap that it might have been the most lucrative thing they could have put on screen. But best? Nah.

Getting to see the title change hands in person was nice and all. But I think Copeland costing Christian the title by preventing The Patriarchy from cheating at the last PPV might have been the right call. They could still have had the same blowoff match and Garcia would benefit more from the title than Copeland.

On a whim I looked at the rankings that went up Wednesday and the most interesting thing to me was Mariah May at number 2 in the women's rankings. A sign that they're planning to pull the trigger on Toni vs Mariah sooner rather than later? The funniest thing was Claudio and Mox at number 3 in tag teams, higher than most of the teams in the tournament. Yet still, to my knowledge, no in-story explanation for why they didn't get a spot in the tournament. Edit: forgot to include a link: https://www.allelitewrestling.com/post/aew-rankings-for-march-27-2024

It absolutely does. Depending on whether MJF comes back cooled off or his absence makes the audience's hearts grow fonder, they can modify how much TV time it gets and how long it takes. But just dropping it completely would be terrible writing. I don't know if this would effect a double turn, though. I mean, Swerve did shit like that to Hangman and came out of that feud a bigger face than Hanger. So I'm not convinced it would suffice to turn MJF back heel.

I think the brackets ruled that out, because no way were they running Kingdom vs Bucks in the semifinals. Bucks vs Private Party worked because of their history, and because while PP are heels they're not really all that hated, so they could easily play faces in this match. Bucks vs Kingdom wouldn't work at all, in my opinion

A few weeks back there were some matches that were made official so quickly you could only assume Tony had nothing more important to do than sit with his phone ready waiting for a babyface to propose a match so he could immediately call in and make it official. My point is, he clearly lives to make matches official. Don't take that from him.

True. Thinking about it more, Hangman trying to cost Swerve the match and failing is the way to go. Hanger costing Swerve the title doesn't lead to anything new, while Swerve defending the title against Page makes for a fitting final blow-off to that feud.

Good show, but why were the Montreal fans chanting "Swerve's house"? Shouldn't it have been "Chez Swerve"?

Probably, yeah. Except... Hangman is still active and, as far as we know, still obsessed with ensuring Swerve never becomes world champion. Narratively, he pretty much has to show up and do something at Dynasty if not before. Of course, no reason he can't try to screw Swerve at Dynasty and fail.

Hey! In my early days I saw guys who worked a technical style as automatically just better workers, but I came by that attitude the right way - via Pro Wrestling Illustrated.

No worries. The Robot God is all-forgiving.

Maybe. Either way the pronoun should be capitalized, though.

Well, I'm putting myself in danger of getting yelled at for repeating old issues here. But I'd say it would be a small thing if it were a one-off occurrence. It's not; AEW has wrestlers go off TV with no stated explanation all the time. And no other well-written serial fiction that I know of has characters randomly disappear from the narrative when the performers aren't available and just pop back up later still with no explanation for their absence. Pro wrestling shouldn't do it either, in my opinion.

I probably shouldn't speak for everybody, but I doubt many people are complaining that FTR were ruined by the loss or anything. The complaint I've seen is that it just doesn't make sense for FTR to get a first-round match in the title tournament while the team that just beat them doesn't even get a "wild card" match. It's a reasonable complaint, in my opinion.

Hmm. Maybe. Or maybe I just need to tune it for the audience more. Are there any indie wrestlers out there whose gimmick is they're a robot god?

I'm only offended that I can't seem to segue this thread into a discussion of robot gods in pop culture.

Joke??? Robot gods are serious business, Eddie.