tbarrie

Interesting. I remember ring announcers at least using the full phrase "World Championship as recognized by WCW International", but then, human memory is faulty. And a Google video search didn't turn up any clips where the audio was good enough for the match introduction to be comprehensible. (Well, not in the first page or so anyway.)

Was it ever officially the "WCW International World Championship", though? I remember it as the "World Championship as recognized by WCW International", which is an even more ridiculous mouthful.

12:27 for me, but I make copious use of the "Check grid" function, so it probably doesn't count.

I enjoy tainting your results with my comically uninformed film opinions and would probably do so again.

Did they show you a bunch of pictures and make you select the ones that had busses?

Oh, I'll concede it's rather unlikely they'd be found guilty in a US court of law. (From my view as an outsider, US culture in general doesn't seem to be big on competitive free markets.) And my original post may have been worded too strongly; I'm not sufficiently versed in antitrust law to say for certain whether WWE's actions crossed the line. My point was that your blanket assertion that those actions aren't illegal may be on shakier ground than you realize. To quote from the US FTC's website: Are you really 100% certain that WWE's actions couldn't be construed as "acting to maintain ... a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry"? If so, would you care to argue your point? Because it looks to me like that's exactly what they're doing.

Competition is things like putting on a better product, selling it at a better price, or maximizing your cost efficiency. Making business decisions that hurt your own bottom line (like scheduling your shows at the same time as the other guy's when they'd get better ratings unopposed, or forgoing advertising revenue during those times for no sensible reason) in the hopes that it'll drive the new guy out of the market is not competition. It's anti-competitive conduct. And it is in fact illegal.

I'm certain that making Page the guy by beating Omega for the title is still the end goal, and I'm down with that. I'm just not certain that the story ends with him winning the world title on this attempt. If he had won the elimination match and challenged at All Out like everybody expected, I'd have said it was definitely too soon for him to win the belt. But I can see an argument that coming up short there and having to regain the number one contendership represents enough adversity. Like I said, I'm unsure.

I had an MRI of my brain a year or so ago and was told said brain was completely normal. So I get where you're coming from. I was unprepared to hear that. Yours is better, though.

In my opinion, if now is the time to put the belt on Page (and I'm undecided on that), then getting the belt off of Omega is enough. Having him kick out of the One-Winged Angel would be overkill. Darby Allin should totally kick out of it some day, though. And it'll mean a lot more if nobody else has yet.

Out of curiosity, Vile, have you read "Superman: Champion of the Oppressed" (Supes's debut story) and the follow-ups from the early Action Comics? I'll confess I've only read synopses myself, but I have it on good authority that the superhero genre has left-wing ideals built in from day one. IMO, you could make a "Superheroes are inherently communist" charge stick a lot more easily than "Superheroes are inherently fascist".

I'd go farther and say pro wrestling in general needs refs to be "bad", so the heels can get away with things and get heel heat. But anything can be overdone, and I think AEW is currently at that point.

He was watching a wrestling show.

I kind of hate that idea, but then, I'm already pretty sick of Bobby Fish. I respect guys who commit to a gimmick. Bobby doesn't wrestle like a fish, so to Hell with him.

Florida yes, but it was about forty years ago. I may have passed through some of the others on the way to Florida. See, on a purely factual level, I'm aware that people in the US actually care about college sports. But I can't fathom it. These kids aren't even pros. If you're not a family member of a player, why would you care? I mean, my university had a football team, yeah. But the only reason I know that is because one of the players was in my D&D group. It certainly wasn't a big deal.

You think? I find it hard to fathom there's a country out there where people actually give half a shit about college sports, much less be willing to watch it for hours at a time.

For the record, my ham sandwich turned out as a white dude also.

They allude to the issue in their FAQ, although their answer isn't great in my opinion. But yeah, it turns out our society is kind of racist (shocking), so when you train an algorithm on data taken from the wild, it often comes out racist.

That's a hell of a trailer.

Fair enough. But didn't they learn during his title reign that Jinder isn't particularly over in India either? Or am I misinformed on that one?

To be fair, the robes Flair wore had always been sort of dress-like. But I agree with your actual point.

I remember this as when I completely turned on WCW as a fan.

Why? Is Jinder really over in Saudi Arabia or something?

Fair. But as much as I and other board denizens may like him, I don't think Ricky Starks is all that over either.

I was going to question this, but decided I didn't want to nitpick SupremeBVE's post, because I agreed with his main point. But since you specifically highlighted this point, I have to ask: who has ever defended kicking out of death moves because it's realistic? I need to find that person, because they're stupid and I want to mock them.