caley

I only caught a couple minutes of Jericho-Takeshita and laughed really hard when Jericho got dropped on the top rope, layed there with his head down, practically dead, then reached down and pulled up his pants.

Thanks! I guess it would be poor form to follow it up with an angle where someone "stops short", especially in light of recent news

I didn't watch Smackdown last week, can someone explain this Damage CTRL-Seinfeld connection he's talking about?!

I think it was director James Gunn who said Cena was the best ad-libber he had ever worked with; that in Suicide Squad when Idris Elba refers to Cena being in his "tightie-whities" and Cena responded "That's racist!" it was completely unscripted and broke them all up.

I was coming in here to see if anyone had posted the Drew tweet and -even better- I got it twice!

It could be worse, it could be mid-90s WWF where every luchadore they bring in has a theme song that you know would fit well on a "Soft Acoustic Guitar for an Empty Room" playlist playing in the background at Michael's.

Oh, I was referring to the 2000-signing (that was actually on WCW's website IIRC) before Heyman quashed it by saying he was under contract to WCW that effectively ended his impending WCW tenure before it started, as well as his ECW tenure (I remember Lance Storm and Justin Credible beating up someone backstage and Storm saying something like "That's one more foreigner out of this company" which was seen as a thinly-veiled, slightly obscure (I mean, he was billed as being from Bombay...Michigan) and final reference to Sabu!).

i think he did, finally cut it during the Team Canada phase. It was just so WCW: "We can sign away their world champion and change everything about him!" I still wonder what have happened if their signing of Sabu had gone through at about this time, as well: a mute guy who specializedin the type of violent matches WCW couldn't show...he might well have ended up a wrestling mime under Russo.

Vince Russo is the answer. WCW brought Awesome in and, suddenly, the guy who looked like such a monster in ECW, didn't look so big next to guys like Nash or even Hogan. Couple that with his dreadful promos, instead of pushing him as a monster, they pivoted and made him 'That 70s Guy' because he had a mullet. I mean, the easier thing to do would be to pair him with smaller wrestlers and give him a mouthpiece but that wasn't Russo's style. Then he became the "Fat Chick Thriller" so that Russo could script segments with obese women. Seeing as all that stuff basically buried Awesome as a comedy-level guy, they needed to rehab him and Lance Storm's Team Canada group (That had almost NO Canadian wrestlers, outside of PCO who was only around for a show or due to some sort of visa reasons) was pretty hot, so they added Awesome to the group in a hilariously ill-designed turn where Awesome turned around to reveal the Canadian flag on his tights but instead just looked like he was pointing at his asshole. He largely went back to being Mike Awesome once he was back in Storm's group but I honestly can't recall a single good match in his time in WCW. His ECW style wasn't really transferable to WCW (IIRC one of the few times he did that brutal Awesome Bomb over the ropes through a table, Vampire ended up with a concussion) and, really, the only matches through the Russo/Bischoff era that are memorable are weird anomalies like the Funk-Candido brawl that ended up with Funk getting kicked by a horse or the Goldberg-Steiner match which is overbooked to hell but largely memorable because both guys seemingly repeatedly forget that it's not a real fight and beat the life out of each other.

I remember when Ellering came back in the late 90s and started calling himself "Mr. Dot Com" and it was such a silly, stupid nickname that it became a running joke with me and my siblings. I still have a piece a TV stand where one of them used a labelmaker to make "Mr Dot Com" and stuck it to the stand.

Not going to lie. As an unabashed fan of rich guys obliviously doing stupid things, this might be my favourite moment in AEW history.

What on Earth was the "Big Billy Starks" taunt? Is the entire joke that that is also the name of a female wrestler? Haha, you have the same name as a woman? Is that really it? Or is there something else to it that I'm not aware of? I haven't watched the last 3-4 weeks of Dynamite (any AEW really), as I'm completely out on the Devil stuff and have no interest in the CC and the shows are basically built around itwith everything else kind of on pause until it ends and I tuned in tonight and only caught the Golden Jets/Bill Starks things and I'm probably not going to watch anymore.

https://twitter.com/kalynkahler/status/1732557205755383819 I have an idea for a new AEW heel gimmick...or a new WWE face gimmick

They did show the Canadian Collision shows but now are basically holding Collision and the Friday show (I have a headache and can't remember its name) hostage unless you subscribe to their pay service. So if you want to watch all the AEW shows, you have to pay for TSN and TSN+.

I think the Punk promo was pretty brilliant because it got a lot of people to tune in and he said...well nothing really. But the crowd cheered where they were supposed to cheer and there were a lot of soundbites that will get posted on social media and re-posted and discussed and Punk is really good at saying nothing and making it sound important. And a lot of people (maybe not the ones who wanted him to trash AEW or bury Vince McMahon etc. etc.) will tune in and keep tuning in to see if he says anything else or who his first feud will be with (I was actually thinking tonight how a great first feud for him could be...Logan Paul actually). Loved the tag team turmoil for just how little of a shit that crowd gave for the Creeds at the start of the match and for how they completely came alive for them when taller Creed (I can't figure out their names) did his repeated suplexes/kip-ups spot and by the end were chanting and cheering their heads off. That move where taller Creed vaulted to the top rope, missed, then sprang back up was actually more impressive than if he'd hit it clean. I seriously don't know how he got up there so fast after missing the landing. I think once the crowd watches the Creeds some more, they will be into them more. I don't understand why they spent so much time building them up in NXT, only to give them such a tepid, anticlimactic debut on Raw. Nakamura talking about chaos is kind of a fun deal. I wonder if there's any chance of him leading a Chaos stable in WWE. Ivar-Reed was pretty good, then got great when they were brawling in the crowd. Is the other Raider hurt? I'm enjoying Ivar's singles run and his moonsault always gets a great reaction but he is going to destroy his knees if he keeps doing it every match. Zoey-Nia was more competitive than I was expecting. I'm not terribly interested in Nia in 2023. Zoey does some stuff that I don't see too many other wrestlers doing (that flipping vault into the ring thing gets me every time!). I think she works better as a heel because her promos are a little middle-of-the-road but she's so good in the rng, she might just get over that way, as well.

https://twitter.com/OaklandRovers/status/1725703374991982954 This is great, the socks are amazing.

I think you're all ignoring the obvious highlight of the night which is that while trying to very SERIOUSLY trying to describe the heated rivalry between Swerve and Hangman, Prince Nana's increasingly insane entrance dance routine (Now featuring little hops!) made Tazz and Excalibur laugh, then having to explain said laughing ("I'm not laughing, it's just that's how insane this is!"), then Excalibur completely forgetting what he was trying to say while trying not to laugh. Runner-up to this was Adam Page talking about stealing Nana's weed which suddenly springs Nana into action: "YOU WILL NOT! YOU WILL NOT!" The less said about almost everything else, the better.

His "maniacal" laughter at the end really puts it over the top . It's an amazing trainwreck like the part where they promote Sapp as a wrestler by talking about a toughman competition and him going "That's because I'm being trained by [slowly puts on hat] Sam Greco" to absolutely no reaction as Greco was under contract but never appeared beyond a backstage appearance (per wiki) which somehow the interviewer decides is him making a challenge against Greco and Sapp being like 'Yeah sure, maybe'. It would be like Brock Lesnar debuting in WWE by talking backstage about some amateur wrestling he was going to be doing but not to worry because he was trained by "Shelton Benjamin!" and the interviewer going "Does that mean you're going to wrestle Shelton?" and not just showing up and destroying a bunch of dudes.

Also, was that a Laura Dern character interviewing him?

The responses to it are gold: Punk, Gillberg, Dolph Ziggler, Funaki, 2 (!) for Tyrus and 1 for Charlotte Flair. By the awkord pronoun-ing, though, it's almost definitely a female wrestler, presumably Sasha Banks (I haven't bothered to learn her new name!)

01. True but Foley is also a guy who has to believe in what he's doing (Witness when he said if the best they had for him was a match with Marc Mero then he'd rather not be on the Wrestlemania card at all) and he was so excited about his ECW run and had been warned off WWF by the recently dumped Shane Douglas that he might not have tried too hard to get it over. 02. Definitely also a possibility, especially with JR and Cornette going to bat for him. I actually wish it had made TV just to hear Vince's pronunciation of "Mewwww-ti-lator!" as Foley described it.

With the stupid hat with his face on it, that skipping pose into the double-bicep flex, and the catchphrases and passable (for the shouting catchphrase era) promos, I think Buff would have been over huge for a little while as a face, the crowd REALLY wanted to cheer him, he could've maybe been a toned-down WCW version of Val Venis . I also think there's a good chance his babyface run would be interrupted by an upcoming heel just SHREDDING him in a promo (say, Jericho...as he's one of the few young heels who got promo time...I could see him unintentionally stopping Buff's face run with a good mocking promo/nickname) or the crowd tiring of him in a "So this guy is good-looking, girls like him, and he kinda sucks, why are we cheering for him" kind of way.

I often wonder how quickly Mick Foley s WWE career would have flamed out if they had stuck with his original WWE moniker/gimmick of Mason the Mutilator

Is '...All the Marbles' with Peter Falk managing a women's tag team any good? It's on TCM tomorow if anyone is interested.

A late Vince Russo-era WCW Nitro live from my hometown seemed an impossibility, but here it was. My friend's dad had box seats to the arena, so he assured me early on that we had seats. The day of the show, my brother and my cousin and I were shopping around downtown, we swung by the arena to see the big WCW trucks unloading equipment and the like, and while we were standing there, a number of wrestlers showed up and were walking across the parking lot, behind metal fencing: Rick Steiner, Kevin Nash and everybody cheered and yelled at them, in order for them to turn around, wave, nod etc. Tank Abbott showed up and everyone went silent, one kid was like "Shhh, he's dangerous" which I thought was quite funny, my brother looked around like 'I'm not scared' and yelled "Tank Abbott!" Tank turns around, glares, stalks over a few feet then yells "Did you all come here to see Three Count dance?!" to massive cheers before going in. My cousin, after this bit decides there's no way he's missing out on this (Because it wasn't my sky box, I didn't feel like I could invite him and my brother) and buys two tickets for them, basically last row, back of the arena seats. So we hung around near the arena, followed Jeff Jarrett around for a bit until the hotel security guards shooed us away, got lied to by Dave Penzer ("Is Bret Hart gonna be here?" "Oh yeah, everyone is here!") and just about half an hour before the show a big guy in a suit came up to us and asked if we had tickets and were sitting together, and I was like "I'm in a box, but they're sitting together" and he hands my brother and cousin a pair of tickets "Compliments of Mr. Goldberg". So my friend shows up and I'm up in the skybox with him (TERRIBLE seats that are adjacent to the entrance so you can't see the screen which is an absolute necessity at a Russo-booked show...the main event was Goldberg putting Midajah through a table backstage shown on said screen) and I scan the crowd for my brother and cousin and they are DIRECTLY behind the announcers desk for the show. All night long they are on camera (If you watch that show...and I don't know why you would, for a show with Sting, Rey Mysterio, Lance Storm, Mike Awesome, PCO, The Great Muta etc. etc. it is a TERRIBLE show...there's a kid directly behind the announcers who does the RVD pose for the cameras, that's my cousin!), they almost got run over by the Harris brothers doing a run-in, a chunk of table almost hit my brother (Though for him, the most memorable part of the night was when the one kid came up to them and told them that ICP was going to be there and if you chanted ICP's name all night they would come out and bring you candy like some demented Juggalo Santa Claus, I guess, and the kid kept chating ICP all night even though they were not there). My mom remembers later that night, checking on my cousin who was wide-awake and staring at the ceiling and he said "Best night of my life Auntie Liz!" I saw said cousin this past summer, he's married with children now, and 23 years later, he stil brought up that night and how he was telling his daughters about it.