April 2023 Wrestling Discussion

[odessasteps]

I’m all for using celebrities in matches, as long as you don’t “waste” a good worker on them. I’d be fine all day with Miz and Seth being the guys who work with Logan Paul or Bad Bunny.

[Just Adam Bay Bay]

14 minutes ago, odessasteps said:

I’m all for using celebrities in matches, as long as you don’t “waste” a good worker on them. I’d be fine all day with Miz and Seth being the guys who work with Logan Paul or Bad Bunny.

Seth isn’t a good worker now? If that’s the criteria then Bad Bunny is going to work with some real garbage at Backlash considering he’s gonna work with Dom at Backlash. 

[odessasteps]

I should have said “don’t waster good workers that I like.” 
 

using Dom as a Mexican heel in PR makes perfect sense, be it versus a celebrity or not, 

[Cobra Commander]

currently trying to imagine Big Bubba playing soccer, no wonder he wasn't able to catch Jim Cornette, not enough experience using his hands.

[John E. Dynamite]

9 minutes ago, Cobra Commander said:

currently trying to imagine Big Bubba playing soccer, no wonder he wasn't able to catch Jim Cornette, not enough experience using his hands.

Tell that to all those wild women.

[Elsalvajeloco]

1 hour ago, Cobra Commander said:

One thing I learned from watching Tiger King in 2020 was how many local morning show segments there could be that would totally fly under the radar if they weren’t posted online.

There’s probably enough of a void in the market for wrestlers to do local market interviews these days?

edit: just imagined how much local media 1980s Hulk Hogan could have done if he was working "400" shows a year in an era where he could just Zoom call into the places where he's about to appear.

It kills me everytime I watch a Superstars episode from the 80s that's from the Boston market (much like most of the Memphis stuff appears to be Evansville). Okerlund literally ran down EVERY PPV distributor in Boston and the surrounding areas where you can order WrestleMania III as well as the closed circuit locations. There was also one from the NY/NJ market I vaguely remember, which makes wonder what brave soul in the 80s would just be wondering the state of New Jersey to watch a wrestling PPV and where is he currently storing his collection of dead bodies to make his skin pelts.

[Cobra Commander]

also the whole local element means somebody who has been storing TV guides for 40 years could potentially get extra value for their collection if they're in a market that is smaller than some markets.

Looking at Archive.org and there's TV guides from 1980 with listings from Louisville/Lexington/Cincinnati (bad news if Jim Cornette has a vault of 45 year old TV guides in his house).

Saturday, January 26th, 1980: Wrestling is on Channel 41 (WDRB-Louisville) at 11:30am and on Channel 18 (WLEX-Lexington) at Noon. Both shows for an hour. Then at 11:30pm on Channel 62 (WTVD-Lexington) more wrestling for an hour. Channel 3 (WAVE-Louisville) also had wrestling at 3pm Sunday Afternoon.

If they run short on wrestling programs for Cornette to guess, just take old TV guides and ask him which promotion is running shows on TV in Louisville/Lexington based on channel/time since he was probably trying to watch all of them at the time.

[Log]

7 minutes ago, Cobra Commander said:

Saturday, January 26th, 1980: Wrestling is on Channel 41 (WDRB-Louisville) at 11:30am and on Channel 18 (WLEX-Lexington) at Noon. Both shows for an hour. Then at 11:30pm on Channel 62 (WTVD-Lexington) more wrestling for an hour. Channel 3 (WAVE-Louisville) also had wrestling at 3pm Sunday Afternoon.

In the 12+ years I worked at WDRB, I spent many a slow day digging around in the archives for wrestling tapes. No luck.

[Raziel]

Now ya'll are making me wonder what happened to everything WGTW used to air.  Considering TBN ended up buying the network and moving it to Millville, they either got burned or someone has a trove of wrestling stuff in their garage.

[Cobra Commander]

yeah, i'm guessing that independent channels (like WDRB was in 1980) were not retaining much footage.

Although some people managed to get jobs where they're able to find and upload footage onto YouTube.

A station like WNEP in Pennsylvania has uploaded 40 year old newscasts. And still their 3rd most popular video on their channel is titled "Residents Devastated After Dunkin Donuts Closed by Fire" (1.8M views!)

[JLowe]

Wasn't there an issue with some of the smaller stations reusing tape to save money, thus taping over things like that?

[Elsalvajeloco]

I was recently devastated to learn that the Youtube channel that housed all the Wrestling Challenges (from Fox 5 in NY) from 93 to late 94 closed down (it appears voluntarily or maybe the recent sale brought one too many copyright strikes and was forced to shut down). On the rewatch front I'm SOL cause I'm not halfway through 94 yet, but in retrospect, it's crazy that someone uploaded WWF's D show at the time which was being cancelled in a bunch of markets in VG to EX quality. Someone literally took time to do that. 

For someone in 2023 to find non WWF stuff or anything that wasn't in wide circulation and much older than that, that has to be some true needle in the haystack type shit. I imagine most of it just got discarded or as JLowe just mentioned taped over.

 

[Dolphman 3000]

4 minutes ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

For someone in 2023 to find non WWF stuff or anything that wasn't in wide circulation and much older than that, that has to be some true needle in the haystack type shit. I imagine most of it just got discarded or as JLowe just mentioned taped over.

 

CrazyMax will outlive us all

[Zakk_Sabbath]

16 minutes ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

For someone in 2023 to find non WWF stuff or anything that wasn't in wide circulation and much older than that, that has to be some true needle in the haystack type shit. I imagine most of it just got discarded or as JLowe just mentioned taped over.

My local ABC affiliate used to air WWF cards from the old arena in my state, and I've always been curious whether they would have anything in their archives. I have a small connection there from my college days, might be worth a phone call... 

I also found out recently our Fox affiliate here used to air NWA Worldwide in the 80s in syndication when I randomly watched one on YouTube that someone had taped off the station - it was still an independent UHF channel back then, was interesting to hear their actual call letters in the station ID instead of 'Fox'

By the time I came of age in the mid '90s, it was pretty much all WWF on every local station except for 3 we picked up from NYC, which all carried WCW Worldwide. Sometimes they wouldn't be in sync, and it was great because you'd get one episode at 12:30 Saturday night and then a totally different one at 1:00 Sunday afternoon.

[odessasteps]

1 hour ago, JLowe said:

Wasn't there an issue with some of the smaller stations reusing tape to save money, thus taping over things like that?

I think it was the promotions themselves usually, not necessarily,  trying to save money. 

[cwoy2j]

1 hour ago, odessasteps said:

I think it was the promotions themselves usually, not necessarily,  trying to save money. 

Yeah, the tapes that were used for bicycling (taking the tapes around to each station the promotion was affiliated with) were super expensive back then so they tried to get as much use as possible out of each one.

[zendragon]

4 hours ago, John E. Dynamite said:

Tell that to all those wild women.

To think we missed out on Playboy Ray Traylor doing a Flair type gimmick

[Elsalvajeloco]

8 minutes ago, zendragon said:

To think we missed out on Playboy Ray Traylor doing a Flair type gimmick

Since WWF loved alliteration, how about Ravishing Ray Traylor? If Dennis Condrey can be Loverboy Dennis, Ray Traylor can be Ravishing.

[Cobra Commander]

Ray Traylor and Arn Anderson were from the same general area of Georgia and were closeish in age, so Big Bubba would have fit in better with the Horsemen than Sid.

(also a masked Bubba was already their #1 pick to replace JJ Dillon in WarGames)

[notoriusvig]

3 hours ago, Dolphman 3000 said:

CrazyMax will outlive us all

I can't remember my login. Is it still sorta complicated to register?

[Tarheel Moneghetti]

I would have bet a fair bit of money CrazyMax was gone by now.  Feels like it has been at least a decade since I even thought of the site,

[Ziggy]

10 hours ago, Log said:

WWE has been embracing the "new" celebrities/influencers/whatever. I'd say they've actually done a really good job with it. But, for me personally, that's a turn-off. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some clouds that need yelling at.

Logan Paul is the Bad Bunny equivalent of Social media influencer. He managed to have a decent amount of his following tune in to watch him work. Plus him fighting Mayweather gave him credibility. 

WWE likes to make alot of these celebrities a bigger deal than they are. Not everyone is going to turn out to be really good at this. They lucked out on some good hands over the past decade or more with Maria Menounos , Snooki , Johnny Knoxville,  even Snoop we saw last week was able to work on the fly and save that segment when Shane got hurt but those people are not social media celebrities.

The problem with Logan Paul being so good is that WWE is probably going to throw money at other people like him and they won't turn out as well. I don't know if he was the biggest fan growing up but he definitely was familiar enough with it. His entourage on his podcast seem to be bigger marks of wrestling than him. 

Most of these celebrities that have turned out to do the best are the ones that are huge fans.

I'm not to familiar with Bad Bunnys music but I know he is a huge star in music and  he's big enough currently that he shouldn't be doing wrestling other than the fact that he loves it so much. Same with Pat McAfee. They lucked up that people like that have come along at the same time that just so happened to have the dream to be apart of WWE. I also remember Bad Bunny on LeBron James Barbershop show with Jay-Z on HBO after one of his Mania appearances and Jay-Z saying Wrestlemania is bigger than the SuperBowl. Image the money WWE would throw at him now if they knew he said that lol

[AxB]

Logan Paul and Bad Bunny have legit beef. Because Bunny is Puerto Rican, and Paul is one of those rich guys who moved to Puerto Rico to avoid paying tax and exploit the locals.

[odessasteps]

Didn't realize PR was a tax haven like the British Virgin Islands or  Monaco. 

[Zakk_Sabbath]

11 hours ago, odessasteps said:

Didn't realize PR was a tax haven like the British Virgin Islands or  Monaco. 

It's kind of not - the way it was explained to me when I visited years ago, is that they have pretty much the same system we do in the mainland US except they have a super low, flat income tax rate. So unless something has changed in the last six years (which is entirely possible) it's more like moving to a New Hampshire, Florida, or Nevada than it is like a Bermuda or something.