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Puroresu General Discussion for 2019


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2 hours ago, Beech27 said:

An impossible non-question with a bit of set-up:

1. Kenny has said on multiple podcast interviews that Gedo approached him about the last Okada match/title win on rather short notice. Kenny further seems to imply that the plan--or at least his goal--was to do more tag stuff with Ibushi.

2. Naito had lost to Okada at the dome, when he was presumed by many to be the winner. That much is uncontroversial. There are more than a few fans who suggest that loss was so Kenny could be the one to beat Okada, however. And of course if that's true, either Gedo didn't tell Kenny, or Kenny hasn't been honest in his reporting of circumstances. Both are possible.

3. It seems really unlikely to me that Okada's epic reign was planned to end... just, y'know, whenever, to whomever gets hot. It also contradicts virtually everything we're told about Gedo's careful booking.

4. It's also true, however, that Kenny's Golden Lovers/Bullet Club angle wasn't done, and hadn't seemed to build to a title shot.

5. Numbering this suggests some kind of logical sequencing, leading from prepositions to a conclusion. I'm not sure I have the former in any real sense, though, and I'm very sure I don't have the latter. It all just seems a little odd, to me. Either Okada's historic reign was ended without much planning; or there was a plan, but it had to be changed (Shibata?) and Kenny was the next best choice; or Kenny was the plan all along, and one or several people just haven't said so.

Work is slow today, and I can't quite figure out what I think is most likely.

I vaguely remember Dave reporting that The Elite got lots of creative control for Bullet Club thing. It was early in the 2018 when everyone was still very excited for it. Anyway, I kinda wonder if they didn't mess up something there with their creative control and thats why things didn't really align.

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Whenever a champion sets a record length or defenses streak and happens to lose it immediately after I feel it is 95% safe to assume that wasn't by accident.  Perhaps before the Naito/Okada Dome match there was an internal debate as to who should win, but once that was figured out I think it is rather safe to say that the length of Okada's reign was rather set in stone. Omega seems to me to have been the only one set up to end it at that point so I'd guess that Gedo had hi penciled in for a while, but that is much more of a guess.

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I'm kind of fien with WWE trying to set up NXT in a few countries, but I still think Japan and Mexico is pushing it too far with the strength of the scene in both places. Its just not necessary and will likely be detrimental to any relationships they have with promotions in the area.

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Kenny Omega was on WOR today and he said something very interesting. Says that for the G1 when he faced Ibushi at the Budokan, they sold 144% of the building, while Tana/Okada on a different night had only sold 65%. Kenny said the New Japan office sent emails around saying that free tickets need to be given away for the Tana/Okada show because they can't have two guys from the indies (Kenny/Ibushi) outselling their home grown guys.

If that’s true, wow.

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He also said that he'd stay up late trying to make something thoughtful out of thoughtless booking directions. Said AEW and WWE wanted him more.

Guy is done with NJPW for the long term. :(

I guess the best we can hope for is a partnership between AEW and DDT now. It's what makes the most sense. Ibushi/Omega can team and face each other there and in AEW but my concern is Kota stays with NJPW.

Spoiler

Image result for cartman balls gif

nooooooooooooo

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It really seemed from the interview that Kenny does not like Harold Meij at all and his relationship with NJPW had deteriorated significantly. I’m doubt it’ll be the last we see him there but I’m very confident he’s not gonna be there for a long while.

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Another interesting thing from that interview I'm slowly making my way through: he wanted to have almost all of the fans behind Tanahashi for the Dome match, which would explain his weird twist in behaviour in the build-up. I didn't like it because it was a betrayal of what he had done with the character and now that's the last image of him in that company for who knows how long. Lame.

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I really like Kenny, but I hope his story on the way out isn’t that New Japan failed to really get behind him, or somehow stifled his creativity. From what we know—admittedly, not everything—it’s hard to believe they could have given him much more. Maybe he was dead set on a dome defense against Ibushi; but without a long term commitment from either, I can see why Tanahashi was the route taken. 

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Kenny talking about his relationship with "New Japan Creative"... I really don't get where he's coming from. He strongly suggested he wasn't getting the storylines he wanted and that he was forced to do the creative heavy lifting in order to make a sensible product out of NJPW's booking choices.

That's delusional. That's a symptom of a mindset that could end up fucking up Kenny's career in the long run.

Kenny's arc vs. Okada was one of the best-booked examples of Gaijin overcomes the Native (or whatever geographic variant you prefer); audiences and critics alike agreed. Concurrent to this he got to be the narrative focal point of the only good homoromantic angle in the history of the artform. And on a grand stage. That isn't small change, it's probably a huge portion of why HBO even bothered with him.  And you got to be THE key player of New Japan's North American expansion, AND you go to work a pretty intriguing "usurp the leader" angle with Cody AND Jay.
 

Hearing the lines about how weird it would be to work for WWE and have your storylines and promos written for you VS. his complaints about having to write his own stuff in NJPW are incongruous at best and a lie at worst. I get that AEW is the best fit for him in terms of creative + money + lifestyle but I wish he'd be honest and come at it in a way that didn't bury NJPW. Just admit the Khans gave you a signing bonus of rounding out your CIB Neo Geo collection.

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1 hour ago, Ryan said:

Or he's just working everyone because that's what he does.

Well thats what people have been saying since his title win and if he is working then he is doing bad job of it.

All this talk roughly fits with the timeline when Dave reported about talent being unhappy about Harold shortly after G1. Most likely thats when Omega realized that he is going to lose to Tanahashi.

I also don't really buy him wanting fans to be behind Tanahashi. Up until final promo where he went full Cleaner with strangling he was trying to present it as ideological conflict and blatantly refused to play the heel. He even made that Undertale video with him presented as a hero, released it on Youtube saying that it couldn't be aired, then it got aired on WK anyway and killed the crowd during his entrance.

Like I really, really hope that he is working because otherwise he seriously might be delusional.

As for Budokan thing. I have hard time believing that NJPW expected Tanahashi/Okada outsell (or sell just as well) as Omega/Ibushi considering that Omega/Ibushi was "preserved match" while they ran Tanahashi/Okada in Dontaku few months earlier and everyone assumed that Okada was just going to win it so there wasn't much interest. If they wanted it to outsell then easier thing to do would have been to swap the blocks so that Tanahashi/Okada had the better day of the week. It still would have sold less, but at least then it would look more plausible that NJPW wanted it to be bigger seller.

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