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JUNE 2019 WRESTLING DISCUSSION - Thread 2


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1 minute ago, jaedmc said:

Today I stopped by the Target and saw they had an Elite Red Rooster figure.

Only in the box it wasn't Red Rooster.

It was John Cena's head. And Drew Gulak's basic(not even Elite articulation!) figure body and tights.

I thought man, what a weird combination that would be in real life, if Drew Gulak was John Cena's minion.

Then I thought - I probably still wouldn't like that as much as Terry Taylor.

Enjoy one of my favorite Terry Taylor matches!

 

Are y'all old enough to remember when we all had Terry Taylor pegged as the next Ric Flair?  Was that ever a bad call.  That would have been 1987 or thereabouts, fast-forward twenty years and Taylor is a corporate stooge and Flair is still Flair. When I'm wrong, I'm way wrong...

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1 hour ago, RIPPA said:

Dean drank.... a lot...

Well, when I first got into lucha libre- around 1995, it was all about being blown away by the spectacularness of Rey Misterio Jr and Juventud and Super Calo.  I just figured these old guys were there to hold back the young guys.  It takes a while to understand the subtleties of lucha libre.  I hated a lot of great wrestlers back then.

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4 minutes ago, DEAN said:

Well, when I first got into lucha libre- around 1995, it was all about being blown away by the spectacularness of Rey Misterio Jr and Juventud and Super Calo.  I just figured these old guys were there to hold back the young guys.  It takes a while to understand the subtleties of lucha libre.  I hated a lot of great wrestlers back then.

To be fair, it wasn't just you. You read most of the sheets from around then and you'll read Dave go on about this big Psicosis Dive but he'll never mention how great an asshole rudo he was. That sort of thing. It's like they were only able to appreciate half of the match.

I was looking at Freidlander's list today because someone posted it and you'll see "huge Mysterio dive!" mentioned all the time, that sort of thing, but they'd ignore something like this in a heartbeat.

yNOaEZ.gif

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8 minutes ago, Matt D said:

To be fair, it wasn't just you. You read most of the sheets from around then and you'll read Dave go on about this big Psicosis Dive but he'll never mention how great an asshole rudo he was. That sort of thing. It's like they were only able to appreciate half of the match.

I can't speak for Dave, but when I first saw lucha- mostly from comp tapes after seeing Eddie Guerrerro and Rey Misterio Jr in ECW, the first thing to strike me was the highspots.  It was hard to get past them in 1995, after seeing 25 years of US wrestling.  The internet was awesome about opening up the world of professional wrestling to the rest of the world.  It was a great time to be a fan.

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Never heard of Davey Richards, but you get to keep your spot another week, pal.

Next time I need a power point on how e-fed promos influenced Triple H and the 30 minute opening segment of RAW. And it better have embedded midi versions of old entrance music.

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3 minutes ago, jaedmc said:

Never heard of Davey Richards, but you get to keep your spot another week, pal.

Next time I need a power point on how e-fed promos influenced Triple H and the 30 minute opening segment of RAW. And it better have embedded midi versions of old entrance music.

Omg... e-feds and everyone writing Tolstoy.

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35 minutes ago, Wyld Samurai said:

Omg... e-feds and everyone writing Tolstoy.

Wasted so much time writing out promos between 1999-2003.  Long winded elaborate promos that no one would ever read or hear.

I can only imagine that the rest of my eFed alumni are now working as writers for WWE or Impact.

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3 hours ago, Smelly McUgly said:

LU didn't get really good until Matanza Cueto showed up, IMO. The problem with LU was that it got good in season two, stayed good in season three, and then fell off a cliff in season four. 

AEW, on the other hand, seems to be coming in hot, though of course that's off the back of one-off shows and not weekly TV like Nitro was doing when it started hot. 

Naw, LU was great from the get-go until it fell off a cliff in season four. I know it wasn't a traditional promotion, but more a telenovel with wrestling as the setting, but I'd be hard pressed to think of any promotion that went from great to unwatchable with the swiftness that LU did. At least we will always have the first three seasons to recall fondly.

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1 hour ago, jaedmc said:

Today I stopped by the Target and saw they had an Elite Red Rooster figure.

Only in the box it wasn't Red Rooster.

It was John Cena's head. 

 

FIFY: Something about finding John Cena's head in a box at Target just seems so perfect...

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I feel like Matt made me watch a Mocho Cota match, and Cota was doing some excellent mugging into the camera when he was booted in the face by a heel at close range. Seriously some of the funniest shit I've ever seen. 

That dude's alright with me, but I just can't get into trios matches like that, unfortunately. 

@OSJ: Agree to disagree. That first season with the derivative "evil owner" stuff didn't work for me at all, and I wasn't really into any of the interweaving side storylines. It wasn't until the actor playing Dario Cueto went from "typical evil executive" to "dude with a serious bloodlust who was deeply involved in evil Aztec mysticism and the criminal underworld" that the show started to get better, and I'm a huge Matanza/Jeff Cobb mark because of Cobb's work as Matanza. 

@For Great Justice: Y'all just keep making interesting points while I try to post. Disagree on your point because Bret was ALL about story; he just focused closely on how the story would play out in-ring. He wasn't doing flashy moves just to do them; he'd do moves and callbacks and finishes that enhanced whatever story was being told. I just mentioned not long ago the Bret/Owen WM X finish as one of my favorites in wrestling because it showed that Owen wanted to win so badly and to show Bret that he was as great as Bret was that he scouted the shit out of Bret's matches and recognized the victory roll strategy that Bret used against Bam Bam at KotR '93 ten months earlier. It made Owen more than just a jealous scumbag; he really did think that he was underappreciated, and maybe he was, and that gave his heel turn some emotional weight.

Seth Rollins ain't doing anything half that smart or half that interested in telling a story for his finishes, I can assure you of that. 

@Elsalvajeloco: You definitely know more than me in this regard, so I'll defer to your knowledge.I just have a feeling that more ex-football players came over to wrestling rather than going into MMA; I don't have actual numbers or enough knowledge of boxing and MMA to make a definite claim. 

Edited by Smelly McUgly
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Also, and this might be contentious I think, I would lay some blame at Bret Hart. Now, Bret was awesome, but through admiration of Hart I believe that this notion of the physical execution of the moves being of greater importance than the story being sold was grown within the early internet fan base, through which stuff like Lance Storm, RVD/Lynn and in general 10.0 Perfect Execution became en vogue. 

You could trace that to DK/TM if you wish, but for US audiences perhaps it is Hart and (God love him) guys like Scott Keith that promoted it in the mid 90’s.

 

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2 hours ago, Smelly McUgly said:

I can see this argument. The modern WWE worker is typically influenced by coming up in the Internet Era, which valued pace and flip-filled movesets, and you can absolutely draw a line between Meltzer's influence, whether direct or indirect, among internet hardcores and the people who became wrestlers under that influence, like, say, Seth Rollins.

Obviously, there are other factors at play, like MMA taking quite a few of the football players and collegiate wrestlers out of the pool of workers and leaving us with the internet geeks who did aerobics for thirty minutes a match on the indies as the biggest part of the wrestler pool, or like Southern-style wrestling being dead once WCW went down for the count in 2001, but sure, I see where you're coming from. 

Wrestling can have Brendan Schaub and some of the other ex football dudes. Most of them never really pan out like that. Greg Hardy is undefeated right now, but he had trouble earlier in the year with someone who just got KO'd in nine seconds last Saturday. And Hardy is a top of the line guy as you could get. I mean he beat an ex Jacksonville Jaguar (forgot his name) as part of a reality show to get into the UFC on a developmental contract. Eryk Anders is probably the next step down being a former Bama guy under Saban, but he is still rough around the edges.

The amateur wrestlers or w/e who would have made it..Askren probably doesn't give a single solitary shit about pro wrestling (even though he did do a Stunner on Punk). Cormier probably would have done well, but his physique would knock him down a peg. Mo Lawal was already shot physically two or so years into his MMA career and isn't a great talker. Lawlor is already doing pro wrestling and had a pro wrestling background beforehand, but I mean his age will hold him back. Chael needed MMA in the first place to become popular and most of his infamous stuff was cribbed from somewhere else. He wouldn't be allowed to do that schtick, and he would be given a script. I can't name any other American who fits that mold. I mean maybe Rampage Jackson, but his career was somewhat defined by not being dedicated.

I think if Yoel Romero was in a different era of pro wrestling, he would be the best foreign cold war heel for JCP or World Class. That broken English promo he cut in the Garden after knocking out Chris Weidman where he called out Bisping was fucking priceless. Plus, he is built like a brick shithouse and scary athletic. He's the one guy who I would consider a loss for pro wrestling. He is old too, but he doesn't have the same wear and tear as a Tom Lawlor or King Mo.

Edited by Elsalvajeloco
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1 minute ago, For Great Justice said:

Also, and this might be contentious I think, I would lay some blame at Bret Hart. Now, Bret was awesome, but through admiration of Hart I believe that this notion of the physical execution of the moves being of greater importance than the story being sold was grown within the early internet fan base, through which stuff like Lance Storm, RVD/Lynn and in general 10.0 Perfect Execution became en vogue. 

You could trace that to DK/TM if you wish, but for US audiences perhaps it is Hart and (God love him) guys like Scott Keith that promoted it in the mid 90’s.

 

CANADIAN VIOLENCE!!! There, now that's out of the way.

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5 minutes ago, Smelly McUgly said:

I feel like Matt made me watch a Mocho Cota match, and Cota was doing some excellent mugging into the camera when he was booted in the face by a heel at close range. Seriously some of the funniest shit I've ever seen. 

That dude's alright with me, but I just can't get into trios matches like that, unfortunately. 

@OSJ: Agree to disagree. That first season with the derivative "evil owner" stuff didn't work for me at all, and I wasn't really into any of the interweaving side storylines. It wasn't until the actor playing Dario Cueto went from "typical evil executive" to "dude with a serious bloodlust who was deeply involved in evil Aztec mysticism and the criminal underworld" that the show started to get better, and I'm a huge Matanza/Jeff Cobb mark because of Cobb's work as Matanza. 

Agree to disagree. I don't watch a lot of TV in the first place so when I'm confronted by a show with lucha libre as the backdrop, I'm all over that like ugly on an ape. I can't even pretend to say that I viewed Season One with anything approaching a critical eye, I just thought it was about the coolest thing I'd ever seen on TV and I was scared to death that each episode might be the last, so to say that I was a dedicated viewer doesn't even begin to cover it.

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12 minutes ago, Smelly McUgly said:

I feel like Matt made me watch a Mocho Cota match, and Cota was doing some excellent mugging into the camera when he was booted in the face by a heel at close range. Seriously some of the funniest shit I've ever seen. 

That dude's alright with me, but I just can't get into trios matches like that, unfortunately. 

@OSJ: Agree to disagree. That first season with the derivative "evil owner" stuff didn't work for me at all, and I wasn't really into any of the interweaving side storylines. It wasn't until the actor playing Dario Cueto went from "typical evil executive" to "dude with a serious bloodlust who was deeply involved in evil Aztec mysticism and the criminal underworld" that the show started to get better, and I'm a huge Matanza/Jeff Cobb mark because of Cobb's work as Matanza. 

 

@For Great Justice: Y'all just keep making interesting points while I try to post. Disagree on your point because Bret was ALL about story; he just focused closely on how the story would play out in-ring. He wasn't doing flashy moves just to do them; he'd do moves and callbacks and finishes that enhanced whatever story was being told. I just mentioned not long ago the Bret/Owen WM X finish as one of my favorites in wrestling because it showed that Owen wanted to win so badly and to show Bret that he was as great as Bret was that he scouted the shit out of Bret's matches and recognized the victory roll strategy that Bret used against Bam Bam at KotR '93 ten months earlier. It made Owen more than just a jealous scumbag; he really did think that he was underappreciated, and maybe he was, and that gave his heel turn some emotional weight.

Seth Rollins ain't doing anything half that smart or half that interested in telling a story for his finishes, I can assure you of that. 

Oh I want to completely agree and reiterate that my fault isn’t with Hart himself, who would be the first to admit that he was foremost a storyteller. Rather I’m laying the blame at the feet of those that appreciated his work more for the physical execution of it. 

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