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Greggulator

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Everything posted by Greggulator

  1. Here is how this story goes: 1) Punk does shoot-y style promos and they are irritating because the WWE doesn’t really do that right now and it hasn’t missed a beat. There are quickly diminishing returns but people pretend to like it anyways. 2) Punk gets hurt in about six weeks. 3) Punk comes back and some drama happens and he’s gone by SummerSlam.
  2. I am glad we are at the time of year when The Miz reminds everyone why he has been here for 20 years and is really high on the list of best WWE performers in the company’s history. Dude’s career is absolutely remarkable.
  3. Yeah, this was a keeper of heel work. The infection is what really sells it. A lesser heel would just say “I hope your leg gets amputated.” But saying “I hope your surgery goes bad” and then saying you hope it leads to an infection and then amputation — that’s such a great specific detail and reflects on just how much thought Santos has given to hurting Rey.
  4. The Iowa/VA Tech women's game tonight was so good. I am going out of my way to watch every Caitlyn Clark game I can this year. She's absolutely incredible. A female Pete Maravich pretty much.
  5. I have to say that I'm so impressed with Lexi King so far. Brian Pillman Jr. in AEW was the dregs. He was so complete uninteresting in terms of personality and in-ring. I had no idea this was coming. It's so weird because the guy he reminds me of the most right now? He's doing an era appropriate version of his dad's Loose Cannon shtick. We're not in the time period where he's going to do the "bookerman" stuff but he's breaking out as a chaos agent stirring the pot to skip the line.
  6. You know what, I could actually see Jack doing a good Hollywood Brat thing. That's what I've wanted from him all along -- him doing the whole "Do you know who the f my dad was?' kind of stuff or him actually starting to believe he's Dylan McKay while his goons look at him completely weird. Or him dangling "big movie and TV roles" ahead as the carrot for his minions. One thing that hit me -- Do you know who would be a really good Devil it turns out? Brian Pillman, Jr. I thought he was on the shortlist of lamest wrestlers we've ever seen. But whoever came up with his new persona and him leaning into it is really great. He'd be so great as something like that.
  7. Yeah, the last we saw Jungle Jack was as a smarmy cowardly heel running away from Hook. He was fine at that and getting better but trying to explain that into “Mastermind wearing a devil’s mask swaying four dudes to wear masks and do his bidding” is a big stretch. The only way you can maybe explain it is if Jungle Jack used his inheritance to pay them off but then afterwards how these guys would stay in line in following the orders of a total dweeb would be so stupid.
  8. The Toni Storm/new woman angle is a reference to All About Eve, which is one of the best movies ever made. It stars Bette Davis as Margo Channing. The plot is about a big star sort of approaching the downward slope of her career who is approached by a giant fan (Eve Harrington) who works her way into her life as her assistant and then manipulated her way to replacing her as the next big star. Bette Davis gives an all-time great performance and the movie has one really famous line: “Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy night.” The RJ City intro to her I believe is a direct reference. I only saw All About Eve once. It’s FANTASTIC. Timeless Toni Storm is Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, which is my favorite movie. Norma Desmond is a faded silent move star who preys upon a struggling young writer to return her to glory as she descends further and further into madness. Toni’s “I’m ready for my closeup!” line before she does her rubbing hip smash in the corner and the “We had FACES” she said before introducing the silent films for the first time and now the obedient butler are all directly taken from Sunset Boulevard, along with Timeless Toni’s overacting and pathos. I have been doing an e-fed character the past two years based off Norma Desmond but as a manager. I love Timeless Toni so much. My comment before about All About Eve — they have not really established Timeless Toni yet. We know the backstory and saw the transformation and it is awesome. But she has not been established (once again) as the best in the division with this new character or the like. For them to do All About Eve properly, they need to do this a few months into Timeless Toni’s reign and then have their Eve Harrington enter the picture before Toni loses the title and then sees her understudy steal her glory by winning the title back. Fun fact about both films: They are both probably the two best movies ever made about Hollywood, and especially how a starlet deals with losing their fame and adulation. Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson (who plays Norma Desmond and really was a silent movie star) give two of the best performances ever captured in film. They both came out in 1950 and they were both up for Best Picture and Best Actress (two nominees for All About Eve between Bette Davis and the woman who played her understudy) and etc. All About Eve won Best Picture, Best Director (Joseph Mankiewicz), Best Supporting Actor and Best Story (Adapted Screenplay.) But the actress in a movie called Born Yesterday (which I have never seen) won Best Actress. Sunset Boulevard only won Best Original Screenplay. Sunset Boulevard holds up a lot better than All About Eve. I am not the movie nerd I used to be but I think it’s the best movie ever made and Billy Wilder is hands down the best director of all-time.
  9. I am fine with Joe vacating the title because AEW needs about 75 percent less titles. It’s the prestige sub-division TV title — who cares? Do they still have the pure title? There is though a 95 percent chance this leads to a tournament of some kind. And on a funny note a friend of mine pointed out: What were they using the office Max got tossed into for? Like did Bowens need a notary or something and they stumbled down there and the Devil’s dudes were there? I like the intrigue of who it could be. It will be hilarious if it is Jungle Jack because that dude would be so so so bad at the evil mastermind role. Swerve/Penta ruled so much. It has so many great weird Swerve spots. That dude is a perfect combination of being insanely athletic but he knows how to fill in the gaps by moving slow and calculating (reminds me a lot of Randy Orton) and making things like his stomp off the apron look so so so nasty. That dude rules. OC’s promo was a banger.
  10. ROTFLMAO this is so stupid. What does that even mean? IF THIS IS EVEN TRUE (spoiler, it’s not): Networks give out TV deals over a few years — like four or five years. NXT is for five years. So an “eight-figure deal” sounds really impressive. But that breaks down to $10 million over 5 years or $2 million a year. So that’s impressive but not as much of a “WOW” as that headline makes you believe. Also: Come on. Keller is getting that information from Billy Corgan or the guy who works for Billy Corgan. It’s not anything at all that would pass any level of smell test. CW’s biggest sports property is LIV Golf. Now, LIV has a lot of problems — backlash because it’s Saudi owned, ridiculous team format, distracting war with the PGA, etc. But it has some of the biggest names in golf (people my wife has heard of and she knows nothing about golf.) And golf gets the most coveted audience members — the worst people alive (ala rich white people.) Even with crappy ratings the people watching are still wealthy. LIV was actually looking to buy time from TV networks like an infomercial before it found a deal with The CW. So knowing that, I doubt that the CW even paid LIV and “eight-figure deal.” Let alone a fly-by-night wrestling company no one cares about even among wrestling fans run by the very dependable businessman/Zwan lead singer Billy Corgan. Let’s also use some more logic here. The WWE is a really big deal. It’s a massive corporate entity. The CW wants to make a splash and is building out its programming around sports and sports-ish stuff. Getting NXT from the much more established USA Network gives The CW some of that rub and reminds people that it used to have Smackdown years ago. On top of possibly making them money, it’s good for putting its name out there to the world. A TV deal between any company takes a really long time to put together. If it is between two companies with stock the general public can buy and sell like the WWE and the CW’s owners, then it becomes even more complicated because of government regulations. And one thing that was absolutely included in the negotiations and The CW agreed to without any hesitation at all would be: “You can’t have any other wrestling on your network” and also very very very certainly “You can’t negotiate with any other wrestling company while we hammer this out.” Who at The CW was going to go out and say “You know what? Let’s risk this whole WWE relationship by going behind their back and against well-established official negotiating practices to give $10 million to a wrestling company even wrestling fans don’t care about that is owned by the guy who made life hell for Guitar Center employees in 1992 when every teenager in the world came in and tried out the opening line to ‘Today’ on a Fender they had no money to actually buy. None of this NWA stuff is even remotely true. Is there any actual reporting on what AEW gets? The only thing I saw was from wrestling journalists and hahahahahaha about them writing anything knowledgeably about the actual business world.
  11. Came on here to see if anyone else dug her. I am not hip to the plagiarism charges. But man so many of the songs off the new album are absolutely wild in terms of the music and production. And in terms of teeny bop lyrics her stuff hits in a way no one else really ever has. Also: A photo is floating around my Facebook feed of her hanging out with The Breeders! She rules so much. National treasure.
  12. I know a woman who went out on a few dates with him. They lived in the same neighborhood in Brooklyn and they were on the same dating app. She said he was kinda dumb but really nice and she could not resist the ability to tell people “You know that guy James Iha from Smashing Pumpikns? Well…”
  13. I want the James Mitchell cocaine bit ruins NWA on CW and WWE snakes it away to be as true as anyone else but there is absolutely no way that happened. WWE and CW are both owned by publicly traded companies. The CW is 75 percent owned by Nextstar if you want to quibble and Nextstar is a soulless media company (and not some religious group.) Have you ever bought a house or a car? Do you remember how much insane work goes into all of it before you and the old owner come to an agreement on the price and who has to pay for what things need to be fixed while the real estate brokers and a bunch of other people are involved? NXT going on CW is going to be that but about 500 times more complicated. And, also, since both companies are on the stock exchange (publicly traded), there are also all kinds of regulations you have to tend to for these sorts of deals. If the rules aren’t followed it’s really easy to get sued. The announcement came out the same day TKO (the WWE’s corporate owner) made its first public statements telling everyone how much money they made the past few months. That is not an accident. Timing big announcements on the same day a company tells the public how it is doing financially (earnings call day) is pretty commonplace. It is a sign that this has been in the works for a really long time. Billy Corgan is an idiot. And a narcissist. Sure, I like a few songs on Gish and Siamese Dream like anyone else who went to high school in the 90s and had exposure to an alternative rock station. But he’s not a business owner. He is not an executive unless you count bossing around James Iha or seeing how much Zwan merchandise is left in the warehouse as an executive skill. My very strong hunch is that Corgan had a meeting with a CW executive who is a fan of his music, since the CW exec knows they want to get into sports and they had a possible thing going on with NXT, and they nodded and smiled and wished Corgan luck and since he is a maniac without any experience he went and told some wrestling journalist they had a deal in the works and whoever wrote up the article has no clue how any of this works (or how to call the Nextstar media relations team so they could say ‘this is not true’) and wrote it like it was fact and not some insane Billy Corgan delusion.
  14. I only watched OC/Claudio because Survivor takes priority for me. But man that was an absolute banger and one of the best AEW matches flat out. Those two guys are a perfect pairing as dance partners — Claudio is not just a beast but he is also one of the most creative wrestlers ever at alternating his spots, and OC is one of the best “thinking man’s wrestler” archetypes we have ever had. Those two are such unique storytellers and I want to see a Best of 7, High water mark for both guys, and think about that. The only TV match with Claudio I can think of at that level was the crazy match against Cena for the US Title. But man this was just so fun
  15. Dear lord Creeds vs. Alpha Academy ruled. That dive sequence was absolutely bonkers. Felt like Steiners vs. Brad Armstrong and Bam Bam Bigelow or something like that.
  16. #1 Wisconsin vs. #2 Nebraska in volleyball this weekend. The game is at Lincoln and the cheapest ticket is $300 or so on Stubhub. They are both juggetnauts. If you have not watched NCAA Volleyball and are curious — this is THE match of the year and it is going to rule.
  17. I KEEP DANCING ON MY OWN!
  18. Also I am bad with technology and have no idea how I can share the picture I have of the Phillies tattoo I had placed on my shoulder two weeks ago. The guy at the tattoo parlor I went to said probably 25 percent of this business comes from Philly sports tattoos.
  19. Cheapest ticket I saw for CBP today was just under $400. I am tempted to skip a monthly deposit to my kid’s college fund if they make it to the next round. Philly is DIFFERENT if you did not know by now. It’s like every game is what Wrigley or Fenway was like when the Cubs and Sox were on the verge of breaking their curses. It’s just been since 2008 here. No joke — pretty much every school with kids between 4th grade and sophomores in high school has at least one kid named Chase or Cole. My wife is a teacher and there are eight Chase’s in her school. It is going to be double that for Bryce’s and Harper’s. Bryce is the best athlete Philly has had since I started living here. It was probably Iverson until then but Bryce is undeniable. He also goes out of his way to pander his pro-Philly stance and that goes a long way here, on top of playing like a lunatic.
  20. Wrestling is the only fictional television program that lets its performers go by without a script and does so live. Man, what could go wrong? Maybe wrestlers should learn to develop scripted lines better.
  21. It sorta feels like AEW is run by children. That’s shocking. We haven’t heard any stories about poor management leading to something completely preventable creating chaos in the company before. Obviously this is not on the same scale as an angle touching on anti-Semitism a few days after what happened in Israel occurred. But a babyface Stat once told Layla Hersch something like “no wonder your parents gave you up” since Hersch is adopted. My son is adopted. Like… there is no worse shit you can say to an adopted child than that. It’s such a friggin’ cruel thing to say and it’s guaranteed that at some point in my little dude’s life it’s something we will have to confront. I would be pissed off at it if it came up at all. But it is especially misguided when it comes from a face. My son also is starting to really love wrestling. If he was just a few years older and saw that unfold it would be really messed up. It’s nutty because AEW has done some really good things with Anthony Bowens and LGBT issues. But they haven’t used his sexuality as an angle (at least from what I remember.) The wrestling industry should really stay away from working angles that touch on current events or social issues. The people in the industry don’t understand things like context. The performers aren’t strong enough with acting chops to pull things like “nuance” off. Just do what you can do and keep it with that. It’s the same stuff whenever the WWE was trying to do the evil Middle Easterner with what’s his name in the 00s. And as much as as I like Mustafa Ali, he was trying to do some edgy political stuff and man I am so glad they told him “nah” about that because it would not go well at all, even with the best intentions. And I say all of this as someone who was a comedian for a really long time. I don’t fly the PC flag. But I have common sense and live in the real world. Just don’t do this stuff.
  22. Why the hell did Juice agree to play a role as a coded anti-Semite?
  23. It feels to me like AEW wants to thread a needle and have Juice taunt Max for being bullied for being Jewish without actually saying that he was bullied for being Jewish. That’s what it is. Like — this is not an attempt at subtlety here. And who cares if Max signed off on it or not? It’s just so messed up to do anything even remotely close touching on anti-Semitism right now. Even under the best of circumstances MJF leaning into that stuff (real experiences or not) is walking a very dangerous line considering wrestlers don’t have the acting chops to pull of subtlety and wrestling fans live in a bubble. Like… how is it even this far into a thread before anyone even pointed this out? Why go anywhere close to anything right now considering there are absolute horror stories and a massive war breaking out and who knows what lunatics are just waiting for any reason to spray up a synagogue (again) here? It is so completely gross. Repulsive. TK does not get a pass for something like this because Bryan Danielson and Swerve had a really good match.
  24. For real, there would be so much outrage about the quarters stuff if that happened in the WWE. That is so fucked up. My son and wife are Jewish. These past few days have been really difficult. Absolutely time deaf and not cool at all.
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