Technico Support

There's a third way but it involves snakes and maybe water hazards I know your joke was "turn it into pro wrestling or MMA" and that was awesome, btw

Is this movie only going to show Kerr's ascent and his wins or did Dwayne suspend his "my character can never lose fights" edict?

I consider the religion scam part of pro wrestling, though.

I just saw the remake, which I didn't even know was a remake until I imdb'd it later that day. I wish I know the date that @Andrew POE! reviewed it. It was okay, but slow-moving -- it took 40 minutes of setup before the revenge plot actually got going. A lot of it was really far-fetched and relied a little too much on certain things going exactly right for the protagonist. Stretched the conceit of confidence porn to its breaking point, really.

Hopefully he's also growing out his hair during his time off. He lost just a massive amount of his aura when he cut it.

So they've fallen so far and burned their names in pro wrestling bad enough that they're running a money mark scheme outside pro wrestling? If you like movies, think of this as Henry Hill sweating and looking for helicopters, Tyrone C. Love getting his arm cut off, or Dirk Diggler getting into prostitution. This is the scene that shows how far your antiheroes have fallen. How long until they're shilling Hulkster Gold on Fox News? "Selling meat off the back of a truck actually doesn't sound so bad, brother!"

(Shhhhh it’s a moment and the whole point is to go viral)

So apparently Sami Zayn, ultra good guy likable underdog babyface, was fucked with by the new heel group all night, given the “leave Raw and we’ll let you live” ultimatum, refused at the end of the show (the babyface move of all babyface moves!), and the heels destroyed him. Oh, and the fans cheered the heels and begged them to keep the beating going. Yeah, this fanbase. They’d cheer Clarence Boddicker and the gang graphically murdering white meat babyface Alex Murphy because iTs A mOmEnT.

That feels more like completely making up a reason for dropping a gimmick that's not working and going with something totally different, but that's just me. Like if Orange Cassidy lost a title match and came back in normal gear, wrestling like Dean Malenko as "The Technician" James Cipperly, is that an "evolution" of the OC character? Warhorse gave up his meme wrestler gimmick. He didn't tweak it to make it better.

*puts foot on bottom rope and cuts meandering promo about how there's no damn way AI can take over the world if it can't even figure out the difference between a genetic FREAK and a crooked yellow teeth jackass Bigg Poppa Pump number two like Turbo Floyd hollaifyahearme yes I know Buddy Rogers is dead God rest his soul*

I think the difference would be letting the moments happen organically, which is what always happened in the past, to what we have now, which is cynically manufacturing these moments to give a short attention span audience their dopamine hit. To put it a different way, those things you described are angles. Lance Storm actually put it really well, saying it's called an "angle" because it's a turn that takes a program in a new direction. Back in the day, they didn't do angles so much, so they stood out more. Today WWE apparently gives their audience the equivalent of Piper hitting Snuka with a coconut, a rare occurrence, multiple times per show. So yeah, yesteryear's angles are today's moments and they're happening to the frequency where they're apparently the only thing some fans have been conditioned to be excited for. There are probably a lot of reasons this is happening. Wrestling used to be slower, where TV built house show business and angles were only needed to build those yearly big shows. Then big shows moved to quarterly, then monthly, then TV became the focus, so a lot more angles were needed. I feel like social media has also wrecked our attention spans and grown our narcissism. I need to see a big moment and then buy a shirt that says "I was there." That way people know I experienced something! I'll make sure I put it on Twitter, too. Jesus. We're also at an all time low for media literacy, so simplifying wrestling narrative into LOUD NOISES is probably really helpful. In turn, companies run more angles because it's easy social media engagement getting the fans to post footage of 12 shocking things per show for free advertising. It's just...god damn...a guy can turn heel and get cheered, and then the fans will cheer the guy he turned on 5 minutes later if he makes a cool entrance or uses a table or whatever. It's like wrestling for goldfish.

For every one Orange Cassidy, who actually evolved a one-note meme into a fully-formed character, there’s a Danhausen, Warhorse, maybe Joe Henry, and many others, who never add anything to their character and end up the wrestling equivalent of the Hawk Tuah girl.

Now that Mark Briscoe got a win, we need Brody and Fox to get wins over non-jobbers. Just thinking today how I wish @Dolfan in NYC did a thread on the Mania weekend shows just so we could have gotten a thread shouting out Sade, “The Sweetest Sabu.”

Adrenaline in my soul there’s Trump napping in the front row OR Adrenaline in my soul We’re cool with Nazis fighting on our show

I keep meaning to ask, because Joe Hendry reminds me of this, but is WWE fandom as bad as Meltzer makes it sound? His key point, made a whole lot lately, is that the majority of WWE's audience just cares about entrances, finishers, and seeing something "history making." I don't watch but hearing him and Alvarez summarize WWE shows makes it sound like "brain rot" has made its way to WWE. Fans don't care about stories or heels and faces, just title changes, heel turns (cheering a heel turn which is ridiculous if the story really matters to you), brawls all over the back, run-ins, surprises, and contrived MOMENTS~! Essentially, WWE is now Michael Bay, giving nothing but the booking equivalent of shaking a set of keys at a bunch of mouthbreathers who can't be bothered to get up for boring stuff like actual story and characterization. Or maybe they're wrong and this is just the natural order of things and everybody thinks their wrestling was better than this new shit, though Meltzer never gave me that impression. Anyway, Joe Hendry reminded me of this because he's a meme wrestler who is the champion of the #3 promotion in the US and wrestled at mania, which definitely feels like brain rot to me. The wrestling equivalent of "Ow, My Balls." Like, "HAY GUYZ HERE COMES THAT FUNNY GUY WITH THAT SONG YAAAAAAYYY"

You KNOW these two asswipes were keeping this in their back pockets like, "as soon as our individual worth fades, let's do something together dude." I recently rewatched WCW Clashes and PPVs from like 88 on and my god did the bloom fall off the Ric Flair rose. His style was absolutely more suited to "territorial champ" than it was to seeing him every month or more in a national promotion. @SirSmUgly raised a great point that Flair was maybe better in his 1989 face fun because at least that made him vary things up a bit. Flair was no doubt good at what he did, but what he did really needed to change when wrestling changed.

LOOOOL I've never seen The Accountant (just the last 5 minutes, a thousand times, due to it always airing before Dynamite in the TNT days), but I saw this trailer last week and thought "Jesus Christ, it's just Rain Main with guns!"

I like the Bucks, but you are exactly right. Matt's "acting" is pretty rough, unless he's just trying really hard to be annoying and weird. If that's the case, bravo.

After they get around to putting all the PPVs on Max, they should post that Daily’s Place house show they did, “The House Always Wins.”

After listening to @Phil Schneider’s excellent interview with Eddie Kingston, I checked out the Kingston/Hero Last Man Standing match from IWA MS. Really excellent match and seeing Remsburg with hair did my head in.

Rick Knox?

Right! It wasn’t even an actual roast by anyone’s definition of a roast. It was just “WWE: A Celebration of Racism and Edgelord Bullshit.”

Why not? The people in charge of WWE and TKO think that’s a fine example of comedy. They legit do not see that as a racist thing to say.

Sami was part of the roast. I’d love to hear his justification for it.

Two weeks in a row, WWE has done things I found myself saying, "Vince wouldn't have done that." How morally bankrupt and/or promotionally clueless do you have to be that a garbage human being sex trafficker rapist made better PR decisions than you? Vince was trash personally and a bad booker later in is career, but he always at least had a PR vision for WWE and kept an eye on what would and wouldn't look good publicly, as a whole. For example, not allowing blood for fear of losing advertisers, or not publicly embracing Trump in his first term. Meanwhile, this. It's absolutely insane that Vince McMahon had a better feel for promotion and made more level-headed moves. TKO seemingly only has one promotional strategy, and that's going after the right wing bro manosphere. Good luck.