SirSmUgly

I say "nay" in most cases. First of all, many shows feature international talent, so running the anthem seems a bit out-of-place Second, if we're talking about the U.S. National Anthem, it's a song about taking an ass-kicking from the Brits in the War of 1812. That's a lame way to start a show. This is why, if you're going to do that sort of thing, WWE gets it right by singing "America the Beautiful" instead.

He did it really slowly, too. I love that if you look at his character arc, his immaturity led to all those losses to Johnny B. Badd, the loss of Kimberly, and the loss of his personal fortune. Once he hit the very bottom, he had to assess where he went wrong, which led to him slowly correcting his behavior and overcoming those immaturity issues. DDP went from being totally destroyed personally and professionally to World Champion in three years...just by becoming a better person. No wonder fans were so invested in him. Well, all that and also the Diamond Cutter was cool.

If we put together a list of best hammy performers in pro wrestling, Paul Bearer would have to be a top five dude. Just the weird faces that he makes on their own would land him that high on the list; I was watching a promo on YouTube and saw him make such ridiculous faces while throwing the promo over to 'Taker that he started laughing at himself before the camera panned off him. Plus, his work outside the ring is underrated, especially when he turns heel and starts managing Vader and Kane at ringside. He's yelling stuff like SEND HIM TO HEEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLL OH YES in a ridiculous falsetto while Vader is powerbombing 'Taker, and it just kills me.

Sorry, I had to post again. Yeah, this was amazing at the time. I think Waylon Mercy got in on it, too. I remember seeing this with my brothers and sister and we were pretty stunned. I assumed it would be like these three guys as the Superfriends trying to find a way to hold off the Legion of Doom (not that Legion of Doom). Wasn't this the night where Mabel cracked 'Taker's orbital bone with a legdrop?

YES! This is one of my favorite PPVs because, full of swerves as it was, they all were logical. Watching that show for the first time and then only realizing at the end that all those heroic victories by The Rock were set-ups is great! It's like when you watch a murder mystery and then, as you find out who the murderer is, they flash back to all the earlier clues that should have told you what was going on, and you realize that you should have known all along. The Sting-Luger-Flair-Hogan-Savage pentagon of hate was expertly booked in 1995 WCW, totally compelling stuff in every way. I always trumpet these shows, and I cannot wait for everyone else to get to see them again when the Network puts them up. Hogan loses the gold to the Giant due to Jimmy Hart turning on the former, and Savage ends up with the held up belt on a screwjob on Hogan that Savage is in position to take advantage of, causing friction between them. At the same time, Flair is just dicking with Savage at every turn as Liz turns on him and then helps Flair steal his gold. Meanwhile Flair is trying to sucker Sting in to turn on him. Sting knows better, but gets turned on anyway. Luger shows up and no one except Sting trusts him, especially after Luger takes Jimmy Hart as his manager. Sting and Luger win the tag gold, and Luger always sort of cheats to win it, but Sting never sees it/doesn't want to turn his back on Lex Luger. And though the nWo storyline de-railed it so there was no ending, when Luger became convinced that Sting was nWo even after Sting tried to show he wasn't and asked for a little bit of trust, that was it. Sting was pushed over the edge into becoming Crow Sting, a dude that is just sick of idiots and will take care of things his own damn self. This was the culmination of an amazing storyline character change for Sting, and it also gave us an awesome Flair/Savage/Liz feud and led to Hogan getting sick of playing around with the Dungeon of Doom and the Horsemen and turning to the nWo to run those groups out of wrestling. Plus, there were great mini-storylines that were sort of tributaries to the main storyline like Arn Anderson's winning streak over Hogan and The Giant trying to break Lex Luger like Bane broke Batman.

Disasters/Beverlys is super underrated. Quake is an awesome hot tag. That Typhoon FIP sequence is pretty dang awesome, something I never thought I'd write about Typhoon playing FIP. I went back to watching WWF in sequence today after watching Summerslam '92 yesterday. I made it through Summerslam '94, and Undertaker vs. Undertaker is still one of my biggest guilty pleasures in pro wrestling. I love everything about it - the goofy Leslie Nielsen-as-Frank Drebin skits, the Faker Taker being unveiled on Heartbreak Hotel, the terrible acting in the "Random Undertaker Sightings" skits, and the match itself. Also, Jeff Jarrett had a decent little match with Mabel and Alundra Blayze/Bull Nakano was really, really fun stuff. The crowd was hot for the latter, too. One thing that I notice about re-watching Bret Hart during this period is that sometimes, he needs an editor. I do think that he and Owen worked the best non-blood cage match they could, especially considering that this was supposed to be a hate feud between brothers. However, at one point, there were just way more than enough near-escapes by Owen trying to get out of the door. They could have lopped off five of the ten minutes before the finish. Also, the "Escape the Cage" stipulation is really terrible, even though Owen tries to work around it by just attempting to flee the cage at every turn. Still, this match needed to be built partially around Owen needing to prove that his win over Bret was no fluke. It really needed to end with a pinfall.

Honestly, that's a fairly restrained response from Orton. At least he didn't snatch her purse from her and defecate in it right after taking the picture.

Summerslam 1992 is such a strange little card. It has a heel vs. heel match which has other heels cracking on the heel manager involved in the match in an interview after it's over. On top of that, it closes with two face vs. face matches. This show made me realize that 1992 WWF was really low on credible heel main eventers and upper-midcarders. The other thing I noticed about this card is that I think I liked Disasters/Beverlys and Warrior/Savage just a bit more than Hart/Bulldog. Not by that much, but Hart/Bulldog sort of needed to edit out about five minutes. It got a bit meandering there somewhere in the middle. The Flair/Perfect stuff bogged down what was a really good Savage/Warrior match, but not too badly in retrospect.

The Sopranos, Mad Men and The Wire have all just been usurped as the "best television shows ever" by this announcement. Somehow, I don't think Vince Russo will be quite as successful as Jenji Kohan in writing multi-layered, thoughtful female characters.

I have literally seen no one raving about Batista. I definitely wouldn't say "raving," but he is getting some plaudits for his dry comedic abilities in the role from many reviewers. For example: http://grantland.com/features/guardians-of-the-galaxy-get-on-up-review/ Well what I've seen from actual critics (as opposed to some wrestling fan on Grantland) went mostly along the lines of "David Bautista works well in the role of Drax." I think the most positive comment was "Bautista shows a gift for deadpan delivery." The comments are appropriate, because that role was written around not having a real actor playing the part. 95% of his appearances are either stone-faced or rage-faced, and that's pretty much Batista's range. Um, Wesley Morris is a Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic. I've seen mostly minor praise for Batista that's much like this from other critics, too. Like I said, I wouldn't call what the critics are saying about his performance "raves." More like "pleasant surprise."

I have literally seen no one raving about Batista. I definitely wouldn't say "raving," but he is getting some plaudits for his dry comedic abilities in the role from many reviewers. For example: http://grantland.com/features/guardians-of-the-galaxy-get-on-up-review/

Grumpy old man Taker was the best, threatening the young'uns with soupbones and telling them to get the hell out of his yard. The original zombie Taker with the gloves and Wild West undertaker getup was second. I didn't remember him as Mean Mark as a kid, so when I saw him for the first time Tombstoning guys and jamming them into bodybags, the whole spectacle made me an instant fan. Also, I think DVDVR would melt down in a good way if there was some sort of temporal slip and in an alternate 1993, Harley Race managed a stable with Mark Henry and Vader in WCW.

Maybe it's because I watched this episode with my sister, but I enjoyed the hell out of it. I thought it was good to send Charlotte out there with Becky Lynch after that confidence crusher against Summer Rae. They had a nice little match that was smartly centered around Charlotte knocking out Lynch's leg to get her down to her knees for the BD2TQ, but the pace in the opening few minutes was fantastic! I loved that they did some nice chain wrestling to begin. Tyler Breeze is actually quite good on the mic. His offense is kinda not great, but since he's a heel that should be poking lots of eyes and doing hidden ball shots in longer matches, he's fine. He's also helped by being placed in a spotfest like his Sami Zayn match at Takeover, so I'm guessing he and Neville will mesh well. I look forward to Bull Dempsey inevitably killing Mojo Rawley dead. Tyson Kidd is really enjoyable. That was the best Adam Rose match ever by far, but his character work is getting a bit more natural. He started out pretty bad on the mic, but he's beginning to find the mark on that douchebaggy husband character, and his in-ring mannerisms exude a mixture of cockiness and annoyance with everyone who he wrestles against and also his wife. Also, Connor saying TOTAL ANI - HYAH - LATION cracked me up. This show was very fun!

I honestly think it's that they have a significant number of rural fans that have limited or no access to high-speed internet as the major factor over all others. As a city-dweller, it takes having to take a trip to a small Midwestern or Southern town to realize how terrible their options are for fast enough internet speed to stream the Network at a watchable level.

I don't have discs worth of wrestling, so this is an easy way to watch all the old stuff that I like. This has been worth it just for the Clashes and WCW PPVs. When they start putting up random Saturday Nights or Worldwides, that will be wonderful. I think to mollify some of the people that are bored with the current shows and that also have seen all the older big shows, it might be worth it to put up NWA/WCW Saturday Nights chronologically or to put up all the Shotgun Saturday Nights, ECW on TNNs, etc. Weekly shows that have stuff that we have probably forgotten about even if we were watching weekly back in the day would be nice for some of the folks like that. I also think they are missing out on a big chance to hook the nostalgia peeps by patterning at least some of their schedule around the old wrestling shows back in the day. WCW Saturday Night re-runs at 6:05 PM every Saturday, WWF Superstars re-runs at 11AM on Saturdays, etc.

3) Start another boom period and reap short-term growth leading to another round of serious spending on pro wrestling from the networks, which doesn't solve the problem in the long term, but which buys you some time and the ability to point to short-term explosive quarterly growth at each stockholders' meeting. I don't know how likely that third one is based on how WWE tends to have hot-and-cold booking for most of its potential breakout stars. Really, this is why they can't really give up on the Network. If advertisers haven't gotten over their stereotyped view of WWE viewers at this point, they are never going to get over it. The Network is the only way they can create growth other than lucking into the next Stone Cold.

He did, but I don't blame him for looking at how Bret Hart and Warrior were portrayed after falling out with Vince or looking at how badly WCW was booked during the Invasion just so that Vince could show that WCW was inferior to his creation and still being a bit reticent about dealing with Vince McMahon.

This I have never understood. Where's the pride in not working for the top company in your industry? Its like playing MLB and being proud to never play in the World Series I kinda get it. Sting had distrust for Vince McMahon re-writing history (and his career) in a negative light, and really, you can't blame him. I liken it to if I were a professional basketball player never wanting to play for the NBA because of my loathing for David Stern and hey, I have an idea, let's shoot David Stern from a cannon and into the sun.

I think that, of all the reasons that I'm glad TNA might be done, one of the biggest is that I still hold a grudge against them for giving Sting a way to hold onto his "never worked for Vince" status that he took so much pride in. Now, Sting's going to have a Legends contract with WWE anyway except that we could have just done this ten years ago and got a good version of Sting/Taker, or better yet, Sting/Cena, one match that I would pay a whole lot of money to see even now with Sting in his mid-50s and Cena being sort of broken down.

Jim Cornette was being flippant to an insincere, condescending douchebag. When two old, out-of-touch wrestling bookers are having a slapfight over Twitter, there are no winners in the comparison really.

"...of dodging death panels in Obama's socialist nightmare."

Cena and Cesaro need to wrestle each other on every major show for the next three months until I get sick of it. Oh, who am I kidding, I'll never get sick of it.

I don't know. What's the point at which the losses that Panda has to eat to keep Dixie away from the real company are greater than the benefit the Carters get from letting Dixie run TNA? I would assume that at this point, if Spike isn't going to keep subsidizing the show, Daddy Carter might find it cheaper to bankroll Dixie's reality career and eventual appearance on some CMT reality show.

I have laughed all throughout reading this thread. The posts here have been tremendous. You know, I have been watching a ton of WCW through the Network lately, and it reminds me of how, even when WCW had its low points in the early and late '90s, it was a promotion that gave me genuine joy and entertainment at many times, and ultimately, I have quite fond memories of the promotion, Ding Dongs and Russo Swerves be damned. The fact that TNA has existed longer than WCW, on the other hand, has is truly awful. The promotion has one redeeming quality, the Dutch Mantell-booked Women's Division of the aughts, and that's about it. I absolutely love that it took Vince Russo CC'ing the wrong guy to probably kill the promotion, and I even kinda look forward to the Death of TNA book that RD Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez co-author. I won't read it, but the cover alone with pictures of Russo, Dixie, Jeff Jarrett, and I don't know, maybe just a picture of a laptop with its browser opened to GMail will justify its existence.

Man, fuck that NXT crowd this week. Summer Rae in control on offense sucks, but doing the wave? Then they started WHAT!-ing Lana. They were the worst. Charlotte sure isn't ready to carry someone of Summer Rae's caliber to a decent match. I do think they tried to do some nice stuff with all the verbalizing in the ring. What I liked the most was the spot where, while locked up on the ground, Summer yelled "OW, MY FACE" and then Charlotte immediately hooked Summer's nose and started pulling, huge smirk on her face. They were doing some decent character stuff that made it easier to put up with Summer Rae's control section. I also liked the Ascension no selling everything and the jobbers running scared. More of that, please. That was the first week that I enjoyed them in ring, and it was mostly predicated on how dickish they were about not selling the jobbers' offense and chasing the jobbers around and stuff. Tyler/Mojo was match of the night. I actually thought Rusev looked pretty good just relentlessly keeping Neville grounded. That match was exactly what it needed to be. That's probably the most I've enjoyed a Neville match so far. I give the Vaudevillains some credit for working a couple nice tag moves into their arsenal. That European uppercut/neckbreaker combo was nice. I love tag teams that actually do tag team moves, and that combo in particular looks like it could be a nice signature spot for them if they develop a good way to signal it to the crowd.