clintthecrippler

I just got back from being at the Chris Hero Mixtape show live. Chris Hero vs Kazusada Higuchi started off as a one-on-one match with every shot stiff as fuck and being some damn fine heavyweight wrestling, but then morphed into the tag team match of Hero and Bryan Keith vs Higuchi and MECHA MUMMY. At first I was disappointed that this hard-hitting singles match with some of the grossest "sounding" wrestling I have ever seen live (maybe 2nd next to seeing Walter vs PCO live at Spring Break 2018) became an oddball spectacle of a comedy tag match, but then as it went on it crossed over into being one of the most gloriously sublime live wrestling experiences of my life and circled back around to being awesome again. Well worth cycling through the Youtube stream for that spectacle, I do however desperately now want Hero vs Higuchi to be run back as a proper singles in a Bloodsport setting. Arez vs Angelico 2-out-of-3-falls submissions-only match is worth checking out as well, they really committed hard to the submission-wrestling aspect of lucha with that one. A LONG show, but he really did a great job of committing to the "mix tape" concept with a little something for everybody. A mini-CHIKARA reunion with Jigsaw and Hallowicked teaming up in a trios match (with Matt Makowski as their partner), a mini-EVOLVE reunion with a triple-threat main event with AR Fox and Jason Kincaid (with Alpha Zo being the third competitor), a lucha three-way that despite being very sloppy at times still won the crowd over with their ambition, a good old "local faces" vs "out of town heels" Los Angeles vs San Francisco trios match, a rock-solid women's triple threat, and to top off the madness, Biff Wiff's Cosmic Gumbo Rumble featuring (1) Hero's fellow IWA Mid-South alumni Jimmy Jacobs and Trik Davis (2) fellow Wrestle Factory alumni like Colin Delaney and Tracy Williams, and (3) a nod to the mid-2000s SoCal indie scene with an impressive appearance by Zokre capped off by the winner being deemed a fellow "Shirt Brother" by Biff Wiff for those that are dedicated fans of Tim Robinson's I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE series.

Before or after you tell people that the now red-hot WCW will be out of business less than five years later?

I would honestly say the same about his role in Uncut Gems as well. Adam Sandler as a gambling-obsessed New York City jewelry-store owner that has NBA players as clientele, there really isn't THAT much of a twist needed to turn that into a comedic romp instead of one of the most horrifyingly true depictions of gambling addiction ever committed to film to the point where it was as much of a horror movie as it was a drama.

Yeah, the first Bloodsport event was Matt Riddle's Bloodsport in 2018 and that first event was a fun curiosity, but the concept as a whole didn't really reach its full vision until the next year when it got re-branded with Josh Barnett involved and you can tell he started getting involved with booking talent for the event himself. It's definitely something that I think would lose its luster quickly if they tried running more than a few times a year, but it really does stand out amongst the crowd of Mania weekend events. I do appreciate how well laid out from start to finish these events typically are as well. It's also fun watching a crowd mentally re-set their brain for a Bloodsport event too. I attended last year's Mania weekend Bloodsport in Los Angeles and a simple running dive to the outside got a "Holy Shit" chant from the crowd simply for being that move happening in a Bloodsport environment.

Huh, did Bart Gunn have the same "put it back in" medical procedure as Katsuyori Shibata so he could continue his career?

WWA Bruiser Bedlam - August 23rd, 1986 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RZmDWHKXOM&t=5s I was a few months shy of turning 8 years old by Summer 1986. I became a wrestling fan during the early stages of Hulkamania-era WWF, and by this point had also become a fan of Jim Crockett Promotions, AWA and World Class. All wrestling television was appointment viewing. On a trip to see my aunt that lived in the halfway point between Detroit and Toledo, I came across an episode of WWA Bruiser Bedlam airing locally during this time frame. I can't tell you anything about the episode except that even at 7 years old, I identified this immediately as "minor league wrestling". The first match on this specific episode may also feature a brand-new contender for "big name wrestler that should definitely not be in a wrestling ring anymore" that wasn't "1992 Andre The Giant". Moose Cholak was a big name in the AWA and WWA throughout the 1960s and early 70s, but watching the 1986 version of him struggle to even go up the ring steps was one of the saddest things I've ever seen but I couldn't take my eyes off it. What's even wilder is at this time, the newly crowned WWA Heavyweight Champion is a future star in his rookie year...SCOTT STEINER. Sadly, no appearance of Steiner (or "Scott Rechsteiner" at the time), but sometime in the early 90s whoever owned the WWA library did put out a "Scott Steiner The Early Years" tape to capitalize. He is definitely still rough around the edges and you can tell he didn't have much to work with around him in that locker room, but sparks are showing already, including a very primitive attempt at a 450 splash somewhere in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAuSmjy9BqU

Thats about where I fell on all of that too and a lot of the older heel promos from 1980s and prior. I imagine Piper's first real money-drawing heat feud being against Chavo Guerrero in Los Angeles probably planted that bug as well when it came to his heel promos. I think for my own personal line a lot of that type of stuff in heel promos comes down to whether the heel got his comeuppance at some point. More often than not, ultimately at some point the faces that were often the targets of the more incendiary promos would get their shine back down the road. Another heel Piper example would be when he called Bruno Sammartino an Italian slur in front of 20000 fans at Madison Square Garden during Pipers Pit. This was then followed however by Bruno beating the holy hell out of Piper and leaving him bloody in cage matches around the horn. I think thats why Triple H going down that road with his promos against Booker T prior to Wrestlemania 2003 is so memorably cringe. It was already (and rightfully so) criticized in real time as being an outdated approach to building heel heat. But then the match ends with Triple H pinning Booker clean and there is never that "heel gets his comeuppance" feelgood moment to wash the bad taste away.

fwiw, one wrestler that was very aware of the Sun City dustup was Rowdy Roddy Piper, who in leading up to Wrestlemania 2 dropped "..and 'I' play Sun City" a few times in his heel promos during the buildup to the boxing match with Mr. T: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMxeN5t_-BM (Piper dropping the line Wrestlemania 2 Press Conference) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iHuoaMEQYs (Piper dropping the line on MTV itself while at the Slammys)

I just assume that the Truth Commission is another in the line of Vince struggling with the overall global climate of the 1990s screwing up the "foreign heel" trope since evil Germans and evil Russians had become passe by then. See for example going ridiculously over the top with some of the imagery around Yokozuna when even concerns about Japan overtaking the US an an economic empire had started to quell (was it his squash of Duggan that had the comically dumb "Japanese broadcast celebrating Yokozuna's victory") and "Finnish ecoterrorist" Ludwig Borga. Those felt so much like he was trying to FORCE a new "foreign heel" menace in the wake of prior tropes no longer being relevant.

All this college talk on a wrestling message board just making me more bummed that there hasn't yet been a Mike Rotunda cameo in NXT to raid Chase U. for the Varsity Club.

Muting and blocking has absolutely been my go-to for several years now. I still see some honestly trash and intellectually dishonest opinions whenever someone that doesn't just mute-and-block and HAS to "dunk-tweet", but all that does is give me one more account to mute and/or block. It's still wild to me how many people fall for the "posting intellectually dishonest opinions in bad faith for the sake of getting dunk-tweets" gimmick on social media. People think they are smart "correcting" the original bad tweet or clever for shouting "look at this idiot" when they don't realize that the original post was made for the sole purpose of engagement and signal-boosting, and that the majority of "posting in bad faith" accounts would choke to death from lack of engagement.

Someone else here has watched TIPTOES! What a compelling piece of absolute insanity and career self-immolation. So many bad choices made with so many different aspects of that movie and I can't imagine that Bright's extended cut would have done that much more to make it less insane. Also over the weekend I watched DEATH MACHINES. Some very delightful 1970s American-produced martial arts trash with multiple insane deaths in just the first 15 minutes alone, with 3 badass silent assassins trained (drugged?) to not feel pain under the guidance of a Japanese lady boss intent on taking over action from the mafia and innocent bystanders, mobbed-up sleazoids and biker gangs all falling in their wake. Some pacing issues as it drags during the middle of the movie (as many of these lower budget 70s genre flicks do) but the adrenaline of the first 15 minutes as well as a fun final fight help make sitting through that sloggy middle worth it.

Hey I was at this show. I have no memory of this, I assume because the minute I heard Black Veil Brides get announced I booked it to the bar for a refill of boozy beverages. A very surreal night. It was the day Jeff Hanneman of Slayer passed away. Metallica was also the headliner and it became apparent as the night went on that a large part of the crowd were "Metallica fans" but not necessarily "METAL fans". Two moments really hit home that dissonance: 1. The show started with an announcement and moment of silence for Jeff Hanneman. A dude in a Metallica t-shirt unironically asked me "Who's Jeff Hanneman?" 2. Watching everyone in Metallica shirts get alienated and pissed off as Dillinger Escape Plan's set started and continued: https://youtu.be/NgGZiQOOhAA?si=TtpAVZKpZjQZiO2a

Are we counting the baby goat that came to the ring with Hillbilly Hills as a manager? Because out of all the managers and valets on that show, I thought the baby goat had the brightest future out of all them. PS yes, the guy doing the hillbilly gimmick on this show brought an actual baby goat to the ring with him. Unfortunately the goat was taken to the back once the match began

ACW Summer Meltdown 2000, an Upper Peninsula Michigan indie wrestling event that I attended in Summer 2000 that had appearances from a Fake Doink and a Fake LA Parka but inexplicably somehow managed to book Real MENG while he was in WCW. And the opening match has Ken Anderson pre-WWE/TNA, and I assume he was my second favorite wrestler on the show next to Meng because he came out to "Push It" by Static X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y42A33JBpwY

Yeah Arrow seems pretty liberal when it comes to licensing their new sets to streaming at the same time, they put a few of the Coffin Joe movies up on their Arrow Streaming sub service as well at the same time as the physical set came out, and there's a lot of other stuff that goes up on their own streaming sub the same time as the physical set. Even with the box sets or collections a lot of those will go streaming at same time, though they (rightfully so) will sometimes withhold 1 or 2 movies from the bigger sets initially.

I am bad at math. Are there enough match permutations between 3 Von Erichs and 3 Freebirds to pull off "8 Crazy Nights at Reunion Arena"?

This is reminding me of the time that they had Bradshaw teaching Taka Michinoku how to drive like he was from a third-world country instead of JAPAN.

I really wish we got more involvement from Dee Snider in 1980s WWF. He is a fantastic promo here and you can tell the dude "got" it. Some fun cameos from other MTV stars circa 1985 in this, especially the one at the end! https://twitter.com/allan_cheapshot/status/1759132154091487381

This is obviously being posted this week to capitalize on a more salacious story, but this was still an interesting watch, KATU-TV in Portland posting a 1985 local talk show appearance on their station by Billy Jack Haynes and Sgt. Slaughter with a run-in by the Road Warriors to promote that night's show at the Portland Memorial Coliseum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvGNKeDYa48 And the match itself - The Road Warriors vs Sgt Slaughter and Billy Jack Haynes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7-w-v9V5Zc

Amityville 1992: Its About Time has the balls to be about an evil clock and use that title for the movie, Megan Ward, and the below death among several other very wacky deaths (though the Youtube title here is misleading, the clock doesn't actually KILL here): https://youtu.be/LvphtzVsYoA?si=sVNeUPdo9k8uwtG2

Yeah, The Rock isn't as much of a pure Hollywood phenom as he was five or ten years ago, but a lot of folks here seem to be overreacting and talking like he's completely washed like Chuck Norris in 1995 or Steven Seagal in 2005.

From the second half on an all-time classic Super Bowl. I had no side to take in this game (a Michigan kid from birth to my early 20's so was riding the Lions wave this year), but feel bad for the 49ers fans who are going to be hurting from that missed PAT for years if they don't exorcise the demon and win immediately within the next few years. I also feel bad for the 49ers caught in camera shots looking dejected while covered in celebratory confetti. That shit is about to replace Lieutenant Dan in social media memes.

I said this elsewhere, but my emotions upon seeing that screencap of "pre-gimmicked" Chick Donovan was similar to when I found out years ago that Nikita Koloff was just some dude from Minnesota named Scott.

Damn, Billy Jack has seemed like a Dark Side of the Ring episode waiting to happen for years now and seemed very obviously mentally ill/CTE/drug burnout/emotional trauma in most of his modern shoot interviews. So yeah, sadly not super surprising.