goc

I'll just reiterate what I was saying on twitter here that although I understand the criticism of TNA letting The Hardys go since they were clearly their hottest act, I don't think there was any way for The Hardys to generate revenue for the company that would pay for the costs of their contract. Even if TNA started running house shows again, what is the ceiling for a house show with Hardys on top? 600-800 paid? Even with 4 shows with those kinds of attendance per month I don't think you could make enough money to where The Hardys contracts weren't adding to the red ink. The overall thing to keep in mind for TNA is they were bought by a company that sees them first and foremost as TV content for the Fight Network. And The Hardys really weren't a big ratings draw. Yes the Hardy Compound specials did higher than average numbers but it was also diminishing returns as Total Nonstop Deletion was lowest of the 3 and them being on the regular show every week didn't really lead to any ratings growth. I realize a lot of that is that Pop TV is a shitty TV station that no one watches but that's also the big problem that TNA has. Nothing they do is going to pay for the production costs of their TV show except getting a better TV deal and the only real outside chance they have of doing that is getting hooked up with ITV in the UK, which to TNA's credit they are (were?) at least trying to do.

I think the timestamps kind of solve that problem on their own. I don't think I've ever listened to a full BTS episode in one sitting unless I had a really long drive somewhere. If I have to stop listening I just make a mental note of where I had to leave off so I can quickly skip back to it.

The dynamic is totally different from what he does (did?) on the Flair show to the one with Bruce. His gimmick on the Prichard show is to be the voice of the internet & to insist that long standing internet bullshit is true & Bruce is just a lying company stooge who won't admit it. I mean Conrad was grilling Bruce about whether Randy Savage had sex with Stephanie and calling Bruce a liar when he said the first time he'd ever even heard about it was in the early 2000s when some writer asked him if it was true. I really liked the show when it first started and listened to every episode but it feels like the longer it's gone on the more Conrad has turned up the "Fuck WWF, everything they did sucked & Bruce I'm going to yell at you until you admit it!" gimmick so I only listen now when it's a topic I actually care about. It really pissed me off that the only thing Conrad really seemed to be interested in during the Houston episode was stupid gossip bullshit about whether Gino was actually Paul Boesch's son or was Gino secretly gay.

The Barbarian match was a pretty fun hoss battle although not as long as I would have liked. Those two would actually wrestle again on Nitro during Nord's WCW run and I remember watching that a few years ago thinking it was also a pretty fun hoss battle.

Everyone keeps talking about Bruce having a "gimmick" for his show but it's obvious Conrad has one too which is "be the most annoying douchebag know it all smark who says everything Vince did sucked" so he can be a hero to the wreddit types.

I've not seen ANYONE say anything about the current Aron Rex character except that it is awful (and made worse by the very bad TNA commentary) but if there is any upside to it hopefully it will spare us from seeing his name on some list years from now as someone "WWE dropped the ball on" because dude was really never all that good is just another in the list of people who aren't very good but got over being paired up with Miz (Alex Riley, Sandow, and the Miz miracle of miracles when he actually made Ziggler relevant in 2016)

I know everyone is going to jump on the "LOLTNA" bandwagon on this and there is SOME basis for that considering the way they apparently tried to sneak in a clause where they would get 10% of Matt Hardy's money from outside dates but I also feel like Matt asking for creative control was something he knew he wasn't going to get & when TNA said no it would make him the babyface because he was theoretically willing to stay there and they said no. He didn't have creative control in his last contract and still got to reinvent himself with the new character and do all the stuff at the Hardy Compound so I'm not sure he really needed that in his contract to keep doing his own thing.

So how about Cody Rhodes letting his wife get booked into this psuedo romance angle with Moose and Cody coming out and being the jealous husband on the last episode? You'd think a second generation guy would know to avoid that kind of a angle.

From everything Bruce Tharpe said on podcasts when the service started up, the whole reason he got involved with the Houston footage is because the WWE made really low ball offers for the footage. I have no idea what money Tharpe has or hasn't given the Boesch family but it seems like the WWE weren't offering a whole lot and that's how he ended up involved.

You just described the whole basis of pro wrestling.

I hope the finish to that battle royal wins Most Disgusting Promotional Tactic for 2017. Absolutely no place for lying in professional wrestling, I'm really disgusted. Hope #CancelWWENetwork starts trending over this.

Not much left to say about this except I liked this a bunch. I mean if someone were to ask me to explain why the ref allowed the 3 rudos to all be the in the ring together for pretty much the entirety of the first 2 falls I would have no idea how to do that but I mean who cares? The beating they dished out was awesome and by the time the tecnicos finally started to fight back you were ready to see them kick ass. Tarzan Boy doesn't seem to be a GREAT wrestler but he certainly seems good enough to be able to have a damn good apuesta match with Satanico when it finally gets to that. I mean the 1 on 1 with Bucanero was really good on it's own. This match also featured one of my favorite things in lucha which is seeing a wrestler laid out in a fan's chair and that fan being annoyed by it and trying to shoo him away.

Damn that Big Show/Braun match was good. There's pretty much no way they are gonna have Braun do a job at FastLane now after the way they've built him up (if they were actually gonna have him put over Reigns they'd be doing it at Mania) so yea I think there is about a 99% chance of Undertaker somehow costing Roman that match. No idea what Braun ends up doing at Mania but since it seems like he's not going to have a big singles match I think they should put him in the Andre battle royal and have him just completely dominate it and toss out the majority of the guys in it.

Reigns is not gonna win that match. Expect some kind of Undertaker shenanigans.

Watching this match it makes me feel like Taijiri was like 5x better than Jerry Lynn. Lynn had nice execution of moves but imo that's pretty much all he ever had going for him. Taijiri however was great at being a little shit throughout this match & with a non-ECW crowd he would have gotten a lot of heat for all the awesome dickhead heel stuff he was doing. This was quite good as far as eight minute TV matches go. As far as the ECW TV show production goes, it seems like they mixed the audio to where the crowd was louder than the commentary. The crowd noise was loud and I could barely hear the commentary and it wasn't worth turning my speakers up even louder just to hear Styles & Cyrus. I think the fact that the replays were sponsored by 1wrestling.com kind of tells you that sponsors weren't really beating down the door to advertise during the ECW on TNN show.

This was ok but really sloppy at times and no one really stood out to me except for Mr. Mexico solely based on a look/character basis. That guy is my kind of wrestler.

I know soup described this as a "bomb throwing match" but it didn't really feel that way to me and that is what I wanted the match to be. Awesome kind of worked from underneath for a lot of this (including sitting in a Rhino chinlock for a minute or so) when I think this would have been a lot better if they'd have shaved off a minute or two of action and just went for a total sprint, bomb throwing match. This was ok for what it was though and the best match of the 4 from this card that are here although that's not really saying much.

That was some of the laziest crowd brawling I've ever seen. I wish the camera had followed Dreamer & Jack Victory instead since it couldn't have been any worse than that. Total throwaway match but I will admit the crowd was into it which is weird since like 90% of them probably couldn't see what was even happening during the crowd brawling.

While we're talking about Dave being oblivious, can we talk about him making big deal on WOR about how the Raw main event saw a significant ratings drop in the female teen demographic and how that means Bayley is failure? I've seen people taking this and running with it without actually stopping to think that TEENS AREN'T HER TARGET AUDIENCE! She's like a female John Cena and I don't think 12-18 was every really a strong demographic for Cena so why should it be for Bayley? Her character seems directly targeted at the 12 and under crowd, not teens.

I'm in the "this was really sloppy" camp. Pretty much every strike thrown in this match looked back and although Dragon's moonsault on the outside looked good it was lame because he just completely ignored that Rudy Boy was actively engaged in trying to stop him from climbing to the top rope and then had to make himself look like a geek by stepping back and getting into position to catch Dragon. The spear by Bonecrusher at the end was pretty awesome though.

Yea this wasn't very good. There really was no need to stick Prodigy in there.

I was so disappointed we didn't really get a match here with Lynn getting hurt. ECW looked to have really nice sized crowd there in Danbury, CT for a house show. The size of that crowd seemed to dwarf most modern indie crowds no matter how much "buzz" they have on twitter.

So Jarrett had a concussion from Nitro, they made him work Thunder and then he couldn't go for Souled Out? Wouldn't it have made sense to be cautious and keep him from wrestling here in hopes he could make the PPV? I have no idea who they would have stuck in there with Sid though if they'd have still been able to do the 3 Benoit/Jarrett matches. Announcers on commentary predicting how many *s a match is going to get is the dirt worst. Sid doing the corner punches and stopping at 8 was very irksome to me and also seemed to leave the crowd very unsatisfied. Randomly throwing the WCW.com graphic up at the bottom of the screen during the middle of the match is just such a WCW thing. The rules for that Triple Threat Theater thing sound so stupid, you can lose the first 2 matches but if you win the 3rd you're still the U.S. champ? Match is ok not really good or bad. Nash seems to be trying WAY less here than he was in the Bret match from Nitro.

This match was pretty good especially considering what we know about Bret's physical condition at this point in time. I liked the story of Bret staying focused on Nash's legs and Nash did a good job at selling the knee. If Loss is right and on Thunder they just blew this off as "fake" dissension then that's just dumb as hell considering the way this match went especially with boys guys hitting a low blow on the other. The ending stinks with just too much shit going on and I find it hard to believe that Arn Anderson would hate the nWo more than Sid but that aside, this is still a lame way to end the show. This era of WCW seems to have had a penchant for having the show go off the air JUST as some big type of moment or spot happens like the branding iron here with Funk and that just doesn't seem a great way to get those moments over.