Jingus

When Shane left, did he sell off his share of the company's stock, or did he keep it? I'm wondering how much backstage power he could possibly have now besides just his name.

I think he's talking about the "Ali". That's a Muslim name of Arabic origin, neither one of which even remotely describe the Singhs. Twenty years later, the same people who bashed Japan for that are saying precisely the same thing about young people or minorities or whomever else they don't like.

I remember having an old bootleg tape of the uncut satellite feed from a Raw taping, including the announcers warming up over Heat/Shotgun matches. One of them included Jim Ross barely paying attention to a Kaientai match, and at one point he noted "they're applying an Oriental nerve hold... those bastards!" in a moment of deliberate self-parody. Of course, they're still doing this shit TODAY with various heel gimmicks. Rusev, Evil Russian Commie (from Bulgaria) is the obvious one, but there's the League Of (foreign) Nations too. They're much more careful about the specific language they use to describe these villains, but it's still very damn obvious that we're mostly supposed to boo them because they're not 'Muricans.

So what? They typically ignore almost everything from that long ago. Absolutely nothing that Undertaker's character has done in the past dozen years suggests that he's a stooge for Vince (or anyone else) in any way whatsoever.

Hogan was already a big star before Vince Jr signed him, but he didn't become an insanely huge era-defining superstar until after he won the belt and the WWF started its multimedia blitzkrieg in 1984. Having a one-scene cameo in Rocky III was nice and all, but it's nowhere near the same level of fame that Hogan had from starring in MTV specials and hosting Saturday Night Live and having his own Saturday-morning cartoon. All that stuff required Hogan's charisma to work, but it was certainly Vince's business savvy that made it all happen in the first place.

Is WO/F4 basically just not doing free shows anymore? There's only been two of 'em in the entire last month, with the most recent one being two weeks ago.

He was INCREDIBLY over at those Ring Of Honor shows he worked. It's true that the crowds were chanting as much for his already-established legendary track record as anything else, but his performances there certainly thrilled those audiences. Out of all the AJPW natives, I think Kobashi's style translates the best to a typical American crowd.

You don't "sabotage" someone by booking them in the main event of your biggest show, no matter how poorly the specifics of said booking are handled. When the WWE buries someone, they take them off TV or drop them way down the card or give them an embarrassing new gimmick, or any of countless other things which aren't "stick them in the main at Mania for the second year in a row".

How many matches do you need to have in order to officially not be a "non-wrestler"? Because Shane's had over a hundred. That's more than Volk Han.

The whole Shane/Taker deal feels like it's Plan C at best. Like they had other ideas for whoever faced Undertaker this year, but they were some of the guys who are on the shelf with injuries. It's just come so directly outta nowhere and seems to make so little narrative sense; is it gonna be face-vs-face? Since when does Taker give a shit about following Vince's orders and being a pawn in McMahon Authority storylines? (Well, post-1999, anyway.) The first half of the second sentence is the key part: why? Why would the company actually want their top babyfaces to get booed out of the building, night in and night out? It makes no sense, there's no benefit. Maybe there's some individual people or factions within the WWE office who want those guys to fail and manipulate things to make their characters look like shit, but I don't see how the company as a whole gains anything whatsoever from their top heroes being contemptuously dismissed as losers by their own fanbase.

I'd vote for him. Match-for-match, I was consistently entertained by Shane's work. Yeah, he was in an unique position which let him do things that most regular wrestlers weren't allowed to do, but good results are good results.

Yep. Dunno exactly where, somewhere in the middle, but more likely in the top half than not.

Is voting for someone in their current prime, with countless examples of their work readily available to watch, really that much weirder than voting for an old-timer who only has maybe a dozen matches on tape?

Yeah. Super Dragon sometimes has a tendency to take too much of the match and guzzle his opponents, while Necro is a great seller and generous to a fault.

Misawa also had the booking behind him to an extent that Kobashi, Kawada et. al. didn't have. He was pushed as the superhuman upcoming star who was the only youngster capable of defeating the dominant older guys like Jumbo and Hansen. It's a lot easier to be perceived as the top star and be a big draw when you're the prodigious Alexander conquering the world, as opposed to "well they tried really really hard before their inevitable defeat!" which is the character that Kobashi was stuck with for years.

I dunno, I've seen many more shitty matches from Batista than I've ever seen from Brock. And Batista's probably a bigger mainstream star now; but he's certainly not a bigger PPV draw. Brock's rematch with Mir scored over 1.6 million buys, which is much bigger than any WWE show ever. I'll agree with all that, and add one more important thing that everyone seems to forget: that's how Shawn ALWAYS works as a heel. Go back and watch his matches from 1997 with Undertaker, and you'll see him taking those exact same giant goofy bumps that he did in the Hogan match.

I'll say this about Panther: he's probably the only luchadore on my list whom I never saw work in American promotions. There's just something special about that guy, far beyond his ability to do some wacky matwork. To me, he had the ephemeral It~!, that certain Special Something which made everything he did feel more important and credible. I know that's the lamest and vaguest compliment you can ever give any performer because you're basically saying "I don't know why I like this guy so much", but I do indeed like him that much. There's just something about him which feels like pure, unfiltered greatness.

Lack of footage is a really tough obstacle to surmount on this one. Looking around, I could only find a grand total of two full unedited Gotch matches online. The rest are all short clipjobs, and there's not even many of those, maybe four or five at most.

You might've answered yourself there. Yeah, Sting finally making physical contact with the NWO afterwards was a big deal; but the match itself was the same old "NWO is Lucy with the football to WCW's Charlie Brown" as always. An extra level of annoyance was how Benoit's great performance here, getting totally over with the crowd as a tough guy who can hang with all the biggest heavyweights, was absolutely thrown in the garbage afterwards. A week later, he's jobbing to Hugh Morrus. He spends the whole summer in meaningless matches with no angles and doesn't even get another storyline to call his own until months later, and that was just a rerun of his on-again-off-again feud with Double J. There's not many clearer examples of "even if we give you the ball and you run with it, we're probably not gonna give you the ball again anyway, because we're a bunch of dicks" type of moments where WCW's Dreaded Glass Ceiling is so palpably present.

There is no one thing which is "THE answer" to any large, complex problem. There never is. All we can do is take the greatest number of little measures possible to chip away at the overall issue.

Bruiser Brody. There are a lot of things that he does which I dislike, mostly the same old selfishness/paranoia/"gotta protect my spot!" bullshit that everyone else rightfully complains about. Yet, there's still A Certain Something About Him which makes his matches way more watchable for me in practice than they should be on paper.

Is there any one moment from 84-85 which really encapsulates the beginning of the Hulkamania era, the same way that Hogan's heel turn is the moment that kicks off the nWo regime or Austin/Tyson's confrontation jump-started the Attitude Era? The obvious contenders are Hulk pinning Sheiky and the first two MTV specials, but none of the above seem even as much of a singular "this will change the business forever" moment as the Horsemen breaking Dusty's leg, let alone Andre ripping off Hogan's crucifix in terms of permanent game-changers.

Yeah, but even the people who've been working in wrestling forever tend to make the same common mistake. "If even 1 out of 10 of our regular fans are willing to contribute to Special Project X, then we'll be a huge success!" has been the rationale behind TNA's dismal PPV buyrates for the past dozen years straight. Ditto for all those lousy direct-to-video movies the WWE keeps putting their wrestlers into, which I can't imagine make anything resembling a healthy profit.

She's pretty honest about everything. She was never a huge wrestling fan, she saw the show as an opportunity for exposure. And when it stopped being fun and didn't help move the needle on her side project that she was really passionate about, she decided to quit. She's a little whiny in how she phrases it, but otherwise I don't see much reason to hate her.

I've seen the clip, and I seriously doubt that was a shoot seizure. He would've had their medical team all over him to seal up that cut on his forehead, and they almost certainly would've noticed if he was showing symptoms of something like that. The WWE was already incredibly paranoid about concussions in general and Bryan's concussions in particular, but they still felt confident enough in his health that they had him go out there and work eight more matches in the next two weeks after that. And really, I wonder how you "hide" seizures in a career like wrestling anyway. You're constantly surrounded by people on the road; and there's no choice in when these things occur, and not even much warning. The tend to happen pretty quickly, out of nowhere. Either he only had a tiny handful of them ever, or he was the luckiest sumbitch in the world that it never happened while he was on the airplane or at the airport or at the gym or at a restaurant or at a publicity event or any of the hundred other places where a seizure would be immediately seen by a zillion outsiders.