Jingus

Nah, I still say she's full of shit. She's acting like anyone who has prior knowledge of the subject should be penalized or handicapped for knowing that stuff. If you're well aware that William Wallace died long years before Isabella Of France ever stepped foot on English soil (as many people would be perfectly aware), then it seriously harms their ability to take Braveheart seriously. And that's directly the fault of the filmmakers who decided to tell a story which they knew was simply not true. Like, if someone happens to make a movie which is set in your hometown and then they proceed to completely fuck up the geography and have characters teleporting from one side of town to the other, that's not your fault for knowing that Alpha Street is nowhere near Omega Avenue when the protagonist steps from one to the other in the blink of an edit. That's on the filmmakers for assuming everyone in their audience is completely ignorant, especially since everyone who was on the set knows that those two streets don't touch. Or if a character whips out a revolver with a silencer on it and the gunshots proceed to make that cat-sneeze "thewp" sound effect, it's on the filmmakers for assuming that the audience knows so little about guns that they aren't aware that this is impossible (especially since on set they would've heard the loud BANG that the gun still makes). No film exists in a vacuum. Every viewer brings their own baggage. And if something in the film is so factually inaccurate that it sets off a viewer's bullshit alarm, that's the film's fault, not the audience's. Choosing to ignore (or follow) the real facts of any situation is a voluntary creative choice on the part of the artists, and EVERY creative choice should be fair game for criticism.

Any movie that made tons and tons of money has, by definition, succeeded on SOME terms. In Transformers' case, they're just terms that make me completely depressed about the easily-amused viewing habits of our generation. And supremebve, your professor was absolutely full of shit. He's basically saying that no film which is adapted from true events should ever be watched by people who are familiar with said events. Criticizing the deliberate storytelling choices which are made in any film (in this case, actively choosing to ignore or change the historical facts) is always fair game.

First impressions shouldn't bias our later viewings... but they do. It's something which has actually been researched in academic studies, and has generally been found to be completely true (sometimes in really weird ways). It's one of those psychological blind spots in the human brain, where our thought processes aren't nearly as logical or objective as we'd like to believe they are. I've had it happen to me with various wrestlers. The first Ultimate Warrior match I ever saw was Wrestlemania 6, and it took me a while to realize just how overall terrible a performer he was. Every time I saw him wrestle after that, the presence of that first perfectly-structured masterpiece of a match was in the back of my mind, subtly convincing me to give him the benefit of a doubt at all times. Same thing with Goldberg, the first time I saw him wrestle was the DDP miracle at Halloween Havoc 98, and as a young rookie fan it took a long time for me to figure out "hey, this guy has a lot of things that he's not very good at". And it can certainly work the other way too: the first time I ever saw Fujiwara was in an embarrassingly lame match against Dan Severn, where Yoshiaki looked about two hundred years old and Severn kept giving him the world's gentlest "playfully dropping a small child onto a mattress" belly-to-back suplexes which couldn't have hurt Mr. Glass from Unbreakable, let alone an allegedly tough professional wrestler. After watching him get treated like a Faberge egg, that "he's old and weak and can't do anything" prejudice took a long time to wipe from my hard drives, until I finally watched a bunch of his best work.

Oh, that's far from the only time I was thoroughly amused by her enlivening a cold-dead-corpse of a situation. When I first saw her at a WCW house show, she was working way harder as a manager than most of the then-indifferent wrestlers were even trying to do in the ring, and I've seen her succeed in various other situations where nobody had any business being any good at all (remember Nise Sarah Palin in TNA?). The empty-room bullshit just came immediately to mind first because it was such a clear example, since I've been there and done that and it's damn near impossible for that stuff to ever be anything but an embarrassing clusterfuck.

If he entertained you that much and it wasn't by you laughing at how bad he was, then yes.

This is truly one of the best threads in the entire history of this board. How would you compare the two's longevity? Sting kept working a much more active schedule as he got older than Trips did.

If we count "following" as in "watching every single show that a promotion puts out, recording most of it on home video", I'd say late 2000 to early 2001 was my zenith. WWF was running hot; WCW and ECW, well, they still existed. Women Of Wrestling was a thing which was televised weekly, I'll say that much for it. And by then I was deeply into the largest of the local indies, Bert Prentice's promotion with occasional co-promoter Mike Porter, at the time it was called "NWA Worldwide". And I sometimes found NWA Wildside as well, on the occasions that I could get the footage from wherever. Reno Riggins also briefly promoted a flash-in-the-pan superindy at the Nashville Faigrounds; sadly it's been lost to history and I can't even remember its name, but they had a pretty good local TV slot, along with weird side notes like "one of Yokozuna's last-ever matches" and "head booker: Dutch Mantel". And then for some damn reason I was actually buying all of Combat Zone's shows on tape for a little while too; man, remember when RF's horrible ringside fancam footage was actually considered to be acceptable production value? ...man, in retrospect, that is just an insane amount of rassling to be consuming on a regular basis. That's not even all of it, I was buying every shoot interview I could get my hands on and discovering all kinds of random shit on an individual tape-by-tape basis. Nowadays I can barely get through two matches in a row on Youtube without getting bored and wanting to do something else. Oh, to be twenty-one years old again...

Daffney once did the impossible and actually entertained me during one of those fuckin' creepy empty-room "custom" matches; I've refereed a few of those and absolutely hate them, they're the most unnatural and awkward things you can possibly do. But she saved this one by basically treating the entire thing as a parody of itself and being a never-ending chatterbox of hilariously cheesy lines. ("No, don't give me a hip toss!!!" she shrieks... a solid five seconds before said hiptoss is applied.) For me, yeah, managing to make a silk purse out of THAT level of nasty rotten sow's ear is worth a vote.

Why bother? Most of them are small-timer local workers whom I've known personally that nobody else has ever heard of, some of whom might not even have enough matches online to rate. And the rest of it runs into "trying to justify why I'm so fond of Daffney, and Sakura Hirota" sort of territory, which is a tough argument to make beyond resorting to plain old they-entertain-me-and-make-me-laugh-a-lot vagueness.

Yeah, probably. Mostly indy guys who are relatively obscure, but also a few Divas and others that nobody else on here would even consider.

Yeah, but then you have to write at least three match writeups per person. I don't feel like doing that a couple dozen times for the various people on my list whom nobody else has nominated.

Almost everything I watch is on Youtube or something similar. It does make it a lot harder to find certain things: modern superindy footage from places like PWG or Chikara or Evolve or SHIMMER is practically nonexistent in terms of full matches. It's hard to find a lot of more recent puro stuff from the larger companies, too, that tends to get taken down pretty quickly.

Which rookies and which tag match? I haven't seen the Nakamura bout, I can only go by what's on Youtube; and sadly, there's shockingly little Otani on Youtube. And glancing at my old playlist for him, it seems like most of his recent work has been taken down, just to make things worse. So I'll watch a new one, some match he had a few months ago with some kid I've never heard of named Mizuki Watase. -Okay, this is gonna be a chore: Mizuki sucks. He's got the worst forearms I've ever seen from perhaps any Japanese wrestler ever. I mean, seriously, your average Divasearch contestant had better forearms than this, and that's not even a joke. Cheeseburger has more credible offense than this guy. And also he's got no charisma, and all the fire of an arctic snowstorm. -The first five minutes repeat the same spot over and over again. Watase tries some incredibly weak offense; Otani doesn't sell it; Otani hits Watase really hard; Watase falls down and sells for a moment, Otani does that generic fist-pumping "Come on, now!" SvR Taunt #17 to the crowd. They literally run this exact sequence at least four or five times in a row, with no deviation. Aside from laying in the strikes, Otani's not even trying. -Finally we get some running kicks into the corner to spice things up a bit, and... uh... Otani's kicks have, shall we say, lost a step or two. You know how when Rhino does the move, it all too often looks like he's kicking a solid twenty inches away from the guy's head? Same thing here, as Otani is gingerly caressing Watase's face with the side of his calf. -Which then leaves me flabbergasted when Watase comes up with a bloody nose. How the hell did THAT happen?! It looked like his face and Otani's boot were in different zip codes. It's also worth noting, almost seven minutes into this match, that Otani hasn't taken a single clean bump; no, a waist-level snapmare and dropping down for his own kicks don't count. -More running kicks to the corner, because God forbid we don't repeat any spot at least five fucking times in this match. Watase tries to "fire up" after a Kawada kick, but it sounds more like Marlon Brando moaning "Stellaaaaaaa!" than anything else. -Otani decides to climb up top for some damn reason, but Watase keeps cutting him off... vvveeerrryyyy ssslllooowwwlllyyy... forcing Shinjiro to just sit there like a chump while waiting for this rookie to finally get there. C'mon, man, if it looks that terrible, call a goddamn audible and just change the spot. But no, they KEEP REPEATING the spot, with Otani knocking him down and Watase climbing back up again. Seven times in a row! SEVEN TIMES they do this horeshit! And Mizuki keeps landing in this cringe-inducing awkward manner on his ass, looking like he's trying to break his tailbone. -Finally, Watase decides to hit what I guess is his one big move with a running dropkick, and Otani takes... well, I guess it's a "bump". He very deliberately steps off the turnbuckle, carefully grabs the ropes with both hands, and takes about a full second "falling" onto the apron. That was just sad, it's like watching latter-day Flair fuck up his corner flip. -He doesn't sell for long, though, he's quickly back up and slapping Watase around again. He FINALLY takes a real bump off a fairly snappy vertical suplex, but he doesn't sell that much either and gets up faster than Watase does. He then acts like he's Andre fighting Hogan, where Watase hits eight (that's eight) running forearms in a row, while Otani weebles and wobbles like a goddamn giant before finally bumping on the last one. -Watase makes me wince by climbing to the top rope; but Otani isn't helping, he stumbles up and then just stands there, like a jorts-wearing midcarder on an IWA-MS show who is just standing still and locking eyes with his opponent in the ring until they finally hit the dive. Which is exactly what happens. And then after a surprisingly decent missile dropkick (I guess Dropkick Class and Vertical Suplex Day were the only times that Mizuki bothered to show up for training), guess what, Otani barely even sells it and gets right the hell up, faster than the guy who just hit him. -Watase charges into what's theoretically a knee to the gut, but Otani completely whiffs the aim and looks more like he just kicked the guy in the balls. Watase obliges with his own botch, taking a forward flip where he almost lands on his goddamn forehead and comes uncomfortably close to Misawa-ing himself right there. -Otani hits a bunch of standard bodyslams in a row... and he's already hit at least three of 'em previously in the match, it's making him look like he only knows one move. Remember how Scott Steiner looked in those Triple H matches? Same deal here. -Otani looks like he's trying to put the match out of its misery by locking on a Boston crab, but Mizuki sells this like a Kurt Anglelock and promptly crawls to the ropes. Well, I say "crawls", but it's more like "Otani spontaneously starts stumbling backwards for no reason, and a few seconds later Watase finally picks his hands up off the mat and starts making dog-paddling motions". -Otani's covered in sweat and completely blown up. He drags Watase into a... uh... a camel half-clutch? The left half of his body is doing a camel clutch, but he's got his right leg held back as if that side's doing a rear chinlock. Then he mysteriously moves himself to the rope again, while Watase feebly pretends that he's causing the momentum in the most lackadaisical fashion imaginable. -The small crowd, by the way, actually LIKES this stuff and is popping pretty big for the rope breaks. I have no idea why, unless the rest of this show was so unfathomably horrible that this is like a Prince Iaukea vs Disco Inferno match on a card which is otherwise entirely peopled with untrained deathmatch backyarders. -We FINALLY receive a modicum of mercy as Otani pretzels Watase with a half-crab for the submission victory... the second time he puts it on. The first time, Watase just "drags himself to the ropes" in the same telekinetic fashion that he's been doing, but the second time I guess it just hurts too dag-gumb much and he taps out. Okay, I'm not sure if Terry Funk on his best night could've carried fucking Watase to anything truly watchable (he KEPT doing those abysmally awful forearms), but Otani was hardly even trying. Barely selling, taking the vast majority of the offense, in a match which went on for way too damn long. And with WAY too many spots repeated over and over and over and over again, a mind-boggling number of times. This was like the world's worst "surly old Akiyama beats the crap out of a young boy" match ever. If this is a good indicator of Otani's typical performance level these days, then I've seen enough. The poor bastard would still make my ballot, but it would be in spite of work like this.

One problem with Bruno (and a lot of other old stars, but especially anyone who was a top WWWF guy) is that we simply don't have most of his blowoff matches on tape. The vast majority of stuff we've got are TV matches which were designed to be commercials for the house shows. Hell, even both matches where he won the world title didn't make tape.

It's not outright badness, just general mediocrity which is disappointing from a guy who used to be capable of so much more. Kinda like that feeling you get from watch many Masa Chono matches; "this guy HAS a Certain Something there, but his body just isn't keeping up with him". Or, kinda like how Flair was during the nWo years.

Considering that every possible inclusion has been pre-listed in the nomination process, is anyone really a surprise now? SOMEONE went to bat for every single one of the available choices.

Cagematch says Bob Orton Jr. had a very brief tenure there, barely two months, so that sounds about right.

The example that comes to mind for me is how Kurt is typically pushed as a technical wrestler, when he rarely even tries to be that. Today I rewatched him vs Austin at Unforgiven 2001, and that was a total brawl with simple strikes making up the vast majority of Angle's offense. But I fault that more on WWE and TNA trying to push Kurt as something he isn't; when he wants to take it to the mat, of course the gold medalist is more than capable of doing that. But they always try to portray his character as a mat wizard when he rarely does much real matwork, and I lay that blame on the office. Push the guy as he is, not as how you'd like him to be.

Which one?

I'd vote for him. Match-for-match, he's got a pretty great record. Regardless of how carefully they're booked and called, regardless of just how much smoke and how many mirrors they use, the fact remains that any random Vince match is often better than any random match from most other wrestlers.

It's not just a WWE problem either, a lot of American companies seem to suffer from this "bitches be crazy" booking. TNA went through several periods where the women were all portrayed as egomaniacal divas. Original ECW women were often portrayed as literal whores, with no personality beyond "she accompanies this guy to ringside, is fucking him in storyline, and occasionally the whole crowd will pop like crazy when she gets piledriven (regardless of whether she's face or heel) and will inevitably backstab her man at some point because all women are lying bitches" being the general story that was repeatedly told.

Well, Cena's out. Now what do they do?

When Ring of Hell was first published, I remember lots of people (including some on this board) defending it as gospel. What changed?

According to Cagematch, they only had one more matchup, Luger/Garvin vs Flair/Tully at a house show a few days after Starrcade.