Jingus

Would they still be ranked as highly if they didn't make the WWF jump and get to show off their skills in a new environment, against all new opponents, where nobody else was working that kind of style? I'm trying to think of any other team besides them and the Road Warriors who got to work the classic-era tag rosters of both the NWA and WWF, and I'm coming up empty. Not to downplay the greatness they legitimately had, "possibly the best tag team to ever include Arn Anderson" is 'nuff said. But in historical terms, I think they might've been a bit more lost in the shuffle with all of Arn's other teams if they didn't have their standout run in Titan where they were so obviously so much better than pretty much everyone else in the division.

I'm hearing it now, and this is just pathetically whiny. The very definition of thin-skinned amateurism that can't handle criticism without childishly lashing out at their critics. I turned the show off, their tendency to double-down on their own arrogance and self-indulgence when called out on it is the worst part of this show and it's nigh unlistenable. Especially since they DO three or four of the five things that Parv suggested in the "how to do a good cast" thread, and then mock him (complete with silly voices, the best indicator of "I don't have a good argument here") for suggesting the exact same shit that they do on their own show.

Thar she blows, thank you very much. It probably wouldn't work anywhere else in the entire world except on a giant staircase like that, but it was still pretty cool to see.

Dunno how much it would apply to a guy who was born in Japan and only lived overseas for a few years, but I've repeatedly heard that Brazilian-born people of Japanese descent often have a very difficult time being accepted into mainstream Japanese society. Japan is still a fairly insular and xenophobic culture, by first-world nation standards. Here's some stories from the BBC and the NY Times that talk about the issue a bit. OJ, can you tell us more on this subject? Or anyone else who's lived in Japan, if we've got any other such folks on here.

That one was always vastly overhyped as an all-time terrible match, anyway. It's basically two horribly-botched spots and not much else, in a mixed tag match which goes a grand total of three minutes. It's nowhere near being on the same level of apocalyptic awfulness as, say, the Sharmell vs Jenna Morasca holocaust.

I thought Radley was just fine. She was basically just the Ed McMahon anyway, Cornette did the vast majority of the talking. Anybody got a link to that? The episode isn't listed on her Stitcher account, and I don't use Itunes.

I once saw a shoot hurricanrana, of all damn things. Happened during a sparring session in jiu-jitsu class. A tiny Mysterio-sized woman leaped right up, locked her legs hard around the skull of this big Brock-sized dude, whiplashed her entire body like a pendulum and yanked him right down onto the mat. He had no idea it was coming, his landing was a hundred different kinds of awkward. I can't find it anywhere, but does anyone else have the clip of the time one of the American Gladiators actually managed to pull off a sunset-flip-powerbomb on one of the contestants? I can't even remember if it was a man or a woman (might've been Gina Carano, come to think of it) but it happened on that giant ziggurat-shaped pyramid obstacle. Closest thing to a non-cooperative Canadian Destroyer that I've ever seen.

Meltzer gave it four and a half. I've seen countless random IWC posters awarding it the full five. I don't even agree it was the full five, but that opinion is certainly not rare.

She got a hell of a send-off... especially when you compare it to Lita's retirement match, which happened just two months later. She lost the match, lost the title, pinned clean in the middle, and then for some damn reason CrymeTyme comes out and starts selling her dirty underwear to the fans. Ya know, sometimes I'm glad WWE went PG.

Would now be the best time for that? The main roster's tag division is unusually crowded at the moment. They've got New Day, the Wyatts, the two lucha teams, the Ascension, the Dudleys, the Usos, and at least a couple of thrown-together teams that I'm blanking on. In theory it could be a great environment to get a new team over since they've got so many different opponents to potentially work with, but it also leaves a lot more room for them to get lost in the crowd. The same problem is facing Bayley and Asuka. Frankly, I don't want either one of them to be called up, or at least not anytime soon. I have zero faith in the office booking Bayley to showcase her strengths on Raw in the same way that she's handled in NXT. And I've got less-than-zero faith in their ability to do anything productive with a joshi superworker who has twice the stiffness and half the language skills of all the other women on the roster. I agree with Matt D, I just wanna see the two of them teaming up as the developmental-chick-equivalent to the MegaPowers for a long time, getting fed a long line of heels until the inevitable explosion. Because... Japan. Same reason why Misawa's finisher, first word: "Emerald" had at least three mutually exclusive spellings of its second word. Translation becomes infinitely harder when you're going back and forth between alphabetic and kanji-based languages. Add in the fact that pronunciation isn't always done identically (the L/R difficulty among Japanese speakers, and probably similar cringe-worthy difficulty with Westerners pronouncing Eastern sounds which don't really show up in European languages) and you're just gonna get a lot of times when something makes no damn sense and there doesn't seem to be any reason for it.

This is the same guy who won't clear Danielson because of too many concussions?

Eh, it mostly just looks like sloppy execution to me. I think the manager dude was a little out of position for his final bit of interference, forcing the babyface to have to turn around and be distracted by a guy who was way behind him. I have no idea what Definitely Not Crusher Blackwell was trying to do with those laughably light strikes on the final sneak attack, it rather blatantly looked like he wasn't even making contact.

I've never heard anything but the most glowing of praise for that match. If you disagree, then by all means, microscope it and list your dissents. Yes, a lot of its success is due to the booking and smoke-and-mirrors stuff; but it's superb booking, smoke, and mirrors. Good results are good results, regardless of how they were achieved.

I think 98-99 still has plenty of fun performances, even though it's probably Austin's worst in-ring period of his non-rookie career. He had the aforementioned Backlash match with Rock, which I've always thought was an overlooked gem (the point-of-view bit with Rock holding the camera was one of the most brilliantly creative spots I've ever seen). I've always thought the Summerslam 98 bout with Taker was tremendously underrated, I thought it was a ton of fun, one of the rare Austin/Undertaker matches that actually clicked (the title match the night after KOTR 99 was another one). Pretty much everyone agrees the Over The Edge match with Mankind was great, possibly five stars. The main events of Manias 14 and 15 were a bit pedestrian and disappointing, but they still worked tremendously well considering the physical limitations of the performers involved. And of course, let's not forget all of Austin's glorious in-ring massacres of Vince during that time period.

One difference is that Gibson's doesn't have anywhere near as deep a list of great singles matches as Jumbo does. The 1990 bouts against Misawa alone are better than anything Robert's ever done in a non-tag setting.

Yep. They pulled a 0.9 number, by far the largest buyrate of the year. For the sake of comparison, the second-biggest was Bash At The Beach with a 0.7; and the lowest was Slamboree with a 0.4. It's estimated to be the first-ever WCW PPV which drew over 300,000 buys. "Dead" is overstating it, WCW had already gotten over their '95 slump. But business did indeed continue to improve. Starrcade '97 did their all-time best number; estimates vary slightly, but it was somewhere around a 1.8 or 1.9 share, doing a grand total of six or seven hundred thousand buys. At the time, it was the second-highest bought wrestling PPV of all time, only behind Wrestlemania 5.

How sad was their attempt to relaunch the show a few years ago? Nobody cared, it drew pretty much the same ratings as Smackdown.

I don't see the problem with just one or two guys on the roster who look like ordinary guys. A lot of people like to see themselves in the ring. That was part of the appeal of Dreamer and Sandman in ECW, that they did look kinda like they'd stepped out of the front row. The important part is that most of the wrestlers on the show didn't look like that (unlike your average shitty local indy full of dad bodies in street clothes), so the ordinary-looking guy stood out as appearing different.

I've seen lots of kudos for Kalisto's crazy move off the ladder, and they're well-deserved. But I find it kinda funny that nobody's praising Jey Uso for taking the move. Especially since Kalisto had NO leverage at the top of that ladder, he wasn't "jumping" at all, Jey pretty much had to use sheer muscle and hoist the dude up and backwards all by himself.

I'm just shocked they actually hired a professional announcer. Their usual M.O. in recent years is to try to fill up the announce booth with a revolving door of retired wrestlers. Who's the last non-wrestler they put behind the desk? Mike Adamle?

Ah, he hadn't typed that yet the last time I refreshed the page. I love the idea of Trips eventually getting up from the huge beating... only for Roman to run right back and spear him down again.

It only counts as "ten years" due to technicalities; Torrie's first match was in 1999, and her last match was in 2009. But that last match was a cameo Mania comeback a year and a half after she took time off for a back injury and never returned to the full-time roster. Also, there was almost a year's gap in between her getting released by WCW and hired by the WWF.

I demand that this must happen. Meltzer wrote that the crowd was booing the shit out of Roman for most of the match; was he wrong? Because some of y'all are acting like he got huge cheers.

The follow match with Necro against Tommy Dreamer is interesting: I call it a softcore match. That is, it pretends to be a hardcore match, but they're not really doing anything which is terribly dangerous or painful. It's PG-rated Necro, fooling everyone at ringside into believing they're watching a wild brawl when it's really pretty tame by his standards. (Well, there is ONE ouchy-looking spot where he flattens a chair, but at least it's at the finish.)

I let out an immediate LOL at the John McClane "ho-ho-ho!" joke. Even if the rest of the podcast turned out to be nothing but three hours of Rick Rolling, it would still be an automatic thumbs-up for just that one line.