Jingus

They might've had some plans for Test at that time, considering that he went on to face Undertaker at Summerslam just a couple months later.

Bonus points also awarded for eventually tagging up with some new partner and calling yourselves "The NEW ______" while rehashing the old gimmick. Morton and Gibson are especially noteworthy in this category, because they've both formed The New Rock 'n Roll Express with different partners at different times.

EDIT: double post

There are indeed a ton of fans who don't think Lawler's an all-time great, or at least didn't believe it until the WWE started pushing that narrative during the Miz and Cole feuds a few years back. His 90s WWF work as a stalling, braying piece-of-shit heel isn't the sort of thing which would impress your average workrate mark. Oh, don't simplify it down to "if you think This, then you've not actually witnessed it". Lots of guys who actually worked the territory at the time, like Bobby Heenan, have their own personal opinions about Greg sucking hard. And yeah, this is one of the relatively few places where Shawn/Angle are divisive. On most boards, they're still considered to be pretty great. Ooh, here's one: Giant Baba. I dunno if I've ever seen anyone who was Just Okay with his work, it seems that either you're appalled by his terrible look and clumsy execution... or you're not, and you totally love the guy. I'm in the second group, but it took a few years and I don't blame anyone who can't get past the fact that he's one of the most creaky-looking workers in the history of da biz.

Bret stayed in the same gear (or at least the same color palette and general design) until he retired. Marty was still wearing his tassel-festooned Rockers tights for at least three or four years after they split.

Reading this thread for the first time, and I find all the Tiger Mask ripoffs to be especially hilarious, considering that TM was a live-action adaptation of a cartoon character in the first place. HOWever: What, this guy is supposed to be Hogan? I don't see it, at all. He looks more like a blonde Rambo than anything else.

Yeah. That's the worst, when the finishes are so lame so often that even the marks-en-masse know exactly what bullshit is on its way. ...actually, on second thought, the WORST is when the finish nonsensically violates every rule of how wrestling is supposed to work. Like, in almost every single Hogan match that ever happened on a WCW Uncensored show. Hogan's creative control is apparently so strong that he can pin you in a match with no-pinfall rules, or even win a match by beating a guy who wasn't booked to compete!

Flair/Hogan from Superbrawl was pretty good too, before the inevitable shitty finish. But I think this Hogan/Piper match is a perfectly fun brawl which is often forgotten or underrated. Yeah, the stupid unannounced nontitle stipulation was incredibly aggravating, and the fan run-in was unfortunate. But the work itself in the match was downright energetic, some of the best that Hogan and especially Piper ever managed to deliver in this company. I'd say it's just as much fun as any of their matchups from 1985.

Goldberg gets a somewhat similar treatment. Some people think he was legit a great wrestler from the way he could get a crowd to react, others insist he couldn't work at all and was dangerously reckless in the ring.

Not in the WWE, it ain't. This is a company with a fairly consistent sixty-year history of doing its best business when they've got a strong babyface champion on top. It's funny that the people who always insist that "the money is in the chase, dammit!" ignore the fact that the most money ever made by an American promotion was usually done with non-chasey storylines. Yep. That's one reason I'm raising an eyebrow at all this "best Mania match ever" talk (I can easily think of at least a dozen Wrestlemania bouts I liked better, maybe lots more than that given more time) when I didn't even think it's been Brock's best match this year. And since when did we all turn on the finish? At the time of the show, the entire internet was raving about how brilliant the Rollins cash-in was and how it saved the match (if not the whole show). This is literally the first time I've seen a bunch of people complaining about it.

The Lapsed Fan's pros: they simply spend more time and effort to do deeper, more detailed coverage of the individual shows than pretty much any other podcast on the net. Bringing in Meltzer (and occasionally some archived interviews with other people, along with frequent excerpts from printed quotes) adds an extra level of fact-checking on the proceedings. And the one guy's impressions are pretty good and their utterly irreverent sense of humor lend an edgy, fearless gilding to everything. The Lapsed Fan's cons: their podcasts are literally longer than the shows they're reviewing. The "irreverent" humor sometimes comes off as trying too hard, if not downright offensive; I've lost count of the number of times that they've made jokes about Vince bringing Bret back only to hurl Owen's corpse out of the rafters at him. They also spend way too much time digressing into the impressions, sometimes literally half the show is dedicated to that shit. And finally, they seem REALLY self-satisfied and rather arrogant about the quality of their own show, as if they believe their own goofy hype.

For purposes of this discussion does Roman/Brock include the Rollins MitB angle? Or are we pretending it's a match without a finish?

I probably credit Inoki more for that one, for several reasons. Inoki was much more familiar with the Korean people than Flair was, he had a better idea of what sort of thing they'd like to see. The match itself felt much more like Average Antonio than it did Regular Ric, it was very spartan and minimalist and contained little of Flair's trademark stooging. (I think Ric was still nursing or recently coming back from an injury at the time, which certainly wouldn't have helped him put on a more dynamic performance.) But I do still give Flair plenty of props for being able to have any effect on that crowd at all, considering that it was over a hundred thousand non-fans who'd literally been forced to attend and had probably never seen rassling before in their entire lives.

You answered your own point: his gimmick and character overshadow his work. He's a guy who plays a demented hillbilly (and Vince has never had problems stuffing his rings full of fat hillbilly gimmicks over the years) who spends lots of time on promos and vignettes and stopping matches dead in their tracks to do creepy spider-walking spots; and he is also a cult leader who makes his henchmen do the majority of the work. All that extraneous stuff takes the focus off his actual wrestling in the matches. He's not a guy whose entire persona is based on "I bring it in the squared circle when they ring the bell!", which Owens is to a large extent.

You guys are putting words in our mouths we never said. It's not that Vince hates Owens, and we never said so. It's that the company has historically proven to be pretty unable to understand "fat guys who can work" characters like him (complete with examples that I provided of other guys in similar situations with the same company, examples which keep getting ignored); and Kevin's start-stop push over the past few months has shown that they're clearly not ready to go all the way with him, or at least not close to being ready yet. And his fatness is probably a big part of that hesitation. And just being a Triple H project doesn't mean a guy is bulletproof, as Sin Cara and others have discovered. "One report was wrong about one thing. Ergo, the dirtsheets/internet can NEVER be trusted."

Hasn't it been repeatedly reported that management types want Kevin to lose weight, get in better shape, or however they phrase it? That's pretty common procedure with this company, I named multiple other examples of them doing the same thing to different guys. (And you'd be AMAZED at the number of mostly-younger smarks who I've seen whining that Owens is "buried" by, uh, I guess by not continuing to beat Cena in every match and not immediately going on to win the world title.)

I already said, it's different when you're talking about giving a submission to a guy who only has a knockout finisher, or vice versa; the company does tend to prefer their upper-carders be able to do both, if necessary. That knocks out two of your examples. Two more were based around angles: Big Show feuding with a boxer, and Rollins being HHH's hhhenchman. That's also different when they've got a storyline reason for adopting a new move, it's not a guy randomly adding some move from left field without a kayfabe explanation why. And the last three aren't guys adding a new move to an already-established list of finishers, it's changing from one move to another and then no longer using the old one. That's different from what Loss & the others are wishing Cena would do, which is much more like "Misawa still pins people with elbow strikes and tiger drivers, but sometimes he now pins them with emerald fusions instead".

In some ways, I think his work style is a hinderance, when you're in a company which is as ludicrously obsessed with certain types of people having certain types of bodies as the WWE is. Owens's problem with the office (and everyone who's been trained to parrot the office's views) is that he's a workrate guy with a fat tummy. They don't know how to process that in the WWE, they never have. Think of all the years that they'd bitch about Big Show and Mark Henry being too fat; when did that complaining finally stop? When those guys gained even more weight and changed their styles from "surprisingly athletic big guy" to "slow plodding monster who just kills people and doesn't sell much". WWE is fine with fat monsters (think Bray Wyatt), they always have been; they're not fine with fat guys who are supposed to be top-shelf athletes (think Braden Walker or latter-day Matt Hardy). Management doesn't think of Owens in terms of guys like King Kong Bundy or Yokozuna; he's an indy workrate guy. He gets compared to Cesaro, to Bryan, maybe even to his possibly-poor-word-choice namesake Owen Hart. And Vince & Co. are utterly flabbergasted at the very idea of a fat guy who does workrate sprints and lots of MOVEZ. They don't like it, they assume nobody else likes it and that such a performer couldn't possibly be an effective draw. Their idea of an effective fat worker is a big mean guy who mostly squashes smaller performers and maybe takes one big bump at the end of the match for token selling purposes. Vince and his yesmen have always insisted that athletes must have those toned muscular bodies, or else nobody in the crowd could possibly believe that they can win a fake fight.

I see your points, and do (in part) agree. But it's one of those "well, in a perfect world..." criticisms of the WWE which is completely opposite of how they do business. Except for occasionally giving a new submission hold to a guy who only had knockout finishers, the WWE practically never gives a new finish to an established top guy who already has his finishers over. And I don't mean like "Edge keeps spearing people until the move becomes so popular that he starts pinning guys with it", I mean a main eventer debuting a brand new move and immediately beating people with it. It's so rare that I can only remember it happening twice, Undertaker with the Last Ride and Jericho with the Codebreaker. Both those times were extenuating circumstances; the office was scared of piledrivers and Taker had knocked HHH out with a sloppy Tombstone upon his return, and Jericho's old finishers were seen as being too flimsy and weak-looking to still be believable. They're not gonna let Cena complicate things by adding another Patented Finishing Maneuver for the fans to keep track of while the old F-U still works perfectly fine, is completely over and he can still safely hit it on everyone.

That's a very excellent point, which always needs to be emphasized when discussing Hansen in Japan. Aside from the Funks, Stan was seen much more as a person than any of the other long-term gaijin guest-stars. He went to Japan early enough in his career that fans saw him when he was still a rookie, they watched him grow and evolve over time. His first match there was being squashed by The Destroyer; he made such an unimpressive, "I'm a heel so I've gotta be a wimpy chickenshit" showing in that AJPW bout that they didn't bring him back afterwards. When he got to New Japan a few years later, he was protected but not super-protected; his matches were mostly DQ and CO "wins" over the top natives there. Compare this to Hogan and Andre, who were given generous pinfalls over most of the biggest Japanese wrestlers at the time. Stan's only truly monstrous period was when he was a top tag wrestler in the 80s, the period where he teamed with Brody and directly afterwards. Stan had obviously started listening to Bruiser when it came to dealing with promoters and insisting on finishes (witness his tenure as AWA champion) and had generally bought into the Kevin Sullivan philosophy of "no matter what else happens out there, brutha, I'm gonna get over". It wasn't until after Brody died and Hansen was deep into his singles feuds against Jumbo and Tenryu in the late 80s that he finally realized "oh holy shit, I can sell my big ass off and even lose and I'll still get over huge, because I've been here so long and worked so hard that the audience loves me no matter what". Even when he still acted heelish in the early 90s, he didn't receive heel heat from the crowd; they popped for him as if he was a beloved native. Between that and having a whole new roster of young stars who needed to be put over by aging legends, Hansen obviously realized that he could show much more vulnerability and ultimately put on stronger showings by acting more like a man and less like a monster. (You rarely if ever saw opponents in the 80s trying the "work the lariat arm" strategy which became so common for Hansen's 90s matches, probably because he wouldn't have spent much effort actually selling that kind of thing in his early days.) The fact that Stan turned out to be such a great seller in his later years of course helped a lot. The difference between him and too many other would-be brawling superstars was that Stan knew he had to take a beating, and had to sell that beating Steamboat-stylez all the way out to the cheap seats. He telegraphs "I'm in pain! Oh God, I'm in such pain!" in those 90s bouts to an extent which would've been completely unthinkable to 80s Stan. Add that to doing many more jobs (he'd still beat the midcarders, but lose more often than not to all the Four Pillars in the second half of the 90s) and while Stan might've still been portrayed as a destructive force, he was also portrayed as an all-too-human old man who was increasingly capable of having bad nights and being the lesser competitor.

In cases like that one, I don't think the finish is something that felt like a slap in the face. It was just a run-in DQ, in a match where it was a bad time for either guy to lay down clean, at a time where they were still trying to build to other feuds involving the guys who were running in. It made sense. Same deal with, for example, Austin/Angle at Summerslam '01; yeah, the cheap heel ref finish was a little annoying, but it was absolutely appropriate for the story they were telling. I think a truly awful finish is something which retroactively shits on the entire match and makes it feel like there was no point in seeing this content in the first place; like, pick your least-favorite Dusty finish involving a reversed decision or "a blood stoppage for a guy who appears to have suffered a paper cut on their forehead" or two guys won't get out of the corner and one of them shoves the ref for the lame disqualification or whatever.

I prefer the struggle. This ain't MMA, there's far too many conventionally accepted aspects of wrestling's narrative style which would rarely-if-ever happen in a real fight. You don't see too many Irish whips in UFC either.

How do those matches hold up now? I recently saw a newly-released match where Arn carried Tom Magee to something halfway-decent, so Mr. Lund's street cred as a divinely-inspired miracle worker are nearly unimpeachable. EDIT: on a whim, I looked up Magee's profile at Cagematch and they list no less than 117 matches for his career. How the heck is that possible? Every time he stepped in the ring, he looked like it was literally his first day in training class, rather than his real identity of a guy who'd had dozens of matches with Cuban Assassin and should've picked up some clue as to what the hell a wrestler is supposed to do.

The first thing that immediately comes to mind was the sadly forgotten, insanely violent Rikishi vs Val Venis mini-feud in 2000. Those were two of the most cartoonish gimmicks on the roster, who suddenly ditched their pelvis-based comedy and just started beating the holy hell out of each other. The company barely even seemed to take notice of how hard these guys were working; aside from giving them the steel cage match at Fully Loaded, there was zero effort given to pushing their storyline as anything special. Which was a sad thing for a rivalry which would casually give us moments like this:

How about Lanny Poffo? He was under contract for at least four or five years, and worked a grand total of one match for that entire time. If not for his couple months of relevance in late '99, I'd say Bret easily wins this one. WCW took the hottest act in the entire business, fresh off the legendary Montreal Screwjob, and cooled him right off with shocking quickness. I understand what they were trying to do by debuting him as the troubleshooting referee at Starrcade, but having him take part of what ended up being a debacle with Hogan squashing Sting and the not-so-fast-count certainly didn't do Hart any favors. Whose bright idea was it to then immediately stick him into a program with Ric Flair of all people? Bret was pretty outspoken about his dislike for wrestling Flair, and Ric had been a solid babyface before suddenly being turned heel for no apparent reason for this program (which was further watered down by his immediate re-turn back face again afterwards). After that, Bret must've pissed somebody off to be stuck in a feud with a debuting Brian fucking Adams in 1998. And then Bret was nonsensically turned heel for no damn reason, supposedly joined the nWo but then never really acted like he was part of the group. They never pulled the trigger on an endlessly-teased feud between him and Hogan, and Bret never even got a single title shot at the world belt until Russo took over. And then when he finally did get booked to win the belt, KICK WHAM CONCUSSION and the office's idea of "going easy on him" afterwards was putting him in ludicrous stunts with cars and hardcore matches with the likes of Terry Funk. That's an astonishing misuse of the guy who was arguably the top performer of the mid-90s in all of North American wrestling.