Jingus

That's not too far from an idea I had. While fantasizing about what I'd do if I had my own promotion, I came up with an idea for a GM. Basically, this dude would be a reclusive, eccentric alcoholic with a bipolar personality; like Howard Hughes crossed with a hair-trigger junkie. He's not a face or a heel, he's just plain crazy (although with occasional moments of clarity). He only shows up every once in a while, and you never had any idea what the hell he would decree. It might be some game-changing paradigm shift that overhauls the entire company, or it might be ordering two chicks to have a jello-fight match. It serves two purposes: firstly, it's a deconstruction and satire of the whole GM concept and that amuses me. Secondly and more importantly, it would be a great Deus Ex Machina for whenever you need to pull something out of your ass when it comes to booking. Think about it: wrestling is insanely unpredictable. Guys routinely get hurt or quit without notice, sometimes you suddenly gain access to some new employee and can't turn them down (that's the old "hey, Colt Cabana is visiting his grandma in that town that day, are there any local indy shows where he can pick up a quick payoff?" situation), and sometimes your brilliant booking ideas just don't fucking work in front of a crowd and you need to change directions very quickly. An authority figure who is established as being willing to do anything at any time, be it sane and predictable or total WTF, is a hell of a piece of storytelling-duct-tape that you can slap onto almost anything to fix it.

Wasn't Hornswaggle out at ringside when the GM chimed in? Like, probably dozens of times? Foley really was the only choice which would've made any sense. Uh, considering the weird Vince/Steph dynamic, Chinatown comparisons for the WWE rather creep me out.

The modern GM is a lazy writer's shortcut. They can't think of any creative ways to start or continue storylines, so they just go "uh, this happens because the authority figure orders it to happen". It's hack booking and is now a desperately tired cliche. I don't think I've ever been to an indy show that DIDN'T have an authority figure who regularly interacted with the wrestlers in the angles. It is an omnipresent tumor on the ass of the wrestling industry. Yeah. It's amazing how many people forget that Eric Bischoff was the first promoter to make himself into the evil authority figure; hell, he also played that role during his company's most profitable period ever. He did the exact same stuff Vince did and did it first. Of course his follow-through was weak; Eric was never as willing to book himself to be humiliated and take beatings like Vince did on a frequent basis. He was always more concerned about being the damn "cool heel" who practically never lost. But still, point is that it gets frustrating when people talk about how amazingly innovative the Mr. McMahon character was and how nothing like that had ever been done before.

Malachi/Kevin Thorne. That guy did not resemble some kind of scary supernatural badass in any way. He was too short, and occasionally you could see his legendary case of stage fright peeking through. Plus he was horrible at squashing people as well.

Yeah, but he's the exception, not the rule. It's easily solved: just turn him face already. "That guy is too popular!" is not exactly a horrible problem to have. Much more worrisome is when the crowd doesn't give a fuck about someone they're supposed to be cheering.

Pretty sure NESLogic meant "isn't it probably true that worked-shoot style style has largely gone out of fashion, with practically no fans remaining, because real shoots are so incredibly easy to find nowadays"? You can almost mark a direct correlation between the popularity of the fake shoots and the current mainstream popularity of the real ones. And how many fans would pay to watch two guys pretend to have a fight if they're not running the ropes and working the crowd and doing a bunch of stuff besides fake-circling-each-other or fake-laying-in-the-guard?

No, and I think that's part of his point. Aside from the occasional Inoki exhibition show or Battlearts zombie tribute, even in Japan it's awfully tough to find shoot-style nowadays. And that's the only country where it's ever been remotely popular. ROH is stupid to do this faked shoot stuff. Real MMA fans can tell it's phony and resent the falseness, while wrestling fans usually find it a boring spectacle which abandons way too many of the things that make wrestling so fun. It's kinda the same thing as all those worked boxing matches we've had on shows throughout the years; there's been lots of them, but how many have been any good or drawn a single dime?

I will never stop being amused by the fact that the very first thing that happened on the very first show from the honor/workrate company was a sportz entertainment segment featuring two dudes making out.

Who said what? Well? Anyone? Cornette certainly understands it. Just listening to him talk about the subject, he clearly understands it. Yet it still keeps happening in ROH. Ergo, Cornette either 1.has no real power in that company, or 2.is unwilling to change the status quo in their workrate for some other reason.

Who said what?

How many times did he wrestle? New rule of thumb: if you've had equal or fewer pro matches than Jingus has (about a dozen), you're not allowed to be called a "former wrestler".

two pieces of shit You shut your filthy whorish mouth about Weird Al's masterpiece, yo! That is a tremendously fun movie. No Holds Barred WISHES it was half as entertaining as UHF.

Rock's bug-eyed reaction of shock and outrage when Shane claimed that the Hurricane could kick the Scorpion King's ass remains a favorite moment of mine.

He'd already begun his political career. Jesse was actually serving as mayor of his home town during his entire WCW tenure. (I guess running the affairs of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota left him with considerable free time on his hands.)

Who was this Doink? About half the time they'll actually throw Borne in the suit again, the other half it's just some random jobber.

Heenan was also pretty open about only being there for the paycheck. Apparently the first time he tried to give Bischoff a suggestion, Bisch blew him off in a really condescending manner. So Bobby just shrugged and was all like "okay, if that's how it's gonna be..." and put forth no more effort than was needed to collect his big Turner money. Heenan was also audibly drunk on multiple shows; if he always had a few before the broadcast began (which often seemed like an epidemic with practically everyone on Nitro), then obviously that would hurt his performance too.

We should try to compile a list of all the most ridiculous blatant lies that they've told in the "Did you know..." segments. Curses! You have me beat by a year!

Seriously? That's a hilariously evil thing to do. I'm amazed the employers didn't get their asses beaten into the ground. However: Madden didn't mention any of that. All he said was "ROH has been doing promotions with arena football, and that is LOLst00pid!".

I don't think he was that spot-on about most things. -Why does he blithely state that ROH is the third-biggest promotion in America, without any challengers to that title (at least a couple other promotions are very close), and why does he act like this is a recent development and not something which pretty much happened ten years ago? -What's the point of bashing on doing local promotion with arena football or local DJs or whatever? It's called marketing, and the company would probably be drawing even less if they weren't doing it. -He claims that, production values aside, ROH's television is great. All but one person here who watches that show strongly disagree with him. -What sort of received wisdom is it that a #3 promotion is inevitably doomed to failure? He says there's simply not enough money in the world, period, and doesn't bother to provide any sort of facts to back up his claim beyond "well ECW went bankrupt, ya know". -He claims that OVW would have gone out of business without WWE's backing. Which is completely wrong because it, y'know, didn't do that when WWE stopped backing them years ago. Does he have some vendetta against Cornette? He keeps making this little passive-aggressive digs, but never comes right out and states his problem with the man. -More Cornette shots: "Whenever Cornette gets put in charge of something, it goes belly-up". Since when? The only genuine example of this is Smokey Mountain, and it's shocking that an attempt to start up an old-school territory in the mid-90s even lasted as long as it did, considering the state of the wrestling industry at the time. And then two paragraphs later, Madden promptly contradicts himself and says Cornette should be booking for the WWE. -Samoa Joe gave the company "a perverse credibility"? The hell does that mean? -LOL at Mark Madden making fun of Kevin Steen because Madden thinks Steen doesn't look like a star. Amazingly hypocritical, considering that we're talking about an obese slug who wrestled on goddamn WCW national television, multiple times. Pretty much the only thing he said in the first article that had any point to it was "hey ROH, you need to do something different because you're not making enough money". Which I'm sure even Sinclair has noticed by now. Thanks, Captain Obvious! And of course he did not offer a single suggestion as to what that "something different" might be. In the second article: -"I got involved in Twitter wars with a sizeable percentage of ROH’s roster and literally half the company's fan base, I mean, I’m talking DOZENS." Hah! Oh, Madden, you sure do provide some knee-slapping zingers, which certainly aren't the most obvious and most trolling things you could possibly say! -And then this lovely blurb: "It is not incorrect to say that I was A BIGGER WRESTLING STAR than almost everybody in ROH is. I can out-talk ‘em all, that’s for sure." Yes, the guy who is infamous for basically being the worst regular commentator in the history of nationally televised wrestling can out-talk 'em all! In the second article, once again, the only good point he makes is "hey ROH, you need to do something different because you're not making enough money". This flash of the blinding obvious apparently needed two separate blogs, for us to fully understand its deeper ramifications. And once again, he completely fails to serve even the slightest hint of what that "something different" might be. He's the worst kind of critic, yelling about something's flaws while clearly having no idea of how to possibly do it better. Fuck Mark Madden. He's still an obnoxious, belittling, arrogant jackass with a vastly overinflated sense of his own fame, wisdon, and importance in this business.

Texas. It's not literally for every application, but essentially every time she gets hired anywhere, regardless if she's just been fingerprinted yesterday for a different job.

Huh? He's alive? ...it is one of my fondest wishes to promote an intentionally terrible wrestling show, and I always wanted Vic Steamboat vs David Flair to be a featured match.

I didn't think we would even need to mention Booker T. Nobody likes his current work, right? Awful catchphrases, terrible jokes, captain-obvious points where he's basically narrating what we're already watching. On the nights when he's in a shouty mood and Cole is full-on heeling, Smackdown has the worst commentary I've heard on any national show in the entire past decade. Oh, hey, yeah! That's a perfect textbook example of this thread's central theme, why the hell hasn't anyone else mentioned it before now? Foley's a world-class talker in promos, but mediocre at best as an announcer. Of course, he did have those infamous problems with Vince screaming in his headset, and teaming him up with generic create-a-commentator Cole probably didn't help either. (Listen to Foley's energized color performance at the first One Night Stand, it's way better than his Smackdown work.) Still, it was rather disappointing that he was such a step down in that position after both Tazz and especially Bradshaw did much better. Are you thinking of that episode where Nash did semi-shoot commentary for that one Thunder? We watched that show over in Shitty WCW Club about a year ago, and it hasn't aged well. Nash was drunk and slurring a lot of his words, plus sometimes he seemed to just forget where the microphone was and you couldn't hear what he was saying. I think it was just so shocking back in 1999 to hear anyone shooting on commentary that we all remembered that call a lot more fondly than it deserved.