Jingus

Yeah. The sexual content has always been way, way overstated. Gotta love America; given a crude, violent program filled with hideously backwards morality tales and rampant physical abuse as a way of life, people will bitch the most about the fact that occasionally a woman shows up in a skimpy outfit. And compared to practically everything else on television, wrestling's version of sexploitation is pretty goddamn tame.

Don't forget all the divas that were "fired" because he was sexually harassing them. I remember a thread on this board a few years ago where I was roundly mocked for saying that Randy Orton had a worse-than-usual track record of backstage misbehavior. To all those who whined about how Orton was no worse than any other wrestler: I told ya so!

It wasn't even anything special, just a simple bridge on a suplex or something like that. My favorite part is right afterward, when he winces at a head-drop buster move and goes "...we still need a little work there, huh?"

The ratings numbers back then aren't a good comparison to ratings numbers today. The number of potential viewers in this country keeps growing by leaps and bounds every year, so a 3.0 now is a hell of a lot more people watching than a 3.0 during the Monday night wars. And with the advent of digital/satellite cable with literally hundreds and hundreds of channels and the rise in popularity of internet media, it's infinitely harder nowadays to get a profitable portion of the audience to ignore all the competition and watch your show.

On the point of seeing "the IWC" as a monolith: lots of older wrestlers still do exactly that. They still think "those damn internet marks" really are the stereotypical nerdy virgins living in the basement, who all have identical opinions and have no ambitions nor desires beyond shitting all over everything in the world. That mindset is changing as younger smarks-turned-wrestlers are invading the locker rooms in greater numbers, but there's still a lot of grumpy old vets who look at any wrestling fan who posts online as basically a member of the pussiest hive-mind in the universe.

Undertaker, too. Even Kane, to an extent, he was involved in a shitload of top angles at the time. Ken Shamrock was a pretty big deal back then as well.

Why aren't the Von Erichs in as a unit already? Pretty good workers overall, and huge draws in their own right; World Class was one of the last thriving big territories, and that's directly because of the boys on top.

Looking at it from the "why not?" side: there's much lower draws in the HoF than Sting. There's crappier workers. There's plenty of guys who aren't remembered nearly so fondly by the general casual-fan audience than the Stinger. So, why not?

Wouldn't Sting count as a draw during NWO-era WCW? Yeah, he was just one part of the package as opposed to the main focus, but he was a huge deal at the time. He got more out of hanging out in the rafters and looking mysterious than most guys ever do out of a to-the-moon main event push. Wasn't his fault that Starrcade and afterwards were booked so goddamn stupidly.

I remember that I gave that one to SLL when he asked for random matches to review over at Segunda Caida, but I can't find the article itself. Hey guys, you really need to do some work on indexing the links for your work. There's a lot of good writing in there, but nobody wants to scroll through the entire thing in order to find just one post (like I did just now). It's a big catalog of reviews without organization as it is right now, you just have to plow through everything chronologically and hope you find what you're looking for.

Those are two odd examples. Why do you consider Rey to be more intimidating than Kendrick, especially since Spanky is a lot bigger than Mysterio?

Nowadays fans seem bored by "look at how huge this guy is!" pushes, a la Ryback or Mason Ryan. Maybe because we've seen so many muscular freakshows that we've built up a tolerance for it? These aren't the days when Billy Graham or the Road Warriors could show up and be awe-inspiring, because the fans today have seen a hundred guys like that. The originals got over because they were the first.

Yeah, that probably goes in the same category with the Goldberg and Piper matches. (And hey, what is the weird deal where Hogan often seems to work harder and have a better match if he's booked to lose?) I'm trying to pick out what the best match he ever had with Sting was, but that's mostly a pick between a wide variety of disappointments. Shit, I could see an argument that the TNA Hogan/Sting match was in some ways better than any of their WCW encounters.

This is a topic we've run into and danced around a few times, but never properly had a full discussion about. Simply put: how important is a wrestler's physical size in today's pro wrestling? Personally, I think it matters less than ever when it comes to drawing money or becoming popular. Cena is a pretty big guy in regular-world terms, but there are plenty of gargantuan superstars who tower over him. Mysterio is the perennial second-biggest draw, and he's the smallest guy in the company. Before they self destructed, the Hardys were HUGE money-makers and sold metric fucktons of merchandise. Clearly, the fans tend to value personality and gimmick and performance over whether or not this person is an unusually tall or muscular human being. For every Big Show who gets over through a combination of size and talent, there's ten Khalis or Rybacks who the crowd never really gives a shit about. So, nowadays size doesn't have as much impact on drawing ability. Next topic: if the crowd wants the little guy to implausibly defeat a much larger opponent, regardless of how unrealistic that might be in a real fight, why shouldn't the little guy win?

We keep returning to the "how much does size matter?" discussion on this board, don't we? Time for a new thread, methinks.

Aside from the Flair and Vader matches, does anything else from WCW come to mind? Someone mentioned vs Piper at Starrcade 96, but it's nowhere near as fun or energetic as their matches from eleven years previous. Nothing else really pops out at me. There's the occasional "better than it should've been" like the Goldberg title change or the Kidman feud, but am I blanking on anything really great?

It doesn't matter, because it's fake. If the crowd reacted to an implausible size mismatch by booing and showering the ring with garbage whenever a tiny guy beat a huge one, that'd be one thing. But they don't. They never do. They always believe it. Wrestling audiences have no more of a problem buying that Mysterio can beat Big Show than movie audiences have a problem believing that action heroes can beat up much larger villains. So why is this even a complaint worth talking about?

Why? This isn't MMA, it's fake. Guys in wrestling routinely wrestle opponents twice their size or more, and often the smaller guy wins, and the crowd never has a problem buying it.

Wasn't that kind of harnessed picked because they wanted to do a comedy pratfall? IIRC, the intended spot was that the Blue Blazer would be lowered down to ringside, but then stop and get caught hanging just a few feet above the mat. Owen would hit the quick release, and splat down onto the canvas for a cheap laugh. I also remember reading somewhere that the harness wasn't even the proper kind of rappelling harness, that it was something designed for work on sailboats or some damn thing like that. Anyone else remember that, know if it's true?

-I only remember one with Angle, at KOTR; the bizarro-world sight of Hogan actually tapping out makes that one memorable, if nothing else. Angle's master-of-suplexes gimmick had Hogan taking more bumps in that one match than he did in his entire last year of WCW. -I think Jericho/Hogan ran twice on Smackdown; both were similar to each other, but decent enough. -With Trips, I know they had one on Backlash and I think a rematch on Smackdown, and recall them both being rather slow and dull and way too long. This was during that Quadruple H period when Trips had come back from the leg injury all bulked up and wasn't moving around nearly as fast as he used to, and at this time Hogan really needed an opponent who could run around him and provide a contrast to Hulk's lumbering.

On banning the punt: I understand why, because it's the only move in the WWE which is supposed to cause a concussion. That's the whole storyline point of the move, that Orton kicks you in the skull so goddamn hard that it gives you brain damage and puts you on injury leave. No other current finisher has been sold like that, as if they're supposed to do more bodily harm than what's simply necessary to pin your opponent. Since they're so terrified of concussions nowadays, it's hard to justify a top babyface whose best move is intended to cause the damn things. Don't forget Tank Abbott!

I thought his matches during his 2002 comeback tour were some surprisingly strong stuff. The Rock match at Mania is of course the big one, but he also did some interesting stuff with Jericho, Angle, and Lesnar. Those all had different stories and flows, and were neither just the same Hogan match nor the same WWE Main Event Style match. It wasn't all great, the HHH and Taker matches stunk. But for a little while, he looked more like HULK F'N HOGAN again and less like a sad old man trying to relive his glory days. Anyone remember if his team with Edge produced anything decent? I'm drawing a total blank on how those matches went. To just name random one-offs, his big interpromotional bout with Stan Hansen in 1990 was a lot of fun. Him and Muta in '93 was way better than it had any right to be, too.

That's something which doesn't get talked about nearly enough, mostly because it's pretty hard to determine who came up with what ideas. Can anyone look at any WWE match and definitively be able to tell which agent laid it out? Or which of the much-derided anonymous Hollywood writers scripted any particular promo? That kind of backstage knowledge is rarely explained even by the dirtsheets. And I think our ignorance of how it works makes smarks reluctant to discuss it or acknowledge just how incredibly damned important it is. Yeah. Drawing new people into a building and satisfying or manipulating the people who are already in the building are two entirely different skills. Broadcasting a product to a mass audience isn't the same thing as narrowcasting a product which is specifically tailored to a small base of hardcore fans. It's the difference between WWF/WCW and ECW/ROH. Ditto. The body of the match is fine, but when Hogan gets up and hits the Standardized Hogan Finishing Sequence it makes me not care at all. You can tell whenever Hulk actually cares about making a match different from usual, because the finish won't be "kick out of a finisher, Hulk Up, no-sell a few punches, block a punch, three punches, Irish whip, big boot, leg drop".

In terms of best vs best, it's kinda hard to compare them since the eras and styles are surprisingly different (considering that both guys do a lot of the same punch-kick New York theatrical brawling). I dunno if Cena, transplanted to 1990 without the modern agents helping him, could've had as good a match with Warrior as Hogan did. But the others are right when they say Cena's produced a more interesting variety of different stuff with wildly different opponents. Worst vs worst, it's hard to make a case for Hulk being better. His crappy matches were pretty goddamned unwatchable; the worst you can say about Cena is that he often goes on autopilot with repetitive spots and flimsy offense. Of course, he's also so much older and so much more insistent on his own deranged ideas of Creative Control that he's had a lot more opportunities to shit the bed than John has.

RTC usually had pretty shitty matches, though. Stevie is the most inconsistent wrestler in the world, Godfather sucked, Venis was bland, and Buchanan always seemed like he had a lot of athletic potential but was never able to use it properly. In a particularly workrate-heavy era in the company, they somehow never had a match which I can even remember later.