Jingus

To be fair, she was talking about hearing that chant during segments that Russo hadn't written. (Basically she was admitting that some of the other writers on the committee are even dumber than Vinnie Roo.) But yeah, it's a really poorly-phrased line.

Thanks, sorry, assumed the IWW site had been taken down. I wish you could see some of the old local TV we broadcasted on Nashville's biggest cable carrier. We did all kinds of the weirdest, funnest, cheapest kind of goofing-off stuff on that show. We had the weirdest pool of talent, we had a constant stream of TNA workers who wanted to get a quick payday on a Friday night, along with all kinds of good up-and-coming young talents; and also a bunch of Memphis dudes, both Dundees and Wolfie D and Ricky Morton and Bobbie Eaton all hanging around. I was on the show for about five years, but probably have little more left of that footage than a few scattered old Youtube links here and there. I used to have some of it on VHS tapes (yeah, it's been a while) but lost those while moving this one time.

Yeah. It's pretty hard to think of anyone who's been booked in more absolutely career-wrecking bullshit (yet not had their career wrecked) than Kane. Alvarez actually had an interesting theory about that: perhaps Kane gets stuck with all the goofy storyline ideas which the writers come up with for Undertaker. It's easy to imagine the writers pitching all kinds of weird angles for the dead man, but Taker either turns them down or is on one of his long sabbaticals. So the idea gets passed down to the other big scary magical giant, one who's a go-along-to-get-along type and won't say no: Kane. Aw, I never got around to listening to many of those. Were the podcasts saved or archived anywhere?

Yep. This was filmed at a USWO show, my old home fed. The building is a horrible crackhouse of a motel called the Stadium Inn, and I'm amazed at how great they got it to look on camera. The Brody-looking dude is a local worker named Josephus, who sometimes works for SAW and a bunch of the other area promotions. You can briefly see old Raw jobber Gary Valiant (also Billy Scott's little brother) on the monitor, as well as infamous Nashville crazy superfan Chicken-hat Charles in the crowd. Good video, it really captures the vibe of a small indy show, especially the general weariness of the locker room.

Is there really a place in wrestling to go terribly deep into those sort of philosophical issues, though? Rassling is mostly about one guy punching another guy right in the fuckin' mouth. Where in all that do you find an appropriate segue into "and by the way, here's my thesis essay upon the subject of the nonexistence of God"? That sort of articulate intellectual debating would require a lot of talking; and as we all know, not too many things tend to ruin a wrestling show worse than too much talking. Yeah. I'm an atheist and I love Hitch's writing, but he was certainly not a cuddly or polite sort of fellow. Kind of like a scholarly version of The Rock, a guy whose mastery of communication skills is usually so much more brilliant than almost any of his opponents that you nearly start feeling sorry for said opponents even when if you violently disagree with their message. One thing I've always wanted to see is a completely intergender federation. Men and women routinely compete in the same matches, for the same championships, and it's not considered weird or unusual. Even aside from my various feelings upon gender equality and feminist theory, I think you could draw some money with this kind of world where it's considered okay for men and women to hit each other. Can you imagine the kind of truly soap opera-esque storylines you could have between opponents who can become entangled in romantic plots? "You're supposed to be my boyfriend, but you slept with my arch-nemesis, you son of a bitch! I challenge you to a steel cage match!"

On the other hand, if Bret stayed then it's entirely possible that Mr. McMahon never becomes a heel figure. Seems like kind of a trade-off.

Pretty sure that was just Russo making sure he'd get fired and released from his contract, so he could go to TNA. Not even Vinnie Roo is so oblivious that he thinks that hanging a controversial fag gimmick on The Rock would be good for business.

Atlas is crazy. Racism in wrestling is so deep and wide that I'm amazed anyone ever tries to claim it doesn't exist. The sheer lack of non-white world champions is the easiest example to point at, of course.

Obviously, that's not what you're talking about, I would need one of the guys who was actually there to tell me how representative, say, OMEGA crowds were of the general population of the south, but it does give one hope. I mean, it's wrestling. You gotta have your Bobo Brazils and whatnot before you can have The Rock. You can't throw them into tolerance and expect them to adapt easily. They need those baby steps away from "boo the evil stereotype" to "cheer the likeable stereotype" before we can get to "the trait we usually stereotype is completely incidental to this character". I'm inclined to think that they'd be able to get there with gay wrestlers, though it seems unlikely at the moment that they'll try. Lazz's gimmick was basically just Adrian Street updated to modern day. I've seen several guys on the indies who did a "flamboyant gay babyface who is cheered for sexually harassing the heels" sort of character like that. It's been around forever; check out a 1950s guy named Ricky Starr, who did a somewhat more old-fashioned and toned-down version of the same thing. When you think about it, it's not too terribly different from all the times Bugs Bunny put on a dress and kissed Elmer Fudd on the mouth. WCW kinda did something similar to that with Chris Candido in 2000. He'd make all these grandiose claims about how he beat all the biggest stars back in the old days, while Mark Madden would be babbling on commentary about how Candido had beaten up everyone from Thesz to Andre. Of course, being WCW in 2000, it was dropped and forgotten pretty quickly. Jericho's old fake backstory for his band Fozzy is along the same lines too.

Roma's claim of shooting on Steamboat (even aside from the fact that one glance at the tape proves he's lying through his goddamn teeth) is awfully weird. Wasn't Richard Blood a championship-winning amateur wrestler back in his school days? I dunno what Paul Centopani's older athletic credentials were, but I know his short run as a boxer in 1992 was awfully mediocre (one loss to a habitual jobber, and two squash wins over debuting tomato cans who never fought again). Especially when you factor in the whole "wrestlers usually kick boxers' asses in real shoots" old-school tendency of pre-UFC martial arts.

I agree with Loss on wrestling badly needing some "just happens to be gay, not a central part of his gimmick" characters. Hell, I wrote one of those when I was doing some fantasy booking way back in 1999. The funny part is, there's plenty of wrestlers who are secretly gay or bi or pan or whatever in their personal life, but it's never ever mentioned during the course of the show. And the vast majority of all the gay gimmicks in wrestling tended to be played by straight dudes. Sonjay Dutt. He's occasionally been dressed in wacky Bollywood clothing, but mostly he's portrayed as a generic flippy cruiserweight who just happens to not be white. Bryan Alvarez actually made a pretty good point along those lines. Cirque du Soleil is regarded as high-class entertainment that appeals to affluent audiences. But when you get right down to it, it's just the circus. I don't know that wrestling couldn't do something similar. Chikara kinda-sorta does this at times. It's true that a lot of their stuff tends to be aimed at a family audience; but there's a strong sense of ironic hipsterism in a lot of their stuff. All the gimmicks based around old video games, the 80s/90s throwback special guest stars, and especially all of the self-mocking spots where they deconstruct various tropes and cliches. Plus the convoluted angles which require the audience to pay attention to the long-term storylines, which some have derisively knocked as "graphic novel booking". Their relative financial success in today's wrestling world tends to suggest that they've made at least a few steps in attracting that sort of audience. PWG and a few others lean in that direction sometimes, just not quite as far. Kaiju Big Battel might've attracted a Cirque Du Soleil-ish crowd (by wrestling standards), but that company's erratic schedule ended up with them never being more than an underground phenomenon. Wrestle Society X tried to go for the MTV audience, but the first few shows were very poorly advertised and it was aborted long before it could've achieved any sort of future success. The audience must be out there, but in my experience wrestling does tend to skew towards lower class audiences. Especially on the indy level. For whatever reason, you can often draw a bigger crowd in middle-of-nowhere hick towns than you can in a big city. Some of NWA Wildside's worst houses happened when they tried to run in downtown Atlanta; and that was a promotion which certainly tried to present a somewhat more sophisticated, less insulting-to-your-intelligence sort of product than most companies do. And at all the shows I ever worked, the trailer park demographic was pretty overwhelming in the crowd's makeup. What do you mean, exactly? There have been non-wrestling celebrities who got involved and did heelish stuff, especially with the run of guest Raw GMs over the past few years. Plus Dennis Rodman, Kevin Federline, David Arquette (after his nonsensical turn), etcetera.

Shawn was still in a program with Taker anyway, so it's 50/50 on whether he might've still been in the casket match at the Rumble.

Hey, that brings up an interesting thought. Andre's national heritage was never made into any kind of big deal. In 1980s WWF. When has any other heel from a foreign country EVER had his birthplace just barely mentioned in passing like that? When you're a foreigner, in Vince's world that automatically means that you're given a (usually heel) gimmick which is entirely centered around your foreign-ness. Even most Canadians at some point have a xenophobic slant to their character, despite the fact that most Americans tend to view Canada as basically the 51st state. By the standards of this industry, Andre should've been forced to wear a beret and a stripey shirt and hit people with baguettes. I understand that he was an unique character and treated differently, but it's odd that Vince didn't do even the slightest bit of France-bashing when Andre was a heel. For that matter, has there ever been any major French gimmick during Vince Jr's tenure? I mean actually from France, and not of Quebecois decent. Cuz lord knows we've had a shitload of various Quebecers doing generic "mincing French bastard" stereotypes, but it was always made very clear that they were from Canada. That's really odd, when you think about it. Maybe it was his lingering respect for Andre or something like that which kept Vinnie Mac from ever doing that? Because it seems like that's the only major NATO nation which hasn't been the birthplace of some bad guy with a xenophobia-based gimmick.

Speaking as a child of that era: GI Joe was huge. And Slaughter was a pretty famous guy among kids. I never watched either GI Joe or pro wrestling back then, but even I knew exactly who the Sarge was. At times it seemed like you couldn't get through a single commercial break during any cartoon without an ad featuring Slaughter popping up. (But still, fame amongst six-year-olds isn't a compelling argument for becoming a national mainstream sensation like Hogan did.)

One important thing which hasn't been mentioned yet is the cosmetic look. Even losing his hair, Hulk Hogan looked like a comic-book superhero. Slaughter already looked like a fat bald old man.

It seems like it was more bad timing than anything else. Hogan's big-scary-monster feuds with Taker and Sid were probably already planned by the time Flair showed up, and then Hogan was out on vacation until after Flair had left the company. They flirted with the idea of a Hulk/Ric feud on the house show circuit and in tag matches, but apparently the drawing numbers were rather disappointing for those matchups.

I actually enjoyed his performances in TNA's weekly ppvs, but his stuff as Jackyl was so forgettable that I'm struggling to recall any details about it.

what That was Don Callis in the WWF. He managed the Truth Commission in the WWF. what

Perhaps; but if it was hardway, you coulda fooled me. Certainly looked like Flair intentionally gigged himself to get that blood. And actually, that's the only part of the match which halfway makes sense: if the whole point is that Charles Robinson is secretly in Flair's pocket, then it's natural for him to ignore Flair bleeding. But to do it that early in the match, and then to later ignore Hogan bleeding too, and then to suddenly start counting pinfalls... yeah, there are plenty of good reasons to hate this match. And the macro-booking of the overall storyline didn't make any damn sense either. After the firing deal with Bischoff, Flair transitions from feuding with Eric to feuding with the whole newly-reformed NWO. Okay, that makes sense, the Horsemen/NWO rivalry had been an ongoing thing for almost three years now. But it falls apart really quickly after that. Someone will have to remind me exactly how Hennig and Windham became the go-to choice for David Flair's debut opponents at Souled Out. Then Hogan (shoot) whips the living shit out of David after the match, prompting an enraged Ric to chase after Hollywood for the next couple of months. Alright, we're back on track, it's making sense again! And then... David promptly turns heel on his dad at Superbrawl. Uh. What? Okay, they tried to explain it by saying the NWO had brainwashed him via the debuting Torrie Wilson, fine whatever. But then we get to the intended double-turn at Uncensored, and I still have no idea why the hell the crowd was supposed to buy any of it. On one side we've got Hollywood Hogan, the biggest piece of shit in the entire wrestling industry. He's run roughshod over this company for three years, making it into his own personal playground. He'd often go months without defending that title belt, yet could always be counted on to kill twenty minutes on every Nitro bragging about how awesome he was. Recently he got the championship back via the goddamn Fingerpoke, and the big storyline before that was his awful vanity feud against Warrior. And the NWO wasn't even cool anymore, having been outstayed its welcome and looking awfully anemic compared to truly world-class badass tweeners in black like Stone Cold. There's NOTHING redeeming about Hollywood Hogan's character at this point, nothing that any fan in their right mind should ever want to cheer. On the other side: Ric Flair. WCW's standard-bearer since time immemorial. The greatest wrestler in the whole damn world (okay not for a long time now, but still). The leader of the Horsemen, who had transformed over the years from a back of punk renegades into a beloved gold standard of quality workrate. Recently he'd actually done something unusual: given the NWO a serious loss, since he repeatedly kicked the shit out of Bischoff, shaved Eric's head, and even took away the position of WCW President. Then Hogan mindfucked Ric harder than anyone ever had before, turning his own young son against Flair. Ric was primed and ready to do what Sting, Goldberg, and everyone else had failed to do: finally get the belt off Hogan for good and maybe even get rid of the fucking NWO forever. So, why the bloody hell is it supposed to make any sense at all in this scenario to outta-nowhere turn Ric Flair heel and Hollywood Hogan face? The answer is: "of course it doesn't make sense, but... Creative Control, brotha". Hogan's knees were starting to get really bad and he thought his in-ring days might be numbered, so he decided to try and be a hero one more time just to prove he could do it. Never mind if it totally fucking sabotages months of storylines and makes the company look even more pathetic and obsolete compared to their white-hot competition.

I might've liked it better if they hadn't done such a similar match just one month beforehand. Take out the bullshit stipulations and stupid double-turn, and you've got the Superbrawl '99 match.

Sure we can say that. It was Hogan's idea to do the match in the first place. And supposedly he only agreed to do it if Bischoff promised that Hogan would be the guy who finally ended Goldberg's streak later. (Funny how Hogan took a vacation as soon as Nash became the head booker...) I've never seen it, but I think that it was a first blood match in which Flair bleeds and wins via pinfall. It is. Outside of that, it was indeed a pretty good match from what I remember, and mostly famous for being the last big numbers PPV WCW ever did. It was good by the standards of a Hogan match in '99, but that was pretty much it. The absolutely nonsensical booking killed the whole thing dead. The double turn came out of nowhere, with practically zero setup. And why even bother announcing it as a first blood match if it's going to end in a pinfall? Actually, the tradition of Hogan/Flair finishes involving ridiculous pinfalls in the main event of Uncensored, considering how Hulk somehow pinned Ric to beat Vader in a strap match in '95, not to mention the whole Tower Of Doom fiasco.

I wish they would do something like that with Foley. He did say years ago that after he retired he'd like to become a Stooge sort of figure, ala Briscoe & Patterson. It seems like it would be a natural role for the guy, just have him as a mentor to some talented but charisma-challenged young workers and let him get them over.

You mean something like the old "one heel holds a babyface for the other heel to punch, but the babyface ducks and Heel #2 whacks Heel #1"? That kind of thing happens in WWE tag matches all the time, especially with the divas for some reason.

Punk seems to be a weird exception to a whole lotta rules. They didn't just let him keep his name; he showed up on WWE television with his indy gimmick, look, and moveset largely intact. They never let guys do that! I can only imagine that his debut was a pet project of Heyman's, and that nobody in the office was paying too much attention to ECW midcarders at that time. He got over pretty quick, to the point of being cheered over both DX and the Hardys in that Survivor Series match; so maybe it was just too late to give him a gimmick makeover by the time management even noticed that this guy existed.

He drew a whole shitload of money and worked a safe style. ... ...that's pretty much all I've got, aside from the occasional good match or bit of hilarious Wrestlecrap.