Jingus

Considering that Malenko had probably already decided that he was walking out on the company that night, I always wondered if he did that on purpose. He certainly was never a guy who was known for blowing spots or making dumbass mistakes like that.

It still happens on the indies, and it can be a surprisingly dangerous move sometimes. I knew a guy who took a double Japanese armdrag, landed on his head, got partial paralysis and took like two years to recover fully. Another time, two friends of mine had a miscommunication; one guy thought they were doing a Japanese armdrag, the other guy thought they were doing a standard one, and BOOM, armdrag driver. Fortunately nobody got hurt that time, it actually looked pretty cool. Did WCW do it consistently until the NWO era, or was there a period in the early 90s when they stopped? I seem to remember that Bill Watts brought that rule back out of retirement when he took over, but I'm not sure. Shawn Michaels did that one a lot. It never quite looked right because HBK could no longer bend his knees enough to kneel properly, but he did it. The standard bodyslam is often kind of a humdrum-looking move. Not much motion, not much impact. Unless you're doing it on a guy bigger than you or unless the guy taking the move can really sell his ass off, it comes off as boring sometimes. Heels historically often tended to be big monsters or annoying little assholes who specialized in pinball bumping and theatrical overselling, so they tend to make the move look more impressive when they take it. But nowadays it's seen as such an obsolete piece of old-school offense that some audiences will shit on the scoopslam. I still remember a Mike Knox vs Little Guido match, where Mike did five bodyslams in a row and you could hear the crowd becoming audibly less and less impressed with Knox each time he repeated the same basic move. Don't forget that Estrada was one of two unfortunate souls to wrestle BRADEN "KNOCK-KNOCK" WALKER as well. Bearer also managed Taker again back in 2010 briefly before turning on him again, but that was so short that it probably doesn't count. It's kinda difficult to keep a babyface manager over, especially if he doesn't have a heel manager on the other side of the ring to play off of. Cornette talked about how dull that role could be sometimes, because there's just not much to do. Having done it myself, he's right; aside from cheerleading your wrestlers and taking the occasional sympathy beatdown, there isn't a whole lot you can try at ringside with being a face manager.

The funny thing is that the modern WWE is just as workrate-friendly as it has been at any time in its modern history. Compare the amount of time they spend on in-ring action now to any other era, and the difference is rather surprisingly big. Despite the still-common received wisdom that the WWE is all talk and no action, they devote a larger percentage of their show to actual wrestling than they have at any point in recent memory. For the past several years, even the most talk-heavy show Raw has roundly spanked Impact when it came to number of minutes spent in the ring.

John, I see your point about storylines and morality in sports, but I don't think it's a good comparison to rassling. You sound kinda like Meltzer trying to justify how MMA = Pro Wres. Fiction and reality do share some common elements, but they're still not even remotely the same thing.

A lot of this stuff depends on a lot of various variables. You've gotta know the territory: an ROH crowd demands a bigger bag of movez than a WWE crowd does. It depends on your gimmick: Jimmy Valiant didn't need as many fancy maneuvers as Daniel Bryan does. It depends on your style of work: a Road Dogg or a Larry Zybyzko don't need a ton of MOVEZ because they fill up time in other crowd-working ways. It depends on the genre of wrestling you inhabit: Dean Malenko needs more moves than Necro Butcher, because technical wrestling is partly showing off all the different shit you can do and hardcore wrestling is more about plunder and punishment. It heavily depends on how much time you're expected to fill: an hour-long match requires more variety of offense to keep the audience from getting bored, while in a three-minute TV match you can get away with literally only having three moves. Also, two different discussions are kinda blurring together here: the number of different moves a guy uses, and how well he executes his moves. Those overlap a bit, but they're separate enough that they shouldn't be conflated together.

I do think that casual popularity matters, because it certainly matters to the performers and their bosses. A lot of the planning that goes into the matches and angles are specifically designed to get over with the popular majority, not a niche minority of internet critics and hardcore fans. We can't ignore that aspect, because it plays such an important role in so many of the creative decisions which go into these things. A lot of the entire "why they do what they do, including where and when" process of psychology is aimed directly at the cheap seats. Which connects back to some of the points from earlier, like Sabu's psychology of "the fans won't care about how long this guy is laying on this table and they'll pop like crazy once I dive through it". Of course popularity =/= artistic quality; if nothing else, the former is a lot easier to measure in some sort of objective way than the latter. Heck, the Hall of Fame arguments always play up that part of entertainment when they talk about how much any particular guy drew during his career. The entire case for guys like Big Daddy seems to be "a lot of fans really liked him for a long time". I do think it's vital to keep in mind the intent and motivation of the artist when talking about the art. (Sometimes that's easier said than done, if the artist in particular is some reclusive type who refuses to discuss their process.) And I think it's also important to analyze how and why the general audience responds to some things much more than others. Why the hell are those godawful Twilight and wretched Transformers movies so frigging successful, anyway? Why are they so much more popular than all the other movies which seem so similar, yet sold many fewer tickets? That's an area of critical study which I think often goes very underrepresented. If we're going to judge the relative merits of all wrestling matches, I think it's appropriate to spend some time deconstructing just exactly how and why Hogan/Andre became such a beloved memory and such a massive draw among the proletariat.

Yeah, there were a few sloppy moments. But that's all they were, a few sloppy moments. There weren't that many of them, and they didn't look that bad. Compare it to, say, Hogan/Warror '98 where they were botching literally half of everything they tried. But Meltzer et al keep hammering on this one match as if it were one of the very worst atrocities to ever occur in a wrestling ring. And for the sake of argument: even if that were true, does it matter? There were clearly 93,000 82,000 78,000 a whole shitload of fans in attendance who were completely satisfied and reacted as if this was the greatest match they'd ever seen in their life. Simple popularity should never be the primary factor considered while critiquing something, but it should definitely play its part.

It is a slippery slope, but it's still something which needs to be taken into account to some extent. To go back to the movie metaphor: I don't expect the same things from Apocalypse Now compared to what I expect from Hobo With a Shotgun. I adore both films with all my heart, but they're clearly not even trying to accomplish anything close to the same goals. There's no good objective, universal paradigm for evaluating both of them under an identical set of criteria. Along those lines, I've never understood why so many people are willing to bury Andre/Hogan '87 as such a terrible match. Why was it bad? Because it was kinda slow? Who cares? Despite what many people think, "fast action = great match" isn't some kind of unbreakable commandment. So why else was it bad? Blown spots? No, there really weren't any, aside from Andre's airball when headbutting the post. Bad psychology? Hell no, they did everything almost perfectly in terms of choosing what to do and when. What else? I'm at a loss to think of any other reasons why we'd call this match a dud. The only logical explanation for why it gets so much hate is simple popularity backlash. Much like a James Cameron movie, Andre/Hogan gets hated on simply because it got SO over and drew so much money, and some people (coughMeltzercough) don't like the idea that this sort of wrestling seems to be what most fans really want to see. (And besides, those guys had several matches together which were MUCH worse than the one at the Silverdome. Whenever someone's bitching about this match, they seem to forget all the shittier encounters that these guys had.)

Absolutely. Wrestlers and fans are often looking at the industry in completely different ways. A small example: never in my life have I ever heard any wrestler in any locker room use the word "blade" as a verb. It's usually called "gigging" or "getting color". But strangely, smarks seem to say "blading" more often than every other synonym for that activity combined. That sort of tiny difference can help contribute to lots of grumpy old workers' mindset that internet marks don't know anything about wrestling. That's exactly why Lance Storm threw that infamous tantrum over the DVDVR 500 list, because to him the term "best worker" means something entirely different than it does to the fans who say it. That's the most basic formula in all of wrestling, and it can be broken down into more or fewer parts depending on how specific you're being (in my neck of the woods, it was typically known as "shine-heat-comeback-finish"). But that formula isn't always a good thing. Al Snow spends a lot of time ranting about how it's ruined the business, because it makes every match look so cookie-cutter and thoughtless. And I've known a few dim-bulb wrestlers who thought that shine-heat-comeback-finish was the deepest psychology of all, and never understood that you could deviate from that plan or do something more complex. Yeah. And some people have their own weird preferences when it comes to watching tapes. Diamond Dallas Page is legendary for obsessively watching his own matches over and over again, microanalyzing everything and trying to pick out every tiny flaw and mistake so that he could improve his own work; but he didn't spend nearly as much time watching anyone else's matches. Meanwhile there's Terry Funk, who basically never watches anything because of his own insecurities. He can't stand to watch shitty wrestlers who don't know what they're doing and make a mockery of the business, but he also hates watching anyone who's awesome because his own jealousy kicks in whenever he sees someone who's a better wrestler than himself. And he never watches his own matches either, basically because he's afraid that he'll find out that he sucked and it'll kill his fond memories of those encounters. The difference is, wrestling matches are much more limited in scope than those TV shows. The shows have more time, more characters, many more locations, more storytelling tools, and have the huge advantage of being carefully scripted long in advance and then painstakingly edited afterwards. It's a hell of a lot harder to tell complex stories when you've just got two guys in a ring on live TV. And sometimes the alternating limbwork simply makes no sense. I remember in a lot of early NOAH matches that Misawa sometimes had a bad tendency of working an arm for a few minutes, and then a leg for a few minutes, and then an arm, and then a leg, as if he had freakin' ADD or Alzheimers and could never remember what his gameplan was. And all of that work would be instantly forgotten and no-sold whenever they stood back up and started throwing elbows again. All that being said, I have seen some examples of limbwork being forgotten which I thought were just fine. Practically every Ricky Steamboat match has a bunch of armwork during the shine which never goes anywhere in particular. The difference in this case is, to me, that felt like it was the character Ricky Steamboat intentionally killing time rather than the actor Richard Blood doing the same. Steamboat was known for preferring to wrestle very long matches, part of that being a specific strategy; simply put, Steamboat's cardio was better than almost everyone else's. He wasn't working the arm in order to weaken that specific bodypart, but rather to grind the opponent down and tire him out so that he'd be vulnerable to the inevitable crossbodies and rollups which Ricky would be doing later. Another case: bear with me, because it's Dynamite Kid vs Tiger Mask. In one of their earliest matches, Dynamite started working Tiger's leg, especially with some hard kicks which Tiger was taking those wacky Hennig flip bumps for. Of course it was later blown off and Tiger was running and leaping around just fine. The difference is, Dynamite didn't keep doing the legwork forever. It only lasted a minute or two, with Kid essentially playing Lucy to TM's Charlie Brown. Once he got Tiger slowed down and grounded, he switched his tactics and started using other offense. But it still worked into the match later anyway, because on the comeback Tiger started kicking Dynamite's legs in retaliation ("because it fucking hurts!"). That didn't play into the finish either (bridging suplex, iirc) but once again they didn't spend forever doing it. I can accept limbwork being forgotten much easier when they don't spend too long doing it. Once you've spent half the match working a limb (see any of HHH's annoying superman performances where he's selling a knee), it becomes insulting for the guy to just stand up and brush himself off and act like his limb is perfectly fine. Interesting point. But it's a little different in American wrestling, especially in the WWE, when guys only have one or two different moves that they ever win matches with. The incredibly simplistic "you can only win by hitting this one finisher" style is one of the worst aspects of current stateside wrestling, in my opinion. It can easily make so much of the match seem so pointless. If Stone Cold can't win without hitting the Stunner, then why is he bothering to do anything else? Why the hell do guys go for pinfalls after basic moves like bodyslams, when that never ever gets a three count? Why does anyone use a sleeper hold or rear chinlock ever, since that move seems like it actually wakes your opponent up and makes him healthier? Why do these guys keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again? However, a smart wrestler can get around anything. The following guys all have their own method: -Steve Austin's character is basically a sadist who enjoys beating the shit out of people at length. He doesn't just want to win the match by keeping their shoulders down, he wants to hurt the other guy. This isn't always consistent, Austin sometimes does the "cover after a bodyslam" bullshit, but most of the time he's portrayed as a guy who likes fighting too much to cut the fight short. And when he's a heel, he's more likely to go for the Stunner early and often in a cowardly attempt to win the match quickly and soothe his paranoid fear that he might not be the best wrestler in the world. -Shawn Michaels is one of those guys who is always talking about how he's gonna put on the greatest match, rather than talking about how he's gonna win. That's because to him, putting on the greatest match is actually more important to him than winning. When he insists on "getting his shit in", it's because the character Shawn Michaels is just as obsessed with that as the performer Michael Hickenbottom is. He's an inveterate show-off, and he'll go for all his crowd-popping moves (whether it makes sense or not in the context of the match) because he's addicted to the cheers and applause. -Undertaker is a stubborn old asshole. He's a control freak who insists on having everything go the way he wants it. When someone kicks out of his finishers or elseways thwarts his plans, his expression isn't one of helpless shock or grim determination; it's rage. He can't believe that anyone would dare to defy him. So why does he keep going for Old School, even though half the time it ends with him being crotched on the ropes? It's because Taker likes doing Old School, dammit, and he's going to stubbornly keep trying for it until he gets it. -Randy Orton is the opposite of all of the above; he just wants to hit his finish and win. His entire match is built around the RKO. Practically every single move in his offense targets the head, neck, or spine in a never-ending quest to soften up those body parts and make them easy prey for the cutter. That also feeds into why he has a thousand different ways to hit the RKO from a counter or a surprise position or even in mid-air, because he's betting everything on being able to flatten his opponent with it. It's his Death Star laser, and the rest of his Imperial fleet is basically just there to help him get the big gun into position to fire. I wonder why that's not a more common theme in title matches. You do still sometimes get the "challenger beats the champ in a nontitle match, only to lose the title shot" story sometimes, but not very often. You'd think it would be an easy way to put more heat on a big match and draw more fan interest, but nobody does it that way.

To an extent, yeah, but not really all the time. First of all, it's one of those "we wrestled four hundred matches a year and every match was a one-hour broadway" exaggerations about The Good Old Days that old veterans bring up whenever they're talking about how all the young wrestlers today suck. And considering how today's WWE guys spend much more of their travel time and social life away from each other, it cuts down on how much they can talk about it; rather than riding for twelve hours a day in the car, they're on a plane for a couple of hours maybe sitting next to random strangers, and lots of the young guys prefer to go sleep or play video games in their hotel rooms rather than hang around the bar all night. But more importantly, even the most obsessive wrestling fan in the world can't talk about it forever. Sooner or later every conversation gets old. When you've been riding with the same guys literally hundreds of times, there's only so many times that you can re-tell the same stories before you want to give up and discuss something, anything else. That happens faster when guys get older; lots of aging wrestlers get burned out to the point where they'll grimace if anyone even tries to talk about wrestling outside of what's necessary for the job tonight.

You'd be surprised. Part of it is that hindsight is 20/20, and it's much easier to criticize something afterwards than to be making the decision yourself in the heat of the moment. How many times have you groaned aloud at someone who made a stupid call on a game show, in a "how could they have possibly thought that was a good idea?!" manner? Same deal here. But a lot of the time, guys do indeed let things slip which they really should have caught. Part of it can be sheer laziness or habit; once they get into the pattern of doing things a certain way, it's awfully hard to change. Once they have a comfortable formula, it's a hell of a lot easier to stick to that plan and rarely or never make any deviations. Especially since this is really a pretty tiny part of their overall lives. The matches we see take up less than an hour of the 160 that makes up their weekly routine. Haven't you ever had your personal life get into your head and distract you from your job? Now imagine that your entire job performance is graded on three minutes' worth of work, and even a single mistake can get you labelled as a shitty employee. The infamous Trish/Jackie Gayda match, for example; go back and watch it, because the entire reputation of that match is really based on two hideously botched spots. But to hear people talk about it, you'd think it was like that truly unbelievable Sharmell/Jenna James holocaust, a jaw-dropping conga line of inexplicable fuckups on every level. Two blown spots basically killed Jackie Gayda's career in its cradle. That's a hell of a lot of pressure to be under, and some people respond to stress by turning into a deer in the headlights. Also doesn't help that some wrestlers truly know jack shit about psychology. I guarantee you that the average poster on this board knows more about the history and theory of wrestling than the majority of guys in the ring. When you start doing something as your day job, it becomes very hard to keep learning new things about your vocation. It's much easier to go through the motions, collect your paycheck, and go home to your family and forget all about your job until it's time to go back to work. Furthermore, I this sounds odd, but most wrestlers don't watch nearly as much wrestling as the hardcore fans do. Imagine it in filmmaking terms: critics spend much more time watching movies than directors do, because directors are using that time to make movies. Roger Ebert has seen more films and knows more cinema history than Steven Spielberg does, because they devote their daily lives to completely different aspects of that medium. Same deal with wrestlers; Dave Meltzer knows more about the non-hands-on aspect of wrestling than Triple H ever will. And this is just talking about the guys who actually like their craft and want to know as much as possible. Imagine what the clock-punchers are like, the apathetic assholes who are only doing it for the money and don't give a shit about the art.

This is a damn fine thread, gentlemen. This is probably the single best board I've ever seen for deep analysis and wide-ranging discussion of this topic; and even by those standards, this discussion rules. Good work, everyone. That's true to an extent, but the difference is that you can do something different with the film setup than the the wrestling setup. In the film, maybe the son doesn't die, but someone else close to him does or he gains a fear of death through some other manner. There's different places you can take that other than the obvious. In wrestling, if a guy hurts his knee on the outside, "work the knee" is pretty much the only thing that makes sense to do next. I guess you could theoretically build a storyline around some honorable babyface who refuses to take cheap advantage of an accidental opening, but I can't think of any easy way to do it which wouldn't make the face look like a goody-two-shoes dumbass. Yeah, that was me, thanks. It does slow the match waaaaay down when it's based around legwork. There's only two ways you can take that: in the first, one guy spends the rest of the match moving in slow motion, and it's easy for the action to drag. The only other choice is to make like a NJPW juniors match and just blow the work off later, and that's annoying too. It's like halfway through the match, they zap you with the Men In Black memory eraser and just pretend that the earlier limb work never happened. Yes, it does fill time, but it's a shitty way to fill time because it's insulting our intelligence. Even a storytelling medium as traditionally stupid as wrestling shouldn't expect us to forget something that we just watched five minutes ago. That can backfire too, though. Remember the boring-as-hell Morton/Gibson match from Bash '91? That's a grudge match which should've been a crazy fiery brawl, with the wronged Robert trying to beat the evil out of his turnabout partner Ricky. But they went work-the-leg instead, and took forever doing it, and ruined what might've been the only good match on paper for that card. That's a good point, actually. I could play devil's advocate and argue that it does kinda go with the territory, because in real life you'd also be sidelined from getting punched in the face a hundred times, which tends to happen in plenty of matches. But still, it does get annoying when you've got stuff like HHH/Jericho from Mania 18 where they go overboard in how ridiculously injured the leg must be. Logically speaking, by the end of that match Jericho should've been able to take Trip's leg back to Canada with him and drink beer out of it in celebration. But I bet that by the time we got to next week's Raw eight days later, HHH probably wasn't even limping. Hey, that sort of fits! "If you engage in any ordinary act of conventional wrestling, you will be severely punished. Now go do all these hideously unnatural garbage spots!" It's more than just Sturgeon's law though! I think most bad books, bad movies, etc... most of them have basic storytelling logic. They're bad in execution, but most bad novels, for instance, at least tell a story. Most bad movies can be followed. Not all, but most. Basic coherence is "square one" element for most narrative mediums. It's a starting point. You almost can't not have it. It's not like that with wrestling. As wrestling has developed in the US, for one reason or another, it's not "square one." It's just not. If you read 8 random novels from this year, I bet at least 7 would make sense. Some might be good. Most would probably be bad, but a huge majority would have basic coherence. as you said, on a card, you might get one match out of eight like that. THAT is why it stands out so much. In almost every other medium, it's a given. In wrestling, it's anything but. Even though you're arguing against each other, I feel like you're all correct. Most wrestling is indeed crap, like most entertainment in any media tends to be crap; but wrestling has a higher crap/gold ratio than most, for several good and not-so-good reasons which you've outlined. You're wrong. It is psych. The psych is to fill a section of the match and/or kill time. If it's well done by engaging the crowd, it's effective even if it has dick to do with the finish. It might not be "great psych", but there is thought there. I tend to think that triple table spots are bad because the force the guy going through the table to lay around far fucking too long. But the psych is: "This is a COOOLLLL MOTHERFUCKING SPOT that the CROWD WILL LUUUUUUUVVVVVVV!!!" You've done a great job in explaining how bad psych isn't the same as no psych. Here's an example: Teddy Hart. His ideas of psychology are very different from yours and mine, because we're humans from Earth and Teddy is some kind of weird alien robot. But he does actually have ideas. Ever notice his really odd manner of selling injuries? Ted's whole mindset is that he wants to sell injuries in the same way that athletes do in real sports. They fall down and go boom, and then there's a period where they're frozen in pain and just go "OW! FUCK!" while trying to gauge just how badly hurt they really are. And then after that, they get right back up (quickly, maybe even too quickly for their own good) and try very hard to mask the fact that they're in serious trouble. It doesn't make much sense from a wrestling psychology standpoint, but there's a reason why he does it. The weird thing is how Flair sometimes goes through a period where he'll actually hit that double axehandle at least 50% of the time. I noticed it especially in his last big babyface run in the WWE, he was hitting it all the time. Oh God, no! Look, wrestling's narrative tools are limited. Very, very limited. Maybe more limited than any other medium of fiction in existence. It does not have the weight necessary to embrace high artistic concepts. And even if it could, does anyone actually want to see that? Do you even really want to see that? Wrestling's a very inarticulate manner of expression. It's one of those "a picture is worth a thousand words" sort of deals. It's often hard to coherently describe the emotions that a great match incites in us, because the two aren't very comparable. Wrestling appeals to a primitive and animalistic part of the brain, which is partly why the crowds at these events often look like a horde of testosterone-fueled drunken cavemen. You really do have to at least partially relax your intellectual standards and kinda just turn off your brain in order to completely enjoy it.

It heavily depends on your definition of "great". Take some of the WWE's best train-wreck multi-man ladder matches, for example. Some of their TLC and MITB matches were among the most entertaining spectacles I've ever seen in a ring, but I wouldn't argue that they had anything resembling a deep story. It was mostly "one guy climbs up, another guy stops him, WHAM CRASH KABOOM" ad infinitum. But I still love 'em with all my heart.

The white title font and yellow background color are too similar, the article titles are kinda hard to read. And there's a typo where Saddam misspells "palace". But otherwise: damn fine stuff, gentlemen The headline about the 70s wrestler got a legit LOL outta me.

I think you're overly conflating the concepts of "logical" and "predictable". Just because a story makes sense doesn't necessarily mean that we know what's going to happen next. The events in Pulp Fiction are logical, and despite its non-chronological structure it still does very much have a plot that moves from A to B to C in a nearly Aristotelian manner. But a first-time viewer still has little idea of exactly where the story is going for its next beat. Because it happens so god damn little? Yeah. Basic narrative competence is rare in an artistic medium which is so debased as wrestling. (Same thing with horror movies; I love the horror genre, but at least 90% of "scary movies" tend to be pure crap and it makes me treasure those rare entries which are actually good.) I did a double take when I read this. Shakespeare's writing wasn't "logical"? Since when? I can't even begin to see this one. Actually, I'm with Jerry on that one. When you step back and look at Shakespeare's stories, they often make no fucking sense at all. Massive plot holes and goofy contrivances are everywhere in his plays. But his dialogue and characterizations are so goddamned brilliant that we don't notice that The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark has plenty of incredibly illogical points. I wasn't particularly wowed by La Grande Illusion myself. For an anti-war movie, it sure tried to avoid ever showing many actual consequences of the horrors of war. And Europe's social structure was already moving away from the aristocratic model which the film was criticizing.

This match is the one I always use to introduce people to Kawada who haven't seen him. It's such a glorious shitkicking, as he finds a hundred different ways to make Jun wish he was never born. Even has a submission finish, which is something you didn't see too often in this company at the time. Yet you guys are right, it's not entirely one-sided, Akiyama gets juuuuust enough offense to make it seem competitive and not like the world's longest, most brutal squash. Kinda like the mid-90s AJPW equivalent to the Samoa Joe/Necro Butcher match.

Wasn't he still doing the El Matador gimmick at the time? He was in the dark match at Summerslam, jobbing to Papa Shango. No fuckin' way he was getting anywhere near the title around that time. Something weird I was reminded of: Tito was also Eastern Championship Wrestling heavyweight champion at this time, while still working for the WWF. Was it common for them to let their guys work a whole bunch of indy shows like that?

I smell the bullshit... "An idea was pitched" is pretty vague; phrased like that, it could've been Borne pitching it.

Savage in the Attitude era would've been pretty neat. He was really the only guy in WCW's crew of aging has-beens on top who could still get out there and seriously bust his ass when it was necessary. Remember his psychotic leap off the gigantic cage at Halloween Havoc 97? In WCW that was a throwaway moment, retardedly forgotten by the next evening's Nitro; in the WWF, they would've made that jump legendary with endless highlight video clips. And him as a pissed-off psyched-up profanity-spewing heel would've been a hell of a feud to have with Stone Cold. He probably also could've done interesting stuff with Bret, Shawn, Taker, Mankind, etcetera. Absolutely, but it's still not really close to the ECW style. Hansen's matches were a different kind of brawling than whacking people with stop signs or walking through the crowd for half the match or a hundred nutshots or a thousand DDTs like you tended to get in Philly. In an AJPW match, powerbombing someone on the floor is a huge deal, the central bump of the match and something which would be referenced and teased in every one of their rematches; in ECW, something like that tends to be just another spot, and the crowd quickly gets impatient and wants them to get up and do something else. That's probably how I would've booked it, if circumstances allowed. Considering the extremely chaotic nature of interpromotional cooperation, especially in ECW, I kinda doubt that circumstances would've allowed. Can't disagree with any of that. The fans never bought Justin, no matter how many guys laid down for him. Hell, the company's top babyface Dreamer was defined by his feud in which he never won a match. But I think you're especially right about the context. Like I said before, All Japan's best matches often tend to have long feeling-out segments in the opening, where references would be made to previous matches. The Philly fans wouldn't get any of that stuff, and I could easily see them chanting a bunch of bullshit which could throw the workers off their game.

Yeah, probably. But even with the Michinoku deal, they still had Sasuke job to Credible and (theoretically) got something out of it for the home team. Also, how much would such a thing cost? I doubt that All Japan would have been willing to degrade themselves with the same the-check's-in-the-mail bullshit that MPro was forced to accept. Also, how would the impatient ECW crowd react to the standard AJPW slow burn in starting most of their matches? I suppose they could try to vary their style a little and hit the ring hot, but there aren't many groups of wrestlers in the world who tended to work a narrower and less variable style than Baba's boys. Too bad they couldn't have had access to New Japan instead. Plenty of their workers would've fit in perfectly in ECW, both the flying juniors and brawling heavyweights. A guy like Muta makes a lot more sense in ECW than a guy like Kobashi.

I'm trying to imagine how that would've looked, and failing. How the hell would you try to marry King's Road style with ECW's bloody brawling? Okay, we've seen a few things like that where Cactus worked most of those guys at various times, and plenty of ECW dudes did at least one or two tours in AJPW at some point. But I'm trying to imagine throwing Kobashi in the ring with Sandman or New Jack or Raven or the other garbage guys and wondering exactly what's supposed to happen.

Now you've got me imagining what a Taue vs Diesel match would've looked like circa '95. Or Taue vs Undertaker, Taue vs Bret, Taue vs Shawn... geez, the mind reels!

That seemed like it started with Bret. He was the first champion since Backlund who used his real full name as his ring name, and they frequently did storylines which involved his real family. His entire gimmick seemed like it was "here's a serious dude without a gimmick". D'oh, that's right. Sorry, for some reason I thought Flair had already won it back. Perhaps, but that would've been one strange card, with champ Flair in a meaningless tag match. What else would Bret have been doing on the show, if he hadn't become champion? They certainly altered the card to put Flair/Razor vs Savage/Perfect way down in the midcard and put Bret/Shawn on top anyway. And just looking at that card, ew, practically none of the other matches look good on paper nor likely to draw a dime.

I'd argue my question fits into a larger discussion in that vein. From the Hulkamania era onwards, Vince always made sure to do title changes at the biggest shows possible. Usually at Wrestlemania, once on a super-hyped Main Event, and then one time at the Rumble (but even then, that one seemed like a last-minute decision to transition from Warrior to Slaughter). The title usually changed no more than once per year, or twice at the very most. Switches were BIG deals. We hit late 1991, and then suddenly most of that goes out the window. The belt changed hands at both Survivor Series and Tuesday in Texas, and then was vacated for some damn reason. (Why? Did Hogan refuse to drop it to Flair under any circumstances?) I understand that they decided to push Undertaker as a new serious top guy, but it's a strange decision which is out of character for the company. Then Flair gets it at the Rumble, okay, I guess that made sense for the buildup to him losing it at Mania. But then, Flair wins it back from Savage... at a house show. Huh? And then Flair doesn't wrestle at all at Summerslam, eventually dropping the belt to Bret (whom I don't think he was really feuding with) at another house show. Double huh? None of that makes any sense to me, even today. It's so dissimilar to their entire philosophy and style of storytelling which Vince Jr had employed ever since he took over the company. Why such a drastic paradigm shift? EDIT: especially since they immediately stopped doing it that way once Bret had the belt, once again saving all the title changes for great big shows until Diesel pinned Backlund for it.

Yeah, why was that one done so hastily? IIRC, Bret didn't even know he was winning the belt until he got to the arena that day. Why not do the switch at a PPV instead? Okay, it was in Canada so the crowd popped even louder for Hart winning, but still. Look at the two PPVs surrounding it: Summerslam didn't have a world title match at all, with the champ relegated to doing a run-in during the semi-main. And Survivor Series had Bret vs Shawn, which must've looked awfully weird to everyone who was used to the giants and household names fighting for the belt and then suddenly there's these two middleweight midcarders contesting the heavyweight strap.