Jingus

No, that's not what I meant at all, sorry if it was unclear. I meant that EL-P et al weren't naming many specific examples of exactly why they hate the style, it was mostly just a general "I just don't like it" albeit expressed in many more words. Kinda like how it's difficult for people to describe exactly why they prefer the taste of some foods versus the others. I'm sure there are some people who would love a sandwich like I described; I don't understand them, but I can't come up with well-articulated reasons why they're wrong.

Please ... just shut up. You are making things up completely out of thin air and you're well aware of that. What? Where did that come from? I was being serious, not making anything up at all.

I don't say this too often, but I mostly agree with Dylan here. The anti-WWE guys have been awfully vague about what their specific problems with the current product is. Heck, in one of my recent posts defending said style, I laid out more articulated criticisms of the problems with WWE Style than most of its detractors had. I think I understand why they don't like it, but they're not stating their positions very well. They sound kinda like me trying to describe how biting into a sandwich that contains pickles, mustard, onions, and tomatoes would likely end with me projectile vomiting onto whomever just gave me such a vile atrocity: I understand their passion, but they're not saying much more than "it tastes yucky". How does that one count? Especially considering that from the second bump onward, Foley was basically out on his feet and the rest of the match was hastily improvised. Yeah, that unbelievable first cage bump was Foley's self-conscious attempt to top everything that Shawn had done in the first Cell match, but the rest is one of the more painful "the show must go on" experiences with Taker leading a dazed Mankind by the hand.

This is the first time that I've realized that 6/9/95 didn't get the Match Of The Year award. What the hell? Yeah, Toyota/Inoue was great and everything, but... 6/9/95!!!

My point is, every positive thing that you can point to as a reason to vote for Big Daddy is something that shores up Ventura's case as well. (Aside from promoting, anyway, and then you run into Gorilla Monsoon comparisons.) Jesse The Body is so ridiculously famous and so influential in his role as a color commentator, I don't understand how he's not a slam dunk when voting for him in a non-wrestling category. Practically every heel announcer owes a lot of their shtick to Ventura, who got very well known in that role before Bobby Heenan did.

I thought "not very good", while certainly polite, is certainly not the same thing as "fucking sucks". A negative-star match fucking sucks; a 1.5-snowflake affair is not very good. Yes, but not to the point of the directing getting totally crazy. That came with the 00's. They've been gradually getting more and more impatient with the camera switches over time. It happened occasionally back in the 80s, first became somewhat common during Attitude, and then over the past half-dozen years got turned up to ludicrous speed. TNA is even worse about it, changing camera angles even faster than Kevin Dunn could keep up with.

I know this is restarting ancient arguments, but I never got a good answer last time: what would be the rationale for voting for a guy like Big Daddy, but not Jesse Ventura? The knock on the latter seems to always be that the voter didn't think Jesse was very good at his job, but it's hard to look at any Big Daddy match ever and find it even remotely tolerable. Certainly the Body had a much larger fanbase, is much more famous worldwide, and had an exponentially larger historical impact on the wrestling business as a whole.

Quick interruption: did this much-discussed Bossman match feature Kobashi hitting approximately nine billion legdrops? I just saw a Bossman/Kobashi match for the first time a couple months back, and don't know if it's the one in question. If so, "not great, not even very good by KOBASHI 93 standards, but certainly watchable and worth about two stars" feels like an accurate summary.

Cena's match with Jack Swagger a couple weeks back was a nice summary of some of his clumsy tendencies. He stiffs the shit out of Swagger right in the throat with a clothesline, follows it up with an awkward airball of dropkick that Jerry Lawler would be embarrassed to claim as his own, and then hits some strikes which showed miles of daylight.

Anyone else seen Taue/Dreamer from 95? Woof. Five minutes of Tommy Dreamer squashing Akira Taue, followed by a nodowa and a pin. It's hard to say which guy was more at fault, they were nowhere even near being on the same page. Tommy was desperately trying to do nothing ECW-ish and keep it all sportsmanlike in the middle of the ring and everything, but the words "styles clash" don't even begin to describe it.

I suppose Dave feels PR is important enough to be separated from America or Mexico as being its own thing, but not nearly important enough to have a category of its own. So it gets thrown into the catch-all Miscellaneous group.

Regarding WWE style: there are some parts of it which do bug me quite a bit, like the constant rope-running which is a cheap substitute for real action. Or how half the moves they ever do tend to end in some variation of "I slam the guy onto his back". Or how a lot of the punches look pretty goddamn lame nowadays. Or the intellectually lazy "you can't beat a guy until you form Blazing Sword hit your finisher, and only the main eventers have more than one finisher" psychology. And yeah, the 619 comes off as incredibly contrived at least half the time. But I think it's still a decent style, on top of all that. It's certainly one which goes out of its way to protect the health of the wrestlers, and it's practically the only major company which seems remotely concerned about such things. And the sheer quantity of wrestling we get is nice too. Turn on Smackdown, and you're likely to get more minutes of in-ring action than you'd get from any other national wrestling show since... shit, since what? You have to go all the way back to Saturday Night's Main Event or old Bill Watts shows to see this many long matches shown on free television. Yeah, the business-first types may grumble about how giving the product away like this has ruined da biz or somesuch shit, but for the fans it's a pretty awesome time to be watching. I'd agree with that. Going back and watching some old Rey lucha matches with my little informal rasslin' club, we weren't terribly impressed with most of it. (Admittedly, I've never been a huge lucha fan in the first place, but I've seen enough good matches from south of the border and it's not like I just say "oh it's lucha, then it must suck" or anything like that.) There were tons of blown spots and a lot of general sloppiness. Yeah, a lot of that came from the sheer complexity and difficulty of what they were trying; but still, a buncha botches is a buncha botches. They seemed like dress rehearsals for the cruiserweight matches in WCW, where they did a lot of the same neat stuff but tended to hit their moves cleaner and the matches were tighter and less plodding.

Sometimes I wonder if Stan's infamous stiffness isn't exaggerated by some guys for the eternal "rasslers are tough" bragging. I remember the Road Warriors once mentioning that Hansen was one of the guys who first taught them how to lighten up a bit and actually work a match. His clothesline might've been the hardest in the business, but I wonder if he was more subtle than we give him credit for on working some of his other moves.

John: I dunno about where you live, but here it's spelled fridge. That's been bugging the hell out of me. Where did you learn that it's spelled "frig"? Also, I don't think it's fair to lay all the blame for the WWE's creative problems on the much-insulted Hollywood writers. By all accounts, the management's process for coming up with these ideas is broken beyond repair. Don't they require every writer to come up with their own separate script for Raw every week, and then Vince pieces the show together from different parts of each? That, and Vince's current ADHD when it comes to changing his mind, pretty much conspire to fuck up every possible long-term angle before any of the writers put the first word on paper. It doesn't matter if they're talented or not, Shakespeare couldn't consistently turn in great work under these circumstances.

The problem with Vince just stripping Punk of the title is that there have been plenty of "Vince hates this champion and doesn't want them to hold the belt" angles in the past. In those, he wasn't able to just say "gimme that belt!" and make it happen. He always had to set up some special stipulations or had a wacky plan to fuck them out of the title. Punk still has the proverbial 30 days to defend his title, so McMahon theoretically has no authority to announce a tournament for a new championship that quickly. And even the excuse that Punk doesn't work here anymore would be a continuity error, considering the number of times we've seen angles revolving around someone who allegedly isn't an official employee. What do they call him, and why?

Hey, who first invented the term "five moves of doom"? I know that SKeith was the one to popularize it the widest, but I shudder to think that a line he created was actually spoken on Raw, especially in freakin' 2011.

Hell, how much of that was a work? A lot of the bragging and ass-kissing resembled the stories we've heard about how John is really like in the office.

But like we've both said, Chikara has traditionally been pretty allergic to breaking kayfabe, for whichever reasons. Doing a worked injury angle has always been the standard wrestling go-to method of explaining away a performer's absence due to more serious medical issues, and I don't see the problem with that. Protected or unprotected? I'm fine with the former, as long as the stunt is executed correctly in a relatively safe manner.

The WWWF controlled more than even just the BosWash. They also had all the cities in upstate New York, Philadelphia, and even New England all the way up into Maine. That is technically a territory, but it's a freakin' gigantic one. Didn't they also run a few shows over the border in Canada occasionally?

Do we have any idea what the cause is? Illness, drugs, or mental problems? Like the others said, she's always been skinny but she looks just horrifying in those recent pics. Like a Lindsay Lohan-style sudden drop in physical appearance. She also appears to be tanned darker than Hogan now. Yeah, I noticed that in the times I've seen her in person. She's one of those unfortunate celebrities who looks uglier through a lens, which isn't exactly a great thing for a career that is largely performed in front of cameras. What exactly did they say? And what could they have said differently? Chikara isn't one of those promotions which does a shit-ton of shoot interviews, they generally try to kayfabe everything and keep the backstage dirt to a minimum.

It's a used video store. They probably have big fat sweaty guys pawing through the racks every week in an endless search for hentai porn and serial killer documentaries. Trust me, the Benoit DVD is probably not even the weirdest thing that cashier sold that day.

It was basically just token jobber offense. At no point was Kidman ever portrayed as even remotely being a threat to Hogan in any way. He lost all their matches, lost almost all of the impromptu brawls, Hogan's promos treated him like a complete joke, and Kidman was generally made to look like a total loser who should've never even dreamed of taking on a half-crippled geriatric. It was similar to how Triple H treated a lot of guys like Jericho or Booker, making himself a boring invincible hero who easily slaughtered his opponents at every turn. Considering that pushing Hogan had done nothing but lost WCW money for the past two years, it was clearly time for a change, but he still insisted on being treated like the biggest draw in the industry.

Firstly, I've never once heard it called a "thunder driver". Secondly, he's completely wrong about the "reverse driver". When describing a wrestling move, "reverse" refers to the movement, not the body positioning. Like, a Flatliner is basically a reverse STO, and the Stroke is a reverse Russian legsweep. What he thinks he means is would really be called an "inverted piledriver", because "inverted" refers to which way the person taking the move is facing. In this case, the Flatliner is an inverted Russian legsweep, and the Stroke is an inverted STO. Or for better proof, think of the most common call involving these words, the Inverted Atomic Drop. That one merely involves doing the same move, but turning the guy around to face the other way. So yeah, this worker is an ignorant egotist.

Yeah. He gets booed out of the building at Wrestlemania every single year, period. Why bother stopping now, when they're building up what's potentially the single biggest drawing match they've had in forever?

Kinda surprised that Dean Malenko is only 51. Guess he's one of those Arn Anderson types who looked like they were 50 even when they were 30. As for the "powerful voice inside the company" trying to squash the Rock/Cena match: probably HHH, right? He's been said to be very dismissive of Rock in general, and it's worth noting that they never had another match together after their feud in 2000 ended (which just about coincides with Hunter's rise to power). Weird that the story would be so vague about this person's identity, since it doesn't seem like it's a secret within the office, hardly something you could blow a source's cover with.