Jingus

Regarding snowflake ratings: I understand why many people hate them, since far too many readers tend to just look at the star ratings and then basically skip the entire review. But they're still a helpful tool to summarize approximately how much you liked a match. Although, I've never quite understood people who break it all the way down to quarter-stars. That seems like you're splitting hairs into nearly microscopic sections. I write movie reviews, and I just use a simple 1-10 numerical system for rating them. Of course sometimes there problems like "I like this movie more than this film I gave a 7 but less than this other film I gave an 8" and so on, but I still think a nice round whole number is less confusing than breaking things down into fractions.

Meltzer's always got the results up as they happen, in a nice efficient and concise format. But I understand your larger point, and find it about equally sad and funny. But as for Beer Money, don't hold your breath, because Robert Roode is apparently working some kind of injury angle and Storm is teaming with Alex Shelley because something something mumble mumble SWERVES HAVE IMPACT. (In fact, why the hell is Roode apparently faking an injury, anyway?)

Yeah, I'd say so. Looking back, he's had a much more varied career than you'd expect from a modern indy guy who's never really worked much outside of America. His IWA Midsouth, ROH, and WWE work has seen him doing a whole lot of diffent stuff in different styles with different opponents. Not many guys can claim to have gotten watchable matches out of Raven in the past decade, or to have gone well past an hour in a marathon match, or to have somehow kept their indy name and gimmick in the WWE, or all the other unlikely accomplishments that he's somehow stacked up over the last several years. Also, he's one of the few relatively safe bets they have in terms of drug scandals. I've always been slightly suspicious of just how firm his straightedge convictions are, but he is at the very least much less likely to get busted with a ton of shit on him. Depends. How important are the Hardys to TNA? I'd think Punk at this point is a more valuable name than Matt is, and it's still a question if Jeff is coming back. And as for Punk's feelings on the matter, that depends on plenty of variables as well. How busy a schedule he wants, how much money he wants, etcetera. Lots of aging big names go with TNA just because it's the only other company which can guarantee them a contract, with the bonus of working much less than in the WWE.

It's just how they were at the time. It was a "respect" deal. As long as the person entertained them in any way, whether through their workrate or gimmick or even just their earned reputation, the crowd was generally positive towards them. The only time I've seen Japanese crowds booing people in the 80s was when they're shitting on bad wrestling. For example, there was a Nasty Boys vs Tsuruta/Hansen match where the Nasties were doing a bunch of Southern cheating-and-bullying heel schtick while their wrestling itself was sub-par, and the crowd absolutely crapped all over them. Or check out any of Tom Magee's infamous matches, along the same lines.

Yeah. Our society is downright cannibalistic when it comes to the amount of shit we demand out of our celebrities. I still find it amazing that hordes of paparazzi stalking their victims right onto their own private property is actually legal. Fuck the public's right to know, famous people deserve privacy too.

I seriously want this guy to explain himself, his actions, and his motivations. In great detail. Either fuck off and leave us alone, or tell us why Diego thinks it's necessary to shill himself on a fairly small and insular board such as this one. We ain't exactly a DVDVR-sized membership here, absolutely nobody on this board is going to attend one of these shows even if these videos impressed us, which clearly they are not. So what's the point of making these posts?

Also, it depends on what he was at the dentist for. If it was a routine checkup, then yeah, you don't need Novocaine for that. But if it was something like a root canal, or getting crowns replaced, or any other procedure which requires them to whip out the drill... well, can you blame them? That's practically a surgical procedure, and even the straightest-edge motherfucker in the world couldn't (or at least shouldn't) refuse a local anesthetic when you're having your body carved on like that. For safety's sake, if nothing else, so you're not jerking around in agony while someone has a sharp object poking your soft places.

This reminds me of the first Danielson vs Low-Ki match I ever saw, from the finals of the ECWA Super 8 tournament from 2000. Yes, I know what a revelation these guys were to indy fans at the time, I've heard all about how loose and shitty most of the Northeastern indy feds tended to be. But watching it on tape a couple years later, my very first thought was: "...why are these guys trying to cosplay Misawa/Kawada spots?" Because that's exactly what it felt like to me, two marks just copying what they'd seen on tape. Obviously they both got better, especially Danielson, but it can remain a problem. As much as I want to like the work of guys like Davey Richards or the Briscoes, that entire "I'm doing everything I watched my idols do!" copycat syndrome is a big problem, especially when they spend more focus and effort on moves and spots and less on selling them or having it all make sense.

Yeah, I know it's more complicated than that, I wasn't writing a whole essay on the subject. As for the inevitable Mark Henry mention, I've never liked him much in the ring. He'll occasionally have a decent match against Rey or someone like that, but for the most part I've always found him to be plodding and dull, especially when he's a heel. (Sometimes it seemed like he has just two facial expressions, Big Toothy Grin and Glowering Scowl, and I preferred the grin.) But there was that period a few years back where on some boards you weren't allowed to say a bad word about the dude without being inundated in replies of "he plays his role, ergo you're wrong not to like him". Nevermind that I genuinely found little to no entertainment in watching this man's matches, somehow I was judged as being objectively wrong for holding that subjective opinion. The only time I marked out for Mark was when he did that gimmick where he controlled the crowd by raising and lowering his arms, getting shockingly over and having the whole audience play along, so naturally the office quickly made him stop doing it.

One thing which I occasionally disagree with is the idea that if guys play their role properly, then it's automatically a good match. The fact is that not every viewer will enjoy every role equally. I for one am not a fan of The Big Monster Who Doesn't Sell Much And Squashes Smaller guys. I don't care how well Great Khali fits that role, it's a story I don't want to be told in the first place. "But he's great at being a big monster!" Don't care. Don't like big monsters. Unless you're as good at doing that shit as Andre was, I simply do not want to watch that sort of match. There are exceptions of course, individual occasions where I'm surprised at how much I enjoyed a Big Slow Under-Selling Monster match, but they're pretty rare. Similar deal with Little Indy Guy Who Constantly Kicks Out Of EVERYTHING Because Of His Fighting Spirit~! I sigh when I see that shit, no matter how well the individual performer milks it. You gotta be on the level of a Kobashi to make that kind of thing entertaining for me, and most of the constant 2.999999999-garnering wannabes don't have anywhere near the charisma or fire or psychological depth to make that work in my opinion. But I've seen some claim that I should enjoy it, because the role is performed properly or somesuch shit. Clearly, Diego Corleone never heard this enough back in training class. That's as perfect an example as you could ask for as a guy whose in-ring style doesn't even remotely fit his intended persona and gimmick.

That's not a good example, because we're not talking about house shows here. That would be more like if Jon Stewart kept hitting the exact same punchlines on every single episode of The Daily Show. (Some of his detractors might claim that he does precisely that, but you get my point.) I know that some media is considered comfort food; you can be pretty sure that David Caruso is gonna use his wacky hi-tech CSI techniques to inevitably catch the bad guys at the end of the episode. But wrestling's soap-opera style of ongoing storylines make it a different medium entirely. It would be more like as if Spider-man beat the Green Goblin in the exact same manner in every single fight they ever had. Comic fans would naturally rebel if such a thing happened, and they'd be right to do so. Wrestling has traditionally been such a debased, uncreative, intellectually undemanding form of storytelling that we've become numb to just how goddamn stupid and lazy it is much of the time.

The problem is, it takes a really first-class worker to be able to make the Big Dive Catch spots look plausible. Unless they're doing the "one guy holds a couple of opponents in place so his partner can dive on them all" setup, there's no reliable way to have everyone standing together in a tightly-packed bunch as someone else Just So Happens to hit a plancha. You can have them brawling or clawing at each other or something, but it takes good peripheral vision and stellar timing for two guys to stop punching one another, turn around, and catch a guy all in a split-second. It's one of those spots whose popularity is unfortunate, because it's really damn hard to get it right at all. No, it goes back even further than that. Consider Hogan, for example. In the earlier years of Hulkamania, sometimes he'd get the pin from a rollup or a weapon shot or whatever. But after a certain point, it seemed like he basically demanded to do the exact same Hulk Up, Three Punches, Irish Whip, Big Boot, Legdrop, 1-2-3 sequence in every single match. That kind of thing kills my suspension of disbelief, when I know exactly how a match is gonna end even before I watch the damn thing. (Stone Cold sometimes had the same problem; although I'm a certified Austin mark, it got damn tiring how he could never win a match with any move besides a Stunner.) Oddly, the WWE is much better about that sort of thing nowadays than it used to be. Most of the guys tend to have multiple finishers, and they do a lot more early teases of going for their finishers in the build-up portions of the match.

It seemed like the Warriors actually started having more competitive matches once they joined the WWF. Which goes entirely against the "heel-in-peril" stereotype of that company, but it felt like they spent more time selling and less time killing people than they had in the NWA. Along similar lines, I don't fit cleanly into a "doesn't rate Demolition" group. I was talking entirely about their look, and no other aspect of their work. In-ring and on promos, I thought they were (as previously mentioned) perfectly competent.

This. If I really wanted to sit down and think hard about it, there's probably dozens of different factors and variables in why I enjoy one match more than another. Technique and execution is one big part; I can forgive the occasional Baba whose moves look so bad that they're insulting to the audience's intelligence, but overall I'd prefer it to look at least halfway credible that these guys are supposed to be hurting each other. Yet paradoxically, safety is another issue; I've been on too many visits to too many wrestlers in too many hospitals to agree with some smarks that good wrestling is inherently dangerous, revolving around stiffness or big bumps or risky highspots or whatever. I prefer a balance between the two; it looks like it probably hurts, but it probably doesn't really hurt (too much). Logic is a big part. I just want this shit to at least try to make sense. Yeah, the old Hulk-Up might pop the crowd huge, but I never understood how exactly it's supposed to work or why the opponents would go along with it. When he's shaking and stomping around the ring, why doesn't anyone just kick Hogan in the balls, or hit his finisher again and see if it works this time? (Which is one reason why I think the matches where Hulk actually jobs tend to be much better than his usual cookie-cutter affairs.) Along similar lines, one thing I tend to dislike about the American style is their treatment of finishers. "I hit my One Big Move and I win." That's, like, the most boring story ever. And why don't they try to keep hitting their big move over and over again, right from the start? Why doesn't Voltron just form his goddamn Blazing Sword and cut the Ro-beast in half at the beginning of the battle? I know the real answer is "because then there wouldn't be any fight", but there are ways to get around that. The Japanese being the best example, where you never really know exactly which move is going to get the pin. Of course, that can lead to finisher overkill with way too many 2.99999999 counts, but looking at stuff like 90s AJPW it's totally possible to walk the tightrope and avoid both extremes. Predictability can be a killer when it's done too much. Yeah, I know that having the "heels cut off the ring, face in peril, then hot tag" formula is tried and true. But when it's done every time in the same manner, that shit gets old. Shake it up every once in a while, just to prove that we don't always know what's gonna happen. But on the flipside, you can't be doing swerves just for the sake of swerves. That way madness lies, as any sane wrestling fan could tell Vince Russo. Good commentary is good; but, ironically considering my experience, I don't think the commentary necessarily plays a make-or-break part of the match. A great match is gonna remain great, no matter if Jim Ross or Mongo McMichael is on the microphone. Truly great commentary is such a rare commodity that I don't expect it and don't think anyone else should either. As long as it's "not so bad that it's distracting from the match", that's fine with me. And above all, don't make it too complicated unless you really know what you're doing. The old rule of Keep It Simple, Stupid is one which should be drilled into every rookie's head. How many times have you sighed at some bullshit indy match where untalented guys were trying dumb highspots which were clearly beyond their ability? If you can't do something competently, don't do it at all. A mundane spot performed correctly is always preferable to a wild highspot which is 90% botched.

There's probably more matches on Dailymotion and other streaming sites, I just didn't feel like checking all of 'em. If anyone else wants to search those, your efforts would be welcomed.

vs Spike and Mikey, ECWvs Rock & Roll Express, USWA vs Road Warriors, WWF vs Jerry Lawler & Brian Christopher, USWA vs Shawn Venom and Bobby Bolton, USWA vs the Dudley Boyz, ECW

Why? Firstly, that's a lot of name-calling for no good reason. Secondly, you're basically saying that we're not allowed to have our own personal tastes and preferences here. Like I said before, I just personally found that Demolition didn't look nearly as intimidating as those other guys you mentioned. Part of it was their body shape, part of it was the wacky bondage-style leather gear, part of it was the KISS ripoff makeup. But just because those guys are all dressed kinda-sorta similarly doesn't mean that they're identical clones. You're acting like they were all exactly the same, when that's not the case.

I know what he said, I've got the Vader shoot. I just disagree with him. People blame themselves all the time for things which really aren't their fault. And no, looking at it again, I'm still not sure Vader could see Shawn clearly on the top rope. He's craning his head all the way to the right, trying to see what's going on; and his mask probably restricts his peripheral vision to an extent. Once Shawn is in the air, you can see Vader kind of start to move once he finally realizes where Shawn is at. He just didn't do it fast enough to get out of the way. I don't blame him for briefly freezing up, under the circumstances, when Michaels is doing something weird that he shouldn't have been trying in the first place.

EL-P's entire argument basically seems to come down to "I thought Demolition's look was too goofy to be taken seriously as legitimate threats", which I kinda agree with. Yes, the kiddie-friendly cartoonish style of the day led to lots of top guys being dressed in a clownish fashion, but that doesn't mean we should all be forced to like it.

Which was a stupid mistake. That's the kind of thing you'd expect to see out of a sloppy backyarder, not Shawn Fricking Michaels. When you're going for any kind of dive, you always glance first to make sure the other guy is in position. It has to do with the physics of the move. To land an elbow drop safely, the guy on the mat has to have his body perpendicular to the guy doing the move. Thus the dropper takes most of the impact on his side, and you land your arm flatly and safely across the other guy's chest. You never try that move against a guy whose body is pointing towards yours like an arrow, as Vader's was here. Either you won't make good contact, or you end up burying the side of your ribcage into their face. It doesn't really matter that the move was supposed to miss, you're still not supposed to do it like Shawn did here. He was far behind Vader, who couldn't see what Shawn was doing. Unless he actually turned around, he couldn't see when Shawn was jumping or when he would land. Vader's only crime here was getting confused and lying there thinking "...where the fuck is he going?" The way his body was positioned, he didn't know where or when Shawn was going to land and thus had no idea which way he should've rolled or at what time. So he froze up and trusted that Shawn knew what the hell he was doing, which clearly wasn't the case.

It depends greatly on who their opponents were. They did a lot of damn fine stuff with the Glamour Girls, which holds up fine now. But few if any of the other women in the WWF at the time had any idea of how to work with that style, so Moolah and all her old drinking buddies were completely lost in there with the Angels. I don't know if they tagged together quite enough to be considered a regular team, but I'd argue that the Aja/Bull tandem would deserve consideration as well. Kinda like Kobashi/Misawa in how they were mostly singles stars, but you'd think that the sheer quality of both women's work would result in something special. I've got a long-ass match they had against Hokuto and Kandori sitting here that I've been meaning to watch for a while now and just not gotten around to.

Yeah, I know, but it still looks fishy. See for yourself. The whole spot starts around 4 minutes in. Vader takes the bump at 4:10, and around 4:15 you can see him shifting his body around a little bit on the mat. The way he's positioned, he's clearly set up for the elbow drop from the bottom-right turnbuckle. But Shawn, inexplicably, goes and climbs the top-right turnbuckle. That's a pure fuckup on Shawn's part, because Vader isn't positioned anywhere near where he would need to be in order to make the move work when Shawn's jumping from that corner. Shawn is much too polished a ring general to make a rookie mistake like that, and that's why I think it just might've been deliberate. Vader doesn't know what's going on, and Shawn doesn't even really give him enough time to dodge before landing on his feet and stomping him in the face. (Also, why land on his feet at all? Just squash him with the fuckin' elbow, if you're intent on stiffing him here. Landing on his feet just broadcasts "Hey everybody, we fucked up!" to anyone remotely smart.) It's all the more apparent because they repeat the spot later (at about 3:45), with Vader landing in the exact same position as before, only this time Shawn climbs the correct corner and hits the move successfully.

That's more of a Japanese corporate culture deal. Whenever one of their companies makes a huge fuckup, the president or CEO often resigns in shame. Even if they had nothing to do with the problem, the idea is that the leader should always be held accountable for any shit that goes down on their watch. See the president of the company that owned the nuclear power plants for a recent example.

Where would you guys rank Undertaker? I know his mid-90s period sucked hard, largely due to all the crappy feuds he was given, and also because the earlier Michael Myers version of the slow no-selling zombie didn't exactly lend itself to workrate classics. But not many guys have the sheer number of fine matches under their belt in that company that he's had, against a wide variety of opponents in different eras. Especially considering he took such a goofy gimmick and made it work so well for such a ridiculously long time.

Maybe, but it still looked awfully weird. Vader was down on the mat and clearly not in the right position for the move, but Shawn climbs up anyway. Like I said, what was Vader supposed to do there? Wake up, roll over, and then fall back unconscious again? Especially when the fix is so obvious, all Shawn had to do was pick him up and then knock him back down in the right place.