Jingus

Probably just conspiracy theorizing, but how often does Randy Savage show up in the Shorties section? I know he's on all the old complete shows that they air, but how often do they specifically cherry-pick something which features the Macho Man and put it on 24/7?

The cynic in me can't help but think much filthier things, such as "is her kid a trick baby?".

Most of the matches are obvious gimmes, except for these three. The 91 match was already on Bret's set. I would've put their match from KOTR 93 on here instead, I always liked that one better anyway. The HBK match is one that is almost universally remembered as being disappointing, partly because of Hennig's back problems, so its inclusion here is strange. Especially since on some Colisseum video they had a much better encounter when Perfect was a heel and Shawn was a Rocker. And the WCW match... well, I guess they had to throw one on there somewhere, and all those Hennig/Windham vs. Benoit/Malenko matches were obviously right out. Still, they could've included at least one of his matches with Flair on here instead, considering Bret's already on here.

What did you think of WWF in the year 2000? They were enjoying heretofore unheard-of financial success, WCW was a joke which couldn't do anything right, but still the whole year is largely regarded as an artistic success as well. Oh, they will find ways to explain it. One of the more hilariously pathetic leftovers from last night were all the posts made in between Punk's title win and the main event. About a thousand smart marks were all paranoid and terrified that Big Mean Bully Bradshaw was gonna stiff their hero and walk off with the belt. Well, truthfully the WWE does have a pretty lousy trackrate with following through on the smaller workrate types after they win the championship belts. Bret Hart was the first and foremost example, and it was always made clear in the early years of his title reign that he wasn't the important part of the promotion, it was all about Hogan or Undertaker or Luger or Yokozuna or Diesel or whomever. Since then, they kept doing this, and in some cases got worse. While Benoit was champion, the only way he got into main events is if they were rematches with Triple H, and he didn't keep the belt long. Similar situation with Eddie. They didn't seem to have much confidence with Rob Van Dam even before the arrest. And Rey Misterio somehow became the recipient of the worst, most damaging booking of his entire WWE career only while he held that title belt. Most importantly, note that after they lost the belts, none of these guys ever returned to legit main event status again. So if the Punk marks are worried that this whole thing might not work out too well for their hero in the end, I'd say that history and precedent do back up that belief. Of course, since I'm not particularly fond of Punk myself, I'll just be laughing the whole time.

The WWE has intentionally built it up that way. The WWE world championships (not counting ECW) have changed hands on free television only six times in the past five years. And more than half of those were unplanned changes which the company was forced into (two battle royales for the belt for when Batista and Edge each got injured, another MITB win when Taker got hurt, and the title switch after RVD's arrest). Tonight's title change was the first one on free television since the Angle/Lesnar iron man match which wasn't dictated by circumstance.

I'd have to go back through my tapes to remember them all, but Backlund/Takada from '88 was a fun little match, should've been a styles clash but somehow came together quite well. He also had a couple of damn fine matches against Hansen in the WWWF, aside from the one cage match that everyone's seen, but they're all on some random comp I bought off Ebay which is in nothing resembling chronological order, so I got no dates for them.

Crap, I think I've been wrong about every single thing I've said in this thread. No more for me.

I completely forgot about HBK's two jobs to Vader. Alright, rephrase: after those losses, he was never pinned clean again until WM14. Of course, being Shawn, he still held and lost various title bests via shenanigans/gave away/forfeit on at least four occasions. When did Funk ever main event a WWF ppv? He's been in semi-mains and Rumbles, but he's never headlined iirc. They had a singles match at Uncensored 99, but it wasn't the main. Bigelow put up a slightly better fight than most Goldberg opponents, but still got destroyed in the end.

Yes, if memory serves the Undertaker was in the main event that night. Vader randomly came out during some undercard match and killed some jobbers. For WWF and WCW guys working the same show, this happened at all the pre-buyout Pillman Memorials iirc. Before losing his "last" match to Steve Austin at Wrestlemania 14, Shawn Michaels had not done a clean pinfall job on any televised show in three years. This includes being both a babyface and a heel.

What, you never saw any of the several million Divas video specials they put out over the past decade? Trish was in plenty of those.

Fans may have called Smackdown the better show, but it's pretty obvious that Vince & co. consider Raw to be the real deal. Vince himself shows up far more often on Raw than any other program. Raw's main event has gone on last at 4 out of the 6 Wrestlemanias since the brand split. Raw traditionally gets the better end of the deal in the yearly draft. Raw is where they've kept Cena since he proved to be an earner. And until now, Raw was The Triple H Show. All that tends to suggest that Raw did indeed get preferential treatment compared to the others. My theory: Triple H sees this as a challenge. He thinks SD is the inferior show, but with his help they can pull ahead and be Raw's equal and do well on their new network.

I can't blame him for this one. Well, that's mostly because I can't blame anyone who gets drafted for being pissed about it. Especially with the WWE's bizarre insistence on not letting them know about it ahead of time. These guys all have their lives planned out around their jobs to an abnormal degree already, and that job just randomly changes it on them, with no warning, for no good reason? It's an incredibly childish way to run a company.

Various thoughts on the draft: -Looking back on paper, Raw and Smackdown came out pretty even. It sure didn't feel that way watching the show live though. ECW seems like it got raped the hardest overall, and it was almost funny to listen to Tazz get more obviously pissed about it as the night went on. Are they supposed to be doing a Raw/ECW talent exchange next? If not, taking away Kane and Punk doesn't make much sense. -What's the point of randomly switching the play-by-play announcers? Both Ross and Cole seemed genuinely unhappy about it. -Man, the WWE is really lacking in the top heel department. On Raw, Orton is hurt, Jericho is the IC champ and currently stuck in an endless feud anyway, JBL is... JBL, and who else is there left? Meanwhile, they did lose Jeff and HHH, but still drafted a whole shitload of new faces to fill those spots up (Batista, Rey, Kane, Punk). On Smackdown, Edge is really the only main-event level heel they have now, with a vague secondary tier of also-rans like Khali, Big Show, Mark Henry, and such to job to the guys who eventually job to Edge. ECW is the only exception; that brand is bursting with various undercard heels, without enough faces to, well, face them. -The new dumb angle. So it's a rehash of the miserably aborted Dead Vince angle from last year. And it takes place on the anniversary of the Benoit slaughter. And how long has it been since the stage collapsed at the TNA show and killed the guy? Like two weeks? I don't think they're necessarily doing all this shit on purpose, but it depresses me that they just didn't care enough to change their plans around these kinds of things.

Huh? Haven't heard those stories. What happened?

That's a hilariously awful "I need to stay looking rebelious despite the reality that a mention of ROH on WWE.com is huge" attempt. Sort of how I felt about the News Bulletins which popped up everywhere about two minutes after the word about the dark match got around, self-consciously saying that ROH gave their "permission" for Danielson to work the dark match. I know he's on a contract, but still. I get a mental image of Vince shuffling into a darkened office, hat in hand, begging "Please Mr. Sapolsky, grant me this favor," and then Gabe makes him kiss his ring.

Are they still gonna do a Bryan & Vinny free show every week? I listened to them last night, but Alvarez was kinda vague on that point.

Though it happened quietly a couple months ago, it's also just now hitting the dirtsheets that Hogan's Foreman grill ripoff which he had been shilling has been discontinued and recalled because it's proven to be a fire hazard. You can't make up gold like this.

To be fair, that feud started back in FMW and then immigrated here. Yeah, that's my point. There have been a bunch of instances where the WWE has fired someone and given a really odd justification. Like, why fire Test for drug use, when he hadn't failed the Third Piss Of Doom which is supposed to determine such things? Why are some of the interchangeable Divasearch chicks kept on while others are let go? Were the Hebners really thrown out of their quarter-century family gig for selling merch on the side? What was the deal when they fired Boogeyman and then hired him back just days later? That kind of stuff.

That's at least, what, the third time they've supposedly fired someone for that? I wonder if that's one of their excuses they use when they want to fire someone for some other, more darkly personal reason that they didn't want to make public. Ya know, same thing they do when someone's fired for "drug reasons" when they've failed less than the requisite three tests or "talking to dirtsheets" like Lagana.

Strangely, this site was still down for a day or so after TSM was back up. Did Mike just forget about here or something?

To people not from the South, sadly all too often.

Yeah. I had to fight back the urge to post a facepalm jpeg. Just didn't seem appropriate for this relatively mature board.

Depends. If I'm just spouting off thoughts on a message board, I'm not too disciplined. I usually type comments on Raw live during the commercial breaks, since it's a live show and all. Everything else I just wait til the show is over and try to remember my thoughts as best I can. If I'm doing something like "Why TNA Sucks, using every single segment from last night as proof" long rant, I might refer to a website recap to remind me of all the crap my brain was trying to repress. The only time I ever took reviewing seriously was several years ago when I was doing reviews of a local indy show for the local indy board and trying to be a Very Serious Smarte Marke. I taped the show every week, and then played it back while I typed the review, often pausing, rewinding, and such to make sure I got everything right. Unfortunately, this was Bert Prentice's wrestling show, so after about a year of nonsensical matches, nonexistant storylines, rerun episodes, and Prentice screaming "TONIGHTTONIGHTTONIGHT!!!" in endless commercials every five seconds, I was finally driven so insane that I actually got into the wrestling business as a consequence. That's my story and I'm sticking too it.

Of course other wrestlers would've flushed the drugs. That's a hallowed old wrestling tradition going back at least as far as David Von Erich. The absurdity here is that there was simply no time for them to do anything like that. Irv himself says there was only a two-hour window. All the wrestlers and other employees were at the arena for the big cross-brand Raw that night. Do they have some of those 80s Action Movie Thugs on the payroll who are willing to committ major crime and risk lengthy jail time just because the boss says so? And even if they did, said thugs would've had to have been in Atlanta already that day. EDIT: and no, they don't teach much interpolation these days. Even when I was in high-school geometry about a dozen years ago, they already more or less required you to have a graphing calculator. The slide rule is dead, long live the slide rule.

I don't know if it's fair to blame all this stuff on ECW anyway. Benoit and his ilk were more influenced by the Japanese style than anything else. He was already Super J-Cup Champion Wild Pegasus before he ever set foot in the ECW arena. If anything, while he was there he dumbed his style down to the usual brawling stuff, before going back to his usual repetoire once he arrived in WCW.