Jingus

How the fuck does Dunn make more money than literally anyone else in the company?

...is this a joke? I honestly don't know. "His vignettes with Crowbar and Daffney, as long as it's not in an actual match" is the serious answer. David was pretty bad, in his second year in the business he still looked as awkward as a student in his second month of training.

Koloff's someone I wish I'd seen a lot more of. Even way past his prime and in the anti-workrate ghetto of Herb Abrahms' UWF, he was putting on some fun performances with neat matwork. It's a shame most of his big run against Bruno et al never made tape.

He's done an elbow drop off the top a whole bunch of times. Missile dropkicks off the top on at least two or three occasions. And yeah, I've seen the kip-up too. It's an interesting comparison, because Henry often moves just as slowly as Show does; would everyone on Team Big Slow have the same complaint about Mark?

That "burn" was so bad, so much more insulting to the guy who said it as revealing of his ridiculous standards of physical perfection, that it felt like one of Andy Samberg's backfiring jabs at a comedy roast. "You haven't spent the last fifteen years injecting yourself with a dangerous level of hormonal supplements like I have, OOOOOH BURN~!" Oh yeah, that's right. I thought that sent a hilarious message. "You can "shoot" all you want about the company and the people who run it, but don't you DARE cast any light on the hypocrisy and uselessness of our bullshit PR campaign which is disguised as a charity service!"

Wasn't the mic finally cut off in Punk's original pipebomb promo when he finally got around to bashing Triple H? And come to think of it, Trips has always made damn sure to stay far, far away from The Rock whenever Dwayne is back in town. The only interaction I remember them having in the past dozen years was the segment at last year's Mania, which was obviously scripted from beginning to end and didn't allow any room for Rock to start hitting improv insults on HHH. In fact, HHH seemed to go extra far out of his way to avoid ever really putting Rock over. From the year 2001 onward, they only wrestled six times on TV, and none of those matches ended with Rock pinning Hunter. And even before that, the win-loss record was pretty dismal: I just went back and counted, and Rock wrestled HHH on TV in thirty-one different matches in the year 2000. (Geez, they REALLY ran those feuds into the ground back in the Attitude days, didn't they?) Number of times Rock ever pinned HHH? Four. Four pinfalls victories for the top babyface, in their entire year-long feud of thirty-one matches. And EVERY SINGLE TIME, the pinfall only happened after some other person interfered and hit Hunter (with a foreign object, three times out of four). So Rocky never once cleanly defeated his nemesis, in the same year that he infamously became the first babyface to lose in the main event of Wrestlemania. How 'bout that.

Graham is indeed unsuited for doing hour broadways, but I thought he was often underrated in the ring. He spent most of his time stooging and selling, and he was good at those; also a really good bumper, which seems to be frequently overlooked when discussing him. Of course I mean all that back in his prime, not in his shrunken shaven Karate Master gimmick period... we should just look upon that part of his career with great pity.

I wouldn't be surprised if Hunter honestly doesn't understand how the portrayal of his character is counterproductive to what they're trying to do with Reigns and others. We've seen countless times that wrestlers who also book almost inevitably fall into the trap of genuinely believing that putting themselves personally over is somehow what's best for business as a whole. He might legitimately think that all his destruction of Roman will just make the eventual Wrestlemania comeuppance mean that much more and solidify Reigns that much harder as the new top guy, for having overcome all that adversity. Of course, the counterargument is a single word: Kliq. HHH is one of the core members of a group which is notorious for being unwilling to look weak, and even when forced into doing a job often find a way to make the winner look worse than themselves.

I don't see how what Trips is doing now is any different from his usual methods. He almost always makes himself look overwhelmingly strong, to the point where we're supposed to believe him going 50-50 with Brock or Taker in the laughable idea that Hunter is the same level of badass as those characters. It's stupid and selfish and especially damaging to the booking whenever he's a heel, but that's just what HHH does in the 21st century. Even during his one genuine attempt to permanently build a new superstar, the feud with Batista, he still took the majority of the offense in those matches, brawls, and beatdowns with Big Dave spending more time down and selling than not.

I remember seeing him once push, pull, and drag a shockingly great match out of JC Bailey. That alone might get him on the bottom of my list.

They struggle to fill up a 3-hour Raw with enough content now. How much harder is it gonna be to do that with only half a roster? And besides, we've already got a split brand, it's called NXT.

pretty sure that one's not an oversight

Foley has gone deeper into detail at some point or another, I forget exactly when, but he's talked about the second bump. I think he's just embarrassed at how badly it went and how he almost got himself killed on such an insanely stupid spot, so he rarely wants to go into the specifics about what they were trying to do. The cage was deliberately gimmicked to break. (Obviously they'd planned to get inside the cell at some point, just from the fact that they'd pre-planned the spot with the bag of thumbtacks stored under the ring.) Their plan was that it would break gradually, rung by rung, and the whole panel would be tilting downward slowly enough that Foley would just sort of roll diagonally downward and finally take a bump into the ring which wouldn't be much worse than a standard Flair-toss off the top. The way that Taker does the chokeslam is indicative that they knew it was going to break; he throws it Akira Taue-style, no altitude at all, not even getting Foley's feet all the way off the floor. They were trying to make the impact as light as possible. But the gimmicking was obviously done badly, and so Foley ended up taking that hideous Super Dave bump instead. Was the panel that Foley fell through the same one that broke partly when Taker stepped on it before the first bump? If so, and if they STILL picked that one to do the chokeslam on, then that's pretty good proof that the panel was supposed to collapse.

Another reason: 2006 was the prime season for all the old-timers publishing their autobiographies. Flair, Funk, and Dusty all had their books published around that time, and all of them sang Harley's praises to the heavens and didn't have a single bad word to say about him. Heck, Race's own book had come out pretty recently. Once again, he was much more in the public IWC consciousness ten years ago than he is now.

Yeah. When his whining has gotten bad enough that he's making Russo-style factual errors, that's just sad. He keeps talking about how the Young Bucks are what's driving fans away from wrestling today, when they're pretty much the most sought-after and frequently-booked act on the whole indy circuit. You'd think New Japan would stop booking those guys if they were as bad for business as Corny claims.

There's lots of different reasons why the audience popped so hard for Shane, and several of 'em have been mentioned here. But I think some of you are underestimating the sheer popularity of his character among the casual fans. Go back and watch that segment from the Raw in 2005 when they moved back to the USA Network, when Austin stunned the entire McMahon family all in a row. All four McMahons got separate entrances, and Shane's received the biggest reaction by far out of all of them. And some of you are underestimating just how integral a part he was to a lot of the big storylines during the WWE's hottest business years. He was the defacto leader of the Alliance throughout the whole Invasion storyline, he fought Vince at Wrestlemania. He's been in either the main event or a world title match on eight different PPVs, and he was one of the tiny number of guys in the exclusive "I wrestled in the Cell before it was a yearly gimmick show" club. He was a strongly-featured member of the roster in their super-boom period from 1999-2001 which a ton of casual fans still think of as the company's best era. His matches generally got very favorable crowd reactions, I don't remember a Shane match where the crowd either sat on their hands or rebelled against the product they were being fed. And after his absence has made the heart grow fonder (especially after years of a storyline about Stephhh's leadership has wrecked the entire company), why wouldn't you expect a great reaction for his unexpected return?

Do they become members-only once they're archived? Because I'm looking at the site now, and there's only one show with the "FREE" tag that's been posted in the four days since I asked the question.

A question to our British members who have an ear for this sort of thing: did Regal even try to modify his natural Blackpool accent whenever he was doing his "foppish nancyboy" gimmick? I can't imagine how strange it must sound to y'all, hearing this character coming out of that mouth. The closest American equivalent I can think of would be if AJ Styles was given a Donald Trump gimmick, or if James Storm was forced to play the original "Greenwich snob" version of HHH.

He had a bigger internet presence then. WWE's home video releases were finally hitting up more historical stuff, Harley was still doing shoot interviews with whatever online company would pay him to do them, HHH was still cosplaying as Race in some of his tribute matches, Harley's WLW indy fed was still a pseudo-developmental and his students were occasionally getting hired to the big time. Now: all the historical footage is easily available in a spoiled-for-choice flood, Harley's bad health keeps him out of the public spotlight, HHH is mostly retired and has a different character now, and WLW has seemingly fallen right off the radar of the IWC entirely. Race is simply out of sight and out of mind.

As a working prison, it was closed about two months before Bruno Sammartino won the world title for the first time. So, yeah, it's been a while.

There's the iron man match with Bret from a house show in '93. And if we're counting "more than 50 minutes" as a broadway, then the Clash match with Steamboat counts too. I'd assume that the vast majority of hour draws were at house shows, and thus unlikely to be taped. Especially considering how damn bulky and unwieldy the video cameras of the day were, and that many of them didn't even have the battery power to keep running for an hour straight without being plugged in.

Oh yeah, it's obvious that Vince&Co. didn't get the gimmick at all. Over the course of a few months, Hassan and Daivari went from being whiny assumptive SJW types who were all like "fuck you for thinking that we're terrorists!" to generic swarthy savages who were more like "fuck you, we're terrorists". Still, my larger point is that the older heat-magnet type of heel gimmicks simply don't work in a modern publicly-traded corporation. People today treat the wrestlers' actions of being indicative of their employer rather than being their individual expressions. JBL didn't get good heat from comically doing the goose-step during a match in Germany, he got fired from his side gig as a business news analyst.

The match with Mutoh is really the only must-see one, it's an insanely bloody brawl which is way more fun than any of their American bouts that I've seen. The others are mostly forgettable, aside from the sheer novelty of seeing the Nature Boy wrestle guys like Tenzan and Chono on their own home turf.

Yeah, that's a big point. Flair's the opposite of what the Japanese model for a world champion was at that time. He was a cowardly, cheating, stooging heel. Of course he toned down that aspect of his character when he worked Japan, but it was still there; and all it takes is one instance of begging off and going "Noooo!" on his knees to absolutely kill his credibility dead in the eyes of a mid-80s AJPW crowd. Him being such a prototypical "melodramatic rassler" didn't help either, with his bright dyed hair and his giant fluffy robes and his theatrical bumps and his OH GAWD shrieking. Back then the Japanese crowds tended to prefer their gaijin superstars to be serious asskickers, either wild take-no-shit brawlers like (insert favorite Texan here) or highly-skilled technical athletes like Backlund or Brisco, and Flair's showmanship didn't fit any of those parts. Also, he didn't have the regional longevity of the other old NWA touring champions. Guys like the Funks had been going there for long years, building up the crowd's respect for them over time. Flair's entire Japanese experience before returning as the defending champion was a two-week tour of All Japan back in 1978.

And then the inevitable media controversy would focus on the promotion rather than the heel. Wrestling used to be able to claim "the views of this person do not reflect the views of the WWF" or whatever, but everyone knows now that these guys are given a script and made to say this stuff. Muhammad Hassan's act didn't generate a great new heel, it ruined that guy's career and created all kinds of PR problems for the company.