Cobra Commander

I can guess how Travis Kelce spent his Monday Nights in the late 90s

kinda remarkable that this gimmick has gotten various news stories over multiple years

The only difference between Chicago/Landover the 2 nights before MLG and Maple Leaf Gardens was that Hogan/Dibiase main evented in Chicago/Landover with Haku wrestling Koko B. Ware. Then in Toronto, Hogan/Haku main evented with Dibiase facing Koko. They had been running Hogan/Dibiase at shows a bit before this show. I don't think it's a thing that they switched it up because Hogan/Dibiase was on a Boston Garden/NESN show a week before unless NESN somehow got into Canada. Then the next loop Hogan worked had him with Big Bossman.

he has mentioned a bunch of times about how corporate suits ruin wrestling companies, so clearly he wasn't gonna do any of thaaaat also gotta imagine the percentage of male employees/talent in Smoky or OVW was quite a bit higher than the percentage of male employees/talent in the recent WWE, so if the only women working around the company are either Tammy Sytch, Tony Anthony's wife occasionally, Jackie Moore for a few minutes, or Pam in the office.

Howard Finkel did a pretty good Howard Cosell impersonation on this video of Mean Gene interview outtakes. So he probably would have been a better commentator than quite a few people used by the WWF, but obviously he already had a stable job.

It's enough to make one wonder what Bobby Blaze's new gimmick name would have been if he went to the WWF after Smoky. Surely the WWF could find some awful name for someone whose real last name is Smedley. I guess the alternate universe scenario where Cornette doesn't try getting his SMW guys some WWF jobs involves Tony Anthony and Tracy Smothers working matches on Worldwide in 1996/1997. As for Uncle Cletus.. Henry broke his neck, and then came back, before they brought a 3rd guy into the act months later, and they gave the 3rd guy a name that sorta gives me the impression that Dutch Mantel wasn't returning their phone calls and they had to pivot from bringing back Uncle Zebekiah to using a guy who was sorta knocking off Uncle Zebekiah, and then they dumped him after like a month.

watched this last night, still amused at Mustafa using a spinning toe hold in essentially a streetfight and thanks to various Public Enemy 1999 drama, they did return 3 years later, but technically didn't have a match in ECW Arena again until 2001, with MECW.

The first time (1999), he won 12%, got over 19000 votes, and finished 3rd. Which really isn't an awful showing for somebody making their first run without really much established political power behind them. Lawler received more votes than 3 candidates who had held elective office and he only finished behind the incumbent Mayor and a member of the city's most prominent political family (The Ford family, which used their Funeral home business to build social ties that got lots and lots of family members into office, including two Congressmen, Harold Ford Sr and Harold Ford Jr). Memphis Mayoral elections don't have a majority requirement so it wouldn't have been impossible to win with much less than 50% but voters coalesce into the top camps of either liking the incumbent or wanting him out, or liking the Fords or not being too high on them. I forget if Lawler put it in his book or just said it in print, but they were thinking he would do better in some heavily Black precincts based off of wrestling fandom, which isn't exactly how these things go with how racially polarized voting can be in the South. Now, Lawler's second mayoral candidacy in 2009, on the other hand, wasn't near as popular. That time he won 4%, which was worth 4049 votes and finished 5th. That election was a bit of a blowout as the incumbent County Mayor (County Executive, the same job Kane has in Knoxville) ran for Mayor of Memphis and won with nearly 60%. So the second place finisher was closer to Lawler than to first place. Although if one wants to be generous to Lawler's 2009 showing... 4049 would have a great attendance for any Mid-South show after the late 1980s. Running in 1999, with the Ventura win still fresh and wrestling being hot, made some sense. Running in 2009, didn't really make much sense.

LA Park vs Fatu was certainly a spectacle of a match (if you didn't see it yet, it's on Episode 90, the end of year review show). The spear through the table didn't really make sense (well, not yet) and while I recognize the logistics.. it really wasn't a visually impressive table spot.

also it always seems like a good portion of the crowd are tourists, who they'd probably doubly prefer not wandering around Mexico City at midnight if they could help it. (Looking at the map, spotted 2 subway stations within walking distance). Then there's Arena Puebla where the shows kick off at 9 and there's a bus stop next to it. Which i'm sure is lots of fun.

the two shows named for having breezy shows also get their stuff taped in some of the longer tapings going these days (MLW slices up one card into 4/5 weeks of somewhat coherent TV, Powerrr tapes a bunch of episodes over 2/3 nights). And there's no shortage of old time breezy watchable TV from the 80s WWF that was made from marathon tapings where the crowd had to endure. Even a place like CMLL takes 2 hours mas o menos (more or less) to get from the first match to the end of the card while having 3 falls in most of the matches. So if you're airing a show, or streaming it, and there's not another show going on against it, the goal is... try to keep eyeballs on the show without having the heat die? That goal might require mixing things up on occasion or going to more of a SNME flow for some shows (Raw) than trying to sustain heat for 3 hours every week. I'll try to not go on the overkill route for a post on this.

Not really an answer to the Q, but have you seen KC on the Mat?

I guess you gotta give them credit for not accidentally exposing anything that would get their video pulled from YouTube during the Priscilla Kelly beatdown Also, Tom Lawler did something, and King Mo's Stinger Splash was neat.

in retrospect, downsides exist to trying to tape 10 weeks of TV at the same time.. even your WCW Worldwides just taped the commentary in studio instead of trying to do it all right there.

i'm sure this has been explained somewhere, but here's the TV markets for the Mid South area Shreveport/Monroe/Alexandra/Lake Charles/Lafayette/Baton Rouge/New Orleans Oklahoma City/Tulsa (also maybe Lawton OK/Wichita Falls TX or Ada OK/Sherman TX, but those stations could be getting World Class) Little Rock/Fort Smith Jackson/Biloxi/Hattiesburg so IIRC, the loop ends with Little Rock getting TV like a few weeks after it aired originally, but what was the sequence for the rest of that? In retrospect, TV Guide's listing every wrestling show (especially territorial ones) as just "Wrestling" was not helpful for future research purposes.

of the 90s moves to get a second run these days, has anybody dusted off the Austin Thesz Press/Punches? (it's possible someone has and it's just on a show I don't regularly watch)

wonder if it's possible to be able to move people from Raw/Smackdown to NXT without it being seen as much of a demotion, since there'll be times where people go from NXT to Raw/Smackdown and they can't always just replace them with somebody who is a level below NXT. The problem early is that the WWE audience historically hasn't been into watching 3 different WWE shows and NXT was seen as a step below RAW/Smackdown. So part of their November success has been sorta hand-waved away as "they're getting the ratings because of the big shows".. and I guess we'll see if the ratings are because of the featured big show wrestlers, or if they're getting better numbers because people who watch Raw/Smackdown are being given reminders that NXT is also on the air. It's be one thing if NXT's ratings month was due to deceptive practices or something similar. But I think there's a certain degree of things that can be sustained as long as the SSeries results aren't awful. Also, last night may have had the most combined viewers of any AEW/NXT week since October 9th. But it's close. Also, both shows are sorta being pulled by the viewers who were teens during the 80s or during the late 90s. Compare their 18-34s to their 18-49s.

imagine Jim Cornette's quality of life at age 58 if not for the existence of Scaffold matches (which fucked up his knee because they thought Bubba could catch him). Cornette right now is the same age that Bill Watts was in 1997. And Bill Watts didn't have a job in a promotion after he was 56, and Watts was 53 when he was fired by WCW for his unintentionally libertarian comments about Lester Maddox. I also suspect the last 2 months made it harder for Cornette to get some outside guests to somewhat freshen things up. But then again, moving off of MLW Radio really dried up the quality of guests who would be given to Cornette (because we all noticed how certain wrestling podcasts get some guests on a loop and got some sponsors on a loop). I say this as somebody who listens to an afternoon radio show that has become really insular because it's 3 very similar guys who really don't have guests or do anything compelling, so they spend like 40 minutes running through a discussion of news stories at 3pm and it's so fucking tedious.

Masked Bizarro Jim Cornette sounds like something that would pop up in Chikara. Another after-effect of the Jim Cornette/Powerrr fallout is that he's gonna stop being diplomatic about Colt Cabana now. Anyways, there's enough forgiving people that if he just allows for some time for things to cool down, he'll be able to supplement his Collectibles income. Although pretty much his top role right now would involve being paid to stay at home and anonymously provide advice. Like the whole Jerry Jarrett being paid by WCW to talk to Bischoff on the phone thing. There's still technical things that he has done in regards to televised wrestling that has value. It's just that he's a liability to publicly employ. Like Russo was during that period where they secretly kept him around despite the network wanting him out.

"For the next 90 days, The Jim Cornette Experience will be hosted by S. Lee, who is not Jim Cornette at all" Considering the assortment of Cornette controversies, obviously the best worked way out of this involves Jim Cornette managing Sonny Kiss.

For the occasional talk from Cornette on his podcasts about “how can I miss you if you won’t go away”... he’s kinda overexposed himself lately. Moving the JCE from Thursday to Friday to be able to talk AEW/NXT. Probably getting a bit too focused on the modern stuff as opposed to his strengths of historical stuff. Also, after this week, would it be safe to say that MLW produced Cornette better than Powerrr. And that was sort of a forgettable MLW stint

considering the stereotypes of the Von Erichs and Hawaii residents, KVE living in Hawaii was a perfect pairing.

the whole "pay us to show your talents" concept is an amazing carny idea.. it's almost as good as the time that Limp Bizkit got a bunch of people to try out for a band spot, and then just stole their riffs. That being said.. tough fucking day for the guy whose job involves editing shows that were taped 7 weeks ago.

Billy Corgan is a weirder version of Moby. And Moby is a weird man in his own ways. Anyways, Jim might need to hibernate a little for his winter.

if you're the guy (yeah, singular more likely than plural) handling NWA Powerrr, shouldn't you have pretty much 90% of the shows in the can shortly after taping? with only like the countdown stuff and some of the meta commercials to add.. figure out the 10 episodes, do some snipping for content and certain lines, cough cough.. in other words, how the fuck does something like that said around 7 weeks ago end up undetected until just after the show goes live? of course the guy who does like 4 hours of pretty-much-in-house podcasts a week would have his problem from something that should have been deleted a month ago. It's Jim's fault, obviously, but the people handling Powerrr fucked up too. When Jim referenced the Challenger in the 80s, they cut the tape and went to a second take. They didn't air it 7 weeks after it was said.