Cobra Commander

The fun thing about the massive WWE committee style? You can blame someone else fairly easily if the idea turns out to suck. There's not exactly a climate for actual accountability

I called Punk a paranoid narcissist in another spot if we're evaluating the merits of applying terms to Punk here. Not sure if sociopath is the best term overall. Also, I'd have to re-read Bret Hart's book to figure out how many times Vince "owed him one".

When your audience is essentially the entire world, it's a little harder to find villains who an overwhelming majority of people can invest themselves in booing. So that mind hinder dreams of the WWE bringing in a Neighborhood Watch heel or a SJW or something that most of the audience may not care about

Not sure if this point has been covered but... The staged bickering of Cole/Lawler patronizing towards JBL is a highlight of how ahitty the commentary could be these days. Cole doesn't really have the gravitas to be as effective as a top PBP/face commentator. Lawler doesn't really add enough on his own and forces Cole to have to do more when it comes to arguing with JBL. It's kinda like Joe Buck. Buck has his pros and cons. But he's been around and mediocre for so long that it colors perceptions of his work. Cole and Joe Buck have the personality of pancakes. If you have them in the right dosage, it's OK, if you're eating pancakes every day, you'll eventually hate pancakes The WWE might need to rotate the 3 man booth a tad like during Nitros. Like don't have the same 3 guys out there for all 3 hours of the show. Or maybe change up parts of the layout that have been the same for over 15 years.

I wouldn't call Vince stupid but I would call him a bit eccentric, at least by comparison. How are you defining stupid and how would you apply that definition to Vince. There are some comparable eccentric billionaires all over the place. Like some of the weirder owners in International Football (see: Vincent Tan of Cardiff City). Vince didn't own a team, but he did technically own 8 football teams at the same time. There's points where you could easily figure out how Punk painlessly won a settlement from the WWE (such as the staph infection) and parts of the interview where you could figure out why they'd get tired of him. I've made longer posts on this matter in other places tonight. Should we chalk it up as a mystery of the WWE that they gave AJ Lee a title reign 2 weeks after firing CM Punk?

wasn't Batista moving towards this point before he departed again?

would having a male wrestler in the feminist gimmick change any expectations for crowd heat or storyline ideas. Granted, they'd probably just book the Male Feminist into being effeminate instead of maybe having him be Steve Rhodes from MWC. And the lack of on-screen social interaction between superstars and divas might diminish the point a bit. New Day looks like a gimmick that might get hamstrung a bit by current events. It's not like a WWE heel is gonna start praising Darren Wilson while heeling on New Day. How far could New Day go until it's a 3 man version of Makin A Difference Fatu? New Day is one Mini in a Sunday Suit away from an endless 3-way feud with Los Matadores/Torito and whoever Hornswoggle is with these days.

he did cut a promo for a match with Jose Rivera in an unspecified year

"Glen Campbell looks like shit" has to be one of the more random tasteless/hilarious outbursts possible. Then Alice completely botching her update on Glen Campbell's welfare/farewell tour

I do like that they managed to incorporate a hot tag into a no-rules handicap match street fight

the more time Ross and TA spend on the TA/Wrestling 2 feud and the less they spend on "the modern product"... the better

Watts on Austin's podcast would involve Watts trying to figure out how Austin watched more of the Mid-South/UWF B-Show than the A-Show. Then there'd be a bunch of Dick Slater stories.

He probably has a solid point about selling, but I don't know if there's a solution to the problem he's speaking about. Although the inspiration of his complaints is the NBC Wrestlemania special. Essentially a few steps above finding WWE matches on YouTube and commenting on them without knowing of the build to the match. How many matches, aired months afterward, will tell a story to someone unfamiliar with the product. That skews things a bit as well. So yeah, they could probably do a better job at some elements of match layout, but the solution to that problem is probably unknown. It seemed less annoying than JR's usual complaints. Granted, if Watts had a podcast and kept hitting various topics over and over and killed them to death, that could change. Bill Watts is probably a better presenter of ideas/philosophies than Jim Ross if we're comparing them here. Although i'd imagine a lot of the JR stuff is essentially 2nd generation Watts stuff though. So obviously 1st gen tops 2nd gen in the scheme of things. -------- So, add Watts to the club of people who will insist they wanted to run head to head TV with the WWF before Bischoff pulled it off?

and Hogan/WWF guys working against AJPW guys a few years before 1990 instead of the WWF/NJPW partnership in the mid-80s

yeah, well.. It wouldn't stun me if Davis was using the Mexican stereotype voice every time that a Hispanic wrestler was working there. But yeah, it was the 50s/60s. So I won't hold that to the same standard as Russ Davis consistently "trying" to talk to the wrestlers in his commentary, which could get a bit annoying since he had a way of overdoing it a bit.

Good thing I saw Thesz/Gagne before I heard you guys compare it to Jack Lemmon wrestling Walter Matthau

Scientfic Heel Lou Thesz made this all a lot more interesting. Essentially they worked the same finish as numerous NWA title matches held 25+ years later.

The Tribune article about the 1/25 match describes falls on the "reserve backdrop", then Gagne won with the sleeper. The article about the 12/12 match mentioned that they had no falls in 60 minutes. So i'm pretty sure the match on YouTube is from 1/25/1952.

pretty much a sprint to showcase Apollo. Neat spots to showcase Apollo (the cartwheel snapmaring). An awkward submission hold thrown in. Then some more cartwheels and kicks. Apollo would be tagging with Rocca in Chicago later in 1961 in matches that are probably going to be pretty entertaining if uploaded to YouTube.

Williams and Kay brought quite a bit of what we probably see now as standard heel tag team fare there with the doubleteams/etc. Al Williams apparently put the children of 1940s tattoo artists through college. Interesting description about partners having to "shake hands" to tag (which they did sometimes, probably just a linguistic quirk of the times) and interesting that both guys had to be pinned to win a fall, which is a format that is still used in Mexican tag team matches i've seen recently.

Nothing is new under the sun. See: The 3rd fall of this match. As for the rest, kinda interesting they go to all 3 falls within about 25 minutes. But maybe they couldn't really add 10-15 minutes more of action here for whichever reason. Would be interesting potentially useless trivia to know how long the Thesz matches usually went back then.

Bob Geigel back when he wasn't old! (some of the Central States footage online was a 60+ Bob Geigel wrestling in the late 80s!) Also, neat counter out of the Indian Deathlock sequence. Unless the Indian Deathlock is really hard to convincingly apply, you'd think someone could use the Indian Deathlock these days, perhaps as a mid-match heeling spot. Both guys can be in the camera shot of the move. Bad guy using his completely free upper body and arms to taunt as he applies and winds up the hold. Before something prevents the doom of the good guy. Maybe Triple H will need to get more concrete control before we get more Indian Deathlock spots in matches. I think the real name for the spread eagle move is a wishbone. That was an interesting several minutes.

as opposed to non-cantankerous moments with Bill Watts. So, if Watts just steamrolls over the usual JR schtick, the interview will be better, right?

*insert Heenan's shoot interview comments about the Vailants* Schiavone was amazingly casual on the interview too like some dude who showed up at JRs house for the first time in a long time and talked about old times

Monsoon and Lawler never worked together as announcers ever when Monsoon was being phased out of regular work, did they? But I think maybe Solie and Lance Russell had some work together during Lance Russell's WCW stint where it seemed like most of the stuff I saw of his WCW work was with Michael Hayes (or Jimmy Garvin?) as partners on a B-Show.