Loss

It's fascinating how they find the time to pay so much attention to detail on things like this, but when it comes to the product they put on TV, they put almost no long-term thought into the ramifications of each win and each loss.

Yeah, the matches they listed are barely enough to fill one DVD, much less three. I'm thinking the extras are what's going to make this an essential purchase.

Ah, yeah, I understand that. I've been watching a little too much myself. I'm still going to watch everyday, but I'm going to shave down the time a little bit. I realized I hadn't done the dishes in a week this morning, and my roommate has been doing them all this time, and we normally trade out. So, I'll probably come home, do everything that needs to be done, have dinner, make phone calls and then sit down. Luckily, I go to the gym in the mornings, so I haven't gained 100 lbs or anything.

Without all that, I still think we'd know something was up, just because he's too entrenched in the big picture. I've had casual fans who follow nothing online ask me about it, because they know I follow it. They've said stuff like, "HHH is still around. Is he ever going to leave?" and I usually tell them the right answer, which is that he'll wrestle until the day he dies.

See? He used to call me a TSM troglodyte all the time. Never in my life have I been around someone that demands entrance music on a message board either.

I haven't. I'm going to turn the tables and ask you to start pumping out some stuff.

Yes.

Because Dynamite Kid has done something for me. HHH hasn't. You get what you give. I couldn't care less if they're all scumbags; HHH can kill kittens and steal groceries from old ladies. I don't know him, and I don't have to be around him. Company sabotaging has nothing to do with quality of human beings and everything to do with making for a crappy wrestling show. If I was a co-worker or peer of HHH, yeah, I'd care if he was doing those things, but as a fan, he's made wrestling less fun to watch. Dynamite Kid never did that.

30-Man Royal Rumble - Royal Rumble 1995 This is actually one of the better-worked Rumbles, and one of the most exciting from start to finish. Many voiced displeasure with the company for shortening the intervals from two minutes to one minute, but in this case, it greatly benefitted the action. The only downside to it was that Shawn and Davey Boy both had the stamina to go another 20-25 minutes if they had to do so, and Shawn's victory would have been more impressive had he toughed it out that long. That is, in essence, the story of the match -- Shawn Michaels v Davey Boy Smith. This was really Davey's first chance to shine after returning to the company and he didn't disappoint. Eliminations between the two were teased well, and Shawn hangs on like a cockroach from beginning to end. If anything, the match showed just little was going on in the company at the time, as outside of the various feuds Bret Hart and the Clique had ongoing, nothing is really explored. The Rumble is always an interesting match because it's a bite-sized overview of the entire company and it acts as a foreshadowing of sorts to Wrestlemania. Sadly, Owen Hart and Bob Backlund were ambushed outside by Bret, depriving the match of at least one more good, long-term worker, and sadly, the finish was needlessly overbooked. All said, the body of the match conveyed the story quite well, even if everyone besides Michaels and Smith act as not much more than window dressing. ***3/4

HTQ invented the Rude Awakening. He also stole HTQ's gimmick.

In the WCW thread.

Right. That's what I'm saying. It could have worked. They can stress that the opponent has the size advantage without making it seem like they're jobbers and that they're too afraid to wrestle the big dogs. Benoit feuded with bigger guys, but he was no bigger than Jericho, so I don't know why they stuck one with the smaller guys and one with the heavies.

And then, Rey comes along and gets more over than a large portion of your heavyweights. What do you do then? Putting Misterio against Nash was bad booking, but putting him against Bret Hart and Ric Flair wouldn't have been. He could have been fairly credible against them. There may still be a limit to how far they can go because of their size, but there's no reason guys like Benoit, Jericho, Eddy, Malenko, Rey, Juvi and Psi couldn't have feuded with mid-sized heavyweights like Bret, Sting, Flair and Scott Hall.

Expanding more, they turned a profit in 1995 for the first time in company history, but they had to do some major fenagling to make that happen, the biggest of which was moving Hogan's salary away from WCW books and over to Turner Home Entertainment. They were called on the carpet about that during the Billionaire Ted skits Vince was doing at the time. When Hogan's plusses don't even cover his salary, it's hard to say he was an effective draw during this time period for WCW.

You already did. He said that Hogan was the big PPV draw in 1994/1995, which is true, but the business was cold at that point anyway, and since Hogan didn't go on the road unless he felt like it (which was extremely rare), the difference was minor at best.

I don;t know if I would have stuck Benoit in the Cruiser division. If that would have happened, I don't think he would have ever lost the stigma of being a little guy. Being small is only a bad thing because it's been presented to be. Benoit, Eddy, Malenko and Jericho all caught on to this by 1998, and all of them specifically said they no longer wanted to be in the cruiserweight division because they didn't think wrestlers should be labeled based on their size, and they thought it was hurting them. Jericho has even said he doesn't think there should be a cruiserweight division in WWE, that they should just have everyone face everyone, and that if you want a small guy to feud with a small guy, just have them feud, but don't remind everyone that they're tiny constantly. He has a point.

Russell was in Memphis for most of the 1970s through the 1990s. He called the Lawler/Idol match you have. Have you watched it yet? He also co-hosted WCW Pro with Michael Hayes from 1989-1991, before going back to Memphis to work in the USWA for a short period. I'm not sure how long he stayed there.

The problem with the use of luchadores was that they brought in too many of them. When it became clear that Rey, Juvi, Psicosis and La Parka stood out from the pack way more than everyone else, they probably should have released the others and built a division off of those four, Guerrero, Benoit, Jericho and Malenko. And actually, La Parka is a heavyweight, not a lightweight, which is part of the problem. They started associating smaller guys with their ethnicity, which was stupid. Remember, Nagata was considered a cruiser in WCW as well. Regal actually worked well with the luchadores from what I have been able to find, because as you know, lucha is not all highspots like we've been led to believe by WCW. Psicosis is very capable on the mat, and I have a Regal/Juvi match I'll get to eventually that was also pretty good considering the time limitations.

Hogan, at his most, spiked PPV buyrates to *half* of what they were during the Flair/Funk feud of '89. So, while he did positively affect the bottom line, it wasn't the windfall change they weren't hoping for or that they hyped it to be, as Hogan merely kept them only slightly less in the red.

No, but it's coming up. I saw the Clash IX tape in the next stack, so it'll be this week or next.

1-2-3 Kid & Bob Holly v Bam Bam Bigelow & Tatanka - WWF Royal Rumble 1995 This was the final round of tag titles tournament, with Kid and Holly as the major underdogs. Considering that 50% of the participants were pretty good around this time when the planets were aligned properly, and another 25% had his moments as well, I was expecting this to be decent, especially since I'd seen it called "good" in some circles. This was actually a horrible match, brought down almost entirely by Tatanka. The announcers refer to Kid losing to Bigelow on Action Zone in the weeks before the show, and I wished I was watching that match instead, because it has the potential to be much better. Kid is barely in the match; the majority of it is wrestled by Holly, who is perhaps the most perfectly average wrestler of all time. He doesn't have the charisma to make the face-in-peril stuff work, and he's not given any hope spots to speak of anyway, as Tatanka keeps slowly dominating him and killing the pace Bigelow establishes when he's in the ring. One rather embarrassing miscue sees Waltman dive in for a dramatic save, only for Tatanka to move out of the way, leaving Kid to accidentally elbow his partner and express grief over it. That's a perfectly good heel spot, but to put the underdog faces in that position when they aren't even getting any offense anyway is death to them. The finish provides them neither credibility nor heat, as Tatanka accidentally knocks Bigelow off the ropes and Kid crawls over for a pin 30 seconds later. If that's not bad enough, the tournament would be rendered meaningless the next night, when Kid & Holly would drop the title back to the Smoking Gunns. The tag division was suffering at this point in time, and that problem wasn't helped by the use of Sean Waltman, as they kept putting him in makeshift tag teams that would get over big, only to be broken up shortly thereafter for no real reason.

Also, while I liked Jesse Ventura in WCW, Jim Cornette said it best in '93, when he said it wasn't even Jesse Ventura doing color in WCW, it was some guy doing Jesse Ventura doing color in WCW. He was still solid, but he lost a step somewhere between the WWF and WCW.

Lance Russell is also the best straight man the wrestling business has probably ever seen. When something funny happened, he didn't laugh; when something ridiculous happened, he didn't scoff. He was just so good at giving everyone else a foundation to work off of, and he deserves major credit for that. The little things that Jim Ross used to do like give subtle facial expressions toward heels/face when holding the mic are things Russell probably did even better. It was also obvious that while he and Lawler were very close friends, he always did his best to be impartial on the air. Their friendship couldn't help but show, despite his best efforts, which was part of his entire appeal. His word had credibility for that reason.

He was in the AWA at the time. Vince and Slaughter weren't on good terms around that time, I think over licensing rights, and if I'm not mistaken, Sarge walked out on him or something. Maybe HTQ can fill us in on the whole story if he sees this.