Bix

What a beautiful treat of a pro wrestling match this was to watch live. Even with the Bloosaport format being dialed in/tightened up this year, every match was different, and this was probably the match that benefitted the most from them all being different. In a 48 hour period where I saw Fred Yehi-Daniel Makabe and a bunch of Johnathan Gresham, this was still a noticeable standout, existing at the perfect midpoint between a '70s style match and UWF style. I'm a low voter on some Thatcher stuff, like the Barnett match from Buffalo, usually preferring the more fired up stuff like his tag work or the delightfully weird Nick Gage match, but Suzuki was the perfect foil for him here. And then the finish, with Suzuki Billy Robinsoning Thatcher to death? Perfect, and possibly my favorite finish of every match I saw on a billion shows this week. That double arm suplex was so beautiful and so emphatic that it had to be the finish, especially coming right after the Robinson back breaker, and Thatcher did the most realistic "spasming unconscious guy" selling I've ever seen. One of the must-see matches of the weekend.

The deal with the rights to footage is basically this: Documentaries fall under fair use, but for a long time, nobody really wanted to buck WWE in that area. (And there was probably a lack of knowledge of the law, as well.) DDP's Jake documentary opened the floodgates, so with VICE being such VICE, they had no hesitation to use WWE-owned footage. As for Tony Atlas, while I do think there are some elements that he may have polished up, the gist of his version has always been the same. I have screeners now for every episode, but Mania week got on the way of watching. Need to get on that...

AFAIK, they shot some stuff for the other episodes on their list but I don't think they have full episodes. One of the reasons Bravo didn't make that cut was that it didn't seem like they had enough for a full episode at that juncture.

Pretty much. Whatever you wanna say about Linda on other topics, you can tell she loved Liz dearly as a friend and she comes off completely credible in the doc.

I saw the Brody and Savage/Liz episodes back in the summer at a private screening here in Brooklyn and hopefully should have screeners of everything else soon. Brody has little new for those who know the story but will probably be genuinely shocking to those who don't, and the new stuff definitely puts it all in a new light. Savage/Liz fills in the details on the dissolution of their marriage, with Linda Hogan in particular giving a fantastic interview that the episode leans heavily on, plus there's a lot of stuff about the weird Kayfabe blurring of the marriage. But I'm most looking forward to Gino (lots of new reporting including his mom being interviewed and outright saying it's a murder) and Moolah (the balanced accounting of the facts we've all wanted). And I'm curious what the new Montreal stuff is.

What did y'all think of how Bruce was telling the Burt Reynolds/Pam Seals/Barry Windham story? I totally buy that Burt—who was something of a fan but probably not enough to know where Barry was working—may have mentioned something about his girlfriend's ex being a wrestler to his agent, who then mentioned it to Titan. But...was Bruce just misremembering Barry being there, bullshitting as he's known to do, or correctly remembering a random Barry backstage visit that sounds incongruous to us? It's probably not the last one, but the Barry Windham/Pam Seals relationship isn't exactly super well known, so it would be a bit random to make up the story out of whole cloth, wouldn't it?

For whatever it's worth, there are basically zero non-Observer references to this movie on the internet, the exception being a super barebones entry with no new information on a non-English language film site.

Setting aside the merits of the Mabel thing itself for a moment, should Dave really be using the Hogan report to debunk the Bischoff narrative around it? There's no movie or even non-wrestling TV show episode (that IMDb is aware of) that Hogan and Piper co-starred in together. That means the report—which at least Dave was transparent about the sourcing for, unlike his usual style—was either complete bullshit or incorrectly sourced. Maybe one was visiting the other on a movie set, but the story can't be true as written.

Konnan-Juicer and I think at least one other dark match tryout that I'm drawing a blank on (maybe Kokina?) went up within a couple weeks of "wouldn't it be cool if this went up on the Network" mentions on Between The Sheets, and I think that might have happened with another release or two at well (maybe the Team Challenge Series pilot?). So I'm becoming increasingly convinced that someone involved in the archive logging and/or Hidden Gems selection process is monitoring PWO and PWO-adjacent podcasts, either specifically because we know what the super unseen stuff is or just because they happen to enjoy the content. This latest one is just too close to be a coincidence: khawk will mention the cereal show from time to time, but not remotely often, and this time it shows up a week and a half after his latest post about it?!?

Didn't that Superstars name change happen in 1990? I'm pretty sure that the WWE Classics Online collection of Superstars episodes started then.

I think what rovert is saying is that if you're an Extremely Online indie fan at this point, the odds are fairly high of befriending wrestlers to some degree. And yes, whatever you think of him, he's still legit connected.

That was stemming from Marko blowing up at the SummerSlam weekend GCW/Janela show. He was pretty much booked for the battle royal as soon as humanly possible.

Are you talking about Dave volunteering to help Eddie Alvarez in his lawsuit against Bellator (which I don't recall him ever acknowledging in his coverage) or something else I'm forgetting in terms of him openly consulting on the MMA side?

He didn't do that, though?

Wasn't Dave. Was a different guy and has been re-told incorrectly as Dave.

...yes, by people who have literally stalked me in real life. Not sure what exactly you're referring to here? My what now? Why would I believe that? I don't and it's not. And what have I been hostile about with AEW? It's clearly a good thing for the business. I thought the Bucks blatantly lying about it (as opposed to just...not doing an interview with an obscure podcast where it would inevitably come up while still under contract to ROH) was insulting, but that's about it. Nobody's saying that, at least that I've seen.

Sek has long had this weird thing about wanting to gotcha me but: I have zero grudge against Dave (dunno if that's mutual since the only vitriol I ever hear from him is for an audience), and I would be subscribing to the Observer if the options weren't giving money to Bryan or the now outrageously expensive print version. I have serious issues with Bryan and Tony over them repeatedly being less than honest with me about monetary matters (among other things) while I was writing for them, but I'm well aware that Dave has nothing to do with any of that. Why would I be "jealous of Dave for breaking the story" when I have very obviously made a point to not be a breaking newz scoopster in the last several years? It's not what I do and not something I have any real desire to do, which should be obvious by this point. Do I think it's weird to (potentially) agree to an embargo that was for the barest minimum of new information? Possibly; it just seems like it would be a weird favor to trade. But no, I don't think it's likely that Dave has done paid consulting for AEW, and especially not since the point that the company became more than a theoretical exercise. I think he's handled the larger story oddly for months (and I'm far from alone there), especially in basically ignoring the original SEScoops report, and I've certainly heard speculation about it. (Which you saw spill over to Twitter on Tuesday.) But the idea of him un-learning one of the most important lessons of his first decade doing the Observer seems pretty farfetched. Are there other people I wouldn't put it past? Absolutely.

I really should have used a better subject line for this originally.

Every time I see this thread I wonder if someone should finally correct the title to reflect the actual name of the show.

Pfft it wasn't JUST Karim who wrote that article...

... seriously? All of that happened?

At some point before WWE bought the library, Bret made a deal with Ross (and possibly Stu) to own the rights to all footage of him in Stampede. Bret was always concerned about, for lack of a better term, being an artist with no ownership of his work, so this was his way to at least partially rectify that.