Bix

While it's not an obscene amount of money, DGUSA/Evolve/RIP and ROH have an additional cost over other indies in that they have to pay in advance for DVDs to be pressed instead of duplicating DVD-Rs themselves.

Also, it's worth pointing out that Evolve at least hasn't drawn live and Gabe has no idea what to do as a promoter. After one of Mike O'Brien's NEW shows sold out the Mid-Hudson Civic Center in Poughkeepsie, NY (old Championship Wrestling and Raw venue) in large part due to some local dude who worked the show, Gabe and Sal Ran a FIP (Sal's Florida based promotion that never really drew well anyway) show there for some reason. They promoted it online, and it drew 30 people. Left to his own devices, Gabe's pretty much epitomizes the only Shirley Doe quote about how every indy promoter thinks they'll draw because fans will somehow find out through the general consciousness of humankind (or whatever it was). Hell, NYWC, who Gabe works with locally for his NY shows, has done the same thing. They've run shows within walking distance of my house on several occasions. I'd never see any kind of flyers or other ads around. I found out about the first show days before it took place via WO.com, the second show from their website, and the third show years later I think from WO.com again. And they always complained about not drawing.

I believe that DSE was suing RF over Zero One footage as well, FWIW. I also get the feeling that Gabe saying 2001 was when he became an "employee" of RF Video is a technicality. He was shooting the Fancams for years and those generally benefitted RF Video, not ECW, who got a small flat fee and very occasionally used the house show footage on TV. Would he really do that without being paid by RF? Plus, IIRC, "Fan Cam Guy" was treated as a RF staff member on their hotline, not someone from the ECW office. One thing I'd like to know is when the print RF Video catalog was abandoned and all that stuff was purged from the website. At least they were mostly down to stuff they owned/licensed, Japan, and territories once they did that. Right, it would be much different coming from one of the DGUSA/Evolve wrestlers or someone like Sal Hamaoui. Here's what Gabe should have said: "Look, you're right. RF Video was built on bootlegging, ECW, and shoot interviews, but it was mostly ECW and generally* we weren't depriving anyone of business because the bootlegs were from international promotions not doing business here and dead territories. It's a different time with different technology and business models. Bootlegging and piracy do a lot more damage now, especially to smaller promotions." *Bob Barnett being the big exception. That would be a reasonable way to address the criticism. Instead, he comes off as overly defensive, in denial, and hypocritical.

Gabe goes into a detailed explanation about how pirating is hurting the business with specific examples of how it's caused them not to be able to run as many shows, pay the wrestlers as much, afford better buildings, etc.. Board response = Gabe's a bitter cry baby, boo hoo. Pretty hilarious to me Not going to pretend I don't pirate stuff too (not Evolve/DG since not a big fan but I DL lots of things in general) but i'm not delusional enough to not be able to see things from the othuper side as well. Look at the reasons people are giving DGUSA has had major booking, marketing and distribution issues. Gabe has owned to all these issues, mostly in other interviews. They are valid criticisms. Your initial post was fairly simplistic about the situation. Then there's the whole issue of how he wouldn't have had a job in wrestling after ECW closed if not for piracy. Someone IMed me the post he made there as a reply to people pointing out his hypocrisy and wow, does he have a lot of chutzpah: RF Video was sued by Dream Stage Entertainment in 2002 for selling Pride dubs. They were selling other bootlegs at that point. That's after Gabe became a full-time RF Video employee and within the last decade. Even if he was telling the complete truth, ROH wouldn't exist without RF's bootlegging. He's a hypocrite who's distorting the fact that he owes his livelihood to a bootlegging business. Otherwise he would just be some guy who worked in the ECW office and got screwed by Heyman's ridiculous financial bullshit.

TBS made them stop for legal reasons. Had they not been paying ASCAP/BMI (as promoters tended to do) or was it a budget issue?

Also, I really should've quoted TomK earlier than this: "Memphis TV show was really straight forward in presenting itself as a TV show. This wasn’t a taped wrestling show in a studio but rather a TV show with a set format announced at the beginning of each show. Time had been set aside for interviews, individual matches, etc. Often times guys fuck up the format as guy will interrupt something that had been set aside for something else. Lance Russell is stuck in position of put-upon Kermit the Frog trying to run a smooth TV show if it wasn’t for these crazy Muppets."

Really? In 2011? Muppet Babies has been gone from TV for many years and will likely never be on DVD. The Muppet Show hasn't been on TV since it was on Odyssey when Odyssey existed and is just available in various DVD releases. They haven't had a TV series in 13 years and a movie in 12. Right now they're a nostalgia act for pop culture junkies and the new movie (written by a pop culture junkie) is being marketed heavily to adults as a celebration of the franchise. I have no idea if there are still Sesame Street News segments with Kermit (the only character who overlaps between the Muppet Show and Sesame Street Muppets). If they do I guess little kids could be pretty familiar with him. But Piggy, Fozzy, etc? Not how things are now. At least Fraggle Rock is on Netflix streaming.

I think it depends on who's involved in the creative process. The Muppet Studios YouTube stuff was largely excellent.

I thought it was a pretty bad show aside from the Muppet segments and Ziggler-Ryder. The non-"WHAT?" Statler & Waldorf segments were kinda disappointing, though, in part because the current voices are startlingly different from the old ones, which is a little weird given how seamless the transitions have been for other characters when the Muppeteer voicing them died (Jim Henson & Richard Hunt) or left (Frank Oz among others). Plus, we didn't get any "DOHOHOHOHOHOHO!!!!"s from them.

Also, the Muppet Studios YouTube vids have generally been excellent.

One spot that was pointed out to me as a kid by one of my uncles, which became one of those things that I noticed in every tag match afterwards... How come the referee always needs to see the babyface make the tag with his own two eyes, even forcing guys who have made a clean tag out of the ring because he didn't see it, but always accepts that heels are making honest tags behind his back just because he hears a clapping sound behind him? Aren't the heels the ones far more likely to lie about something like that? The best explanation I've seen is that since it happens with the heels dominating, the ref feels it doesn't really affect the integrity of the match since they're just doing it to be dicks. The babyfaces, however, are going for the hot tag, which is a major change in the direction of the match, so he has to witness the tag himself.

I never got why a count–out wouldn't be a title change in wrestling internal logic anyway.

When was Hall suspended? Austin shaved his head completely pretty quickly.

It looks like it was complete and they added posthumous thoughts from the co-author, friends, and family.

I got my copy of the Kanyon book from ECW Press and have skimmed through it. If it wasn't obvious reading the review and knowing his history, it's really obvious that Babinsack had issues with the book because of all of the stories Kanyon tells about gay bars, hooking up, witnessing a bondage threesome when he bowed out of a sexual encounter when a woman joined in, being asked by his parents if he's a pitcher or a catcher, etc. Also what I've read so far has been excellent aside from the usual stupid ghostwriter mistakes Babinsack harped on.

We've had this discussion before, but even the pay site should be overhauled into a series of articles that are collected into the newsletters on Wednesday for print subscribers. Then they can either make some of that stuff free or add some additional content specifically for the free site, etc. It's absurdly outdated. And they need to make sure to not throw terribly homophobic book & DVD reviews on the main page.

I don't think so. To be blunt, F4WOnline.com a completely ineffective website in 2011. They've largely abandoned Dave's better known brand to the point it exists mainly as a forwarding domain and the name of a few pieces of content on the site. They first added "Share on [X social network]" buttons a few weeks ago. There is literally no search engine optimization, something that is of utmost importance to all sites nowadays. Until you see the internal stats, you don't realize how much traffic on wrestling sites comes from people searching for WWE, TNA, CM Punk, Jeff Hardy, etc. on Google News. They've largely been siphoning unique visitors for well over a year based on the public traffic estimating sites (which, in fairness, can be inaccurate but are the only gauge we have). They're too complacent and need to figure out that they need decent free content with good SEO to push the pay site further. 18 months ago they raised the price a dollar to employ Admin Tony FULL TIME I'm not disputing that they're doing well based on the number of subscribers. The problem is that they're making no effort to do any better.

I don't think so. To be blunt, F4WOnline.com a completely ineffective website in 2011. They've largely abandoned Dave's better known brand to the point it exists mainly as a forwarding domain and the name of a few pieces of content on the site. They first added "Share on [X social network]" buttons a few weeks ago. There is literally no search engine optimization, something that is of utmost importance to all sites nowadays. Until you see the internal stats, you don't realize how much traffic on wrestling sites comes from people searching for WWE, TNA, CM Punk, Jeff Hardy, etc. on Google News. They've largely been siphoning unique visitors for well over a year based on the public traffic estimating sites (which, in fairness, can be inaccurate but are the only gauge we have). They're too complacent and need to figure out that they need decent free content with good SEO to push the pay site further.

And if you wanted to make that argument about a band you could probably pick a better example than this year's Coachella headliners. Friday: Kings of Leon Saturday: Arcade Fire Sunday: Kanye West / The Strokes Duran Duran weren't the headliners on Sunday. I definitely saw promotion for stuff like the YouTube broadcast with them getting equal billing, but at worst they were the #3 act on Sunday.

Even then, the issue on Raw is really that it's WWE talking down to the audience and revelling in their own awesomeness rather than presenting it more like a celebration of the fans as a collective like it was at the concert. It's in the tone. When the tone is different, like Cole gleefully celebrating that "anal bleeding" or whatever it was that he said that trended a few weeks ago, it didn't have the talking down issue because it was clearly meant to be funny more than anything. Then there's the fact that numerous prime time network shows are openly and actively trying to trend using on-screen graphics with hash tags and such. WWE is just being more annoying and ham fisted about it BECAUSE THEY'RE WWE. That's how they are with EVERYTHING and it has nothing to do with the concept of pushing Twitter hashtags in general. Twitter references are to WWE in 2011 as charity event videos were to the WWF in 1993. WWE comes across insecure in the process because they're insecure, not because of how they choose to express their insecurities.

And if you wanted to make that argument about a band you could probably pick a better example than this year's Coachella headliners.

So you know how lately Dave and Bryan have been constantly saying WWE sounds desperate and insecure about the usual stuff when they brag about something trending on Twitter during Raw? Last night at the Duran Duran concert at MSG, before the show and during the instrumental "Tiger Tiger," they had a screen where tweets with the #duranlive hash tag would be displayed. At one point, in between songs, Simon LeBon announced that they were trending in NY ("...and even I know that's a Twitter reference.") to loud cheers. I guess Simon LeBon is really insecure about Duran Duran not being mainstream or something. Does that make John Taylor his Kevin Dunn?

What's the story on that? An indy promoter (who I won't name for obvious reasons) wrote an email to Dave during the aftermath of the RF bust. In the course of it the email, he went off on a weird tangent about liking younger guys...and also mentioned that his parents (may have been his whole family but I think it was just his parents) didn't know he was gay even though people within wrestling did. It was clearly supposed to be a private email to Dave but he posted it as a column before pulling it a few hours later. Something similar happened with an email from Lance Storm about how awful Ken Anderson is (big difference in content, though...) a year or two back.

Well, it's not like it's surprising: http://www.f4wonline.com/index2.php?option...op=1&page=0 "If you love man on man, man on animal, animal on animal, undead on faux Egyptian, various interspecies conflicts, and to be honest, the ring announcer does provide the litany of abnormalcy one can expect at the shows, then this is the product to warm your heart." But it's still probably the most offensive thing ever on any iteration of that site (not counting Dave accidentally outing someone).

Ostensibly as of January, yes. Unless the percentage is out of a total that includes those who are deceased and not contactable as opposed to the number of those contacted. And depends on if developmental guys who were never called up are included. According to "Road Dogg" Brian James Armstrong except for one all his brothers and himself have used the program. What is the story here Bix? Is it that unbelievable to you? Do you think WWE are double or triple counting the Scott Halls of this world? Going on a witch hunt to find an exhaustive list of 60 isnt really in the spirit of things either. Really just that I wouldn't have expected WWE to release the figure because, well, it's WWE. When I realized where it came from, I was wondering if it was manipulated at all. The official percentage of former WWE wrestlers who have gone through the program is reasonably close to how many Americans are addicts in general, so when you account for wrestlers who are addicts and haven't sought treatment, it's not a flattering figure to WWE. And then I wanted to just open a dialogue about the topic from there. I'm not sure if I've talked about it here but I have wondered how many wrestlers who have been branded painkiller addicts aren't addicts in the compulsive mental illness sense because the estimates about how many wrestlers have problems are sometimes so high that it seems statistically impossible. Once, when I was seeing a neurologist, he explained (to reassure patients who thought that some of the other patients seemed creepy) that some people who don't take pills to get high can end up drug seeking and showing other addict-like behavior due to issues with tolerance and insufficient pain management. With how badly bumps mess dudes up, it makes me wonder.