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The push is before Mania. As others have said: it's good to have this stuff happen in a "free" period rather than during The Biggest Show Of The Year, especially when people are paying for it. Shit gets rolled out clunky all the time. It's how well the company fixes them on the fly, and how well the product delievers when the true mass surge comes, that determine whether it flys. It's easy enough for the WWE to extend the "free period" for another week, especially if they see strong interest. More chances to hook people, the better for them. John

Chris' piece on sign ups data / estimates: http://indeedwrestling.blogspot.com/2014/02/wwe-launch-day-subscriptions-estimates.html

So is this the quickest any thread made it to the Megathread section?

When someone has time, can you toss up what the 24/7 "schedule" looks like.

Just out of curiosity, not as a "gotcha" question, what was your reaction to Montreal--whether watching it or hearing about it for the first time? Watched the PPV live at Casa del Yohe. I thought it was obvious that Vince took the belt off Bret in a way that Bret didn't expect or agree to. Was suprised when people thought differently.

Can you simply fast forward / drag the scroll bar back to where you were? It would suck to watch 2 hours of a PPV, have to run out to do something else, comeback later (or the next day) and sit through the same dame 2 hours again. FWIW, I think some of the Olympics replay streaming was like that - no obvious scroll bar to drag / skip forward.

Something to keep an eye on, with an obvious parallel to the WON HOF: http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/68054018/the-bbwaa-should-rescind-its-2011-award-to-bill-conlin

My thought would be that even if someone paid for your product, if he posted stuff similar to what you guys have banned folks recently her for, then you'd ban them even on a pay board.

You only need to go up a few posts from yours to find a big, massive junk of his bullshit.

Seeing Network adds pop up online. In fact, was getting fed some over at Kos. That likely is a function of the Ad Server reading my browser history, seeing some Wrestling stuff, and feeding me it (when I refreshed I got an add for AT&T, my telecom). So the WWE is starting to spend some money on this. Online ads are reasonably cheap.

This is all so true, and in the case of #2 so sad. I don't think most people outside of education get it.

There's some truth to this statement, but I work in a maths department and there's often complaints about how undergraduate students today know a lot less coming in than they did say 30 years ago. Keith: I'm willing to bet that 30 years ago that teachers were saying the same thing: "Kids today don't know as much as they did in the 50s when I started teaching." -Older Teacher in the mid-80s I suspect that there were articles being written about it, etc. I'm not going to say that kids today know more or less, or give a shit more or less, than kids when I went to school in the 80s. Just that neither gave a shit.

Matt - can you edit / clean up your first review on 2/5? The match run together after the board update, creating a Big Block Of Text.

I would say that Bret was the best worker in the WWF in the 90s. Bret vs Shawn is a matter of taste, but I don't think there are just a handful of people that think Bret was better... or really don't care for much of Shawn's work.

I'm reading the "how perception changes" and "now", and think the point of his first two sentences is the one I addressed. He, you and I all agree that it would be nice if Marty got some jail time over it.

Wade actually is a very nice person. One can be critical of his work, and like everyone there are valid things to be critical of or disagree with. But he is a good person. Mr. Schemer, on the other hand, is a rather vile human being.

The Marty story I tend to believe are the ones of him drugging up women to bang, which if I recall correctly he told on his brief time on Wrestling Classics. Bix or Dylan - do you remember them? Anyway... it's not something that someone would make up, and only something that someone would say if he thought it was a cool funny story of his fun old days in the business. I recall that a slew of people were flat out appalled. Drugging some college kids (two guys and a girl) on a plane and molesting the girl. Buddy Rose and Luke Williams (I think) corroborated it. It's crazy how perception changes. It's not to say that was acceptable then, but the criminal justice system now makes that a very serious crime (as it should be). The guy must be a serious sociopath, which I suspect is an overrepresented psychological condition in the business. It was a crime back then, and a pretty serious one. It's just that rape and sexual assualt have always been under reported and especially in that age range (high school / college) and circumstances (booze or drugs involved). They still are under reported, and if you ever read the stats on the % of women raped or assualted in their lifetime, the % that aren't reported, and then the % of rapists / assualist who actually ever do time... you brain would hurt. It's staggering data.

I think a couple of things gave it away: * Gorilla giving away script elements to get over Dave use to have fun pointing them out in the WON. * the "Lots of people staying in the ring before the Big Guy comes in to toos loads of people out" spots You'd have people going out at a normal clip, then at a certain point eliminations (and usually the match) would grind to a stop. The ring would get filled up waiting for the Monster Of The Year to come out and start tossing people out left and right. OMG in the first, Hogan in the second, etc. * the "Guys who are going to win / be there near the end but can't work / have no gas so the enter late" spot. Studd in the second, Hogan and Warrior in the 3rd. * the "Feuding Guys perfectly timed to face each other / Partners perfectly times to help each other" spot The first one had the Hart Foundation come out 2-4... and Strikeforce Tito at #1, so that pretty much nailed both spots perfectly at the start of the first Rumble. * * * * * You do wonder what would happen if they truly did a Random Draw, and largely had Workers in the match who could "go". You'd have to give it some structure prior to the match to frame the event. My thought would be that if it's a 30 man Rumble, you'd have on Raw and SD a process of selecting #1 and #30, along with say #10 & #15 & #20. Perhaps "draw" the first two, and then have "matches" for the other three. You would actually Work both the drawing and of course the matches are worked, so you can use them to place (i) someone going Long in the #1 spot, (ii) someone Fat / Big / Can't Go Long / Can't Work in the #30 spots, and (iii) the guys you want to have dramatic moments or booking with in the other slots so that everyone else knows that when they come in, "We want you to do A-B-C." Then the other 25 are just random. You give some overall guidelines, and you use the refs to send in instructions... and you probably want to do the "draws" right as the next guy is running to the ring / coming to the ring so it can be "posted" up on the screen. That give you some time of an agent / Vince to give the next guy instructions off camera before he runs out. The folks also know looking at the screen, "Oh... it's X and our general guidelines were to toss him the fuck out in 30 seconds" or whatever. You'd have to do more ad-lib / winging it that currently is done in the Rumbles. But you also could lay out guidelines in advance, and use your agents and refs, and even the wrestlers coming in, to get instructions to the workers. It could be pretty fun to watch... or could be a total trainwreck.

They won't be going to FS1. Have you tracked how often UFC's events are running up against overruns on the shows that air before them? Vince flat out doesn't want to have his show pushed back because some Big 12 hoops game goes long. Or whatever sporting events Fox grabs over time (such as the Big 10 contract being one of the last big ones left out there after the NBA gets done soon). For Vince to allow his programing on FS1, he'd have to get a guarantee that Fox would never schedule a sporting event in the time slot prior to Raw that has a chance of over-running the time slot. Take the Duke-UNC game last night. Event without Overtime, the game bled past the hour. Late in the game there was a very strong chance of OT, which would have pushed it miles into the next slot. Vince hates that. He wasn't a fixed slot. He doesn't even want that Dog Show pre-emption anymore, which is a big reason why it's not on USA anymore: they were faced with the choice between Vince or one of their other valueable ratings draw. They chose Vince. Raw's the key one, but one also suspects that in the coming deal that Vince & Co. are going to want to put more effort into getting SD's viewerships at a good ratio to Raw's. The ability to have both Raw and SD strong adds value (i.e. $$$) to future contracts. So SD getting bumped around by sporting events is also something Vince wouldn't want. For FS1 (or NBCSN) to get the WWE, they'd have to either (i) promise no risky live sports in the slot prior, or (ii) throw Silly Money at Vince that he couldn't turn down. Akin to the silly money that NBC threw at the NHL. The NHL knew it was bad for exposure of the sport, but it also was so much more than what ESPN was willing to go to that they couldn't resist taking the cash.

1. When Owen dropped dead. 2. When it was reported Benoit and his family were dead. 3. When it was reported that Pillman was dead (which I'd flippantly predicted a few months earlier) 4. Wash:Rinse:Repeat Uh... beyond that? I don't really think about Pro Wrestling in terms of Shoot. Tends to annoy the shit out of me, as could be seen in the old thread about Punk "shooting" during the interview, or Bryan being "fired" when it was pretty obvious he'd be brought back no later than right after the Election. The way people talk about "the loss of kayfabe" killing wrestling is how I talk about Work-Shoot-Fabe being one of the worst things ever to happen to wrestling. Just hate it for the most part, and there's been way too much of it in the years since Pillman-Sully. John

You thought it was bullshit yet you suspended your disbelief enough to enjoy the film.... ? Since when did suspension of belief mean you can't enjoy a film because of minor details or in Matt's case structure? So tell me the points at which I suspended my disbelief in the movie. I mean... obviously you sat there with me and my girlfriend and observed what I enjoyed, and slid inside my head to know what I was popping for and why. The floor is yours, Daniel... share your knowledge of exactly how I viewed and enjoyed the movie.

As Loss says, it's fitting. On the "rubbed people wrong", it would be ironic since he appeared more than willing to put people over after he left All Japan and went freelance. Hell, even in All Japan after everyone left, he was more than willing to put over the people brought in to headline.

I didn't write up any of the 1995 shows. I did 3-4 pieces for the Torch on the 1996 trip, along with writing up the NJPW TV that covered G1 and the J-Crown. Haven't read it all in probably a decade or so, but still liked the two primary pieces that I wrote. Probably the end of my initial stretch of "good" Torch writing before RSP-W distracted me and turned me into a shitty writer. The only things that stick out in my mind after that were the ECW PPV pieces, which had a nice amount of meanspiritedness that holds up nicely. In some box of I have my notes from the 1996 trip as well. Didn't take any notes in 1995... again, wasn't writing at that point.

I think that's one of the reasons that the Aja vs Dynamite series was so great. They seemed to avoid all that interpromotional bullshit. Dynamite flat out put over Aja without the bullshit. When it was time for Aja to put over Dynamite, it was done emphatically and without bullshit. With Kudo, we get bullshit. With Kandori, they wouldn't even make the match because Kandori wouldn't put over Aja. I mean... it was kind of set up by Kandori beating Hokuto on this card, but they danced around it keeping it to tags. Not only that, but they couldn't even get Kandori to work the tourney at the Dome the following year. I don't think we realized at the time how lucky we are that the NJPW vs Tenryu/WAR and AJW vs JWP rivalries/feuds worked out so well in this era.

The Marty story I tend to believe are the ones of him drugging up women to bang, which if I recall correctly he told on his brief time on Wrestling Classics. Bix or Dylan - do you remember them? Anyway... it's not something that someone would make up, and only something that someone would say if he thought it was a cool funny story of his fun old days in the business. I recall that a slew of people were flat out appalled. Drugging some college kids (two guys and a girl) on a plane and molesting the girl. Buddy Rose and Luke Williams (I think) corroborated it. That sounds right. Thought it was plane related, but wondered if I was getting it mixed up with some other drugged plan story.