jdw

People came around on Tip a year or so ago? I thought that last a week or two, and then everyone realized: "Oh... that's right... we hate this motherfucker who it total shit and books the WWE like it's his own personal blow up doll that he can go around the world with to fulfill all his personal fantasies." As far as Masked Man, this should make people get their rocks off: Daniel Bryan: Q&A With a Reluctant Hero I bet there's a chunk of the WWE that can't believe they've found someone like Shoemaker to have fun with.

Alrighty. John

Two fold: As you touched on in the elimination match, and pretty much everyone else has since WAR vs NJPW happened, the WAR side pretty much dropped off the cliff after Tenryu in terms of anyone having real cred against the top NJPW guys. So if you're going to book a Mutoh/Muta vs WAR match with someone other than Tenryu, you've got to find someone. Kabuki got the call. Then they worked opposite each other in a fair number of tags, and had this which Kabuki "won" the month before: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-Q3sf9nxd8

Probably should chance that from "final possible occurrence" to "third most common that I can think of" to be consistent with the first two. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqyAmgz2QTs You've got two of them in the Warrior Kicks The Living Shit Out Of Rude section of the match, which is the first six minutes. Neither is a transition/counter. They're just Warrior destroying Rude, and looking like he'd pitch a shutout until the distraction spot turned things around. God I love that match... John

I must have missed Dave making the annual trip to cover the NCAA Tourney for the WON... and those every-four-years trips to the Olympics to cover the freestyle and Grecco tournies. In turn, we all know what will happen in the WON when Bruno drops dead.

That could be entertaining as hell.

We all think the WWE = Sports Rights Fee was laughable when the WWE first started rolling it out. I think we've shot it down a few times. We also all have long said that the WWE's 4M viewers are of less value than other types of content (such as Sports) having 4M viewers. My walk through the NASCAR numbers in another thread wasn't to make the WWE look good. It was to point out that the WWE was full of shit in how they were presenting NASCAR numbers i.e. under reporting them. I guess the way I would put it... If one game of the EPL each week averaged in the US the viewers Raw averages, and another game averaged what SmackDown does, we'd be talking about a TV contract paying $400M a year... maybe $500M, instead of the $80M overpay that NBC made. Whereas the WWE isn't going to get remotely close to $400M or $500M. The flip side: those viewers are of value to USA. If they weren't, they never would have taken the WWE back nor pay them decent money for the show. John

One other add: Gordy was a month past his 32nd birthday here. He'd been around forever, but you forget that he wasn't that old. John

On the plane flight over for the Aug-Sep series. Last worked the July Budokan. Tag title challenge a couple of days earlier which I recall was watchable. He was to have the TC shot at the Sep Budokan. When he went out, they had Doc vs Kobashi for the spot, and Doc then challenging Misawa. Bubba then teamed with Williams for the tag league, and of course Doc really picked up his game. John

No shit. "Back when I was a kid, we didn't have TV. We read. Kids today don't read." -My Dad in the 70s As I pointed out several threads ago but you seem to ignore, The Internet / Online is just the latest chapter in tech evolving and changing the world... with people like Neal Gabler and you pretending that the same exact shit wasn't going on with tech when Young Neal and Young Jerry were kids and that cranky older people like Older Neal and Older Jerry weren't stuff out of the air that doesn't hold up with five seconds of thought. I gave you the example of Neal's hook intro in the article that you loved so much you had to drag it over here. The same exact stuff was going on 30 year ago when Neal was a movie reviewer on National TV. Neal is either too stupid to remember (which I don't buy since he's not a complete dumbfuck) or just too much of a cranky bastard to give five seconds of thought to, "Hmmm... was there anything like the Spidey Reboot back in the 80s of a major epic blockbust from the 70s? Hmmm..." You of course chose to ignore that as well. Which is par for the course. So are books and newspapers. People in my youth were linking them, and if we go back further I'm sure we'll find Marrow talking about TV killing stuff of. That was my point several threads back: this is the same shit that's been going on for generations. Radio was killing books. TV killed radio, and was going to kill movies. Etc., etc., etc. They are all just step forward in tech, which have always impacted what was before them. You're losing me here. * We chose to connect to our internet content by turning on our receiving device. * We chose to connect to our television content by turning on our receiving device. * We chose to which internet content to watch by selecting it from a variety of options. * We chose to which television content to watch by selecting it from a variety of options. * if we don't like the internet content, we turn it off or select something else. * if we don't like the television content, we turn it off or select something else. Same thing for internet music vs owned/stored music vs radio music. We actively turn on the device, select what we want to listen to, switch off/over if we don't like something. Reading this message board is no more active than reading The Nation when I get it in the mailbox: I having to actively get both, and then actively chose what to read from them. The decision making process is the same. The tech that provides the content is different. There are kids of my gen who watched the Brady Bunch. There are kids a but younger than me who watched Saved By The Bell, and talk about it like my gen did TBB. There's a later age bracker that would have a Nick or Disney show that's more recent: I suspect we have some posters who were of the age range that watched Clarissa Explained All. Another later one around Hanna or Wizards of Whatever Place. Hoback's son watches Kickin' It. Kids, left to their own devices, are selecting stuff to watch. Again: it's just another brick in the advancement of tech. Which people are bent about the CHANGE~! just like people in prior gens were getting bent about extremely similar change. Okay... let me draw a little analogy for you. Remember those crackpots who didn't want Black People to marry White People? They had all sorts of reasons for it, including Tradition and pointing to The Bible, and that it would Ruin The Country. They happen to be the same arguments as people are making against Same Sex Marriage. Seriously. One doesn't have to change much in the Interracial vs Gay Marriage protestations to find the commonality. That's what this whole thing is. You're arguing against Same Sex Marriage with the same "Holy Shit Change & Hellfire!!!" stuff that people were rolling out against prior changes in the 80s and 70s and 60s and 50s... and probably the 1850s on something else. Why would I say that you are correct when you're wrong as usual. I mean... that piece by Neal that you dragged over here to restart this discussion was utter shite. When point out that it was utter shite, you won't even defend it. Standard stuff. John

Original version of the post: Which fits with: John

Most of the "second wave" was Nostalgia base. If you went to Monkees concert, the number of Adults would be far greater than New Fan Kids. As far as true popularity: 1966-68 Peak Singles #1 - "Last Train to Clarksville" #1 - "I'm a Believer" (B-Side "I'm Not Your Steppin' Stone" went to #20) #2 - "A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You" #3 - "Pleasant Valley Sunday" (B-Side "Words" went to #11) #1 - "Daydream Believer" #3 - "Valleri" #19 - "D. W. Washburn" Albums #1 - The Monkees (13 weeks at #1) #1 - More of the Monkees (18 weeks) #1 - Headquarters (1 week) #1 - Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. (5 weeks) #3 - The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees 1986-87 Singles: #20 - That Was Then, This Is Now #79 - "Daydream Believer - Remix" #87 - "Heart and Soul" Album #72 - Pool It! It's not just that the Monkees were wildly more popular at their peak: it's that their "popularity" in the 80s was wildly overplayed. Folks thought "That Was Then, This Is Now" was cute and shit... then they bombed in sales. Flat out bombed. Their concerts did decent business: not great, but decent enough for a washed up oldies band. It really didn't. It's puffiery. If they were more popular, one of the major networks would have bought up the episodes and aired one each Friday at 8:30 because it would have pulled in more than at least one of them was drawing... and would have cost wildly less money that paying the cast and Creative and Directors of Step by Step. I mean... you don't think Duffy & Somers and all those kids were working for less than the residuals for Brady Bunch? Step By Step never got into the Top 30. It's hardly in the sub conscience of America, certainly not like Duffy's more famous role (Bobby Ewing) or Somers (Chrissy in Three's Company). But it ran for 7 years, had more episodes than The Brady Bunch, and made Duffy and Somers more money than the entire cast of TBB was paid. Why? Because it actually was more popular in 1991-97 than The Brady Bunch. Just like TBB was more popular in its run that re-runs of Leave it to Beaver of Dennis The Menace or Make Room For Daddy, which were in syndy. I doubt I could have in our department lunch yesterday and gotten any. Age range of about 40-60. Of course "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia" would have gotten at least a couple. Parents have always existed. The equiv of syndication/re-runs has existed since at least the 60s. They still exist. What the running theme of this is that something has magically changed in the last few years and/or decade in younger people being more or less interested in stuff from the past. And that's a massive stretch. John

Actually, we saw it and thought it was too stupid to comment on. Even the authors wouldn't claim Undertaker was the #2 celeb in the world, or that Cena is #16. Looking at their website: http://www.whoisbigger.com/entity/john_cena http://whoisbigger.com/entity/Dwayne_Johnson Cena and Rock appear to have dropped just a bit. Oh... wait... who is the #2 celeb in the world? http://whoisbigger.com/entity/Curtis_Bush -The Ninth Doctor John

Understood. Though while we think of today as having 200 options, there actually were more back in the 80s and 70s that folks care to remember. Shit like Family Affair and The Courtship of Eddie's Father was in re-run-o-rama. Lucy was around forever. Andy Griffith was. F-Troop was. Etc. Go deeper into UHF and you'd have a ton of Westerns. Really the same shit as now, and as in the 80s Youtube, and other things like it, have done big views of Old Shit. In fact, there's old shit on them that hasn't seen the light of day in ages. You know how we get all hyper about new Lawler Shit or Puro Shit showing up? People hung onto stuff like The Johnny Cash Show and were tossing them up on Youtube before they got their official releases. My point isn't that people, including I, didn't watch it. It's that it rated low for all of our generations relative to what was Current. In 1977 when I was 13, Brady Bunch vs Star Wars as a thing kids talked about? Not close. Brady Bunch vs Happy Days, at it's *peak*? Not even close. Brady Bunch vs Suzanne Somers chest on Three's Company? Not even close. I doubt it was terribly different in any of our generations when we were 13 if we care to recall our school and classmates. John

Unlikely. The TV movie did well, but the re-launched series died a death even quicker than the one in the early 80s. There was nostalgia for one-offs. Not true popularity to sustain a show. I think Loss was talking about syndie reruns. I don't have any hard data but I've heard the same thing--the show wasn't any kind of ratings monster in first-run, but had a resurgence in repeats, just like Star Trek though obviously to a lesser degree. I've read similar stuff. But it's usually, like the article being quoted, bullshit. :/ Star Trek is a bit different: it bombed when it aired. The SciFi watching generation came after. It's "popularity" is that it had: * an original small base of fans who were hated that it was cancelled and obsessively wanted more * "new" fans who came along after via re-runs... and wanted to see more My brother and I were part of the second group: we were far too young to have watched the original one. What you end up with is a cumulative fan base, which if (like the WWE counting up the "viewers" of all their programs), gives a bit of an artificial number for the popularity. Think along the lines of Dark Side Of The Moon. The thing has sold 40M+ albums. A large % of people who bought that "liked" it. Sure, some folks have dropped dead since the early 70s... but the majority of people who bought the thing are still alive. 20M people are fans of Dark Side of the Moon in 2013 2M people bought the album in 1973 Ergo: DSotM is vastly more popular in 2013 than in 1973! Really? If you asked me in the late 80s whether I watched Brady Bunch and liked it, I would have said, "Sure... watched it when I was a kid and liked it." But I wasn't watching it in 1989. It's highly unlikely that the daily viewers of TBB in 1989 were higher than the first run viewers when the show was at it's peak, especially if we factor in the population growth in the country. Someone was just adding up viewer numbers in a week, like adding Raw+SD+NTX and pretending that the same person doesn't watch more than one. John

As am I. But you went to school. How much of the kids in your school, from elementary through high school, would regularly talk about an old TV show that was repeated the prior day... or something current? Same with music? Same with movies? Just because we're oddball's who like old shit doesn't mean we can project it onto the mass of kids we grew up with. I don't recall a whole lot of conversations about what Alice and Al The Butcher did the day before, but lots of kids were talking about Cheryl Ladd in a bikini the next day. :/ Or Roots... or Family Ties, etc. John

Looking at the other major players named: * Discovery Communications An odd fit. One would also expect Vince to demand to be on either Discovery Channel or TLC given the number of households those two are on, and their "Basic" nature. Animal Planet is in the same boat, but can't see Vince wanting that one. Also... historically Discovery's business model doesn't include splashing the type of cash that it would take to get the WWE. They've tended to develop cheap-o shows, with ones that become "hits" pushed and run into the ground, and ones that don't to well tossed overboard. The failures never cost all that much to lose the business much money. * Viacom Things didn't work out well last time. Anyway... that seems pretty much like it would be Spike. Not sure that the WWE wants another round on MTV. CMT is hardly where they want to go. Can't see them on the Nicks. Looks pretty Spike-centric as a landing spot. * Fox FS1 creates the same issues as ESPN: "live" sports going long running into the WWE's timeslot. One would assume then the FX side of the house would be the ticket, of which the main FX is the only viable one right now with the others really midcard channels at best right now. The WWE bring in viewers... not sure if it's how Fox wants FX to be seen. * Comcast Remains the best fit because of USA. Finding spots for the other programing is the problem, and it's questionable if Comcast wants to add SmackDown to Raw on USA rather than tossing it on a weaker Comcast channel. When you look around... there again might not be as much demand for the WWE programing as Vince would like us to think. Not that it's "unwanted", but that it's an odd fit in so many places. My choice? A&E would be a hoot, with the WWE fitting in and having to do some really stupid cross promotional stuff. John

Disney most likely equates to ESPN or A&E to be honest. RAW won't be following Fantasia any time soon. The WWE won't be on ESPN or ESPN2. MNF alone kills off Raw being on ESPN, and it's unlikely they want to counter program Raw over onto to ESPN2 from Sep-Dec. Even in the non-MNF part of the year, Vince absolutely hated "pre-emptions" during their first run with USA. ESPN's content is regularly over-running time slots. The rest of Disney via Wiki: ABC ABC Family ESPN - ESPN - ESPN2 - ESPNews - ESPN Classic - ESPNU A+E Networks (50%) - A&E - Bio - Crime & Investigation Network - History - H2 - Lifetime - LMN - Lifetime Real Women - Military History Disney Channel Disney Junior Disney XD Okay... toss out the Disney ones at the bottom: the WWE isn't going on them. Then toss out the "L's", as the WWE isn't going on a chick station. Bio and Crime don't look like a fit... even setting aside the SyFy connection, which is something that the WWE probably would have preferred never to have happened but were stuck with it. Same for History and H2. ESPN's are out. They're not going to be on ABC. We're left with: ABC Family A&E Really hard to see Vince wanting it on ABC Family. Which leaves: A&E A&E has pretty radically transformed themselves into The Stupid Network. Perhaps Vince, or A&E, thinks the WWE will fit right in. Anyway... Disney is an odd fit as no one channel of their makes a lot of sense. Perhaps there's a plan to rebrand one of the low level ones, but I'm not sure how much Vince wants to go through that again after the last time he left USA to help someone do that. John

MTV started airing reruns in the mid/late 80s. I wanna say 87/88 and I absolutely loved this show. Even though it was on the air nearly 15 years before I was born. I can remember watching the show every day after school and in fact begged my mother to see them in concert during their reunion tour along the same time.( I was only about 7 or 8 at the time) I dug the Beatles in Jr. High and High School in 1979-84. Had a couple of Beatles t-shirts, in addition to other current rock groups. So it's not a "never" that a kid liked something that was hot 20 years before he turned 18. Of course I was the only one who, during my time in HS, wore a Beatles shirt. Zep... sure. But they also we performing as recently as 1980, so they weren't "ancient" like the Beatles. An *no one* ever wore an Elvis shirt... or a Sinatra shirt... or a Bing Crosby shirt. That's not to say that some 13-18 year old in 1979-84 somewhere in the US didn't love him some Elvis (sure a decent number did), some Sinatra (okay... that's stretching) and some Bing (umm...). Just that as a % of the population at that point... small. Even the Beatles would have been small. I know... I went to Beatlesfests back in those days, and it wasn't exactly Comic Con.

Unlikely. The TV movie did well, but the re-launched series died a death even quicker than the one in the early 80s. There was nostalgia for one-offs. Not true popularity to sustain a show.

When you were 12, did you care more about the new movies coming out, or movies that came out in the 60s? More about music that was current, or stuff from the 60s? Did you watch more Old TV, or did you watch more New TV such as pro wrestling or Cosby or Family Ties? Did you spend more time watching current sports, or did you not care about that and instead focused your time on sports in the 60s? The question isn't about total obliviousness. I doubt that Neal would even claim that: after all, Spidey-Re-Boot did $250M+ in the US and $750M world wide because it was another in the Spider-Man series, even if it was a re-boot. John

There's a link to a related article: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/14/en...ovelty-20120715 A key passage: There it is right there. I will make no secret of the fact that I genuinely despise that attitude. Genuinely and deeply. So the generation of kids who grew up listening to the Beatles in the mid-60s all wanted to listen to their parent's music of the 40s? No... they didn't give a shit about it. Neal Gabler isn't a total dumbfuck. But if someone actually sat down and asked him about *his* generation when they were kids, and the various entertainment that they watched/listened to/bought, and how much they really cared about the stuff their parents did a decade before, in about 5 minutes he would cop to being full of shit. Or if they asked him about the *last* generation, he's cop to the same thing. It's probably a waste to point this out, but: Jaws (1975) Jaws 2 (1978) Jaws 3-D (1983) Jaws: The Revenge (1987) Neal was a movie reviewer when Jaws 3-D came out. It was a total reboot of the prior two. Hmmm... "A lot of folks have wondered whether it is too soon, just [8] years after the release of the original film and five years after the [second] installment, to relaunch [Jaws]. When questioned, a producer of the new picture snapped that anyone who asked that is "too old." He may have been dismissively arrogant, especially to geriatrics over 30, but he may also have been right." -What Neal Gabler *wasn't* saying in 1983 about Jaws 3-D and the Post Boomers before they were called Generation X Yep. Neal's intro works just as well in 1983 as it did 29 years later in 2013. John

I go to Grantland all the time to read Lowe, so since I'm there and if one pops up, I'll scan it and drag it over.

Millennials = Generation Y = Echo Boomers It's kind of funny that folks have had to come up with a third name for this generation when the first one was being used even before Generation X became popular for the post-Boom. Hell... I grew up with my generation being called the Post Boom and have always thought Gen X was silly... mostly because a shittly Billy Idol band already used the term. John

NASCAR doesn't run 154 "races" in a year. It runs: 33 - Sprint Cup + Bud Shootout/Sprint Unlimited (5.7M) + Daytona 500 Qualifying (3.1M) + Budweiser Duels + Sprint All-Star Race (3.7M) 33 - Nationwide Series 22- Camping World Truck Series Sprint averaged last year: 7.8M on FOX for 13 Sprint Cup races 4.7M on TNT for 6 Sprint Cup races 4.8M on ESPN for 17 Sprint Cup races http://www.jayski.com/news/pages/story/_/p...on-Ratings-2013 Then add in: 5.7M Bud Shootout/Sprint Unlimited 3.1M Daytona 500 Qualifying 3.7M Sprint All-Star Race The Budweiser Duels were on Speed, and low rated in part due to the jobber nature of the network. Fox expects FS1 to be their ESPN, and over time the Duels should go up on FS1 vs Speed... or at least that's what they're banking on. The Shootout/Unlimited actually tends to do 7M+, but "was the first to air opposite the NBA's All-Star Saturday Night since 2003" which cut 2M off it. Sprint Cup drives the contract. It also tends to get a wide broadcast window, with a Pre Game Show, then a staggering amount of bullshit in the "race" timeslot before the flag actually gets dropped. We're talking about a 3-4+ hour "race" timeslot, not counting the other NASCAR related content the networks have around it. That's likely where they get their "156 races": 36 * 4.33 hours = 156. Where they come up with a "1.38 household rating" is beyond me, since the Sprint Cup ratings were far higher than that, not to mention the 7.8M / 4.7M / 4.8M for Fox / TNT / ESPN. The most important part of this to Fox and NBC: http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal...AR-ratings.aspx FS1 and NBCSN are desperate for Content, especially Content that could get locked up by ESPN into the next decade. That's 20 Sprint Cup races that will be over on those networks that they hope to eventually draw in the range of what even TNT could do: NASCAR fans are smart enough to find those 6 races that bridged the primary Fox and ESPN halves of past seasons. None of that is the case for the WWE. ESPN doesn't want it. FS1 and NBCSN aren't desperate to overpay for it. Both are looking at: * the NBA contract coming up which it's likely that *both* won't get a pieces of, and better than 50/50 that no single one of them will get it unless they break the bank. * Big 10 deal (i.e. Football since that's the key). That's one that either of them could get from ESPN, especially if the Big 10 sees ESPN as completely in bed with the SEC (which they are with the coming SEC Network) and the ACC (which ESPN owns 100% of and will eventually do a Network for)... while being half in the sack with both the Big 12 and PAC 12 (which Fox has the other half of). The B1G may want their own house organ to focus on them... and overpay for them. NBC and Fox know this, and also know it's the last major conference up for grabs until well into next decade The WWE ain't those guys. Anyway... back to NASCAR... Then there's Nationwide. It averages about 2M per race. That's pretty decent if we compare it to something *below* the SmackDown level. That's the key way to look at it: the thing draws more than NXT for 33 races a year which each got 2.5 to 3 hours long. NXT doesn't even have 33 one hour episodes in a year. Point of all of this: The WWE isn't fucking NASCAR. If they really want to have fun, they should compare themselves to the NHL, which got that laughable $200M a year deal from NBC. My guess is that the WWE would be really, really, really happy to get $200M a year in this round, especially if they can avoid locking up for more than 5 years so that they can go back to the well again if $200M also is an undervalue.