jdw

This is funny. Leave it to Forbes to come up with a stupid list. Are they going to revise it when Hobbit 2.0 goes close to $1B world wide, we add it to the $467.4M that Star Trek Into Darkness made, and declare Benedict Cumberbatch the champ? After all, he was the lead heel in both movies... and considering Forbes gives full credit to all three "lead" babyfaces. John, thinking it's best not to mention Idris Elba...

I'd also add that Awesome was making decent money in FMW. Not off the charts, but decent money. This was a period in the pre-Monday Night wars era where the WWF and WCW weren't offering tons of money for guys underneath the top guys. The WWF had scaled back to largely one house show by this point rather than multiple crews, so the roster was also smaller. They were a bit more selective in who they brought in rather than casting out the net and grabbing everyone in the 80s. So in the WWF, there were less chances. In the 80s, you'd think the WWF would grab both Big Titan (Rick Bognar) & Gladiator (Awesome) from FMW. In the mid-90s... not so much. They did eventually grab Bognar for the Fake Razor gimmick, but this was a point where Awesome was main eventing in FMW. Why didn't WCW grab him when they were signing everyone up? I don't think he was much on their radar until ECW. Hell, even the initial PPV matches in ECW didn't get him a job with WCW, and he was just sitting out there.

Misread the original, didn't think it was just weekly stuff.

Valentine's Day is the Royal Rumble. Moves shitloads of merch too. The big hit of the early year. Although I remember one time this girl drew number one, she had to go the whole hour and she was not so happy about that… I drew 27. I was gutted as most everyone had already come and gone. I'm looking at that a number of ways...

Snowden will especially appreciate the Gold Dust Trio reference. John

Pro Wrestling Chaos Theory: WWE got crazy on the eve of the TLC pay-per-view, and it was glorious Dear god... John

I hadn't thought of that traveling part of Christmas. About half the time I'm JCP Flair: Christmas morning in SoCal with my parent, then jet flying across country to the DC Metro for Christmas night with my girlfriend.

I wonder about some of the SNME. Hogan-Race and Savage-Ted before Mania IV? Savage-Hart the year before also had a Hogan-Bundy match, and I seem to recall one of the posters here liked one of those two 1987 Hogan-Bundy SNME matches quite a bit (or both of them a good deal). Savage-Jake in 1986 also had a Hogan-Herc match that I recall was pretty solid for a Hogan SNME match. Don't know if anything else would fit. The Hogan-Bossman cage match show had a 9 minute Arn & Tully vs Demo match, and maybe Demo Fans like that one. Hogan-Bossman was great. John

I thought so too, since it means nothing to me at this point. But the sales... pretty mind numbing. We also should probably give it some extra points for having a gimmick beyond "Day off from Work/School", and selling stuff, and stuff our faces with food. I'm not religious, so that angle doesn't mean anything to me... but I'm willing to admit that it means a lot to a lot of people, and in ways that don't get accounted for in Traditional Capitalist Revenue Streams. It has that Old School Revenue Stream: go to Church, have that communal feeling, and give to the church. John

Mother's Day is the Royal Rumble. Simple gimmick, same thing year after year, monster draw: Holiday Season Spending Thanksgiving is a tough one since most of "Thanksgiving Weekend" spending is really Christmas & other stuff buying on Black Friday sales. Thanksgiving on it's own really isn't a big draw. Valentine's Day has a great gimmick, almost like Wrestlemania Title Matches back in the day where you knew you would see something special and (after a certain point) a title change. With Valentine's Day the unspoken gimmick of course Getting Laid. Easter is underrated. Surprised by that one. Agree that Halloween beats Thanksgiving, wisely transitioning fans from seeing it as a Kids Holiday (Trick-o-Treat & Dress Up & "Candy! Candy! Candy!!!") to a Adult Holiday (Halloween Parties & Booze & Dope & "Hope I Score Tonight!!!") to a Parent Holiday (Your Children Dress Up & Trick-o-Treat & "I Need To Make Sure They Don't Eat All That Damn Candy!"). Brilliant booking by Holiday Creative, and Holiday Corporate has done a fine job of creating merchandise to sell.

Hulu is also something of a mess that no one seems entirely committed to, including the trio of owners.

Christmas is the Wrestlemania. As others said, it's over in most parts of the world, and crosses all generations from kids to old farts. People remember past Christmas like Hogan vs Andre, and base ones. One Thanksgiving is the same as another, with the only exceptions being disasters than end up winning Worst Holiday of the Year and become infamous for their shittiness. And the food gimmick: Turkey? Is there a worse Holiday Food Gimmick? It's not just that Christmas kicks its ass with a variety of potential main eventers, but the 4th chairshots with will 'Cue and Grilling. Yeah... Thanksgiving is JTTS holiday.

I also believe that it was originally used with boxing, then made its way over to wrestling. John

Check... got it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti7irf1SCrI Thanks, BBscout.

I think we have Bix's next sig.file gif. Anyway... what segment is this from? Is there a youtube link that I can watch to get the context of why everyone is laughing at how stupid Steph is?

I think somewhere up the thread I mentioned that Networks are starting to see a negative impact on viewers from a mass of content being available on places like Netflixs. While some show can build a fan base off it, others have seen 10%+ drops in viewers for new episodes of the shows because a slew of prior stuff is up there. I suspect the WWE will claim there's value in Raw and Smackdown "live" because their fans want to see the shows live (or within a few hours off the DVR). It certainly is something they're pushing in their Media Storyline when comparing themselves to Sports and that "Pay more for us because we're like Sports where people want to watch it live!" meme. Whether Comcast buys that, or anyone else does... who knows. It's highly likely that Comcast would want some strong exclusivity on first run episodes. Whether that's a week... two weeks... a month... who knows. It's seems very unlikely that the WWE would be able to put the content up on WWE Net within hours of the show airing, unless they're willing to take a good sized cut in rights fees. It also seems unlikely that the WWE is going to do anything to put their rights fees at risk when launching WWE Net, or screwing up their relationship with whoever carries Raw and SD. Those are the methods that they're going to use to shill the WWE Net: by pimping the shit out of it on "free tv". John

I don't find anything in the most recent 10-K indicating how long it goes. It is in the risk section: Earlier they reference iNDEMAND and TVN. But Barrios has been talking about life after PPV relating to the Network for most of the year, so one gets the sense that either the contract has a shorter term than one would expect, or has a rather easy/short no-cause termination window. That might be the case, as iNDEMAND long ago may have had standard boilerplate mutal 30-day no-cause language to let them get out of underperforming deals. If it stays in year after year, it's just sitting their waiting for the WWE to pull the trigger. Might be worth digging deeper with sources.

Perhaps they're not long term contracts, and are about to expire.

There also were those shows over on TBS and TNT, with a certain % of the viewers crossing over. John

Well, it does get across the general point of Trip doing what's best for Trip at the expense of the company.

Harley Race sure looks a lot like Ric Flair: http://whatculture.com/wwe/wwe-10-times-tr...-business.php/5

It is, but it's also Steve: he'll say something odd out of left field from time to time.

Steve wouldn't have had a problem with Hogan winning.

This is a bit tricky. The states (and DC) that Bob regularly defended the title in accounted for 24.1% of the US population in the 1980 Census. Dory's account for more than that in the 1970 Census. It's hard to put an exact finger on it since: * we don't have close to a full record for Dory * we have a pretty exact understanding of the WWF's territory pre-Expansion Pretty obvious there * things split up tricky One defense in SF that's on the list, while more work in Los Angeles. So how do you split up those 19M in California. Colorado is similar: the NWA seems to have a corner of the state in Colorado Springs, while Denver is AWA country. Still, you don't have to work very hard to scale over the 24.1% of the WWF. On top of that, Dory as Champ seemed to work quite a bit more of Canada than Backlund worked as Champ (pretty much Toronto). Japan is interesting, but Dory was a bigger star.

Lots of guys got left off ballots, including pretty much everyone from #10 on down: 3- Hulk Hogan 2318 25 2 7-Ric Flair 2225 25 1 10- Buddy Rogers 2102 25 11-El Santo 2091 23 1 12-Antonio Inoki 1987 24 13- Steve Austin 1975 23 14-Joe Stecher 1929 24 15-Shohei Baba 1801 22 16-Gorgeous George 1770 23 17-Verne Gagne 1769 24 18-The Rock 1765 23 19-George Hackenschmidt 1725 24 20-Harley Race 1637 23 21-Antonino Rocca 1573 24 22-Nick Bockwinkel 1562 25 23-Dory Funk Jr 1487 24 24-Mil Mascaras 1481 23 25-Dusty Rhodes 1459 22 I'd say it was something different from sandbagging given the wide spectrum of wrestlers on the list above.