jdw

"As you can imagine, I have nothing but disgust and pity for websites that rip off others' hard work." -MKJ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p34JujfVKkw&t=34m6s Through the end. Of course 37:32 is off the hook.

We are wrestling fans. We'll eventually tie everything back into wrestling.

It'd have to be something that cost a ton of money and failed right out the gate. ...and did huge damage to the business as a whole (when OJ talks about auteurs being to blame for their own Hollywood demise, this movie served as the breaking point). That's why I'm tempted to go with '87 Crockett over SWS, which was sort off in its own isolated world and ended up being a blessing in disguise for All-Japan, despite being a money pit. TNA is one long unending Heaven's Gate.

From a critical standpoint, a lot of critics blame Jaws and Star Wars for killing off the more artistic, auteur-driven New Hollywood cinema, so if people view the territories as being more artistic per se then I think Star Wars or Jaws is a fairly apt analogy for the WWF. I like the image of the WWF being Jaws. The auteurs were also largely to blame for the demise of New Hollywood, much like the territories themselves, and Hollywood was taking advantage of a changing commercial landscape much like Vince did. I think the analogy works fairly well. Not unreasonable. Except Jaws probably was a better movie than the WWF was wrestling.

Have no idea if these searches hold when posted, but give it a go: WWF: http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon...11220&SID=2 Evart: http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon...11220&SID=2 Evart in more detail: http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon...HC=83&SID=4 Setting aside the porn, the WWF ones by Evart are little inconsistent. Some, like the Andre, might be box art. Others, like the WrestleMania and "Biggest, the smallest, the strangest, the strongest" (which isn't porn) aren't for box art: It is an oddity.

I wouldn't disagree. But this was the mid-90s. It really doesn't have anything to do with 80s WWF or SW getting release in 1977. No one is arguing that. Hell, those shitty prequels were one of the first movies to push the shit out of ad campaign tie-ins with places like Burger King, which we see all the time now. But again... that's the 90s and 00s, not the 70s. This is 2013. Hogan was 1984. I keep saying in this thread, as I have for more than a decade online: Vince didn't always innovate, but he usually did things better. We'll take something that hasn't been discussed in the thread, and isn't relevant to the 80s but makes the point: Vince didn't innovate turning wrestling television into Big Money Making TV Content. While Vince may have made money over the years with some of his deals like SNME or Primetime / Early Raw, it wasn't a cash cow nor a major focus on his business in terms of making money. It was still there to get people to buy the stuff that mattered: house shows and PPV / Closed Circuit. The folks who innovated in the US on that was Eric Bischoff and the Turner folks. Nitro and later Thunder were cash cows with loads of revenue coming into the Corporate coffers, a chunk of which were tossed into the Wrestling books. It's why over time the company focused so much attention on TV: it wasn't just the egofuck of beating Vince (though that was a big part), but Wrestling Content was a massive boon to TNT (and TBS) due to those prime time ratings. 1 hour to 2. 2 hours to 3. 2 additional hours on Thursday. They weren't creating that extra time just to sell house shows and PPV: it was to sell Television Time. Vince got that, followed that lead, and when he got his TV feet back under him, went on the same expansion plan and made a killing in revenue off television. To this day it remains a central element of the company. Vince might pat himself on the head for inventing that. He didn't. He just ended up doing it better than anyone else. This to me is an overstatement. Comic book movies have been out there your entire life. I'd disagree that Spidey was an important moment, but it hardly was earth changing. Marvel's properties are, and still are, spread out: Fox: X-Men, Fantastic Four, and other smaller projects like Daredevil & Electra Columbia: Spider-Man and jobbers like Ghost Rider Marvel: Avengers univers, along with everything they've been able to hold onto / regain Spidey didn't have anything do to with Fox doing X2 and Daredevil: those were in the works before Spidey came out. X-Men's success made Fox want to invest into the properties they had. Over time, X has been the only thing they've been able to sell. Of course they're going to reboot Fantastic Four, but we all know that as soon as Avengers took off. Dittos with Ang Lee's Hulk: that was a project in the works for more than a decade, harking back to the 1989 Batman era and folks trying figure out how to get in on that. Lee got involved in it more than a year before Spidey was released, and shooting began before Spidey was released. In turn, Spidey didn't have much to do with the Superman and Batman franchises. They're Warner's baby, and they were always going to cough out more rather than have the rights revert back to DC. The success of not just Spidey, but the entire genre including X-Men, made them go back in during the mid-00's. Hell, Warner lifted Singer from the X-Men series to reboot Superman. Marvel Studios is a different beast. It's drive to produce movies itself was more than just Spidey: it was the fact that Marvel wasn't raking in as much money off the X-Men and Spidey movies as they thought they should given their ownership of the base characters. So self product, and keep more of the cash. Smart. Spidey had a big impact. But it was a piece of various balls in the air that got us to where we are now. A big one, but there were other big ones as well. I live through it. SW didn't really stamp on our views that Summer = Blockbuster. You can look at the other big movies of 1977, and the big movies of 1978 and the big movies of 1979 and the big movies of 1980, and it really wasn't a case of Summer = Blockbuster. There very much was still a split between them coming out in Summer and in Fall/Winter. Trust me... Summer = Blockbuster was an 80s thing when it completely took off. That's coming from someone who saw SW more than 20+ times that summer it came out. Meltzer was/is Meltzer, and most hardcores in the 80s hated the WWF. I certainly did back them. But... That was then, this is now. There have always been hardcores online, and all of us who were online back in the mid-90s certainly ran into them. There were people who loved the WWF and hated WCW, people who loved WCW and hated the WWF, those kooky ECW fans over in the corner, and those elitist snob puroresu fans getting off on their own stuff and looking down their nose at everyone else. Now? There are plenty of people online who like 80s WWF. There are big long threads about it all over the web. There were polls on sites that have long since disappeared where 80s WWF stood toe-to-toe with the more praised 90s and 00s WWF and frankly did pretty well, with people liking both. So... It's well past the time that people stop tossing out the "Elitist Snob" crap at people who don't think 80s WWF is all that great. People like what they like, and dislike what they dislike for whatever reasons they have. That goes for any promotion or wrestlers. Example: I really hate watching the 1998 and 1999 Misawa-Kobashi matches. I'd rather watch a random Triple H match... and I fucking HATE Triple H. Now if some All Japan fan read that comment and responded by saying: "You must be one of those rubes who hates All Japan and puroresu." Well... that person would be a dumb ass. People like what they like, don't like what they don't like, stop thinking it's because they're Elitists or Rubes. They just happen to not like what you like, or vice versa. More often than any of us care to think, they might just be right and the shit is better/worse than we think it is. That's all stuff we covered when the topic came up. We looked it in a variety of ways, and from every angle. The person making the claim just happened to be dead wrong. Hard to tell. GWTW was a commercial and critical success at the time it came out. WWF 80s was a commercial success... and a critical flop at the time. It's only in the years sense that it's gotten better critical notice. I'd have to think of an equiv on that aspect: slow critical acknowledgement. It's not gotten the praise of Kane: at the end of the 80s DVDVR Project if they did a Top 200 of matches, the WWF is going to get less representation than a number of other promotions. So we'd have to find something that was critically savaged at the time of release, was a hit, and then 20-30+ years later people took another look and thought, "This actually is good. Maybe not GREAT~!, but it's not a bad movie at all." The Jazz Singer was a change in this sense: No Sound before, Sound after. And that's basically what the WWF in the 80s was: No National Promotion before, National Promotions after. It took a while for JCP to go National, but it did and in a sense had to in some way or it wouldn't have survived. Watts made a stab at going national before his company went under. The promotions that stayed territories eventually all died. Well... I was getting my history degree exactly during Hogan's first reign, so I kind of get history a bit. Hogan as a babyface really wasn't any different from loads of babyfaces who came before him. Reagan's America really had very little to do with it. Heels were bad, some of them did bad things to Hogan and he was after vengeance, and some of them were chasing the belt and Hogan was going to keep it. Hogan-Orndorff really wasn't an embodiment of the Reagan Era. Paul felt slighted. Paul struck out. Paul listened to bad people. Hogan went for payback. It's the type of thing that had been going on in heel turns for decades. Did Vince wrap Hogan in the Flag? Real American nonsense? Sure. But that had been going on for ages in pro wrestling. Hell, it wasn't even central to Hogan as a champ as the majority of his opponents happened not to be Evil Foreigners. Say your prayers and take you vitamins? That crap had been around long before RR, and has been around long after. It really wasn't an RR thing, no matter how much goofballs like the Moral Majority thought it was. Really... you're reading far too much into Hogan. That's not an unreasonable way to look at it. I was going more for Smokey be from a pedestrian genre, being rather simplistic in it's goals and execution, not really going for anything terribly broad artistically or thematically, not taking itself seriously, being rather cliched, generally dismissed as low brow... but both wildly successful, perfectly entertaining, and when reflecting back on it was a pretty good movie for what it was. No one thought the WWF was an Oscar nominee for churning out Best Matches. No one thought Smokey was either. SW got 10 Oscar nomination, including the three big non-acting ones: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. It won 6 of them, and got a 7th special award because people were so blown away with an element of making it. It was a massive commercial hit... and it was a massive critical hit as well. Granted, anyone who knows anything about the movie kind of laughs in hindsight at Lucas getting nominations for Director and Screenplay. But they are reflective of folks being blown away by the shit on a critical level at the time. The WWF in the 80s? Not so much. That was my analogy to Smokey. I'm sure we can some up with others.

Cool. So Vince made even less money off home video than we thought with cuts going to Evart, his distribution network, and resellers. Awesome!

This isn't true on two fronts: 1. Wrestlemania was a hit A total, monster hit. 400K in closed circuit attendance. 2. there was no Coliseum Video deal Coliseum Video = WWF. It was Vince's company. It would be like saying Sony Pictures has a "deal" with Sony DVD when it's just another part of the firm. Video business wasn't that massive at the time. Blockbuster Video didn't even exist at the time of Wrestlemania I. You had some mom & pops stores, and the music stores were just getting into it. This was also the era of Rentals rather than Sales. The WWF would sell 1 copy of a video to a store, which would then rent it out... and hope to rent it out enough over the years to pay for the cost of buying it from the WWF. I think a lot of us had the experiance of going to the video (or music-video) store and renting the WWF videos and Lords of the Rings. Not a lot of people bought videos because very few were "priced to move" in those days. The WWF was trying to churn them out, but it was a small part of the business. Credit to Vince: it still was money, and a way to use content that he'd already spent money on filming. He was ahead of the curve relative to his competitors in churning a lot of them out rather than farting around with 1 or 2 a year, taking forever to get them out, and being piss poor in getting them in stores. Of course Vince could have been slipping folks some cash to keep stores WWF-exclusive. We're talking several eras when you toss out 1984-2013. That's 30 years. We were talking about 80s WWF, which ended in 1989. Merch was a good revenue stream for the WWF. Vince was smart in using it. But it wasn't the core business or core revenue stream. It also wasn't "How Wrestling Was Made". It simply was a way to make money off the wrestlers and wrestling. And as pointed out earlier: wrestling merchandise existed before 1984. Vince didn't invent it. Just like a lot of things, he happened to do it better. I think you would find that the WWF made more money on one single day in 1987 from live gate, PPV and closed circuit (Wrestlemania III) than they did in the entire year of 1987 from all merchandise, licensing and video sales. Suspect that if we were able to add up the Live Gates of all the Hogan-Orndorff and Hogan-Kimala matches going around the horn, *both* feuds drew more revenue than those 1987 merch, licensing and video sales. That's while admitting that Vince did good merch business.

SW has an impact on the business. A major one. It just didn't have the immediate one that you cited: Summer Block Busters. Yes, it is perception. A lazy one that people who make it never have bothered to go check. As human beings, we're not forced to accept perceptions that are wrong. Breaking free of them is wonderful. Again, we're playing apples and oranges. WWF Expansion (i.e. Vince & Hogan vs The World) was a major shift in the pro wrestling business in this country. Kris and I devoted a giant massive thread on it just to get that point across. I'm the one who thinks either Hulk Hogan or Jim Londos is the greatest pro wrestler who ever lived. So you're arguing with the wrong person if you think I don't believe WWF Expansion didn't change the business. But what Jerry pointed to was "how wrestling is made". Which is a wildly overstatement. That is... unless... you want to say that the "change" was: 1. Pre-Expansion wrestling was made by territories 2. Post-Expansion wrestling was largely made by national companies In which case... well... that was my point: Vince's change was going National. See... this is where you have an inferiority complex as an 80s WWF Fan. You think everyone is out to get the WWF, and it's hurtful to your fandom. Anyone who doesn't see that WWF in the way you do is an Expert or Elitist out to get the WWF. Look: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?showtopic=11633 You aiming that stuff at the wrong guy. There's lots of stuff about 80s WWF that I think if goofy. I confess to hating Gorilla Monsoon and thinking he was a shitty announcer. I don't agree with the premise that Demolition was a good working tag team. But I do think Vince is the best promoter who ever lived, Hogan is one of the two best wrestlers who ever lived, and by that thread you'll see that I think they were awesome in kicking the living shit out of other promotions. I've long believed that people who buy into perception without taking a step back to look at reality are idiots. Sometimes what the believe in or buy wouldn't even survive a minute if they paused to think about it. Or five minutes if they took a look at the Google. It's not just me. Most of the discussions here are about perception, and trying to find the reality. Perception: Hogan was a shitty worker Reality: a number of people looked a bit deeper and found him at the very least to be "very effective" Perception: Fujiwara wasn't any good Reality: there are folks here who get all warm and fuzzy when watching him Perception: A Whole Lotta People could have taken Backlund's spot in 1978-83 Reality: folks who've looked at this find a real hard time finding anyone who could have held it for 5 years Perception: Carlos Colon was a shitty worker Reality: looking at a host of matches over a good number of years, people now think he was a very effective babyface worker Perception: Vince could have gone national with someone other than Hogan Reality: when people have looked at this closely, they come up empty on anyone from that era being able to sustain Hogan's role from 1984-88 Perception: the WWF had deeper house show cards in the 80s than JCP Reality: completely fucking off the deep end laughably nuts There are several hundred conversations on this board where perception has been looked at and people figure out reality. It's what we do. That's perhaps a slight difference: I was 11 when SW came out, and you were not born. You entered a world where SW and merch already existed. I was in a world where there were OJ Simpson dolls before Star Wars came out. And Evel Knievel merch. SW took existing things and pushed them to another level. It was a phenom, but people who claim it invented these things are wrong. The WWF merch biz is great. But Brain... it's not How Wrestling Is Made. Anymore than the SW merch that I bought in 1977/78 was how Movies Were Made. They were ways to exploit the popularity of a movie, or in the case of the WWF "wrestlers" and "wrestling". I have a dozen Manchester United jerseys at home, and a half dozen Barcelona jerseys. They don't change how futbol is played. The only change how those teams can make money... except of course they've been selling kits for ages. That's entirely fair. It's quite a distance from your original Kane/GWTW reference, but perfectly fair. On the other hand, there were no National Promotions before Vince and Hogan. There really is no Hollywood equiv for that landmark change, unless we care to go Jazz Singer. Well, you were 0-8 during the RR era. I cast my first vote when I was 18 in 1984, and it was against RR. So if there is someone who tends to get RR's America here having come politically aware during it and behind shaped by it (I'm a DFH Liberal), let me raise my hand. Hogan = RR America isn't something that impacted me when watching Hogan at the time, and doesn't impact me when watching him now. He's just a typical babyface, and almost all of them as as big of assholes in what they do as the heels. There's nothing about Hogan that jumps out as an disgusting character. This awesome thread notwithstanding: http://prowrestlingonly.com/index.php?showtopic=14212 Though I will say that, as well documented in that thread, this guy is a total douchebag:

I know it's hard for you, but you need to read closer. I didn't say Star Wars didn't change the movies. I said this: Then backed it up with, you know, those little things called facts. In turn: It did change the wrestling business in this country. But it didn't really change the way wrestling was *made*. TV tapings and the equiv of syndication? Existed before the WWF. Closed circuit and it's successor PPV? Closed circuit existed in pro wrestling before Wrestlemania, and PPV existed in boxing and was just waiting for someone to use it in wrestling. The required what boxing was: National business. National TV on a Network? Oh my god... that existed in the 40s and 50s! Split rosters? JCP was doing it before Vince, as were other promotions. To a degree, the WWWF was doing a little of it before Vince, and probably a lot more than we're aware of if we had the results. Characters? Holy shit! Storylines? Oh my god! And on and on. I'm sure someone can pull Ice Cream Bars and Vitamins out of their ass, but that's the equiv of merchandising... and last I looked, they have very little to do with the WWF's big bottom line in the 80s and how they did business. They are not how Wrestling Is Made. They simply are side areas to cash in. I know you get all worked up over TNT, but it had no significant impact. In the big picture, it was gone in short order while Vince focused on the things that made him money. Vince changed the business by going national. He was successful in going national because he was smarter than his competition, exploited changes in technology, exploited dumbass and lazy rivals, and had Hulk Hogan. A lot of it was the last one. Much more than stuff like TNT. "When I was playing the character." -Tugg Speedman John

Alright... let's take a look at this... That's why The Destroyer wrestled a Bear in the 60s. Because bears took the field NFL games, played outfield in Major League Baseball, played for Matt Busby in the 60s, etc. Right... As far as characters and stories, that went back before Vince even promoted the business. Wrestling was entertainment back to the 20s. Don't be stupid and think otherwise. Okay... so your "Vince Changed Wrestling" epic had TWO POINTS~! For fuck's sake. Anyway, you're #2 is covered by my: He went National. That was the balls. All those things your mention in the sentences that follow it are requirements of going national and succeeding. Corrected, though you're not self reflective enough to see it in yourself. Or perhaps better stated with: Tugg Speedman: In a weird way I had to sort of just free myself up to believe that is was ok to be stupid or dumb. Kirk Lazarus: To be a moron. Tugg Speedman: Yeah! Kirk Lazarus: To be moronical. Tugg Speedman: Exactly, to be a moron. Kirk Lazarus: An imbecile. Tugg Speedman: Yeah! Kirk Lazarus: Like the dumbest mother fucker that ever lived. Tugg Speedman: [pause] When I was playing the character.

Okay... so Money is a pussy who has ducked people.

Totally agree on that. Which I kind of highlighted here: If an experienced, trained and rounded MMA guy like Leban can be so totally dominated by Josh, it's hard to imagine a World Class Boxer of Josh's weightclass with zero MMA training having a shot. In a sense, that boxer would need to be like Josh: very good at his art (wrestling for Josh and boxing for Boxer), but also a terrific athlete who could learn a more rounded game. The Josh that beat Diego Sanchez just two years after TUF was an insanely more rounded fighter than he had been on TUF. In turn, the Josh of 2010 that got a shot and lost to GSP was better than he had been in 2007. He was a heck of an athlete, and a hard worker who threw himself into learning more. Our Boxer example would need to be both of those... but it would take a while for him to get there if he had no wrestling and/or other martial arts background beyond boxing.

I don't think 80s WWF was especially disgusting. 80s WCCW was the one with disgusting booking and angles, taking advantages of death, making a bunch of dead drug addicts into heros, pushing kids into the business who should never have been in there and ended up dead, and of course the faking that Fritz heart attack. The WWF was just a big over the top giant piece of entertainment. Like Smokey. It launched Bert into being the #1 star in the country for 5 years. I'm not terribly sold that the 80s WWF altered the way wrestling was made. It took advantage of changing technologies, though hardly the only company to do so and frankly beaten to it by a few. It just did it better, and figured out stuff that slipped by others. The one major innovation of the WWF was going National, which isn't really relevant to Movies because they've always been national. Smokey didn't change the Car Chase genre. It just did it great. It didn't go in for Drama like say Bullet, but played it low brow like the WWF. Star Wars was more likely the Gold Dust Trio, Jack Curley, Fabian and others in the 20s and 30s. They changed the business from a period of "few matches" and working the gamblers to Wrestling As Spectator Entertainment where wrestlers worked much more regularly, and the money was entirely made from drawing crowds. In effect, the summer blockbuster. That said, the notion that the Summer Blockbuster started with Star Wars has always been overrated. One can just look at the rest of the summer of 1977 to see that: it was filled with blockbusters. In turn, the biggest blockbuster of the following year opened in December. While that movie was over ambitious in shooting, over budget and delayed, if Summer was the be all, end all after Star Wars, they could easily have pushed it out to a May 1979 release which was just five months later. Star Wars just made a point that people knew from Jaws and frankly long before that: there's money to be made in Summer when kids (from young through college) are out of school and adults are taking vacations. The real change was even more in the 80s, after Empire (1980), Raiders vs Superman II (1981) and ET (1982). I think if you look at 1980: 1980 DOMESTIC GROSSES You'll see that the Summer wasn't massively loaded up. I saying that less in the sense of what became a Hit but in what was Released. For example: Airplane! was a hit, but it wasn't a blockbuster, and ended up being a super surprise hit. In turn, Any Which Way You Can was a sequel to Clint's biggest hit ever, and was saved for the fall/winter. In contrast, his more specialty and personal Bronco Billy was rolled out in the summer. Pretty much everyone knew Any Which Way You Can was the one likely to be the bigger hit. Stir Crazy was the follow up to the big hit Silver Streak, and saved for December. Blue Lagoon wasn't a blockbuster in the summer, but Blues Brothers was one in the summer, while the equally expensive blockbuster Popeye went to December. Flash Gordon was a blockbuster at the end of the year. Anyway, three years out from SW and the Summer Blockbuster is still just the Blockbuster which popped up as much as the end of the year as the summer. ESB not withstanding. But by here: 1982 DOMESTIC BOX OFFICE Bingo. I'd add, though, that smaller movies weren't totally crushed out by the big. An Officer and a Gentleman, despite what we think of it now, wasn't a blockbuster. Gere wasn't a star at that point, instead the movie made him. Winger wasn't a massive star, and the director never made a hit before it. There still were movies like that which did business and weren't squeezed out. But things had swung towards summer blockbusters. Anyway, Hollywood tends not to be slow. If SW was a total game changer on when movies get released, it wouldn't have taken 5 years for them to figure it out. So... no... Vince and the WWF in the 80s weren't Star Wars.

My recollection is that Nash's version, which he's told several versions of over the years, was just about the same level of being full of shit as Trip's version. In the end, it's not really a Kliq, Hall or Nash story. All sorts of wrestlers and promoters over the years have told different stories above how they pulled one over on the sheets, how the sheets rolled over to them when pushed, how some wrestle was bent about something in the sheets, etc. My favorite variation was Bret Hart getting up in a WWF locker room and going off on how too many people were talking to Meltzer and stuff was ending up in the sheets that shouldn't be there. Of course it ended up in the WON the next week. One of the times we went down to TJ, we were joking about the piece and Hoback tossed out: Hoback: "It would be funny if you got that from Owen." Dave: *pause* *smile* "It wasn't Owen." Anyway, there are a lot of variations of bullshit out there. One suspects that these guys have grabbed hold of them, retold them, morphed it from being someone else to being one they're in the middle of, and then say them enough times that they believe their own bullshit. John

He clearly isn't Simmons-ized. He's just a shitty writer. Perhaps less for writing style, which while annoying isn't as poorly written as say some of Dave's pieces on MMAFighting.com. It's the content of the pieces that's horrid. Like we all seem to be agreeing, he's a mark for the work-shoot-fabe concept of pro wrestling. It's pretty funny that he likes to give it a Reality TV spin, when Reality TV in this country took off in 2000 (Survivor) while work-shoot-fabe reared its ugly head nationally with "I Respect You, Booker Man" in 1995. It's sad he writes for Grantland. It's also sad that they don't have an MMA writer. Given ESPN doesn't have a skin in the MMA game, but remains an immensely powerful sports entity (especially on the "news" side), it's a spot where some really interesting writing, reporting and analysis could take place. John

This is my stumbling block with him. Deeper than that. I started watching the weekely stuff in 1989, actually with the tag league ending the prior year. I pretty much watched Chono, Hash, Mutoh and Sasaki grow up, with really only Mutoh getting a push of any note prior to the time I started watching. I started zoning out of the weekly TV at some point in 2001: AJPW split the year before, Hash-Ogawa just killed me for NJPW, and NOAH did little for me. Sasaki in that period just didn't do anything for me in a HOF fashion. The work was quite sub-Taue. The impact on drawing wasn't there. Quality feuds or rivalries wasn't there. His big matches since then haven't done anything for me, and the business was in the tank in his alleged "peak". What I tend to circle back in my mind is that I sat there in Sumo Hall five straight nights at the very peak of New Japan in the 90s. And these were the main events: 08/02/96 Riki Choshu vs Shinya Hashimoto 08/03/96 Shiro Koshinaka vs Kazuo Yamazaki 08/04/96 Shiro Koshinaka vs Masa Chono 08/05/96 Keiji Mutoh vs Shiro Koshinaka 08/06/96 G1 Final (Choshu vs Mutoh) Right in the middle of it, Choshu trusted that Koshinaka could go on last three straight nights against tricky opponents and deliver matches that the fans felt were main event level. On 08/05/96, the second-to-last match was Choshu-Sasaki, which would decide the winner of that block since Choshu had a default the next night due to Hirata's injury. Deciding match of a block, with Choshu in it against his protege... and he chose Mutoh-Kosh to go on last. It wasn't just the trust. It was that Kosh went out there and delivered matches that the fans did enjoy. I get that Sasaki popped the fans in any number of later matches after that peak. But there are six names that got into main events those nights, and none of them were Sasaki. Two of them were guys pushed far less than he was, and those two happened to be against each other in one of the mains (Kosh and Yamazaki). For all the "honors" that he bagged, Sasaki just hasn't been that huge of a wrestler.

This. Fuck that asshole Russo, Jerome, you can kick his ass and finish the thread when Vince & Skippy show up! "What the fuck happened to the PWO I used to know? Where's the spirit? Where's the guts, huh? This could be the greatest thread of our lives, but you're gonna let it be the worst. "Ooh, we're afraid to go with you Jerome, we might get in trouble." Well just kiss my ass from now on! Not me! I'm not gonna take this. Bischoff, he's a dead man! Russo, dead! Nash..." -El P-luto John PS: no... not trying to sidedrain but fire Jerome up since he'll get the Animal House reference.

Good lord. This thread was dead for 2.5 years. Wait, even before that there were issues. You posted it, and there were no responses for 12 days which led you to pulling the Kobashi Crying Spot: Which caused the thread to generate 7 post in the next day before it died for those 2.5 years. Which got twelve posts in a day and a half, 2 of which were over the word Bottler and a third was Will pointing out that he forgot Ross announced in Wattsville. Oh, and one of them opened with this gem: So I made a movie reference to a movie reference brainfollower made, because I don't think most of is see 80s WWF as the Citizen Kane or Gone With The Wind of professional wrestling. To which in a follow up I explained why I used Smokey (a movie I actually like) as a counter-reference. There was the chance for posters, if they chose, to run with that aspect: what really was the Kane or Gone With The Wind of 80s wrestling? What movie would JCP be? What would Mid South be? What would Jarrett & Lawlerland be? Etc. Instead, folks liked talking about Burt and Sally... "So this topic was completely no sold!" -Warden Jerry Van Hazen

Babyface demonstrates the gimmick of a coming gimmick match:

Seriously... if you don't have the DVD, get it, make sure it has the commentary, and enjoy those three laughing out loud at the goofy shit they put up on the screen.

Before his run at #1. That was before he even broke into the Top 10. For a small little movie, I might go with Breaking In because it's so removed from his typical character and performance. For a big movie, of course Boogie Nights is the best movie he was ever in.

NEVER blasphemy Canonball Run as not memorable....EVER!!! That movie is the best he was EVER in!! LOL...Smokey is the best...but Canonball is really good to!!! Canonball worked at the time, but I wonder if in re-watch it will come across as a movie where they were doing a ton of booze and blow and just making shit up as they went along. And if you're going to watch a movie like that from that era, I like this more: Especially if you also get time to listen to the commentary track with Robert Zemeckis (writer & director), Kurt Russell (star) and Bob Gale (writer & producer) which might be my favorite commentary track of all time as they have shitloads of fun remembering making the movie.