pantherwagner

Yeah, this is my main takeaway from it. I have no feelings about her one way or another but her story really is a shame. WWE really is a fucked up company.

World Wrestling Council too. We are booking this for you Kris.

This was tremendous and I look forward to hearing the future Crockett 88 podcast. You guys should do one about Continental as well. Am I the only one that would actually be interested in seeing Kevin Sullivan vs Hiro Matsuda? (Obviously not as a replacement to Starrcade, though!) Also thank you Dylan, you owe me 2 USD. That's probably the amount of beer that came out of my nose when I was drinking this very nice 11 USD Belgian lambic and you said "McGuirk didn't have a very good eye for talent".

I think there's also a weird chicken/egg thing where wrestling fans seem to have a higher tolerance for longer shows. Dylan and I didn't plan to go as long as we did on the first Trade Marks, but it being the first in large part becuase of lots of stuff happening on top of the WM lawsuits topic turning out meatier than we expected made it, well, long. Though I figure for that show the length doesn't matter quite as much since it's more niche of a niche.Future shows will more likely be single topic I would think. My goal for The Bix Show is to cap at 90 minutes, whether it's all one shot or combining multiple segments. No complaints on the length of the Trade Marks, it was very interesting from start to finish and there was a lot of information I didn't know about. Some parts could have been shortened but I never found it boring or dragging.

Same here. I think that when you are a kid you love the concept of the superteams (SS) and the random pairings that you'd otherwise never see (Battlebowl). When you are older you realise that with the SS they book themselves into a corner and have to come up with tons of screwy eliminations or uneven teams... otherwise tons of stars in the promotion need to lose a match that they shouldn't be losing. The Lethal Lottery concept died for me at Slamboree 1996 - I was 16 and I had known what was up for a while, but the teams were far too "convenient". Lazy booking and not compelling at all.

Hahaha I have a couple of masks but flying from Europe to Mexico for a shag wouldn't be a very cost effective move. Some of them did send pictures and were rather nice too... which is why I have always believed each and every single one of Mil Mascaras' stories about banging all kinds of flight stewardesses and five star hotel reception ladies. I have a friend who wrestles for CMLL, he's not a star at all or somebody most people here would know. He's a very religious good boy and he's actually a pretty good looking chap (sans mask) so he has got tons and tons of groupies at every single big small and medium size arena he goes to. I can only imagine the kind of offers that the real major league stars used to get back in the 70s-80s when the world was a bit more lawless. But, yeah, they did really believe that I was Mil Mascaras. I also had many people asking for autographs, free masks, phone calls and other favours as Mil Mascaras and as Dos Caras back when I used that internet handle in Mexican forums. I had so many requests that I had to change my name.

Back in the late 90s/early 00's when I ran a lucha website I often was asked if mask vs mask matches were real by people who were pretty much aware that everything was determined. The notion of wrestlers willingly losing their mask made no sense at all to Mexicans and even Mexican Americans. You've got to realise that until many years later there were zero non kayfabe Spanish language lucha libre websites and the biggest hangout was the Univision forum where you'd get maybe 2 or 3 new theads a day and you had I also received several sexual offers by women who assumed that I was Mil Mascaras because my mail started with milmascaras (even though I clearly stated in English AND Spanish that I was not Mil Mascaras). And one "promoter" wanted to pay me money if I could provide him with "barrio looking" Mexican boys who could wrestle for his gay themed video company... but I guess I'm getting away from the subject. Not sure if this is in the spirit of the thread or not but I have been able to justify pretty much any type of wrestling that I like to former girlfriends except for Japanese women's wrestling. The whole "I watch it for the athleticism and the spectacle" thing doesn't fly, plus there's the entire Japanese woman/fetish/anime/sexualised view of them by some people in the west. People used to ask me how did I watch old wrestling. That stuff surely isn't on TV. Tapes? And where do I get those tapes? It's not like I can walk to a Blockbuster and rent them. I remember having this conversation with OJ many years ago in Japan about people being puzzled about him watching old wrestling. Now there's youtube and people know that you can find practically anything in there. I have also found people think it's odd that some of us watch old territorial wrestling from 30 years ago. At least the WWF looks cool and flashy with the over the top characters and showmanship, Japan looks like a serious kick ass tough man competition and lucha looks fun with the masks and the colourful characters. I have found plenty of regular people who think that Mid South or NWA wrestling looks like old hillbilly shit.

I have not listened to this yet but glad that you have kept it to a manageable length and I hope that you keep doing so. A lot of the wrestling podcasts these days (both amateur and "pro") tend to be too long these days in my opinion.

Rock/Rousey segment was too long but this is the first time in 15+ years that I have seen anything by WWE that makes them look like a cool company that is relevant and has got the pulse on what’s happening in the world today. Seriously, this is the stuff that makes people care. If they play this right it may not be a complete game changer like Cindy Lauper, Mr. T or Tyson (nowadays it’s much harder to hit a nerve like that again) but it could easily be their fourth biggest celeb coup ever. HHH and Stephanie could get extra points for being visionaries if they can put this one together… even though the truth is that they lucked out that she’s making a movie with Rocky and that one of her best friends is such a wrestling geek that she wouldn’t look out of place at all in this board. The interesting part will be how a star depressed UFC (that is even more in panic mode than WWE) reacts to this. They may be so scared to lose Ronda that they may just let her take a WM booking to keep her happy and let her cash in an “easy” few mill dollars

I agree with the two posts above. I often used those threads for stuff that I wanted to mention but I expected no replies on, which is OK, because me getting a reply was not the goal. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Many times you read something, think "good stuff" or "interesting" or whatever, and move on. This is likely to make people post less, not more. In fact yesterday night I was going to make a comment about the stock price on the "comments that don't deserve a thread" but I saw that it was locked and as it was late I logged off. My only complaint about this board (which is a minor one and something I can live with) is that sometimes I don't come here for a few days and I see 9 or 10 pages of new stuff so I end up missing or deliberately skipping a good chunk of it because I don't have the time to go through pages and pages of content. This is mostly due to the yearbook/single match/interview threads which serve their purpose and shouldn't change, but the megathreads not being there isn't going to help.

When you realise that they are soon moving to 2 hrs Raw and Nitro probably half of that is going to be a bit more than two years of each and a couple of years of ECW TV. Will be great to have all of that there in perfect VQ available a few clicks away though. It's great news for the company that they are finally getting around to producing things that make them stand out but the new content makes them look desperate to somehow recapture their late 90s crash TV glory days.

According to thir schedule the Macho Man DVD goes up on Monday and the Austin season of Tough Enough is going up on Tuesday.

I watched Starrcade 85 some time ago and exactly the same thing happened to me. It looks like a chunk at the end has been encoded with more compression.

If you want to watch the old HOF's bookmark them on the website and they should show up on Roku. At least that's how you get around to it using Apple TV. When I stream or play archived content after 8PM GMT (maybe earlier but that's when I usually arrive from work) it often starts-stops every couple of minutes and I can't watch things on my iPad anymore because the start/stop switches the quality from HQ/reduced/superLQ. This started happening after the UK went live... before I had a DNS server and it never gave me a single problem. Needless to say, it's not on my end. I can stream anything else available on Apple TV in HQ without a single issue.

Nice tribute, thanks Kris. Herodes, I had completely forgotten that Perrito was part of the brief AAA invasion. Thanks for the reminder by posting that match - I really don't feel like watching it now but will definitely do so in the near future.

That's hearbreaking. I was thinking about big Perro yesterday and wondering how hard he must have been taking it. By the way, I have been to the auditorio and there's a hospital literally across the road. However I don't know if anything could have been done even if everybody had reacted right away.

Video starts right after the supposed spot that did it and shows how he's getting carried away. There is nothing violent or graphic about it, nevertheless beware when watching. I was sent this (with no description) without being told what was it and right away you can see something is not right. EDIT: Now that I am over the initial shock, let me say that I'd not want to watch the video. I watched it as I didn't even know what it was but it's quite sad. Probably worse than the Oro video in that regard.

Well, hopefully they put up that stuff before 2020. They just seemed to dump 6-7 episodes in one go a few weeks ago and forgotten about PTW. One thing that I forgot to mention (JVK makes a reference to this) is that I really like how they have different commentator pairings for the different arenas. Another odd, somewhat un-McMahon like feature of PTW is how they'd sometimes air matches 1 or 2 years old. They did that a lot on TNT as wel.

No chapters on Apple TV... I mostly watch from Sony Bravia due to that. Catching up today on Countdown as I hadn't watched the last three or four. Talking about International Superstars, they ask Vince McMahon where is parts unknown, and he says with a completely straight face "It's in between Venus and Uranus... maybe closer to Uranus". That made me laugh.

Orndorff and Blair was pretty good. Some odd stuff like Bull Nakano and Dump Matsumoto, or a match with the Crush Girls. Steamboat vs Hart from Boston which you may have already seen. Some fun Killer Bees vs Harts matches, both singles and in tag competition. Nothing else I'd really go out of my way to look for though. I also just watched a surprisingly good Hart Foundation vs Iron Sheik and Nikolai Volkoff 6 min sprint. Probably the first time I have ever enjoyed a Volkoff performance. Sheik took some big bumps, used several suplexes and used a mean jumping lariat on Hart. Volkoff was working at a pace that I thought was going to give him a heart attack. The star of this show is Bret Hart. Everybody looks much better with him than with anybody else. But, yes, the show is often quite dull. Like a lot of things on the network I sometimes leave it on as background noise. Most of the time it's not good or interesting enough for me to give the show 100% of my attention.

During the last few months I have watched every Prime Time currently available in the WWE network (except for the last one) as well as some older ones that I have found in other places. Let me preface by saying that this is a program that I was not familiar with: I only watched Prime Time starting in 1991 (when it was a very different program) and getting WWF 1986 TV set never was a priority when I was heavily into DVD trading a decade ago. This show is not at all like I would expect a Vince McMahon show to be, especially the wrestling part. Many name vs name matches featuring tons of Moondogs but also Siva Afi, Lanny Poffo, SD Jones and other lower stars. Tons of Hart Foundation too which is great. More Tony Garea that I'd care to watch. They feature a lot of Pedro Morales, Harley Race and Dory Funk - names that I'm not sure Vince had a lot of stakes on back in 1986. Tons of time limit draws: I know this happened at house shows regularly but I never would have pegged McMahon as a TV time limit draw kind of guy. I can understand having Orton vs Santana calibre workers battling it out for 15 minutes but I'm not sure why would you have Hercules vs Billy Jack going longer than 5 minutes on TV much less three times as much. Not many angles or interviews: often the interviews are about self-contained angles that were born, lived and died within the show. Many minutes of wrestling, most of it way below average and whatever is good doesn't seem to mean a lot anyway. Very different to territorial episodic wrestling from that era but in the end a kind of plain show. Heenan and Gorilla are entertaining and are the only remarkable thing in most shows. So, what am I missing here? Was this the McMahon philosophy back then and I just never knew by watching the PPVs/SNMEs? It seems that this show was put together as filler and nothing more than that. I could be very wrong (again, not an early or mid 80s WWE expert by any means) but it looks like the WWF had a booking and presentation paradigm shift after Wrestlemania III so this may just be a product of the expansion era WWF trying to find its sports entertainment identity.

I voted "Low enthusiasm - This card looks like shit, still going to watch" but the real option is "Low enthusiasm - This card looks like shit, will probably only watch the top matches and leave the rest as background noise"

Thanks for the detailed response Chris As kjh said I imagine that there will be a 18-23% bump in the stock after the Q1 results - a lot of people may see the huge bump and jump in. I may pick some shares up and top slice after the announcement or dump them all depending on the gains. Only weary because of the USD being so strong as I said, so I actually missed the ex-dividend date. Subscription numbers seem to be a factor as big as any other indicator and I can’t see them getting hundreds of thousands with this new product, and I do not know for how long are they going to be able to pull out gimmicks out of their hat to artificially keep the numbers up. I expect them getting their ass kicked and then coming up with something to pump numbers up again. I do not see the long term value of WWE stock, in fact it’s a terrible investing stock because of its volatility, but a wrestling fan can hear signals and trade. However the stock is hard to read. If they hadn’t thrown in such ridiculous numbers at the start the stock could be a steady 50% more valuable at this point. It has also been a historically underperforming stock (maybe because of the wrestling bias, I don’t know) and there’s always the black swan of people dying and the stock crumbling again. Interesting how for years and years I’d skip the financial portions of WON but now they are the only WWE pages that I always read. PS - Chris, is the dude that criticised you and thinks they will get to 2M a wrestling fan?

I'm not sure where to put this (there's an old WWE financials thread that I did not want to resurrect) so here it goes. Is there anybody that deals in WWE shares? I'm curious. They have been underperforming for years but they I imagine the Wrestlemania enthusiasm will give them a bump (WM season isn't a historical direct indicative of a share price bump though) and they may get a second bump once Network numbers are announced (inflated by the WM enthusiasm and all the free month gimmicks). I'd buy some but GBP/USD isn't that great at the moment.

Is it possible that this is one of those "it's pro wrestling, they are all drug addicts so who cares" cases? Usually click baiting internet media loves a good sexual related scandal.