pantherwagner

Listened to the Tommy Rogers interview. Sad to hear how he's in such bad physical shape as he's still quite young (53). Which is the tag team that was run out of Japan before The Fantastics were called in? (If that story is even true). Sounds like he was hinting that it was the Rock and Roll Express.

So one of the biggest mysteries of my early teenage years was that freakin WCW logo on PPV's at the end of the ramp that looked like it was sinking. No idea why the bottom of the C and the first W was cut off. Now that I can easily see all the PPV's in order I saw that its first appearance on PPV was at Halloween Havoc 1990 and it kind of looks like part of the set. After that the next appearance was at the GAB 1990 (the second WCW PPV I ever saw, first was Battlebowl 1993) and it looks weird there. Since this is WCW I assume they ordered the sign and then they realised it wouldn't stand up by itself so they cut it off. Or something. It always looked odd and I imagine is the kind of stuff that would make Vince McMahon flip his lid and fire the entire production crew on the spot. I can't be the only one about here who has wondered about that sign.

I'm not the biggest Piper or Piper's Pit fan so I haven't seen all or even most of them but I recall him using fried chicken and watermelon jokes with Tony Atlas (or was it JYD) and saying that Mr. T (or again was it JYD???) was the only man who wears more chains than his ancestors. So, par for the course for that era of rasslin.

I threw away about 350 tapes (mostly bootlegs) at one point about more than 10 years ago. I still lived with my parents and we needed the space. I held onto them for too long out of perceived nostalgia value when I should have been selling them slowly. Instead I was stuck with a huge collection that was unsellable as I was liviing in Spain where there was no interest in those tapes and and postage anywhere in Europe would have killed any deal. I still keep a couple of boxes with mostly lucha libre, my own compilations and some originals. Funny enough, most of the ultra-rare stuff I have found or received in the last 10 years came out of VHS's that had never been converted.

This is exactly my description - focusing and performances and not matches. Sometimes great wrestlers don't always have great matches due to poor opposition / booking constraints and sometimes average wrestlers have tons of great matches because they are surrounded by good or great wrestlers.

I missed this when it was posted. What a tremendous gallery (in general, not only the wrestling photo).

Finally some AWA on the network....... well, the WWE documentary about it will be up tomorrow. Now watching the This is Your Life RAW that was uploaded. The promo opening the show took forever. The Rock segment isn't very good. I have rewatched most of these in the last few months (mostly on the network) and I find all of the "classic" "hilarious" Monday Night Raw moments to be actually terrible: the beer truck, the milk truck, DX and the tank, the promo mocking Owen and NOD, etc.

Dave is completely missing the point on this one. It was a great episode and the build up to the reveal was very well done. Pat coming out publically would have felt weird or forced if Atlas, Hart and Duggan hadn't shared their real stories previously and hadn't changed the mood from rasslin stories to real feelings.

I haven't listened to that one (and I won't) but I am going to put the blame in DiBiase. He's terrible on this type of shows.

I think the problem with their strategy is that we aren't the people they should worry about. We'll keep the network pretty much no matter what. Dave Meltzer mentioned recently how he had heard several people mentioning that they haven't subscribed after their trial period because they expected the entire Monday Night Wars era weekly TV to be there. At least I can't see why they haven't uploaded every Raw in a single batch until November 1995 already. If the MNW show and something like the entire SNME run is what they are planning to upload in August to keep people interested then it's kind of silly. Looks to me like the people who got the network early on are the ones that will keep it no matter what. I think another underrated thing is the search and indexing tools are terrible. Try searching for "The Rock". I'd expect to see an ordered list of all of his PPV matches that you can filter by year, perhaps a different section with his TV appearances, maybe a "must see" list of classic segments or important matches from those TV shows. Instead if you do the search from the website you get about 30 pages of results and in the first three pages about 75% of them are irrelevant. And, variety! Imagine all the goodwill they'd gain (as well as the attention of older/lapsed fans) if they released a new weekly schedule with a regular time slot for a MACW episode, some Florida TV, Stampede (though I'd save that for the launch in Canada), perhaps SMW, a weekly MSG show starting in the 70s and a Saturday "supercard" which could feature anything from a Superdome show to a Superclash or a Star Wars/Parade of Champions. I'm sure that this is what we'll eventually have in a year but right now it's clear that there's some urgency in getting their network numbers up and other than some more references during their weekly shows they aren't doing all that much.

Yes, Austin is by far the best shoot interviewer in history. Vader had some great stories - my favourite was the con they'd do in Germany (which I had never heard before). He'd attack a babyface from behind in between rounds when the referee wasn't looking and get a big reaction. Then a round or two later the babyface would do the same but he'd be caught by the referee and be given a big fine, something like 1000 Deutsche marks, which would be around 700 or 800 USD I guess. To help the poor babyface somebody would start collecting money from the crowd to help pay the fine, which of course was later split in between the wrestlers and the ref in the back.

WWE making strides in North Korea's bootleg videotape market. I'm sure we can't even imagine what these people go through but somewhere in the world people risking freedom to watch Randy Orton matches. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yeon-mi-park-the-hopes-of-north-koreas-black-market-generation/2014/05/25/dcab911c-dc49-11e3-8009-71de85b9c527_story.html

I am coming late to the thread and most of the good points and most of the bad points have already been made. However I think that it’s pretty telling that most of those are Vince McMahon trademarks and the product isn’t going to change until Vince McMahon dies and they get rid of his old guard of producers, writers and yes men (most of them with a chunky severance package and an NDA so they don’t reveal where Vince’s skeletons in the closet are). Also any goodwill they gain will be gone if any current major headliner dies of a heart attack before 50. You can write-off Warrior as a poster child of the excesses of the 80s but not sure how could you handle a post mid 00's star dying young.

I laughed at the midgets being called liliputiens. What a tremendous channel, though.

I guess you could point at Herd during that era but it’s really more of a WCW trademark than anything else. People like Van Hammer, Erik Watts, The Cole Twins, Jungle Jim Steele, Ice Train, Charlie Norris and others I'm probably forgetting kept showing up years after he left. I guess they were very lucky that a stripper like Marcus Bagwell ended up being a pretty good hand after only a couple of years in the business.

Holy shit. That's a tremendous post on JW Storm. Here's a twist on the "does wrestling attract insane people or do people become insane because they work in wrestling?" age old question. Does wrestling attract carnies or do people become carnies because they work in wrestling? In my early teens I was very curious about him for two reasons: I read a mag (an Apter mag I guess) that had a write-up about him as the next big thing in wrestling, and he was Art Barr's partner (as BIG JUICER, no less) and Barr was my favourite back then. What a letdown when I actually saw him wrestle for the first time. Anyway, I only came to this thread to mention what funkdoc was actually quoting. Been watching some Clashes and tons of new young guys in 1990 and 1991 and pretty much all of them are atrocious. You'd think with all those supposed brilliant wrestling minds there at the time that there would have been some sort of filter. Also I forgot how awesome was that Sid Vicious used to be billed "from anywhere he darn well pleases".

It's a town where everyone wears masks and no one owns a scale. According to Bobby Heenan Parts Unknown usually means downtown Newark.

I thought so as well. The chairs don't look comfortable either. Definitely not like in the days of Tazz reclining in his chair while smoking a big ass cigar.

Why not? If enough people are watching it (and I have no idea about any of the data), I could very well see it happening. According to the WWE's top 10 they release during RAW it has been the number 1 most watched show every week, and Ep 1 was number three during its second week. The Network is clearly aiming to attract a kind of superfan that is a different type of superfan to the one that posts here and "Original Content" seems to be a key component in their strategy. I have absolutely no idea why would anyone want to watch pre and post shows for freaking Raw when it feels like boot camp to get through it most weeks. Nevermind Smackdown (does anything relevant ever happen there?). But the shows seem to be popular.

Why not? If enough people are watching it (and I have no idea about any of the data), I could very well see it happening. Tough Enough is coming back, so anything's possible. I watched the Iron Sheik/Andre episode of Legends of Wrestling. I had actually seen it before, on DVD, and it's still probably the best episode they've ever done. For the most part, all they do is tell awesome road stories for an hour. I highly, highly recommend it. I wish every roundtable was as good as this one. I had never seen that episode until recently and it's great. They don't shy away from telling road stories that nowadays you couldn't touch. No way you could get PS Hayes on any new shows laughing off his number of DUI's or telling drug use stories. The beauty of Legends of Wrestling is that it was a show that flew completely under the McMahon radar and doesn't have the fingerprints of anybody in the family. On the other hand their two most recent roundtables are overproduced and overscripted sounding corporate products that are lack the casual conversation feeling of the old roundtables.

I had fairly decent self-taught English as a 13 year old partly due to videogames but more importantly because I'd translate (sometimes almost literally word by word screwing up the context) Eurodance music lyrics (we all have a dark past) and articles from WWF Magazine, WCW Magazine, New Wave Wrestling and any other random wrestling magazines I could get my hands on. My grammar wasn't the greatest but I knew a shitload of words. I also learned how to read very basic Japanese in the late 90s/early 00s to be able to get real names, former alias, title histories and other basic information from the Nippon Sports MOOK that was released every year. Still a very valuable resource every time that I go to Japan as I can partly figure out menus on restaurants that I'd otherwise not being able to attend without a local. A great example of that would be Killer Khan's restaurant.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Flair/Andre match in there too. Is there any Flair vs Andre footage already available? Never saw it myself but Classics on Demand used to have a Gordon Solie clip show called the Film Room.

Here's one. El Padre de Mascarita Sagrada?

Bumping an old thread Less than two weeks ago the British Pathe archive of newsreels was updated with literally thousands of films. There are many wrestling clips from France, England, USA, Japan, etc.: https://www.youtube.com/user/britishpathe/search?query=wrestling

Classics on Demand showed a lot of different stuff. The market for a lot of these shows may not be as large as we'd have imagined. They seem to be pushing a lot more for original content as well as recycled content (such as the new Hall of Fame show). So I was watching the start of this MSG show from 1986 with the tag team battle royal and Mean Gene is a commentator with Gorilla and Hayes. Other than the Wrestlemania gimmicks battle royal a few years ago I had never seen him doing colour (unless it's something that I am forgetting about). Did he join the booth at many shows? Any opinions on how good he was/wasn't? He seems to be a natural at it.