pantherwagner

Billy Joe Travis

Who was it that said that it's a shame that the world has got millions and millions of marks but only a tiny percentage are fans of wrestling? Sounds like something that Cornette would say.

English is not my first language, actually not even the second, so maybe that's why I find it funny when Dave says that the PPV business is going to be CANNIBALIZED by the WWF/UFC networks.

I may have mentioned this already but I saw Bull Nakano at a 7-Eleven type place. She had a Dump Matsumoto type girl with her, much younger but short and stocky with David Beckham style hair, carrying her bags. She looked like a pro wrestler for sure. There was a guy waiting for them outside that looked like a mini Animal Hamaguchi. I said hi and asked about her bar and she kind of acted like she didn't understand (maybe she didn't) , she looked aloof, all of this while Dump Jr. was looking at me dumbfounded. I smiled, said have a nice day and moved on but that was a weird encounter. They looked like a pretty odd trio. Bull looks very pretty sometimes but here she looked much older than 45 and was having a bad hair day. I'm pretty sure that yesterday I saw Atsushi Onita having a smoke outside a joint also in Nakano (close to Shinjuku in tokyo). He looked like absolute shit and was dressing like a mid 20s guy from Shibuya. I wanted to randomly meet Hase when I was in Kanazawa last week, didn't even know he was running there until I saw a few campaign posters on the street. Instead I had to see freakin Onita, oh well.

How about Don Muraco? He looked like Brisco, could talk, could work (I haven't seen all that much of him before his terrible WWF bulked up days but I was recently reading Dave's Roy Shire bio and he was rated high) and I believe had some sort of amateur background.

I forgot to mention that there's a large open window so you can't literally see him cooking unless you get close, but you can see him moving around back and forth from any table. But it was a rather odd sight, indeed. I also heard that Killer Khan has got a Mongolian BBQ joint in Shinjuku so we may drop by.

I went to Kawada's ramen restaurant last week. It's located in the basement of a building in a nice middle-upper class residential neighbourhood though it is in the middle of a busy long road and not in a particularly pedestrian friendly or well located area (i.e. not close to a train station). The first thing that I thought after going in was: where did this man's money go? Restaurant is small, maybe 20 to 25 people, looks old and not filthy but not all that clean either. I guess him being loyal to Motoko cost him a nice chunk of money. There's no wrestling decoration other than some Kawada dolls and t-shirts that are on sale. It looks like any other pop and mom ramen joint you can find in Tokyo. Kawada was cooking and his wife brought the food. They had no more staff. Ordering is through a machine that takes your money and gives you a printed ticket. Service was OK, food came in fast but Mrs Kawada dropped some beer on one of my friends. She was very apologetic after that. She was a nice lady, though. Glasses, cups and bowls were all very clean. We were five plus a small child so we decided to get three bowls of ramen to share, several starters and a lot of beer. The Dangerous K signature ramen had curry flavour and was decent, the regular ramen was very bland and the cold shrimp ramen was passable. Noodles were packaged and not fresh. Each bowl was 1000 yen (exactly 10 bucks) but you can find much better stuff for half that price. The starters were pretty average. Nothing was bad but nothing was good. Kawada isn't a very personable fella. We didn't talk to him other than to greet him and say goodbye. He wasn't unfriendly or grumpy but since he wasn't interacting with anybody, and it's not like he was all that busy, we didn't want to bother him. There's a gimmick where you can buy his t-shirt for 30 bucks and take a picture with him, but we didn't do it. He doesn't look like the youngest 50 year old man in the world but he doesn't look bad. He doesn't have the wide shoulders, chest and big arms anymore though. And he's got teeth. Considering that the location isn't convenient for me and that the food was so-so, I probably won't go back, but the gimmick itself is that Kawada is the one doing all the cooking, which is quite an odd sight, so the 17 or 18 bucks I paid were fine in that regard. All this being said I'm happy that the guy has moved on and that he's got something to bring money home, so I hope that he does well.

I always thought they were CM Punk/Heyman henchmen and that it was going to come out when they attacked Undertaker. They were, but only when they were protecting Punk's title. It came out that they were available for hire because "justice isn't always free." Same with Brad Maddox as the bought ref. Maddox was confronting Heyman and had his cameraman secretly record the incident that revealed all of this. I haven't watched any of that (I picked up on WWE again after half a decade a few weeks after Rock regained the title!), I just imagined it was the obvious conclusion. It's probably better that they aren't linked to Punk at this point.

I always thought they were CM Punk/Heyman henchmen and that it was going to come out when they attacked Undertaker.

It looks like they are trying to make a star out of Big E. Langston, in that case he needs new ring gear that doesn't make him look goofy, and a new finisher that doesn't look like shit time and time again even with WWE's tricky bouncy camera work.

Curtis Axel is a terrible name.

It's the first time that I see vintage footage from any place where there are any logos of any kind on the skirt. I'd have expected a big ass banner like on other sports events or flags decorating ringside like at boxing events during Nazi Germany but it was amusing to see it on the ring skirt. I always thought ring skirt decorations came several decades later.

This is not French but interesting Euro vintage nonetheless... http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/no-do/not-97/1465300/ There's a clip here of a catch-as-catch-can bout held in Vienna (Austria) in 1944. Go to the link and click on the right bookmark called "Deportes" (Sport) to skip right to it. The ring's skirt is barely visible at the start but it's an interesting one to say the least.

Is there a wrestling books thread (like the one we have for shoots)? I haven't read a wrestling book in years, probably since I read the Bret Hart book 3 or 4 years ago and I'm looking to read one but not sure which ones are good. It's hard to go by Amazon reviews as even books I have hated have many five star ratings by fans that will love anything they read as long as it's wrestling related. If not, what else can people here recommend? It must be available to buy on ebook format. So far only Snowden's book on shooters is on my list.

Have Dave or Bryan ever explained the rationale of the polls? Dave often mocks them and Bryan too when the results are, as he'd say, preposterous. I can see the MMA ones making sense and current wrestling product polls too but the historical ones are a source of embarrassment more often than not.

You will get a kick out of that guy's channel then, there's plenty of Mighty Inoue (my favourite Showa Era low/mid card guy).

There's also Choshu vs Tom Magee~~~~~ Magee on his ring entrance does a shooting star press landing on his feet. Video time is 20 minutes so I don't dare watch it.

There's a channel on youtube (that I have been subscribed to for some time) that has uploaded two Mil Mascaras vs. El Halcon matches from Japan, and one Masa Fuchi vs. Dos Caras match from 1978, as well as Onita vs Halcon. I haven't seen any of them yet and I could be very wrong here but I only recall having seen short clips of Mascaras vs Halcon before, so it may be the first time they have been on youtube or DVD trades outside of Japan. Pointing this out mainly because this dude is uploading other AJPW on his channel so there may be some stuff that some people here consider small gems. Easy to find channel if you look for Mil Mascaras vs. Halcon (or Tenryu vs One Man Gang if you dare...).

I don't think there will be any sympathy for HHH, which is what they are probably looking for, but Brock will look like a beast. On paper it sounds like a very good angle.

Anddddd here's the answer: You know, these was some regulatory pressure on RTL2 at the time but what got them to pull the plug on WWF was never bad ratings. It was WWE being too cocky and too difficult to deal with. It also wasn't wrestling losing popularity because WCW really took off in 1994/1995 and stayed hot through 2002. We're talking biggest single-ticket PPV in German TV history here. Where WWF did suffer popularity-wise was by doing a tour almost every month in 1995 and parts of 1996. They ran so many house shows that fans lost interest in live events for years. WWF bounced from station to station until the early 2000s then, as in the late 90s, advertisers (not regulators) really started to hate wrestling. To this day, many of the biggest brands have clauses in their ad deals that stipulate that not even make-good ads are allowed to be put during wrestling programming. That pretty much killed their longterm on free TV. The final blow was then a combination of fans growing tired of Smackdown, Smackdown tours and WWE in general. Viewership dropped below 100,000 in recent years, and that's where we are today.

Not to sure about anime, there have always been quite a number of international co-productions as the Japanese were able to produce it cheap (just think of Heidi). The private stations had the major advantage that no conservative group or church was able to veto such programming, they could just start a media campaign condemning wrestling as a vile waste of time that will only corrupt the youth. TV got a lot more daring once private stations came into the pictures. For Germany it's actually a bit bizarre, the conservatives were violently against wrestling yet they were also strongly pushing for private stations when they feared that state tv would be overrun by young leftist hippies trying to destroy family values and what not. Had that happened in the 50s there is a good chance that there would have been some kind of World of Sports pendant. Alas, that was not to be. Do you have more information how WWF fared during their expansion, I am not aware of shows being canceled because of low ratings. In 1995 German station RTL2 tried to establish Superstars in a Sunday afternoon timeslot. After 2 episodes (can't remember if they aired on the same day) all those aforementioned conservatives groups had a meltdown and managed to make wrestling either FSK 16 or 18, 18 being an X rating. After that wrestling could only be aired after 11PM. That was the end of our mainstream boom I never thought I'd see a Heidi mention on this website. But I can't really answer you on that. I never knew the times as I had a friend (who was also a fan) with a dish and every other Saturday we'd watch the Mexican wrestling on TV and then I'd get a shitload of tapes from DSF and RTL2 (and sometimes other odd stuff like IWF Florida from an Israeli TV channel and GWF or IWCCW or whatever was shown here and there). I remember wrestling being very late on TV so you may be right. Let me ask my buddy Oliver Copp who would know for sure and I will post the answer. If you are German and you have a younger sister who is now almost 30, ask her when did Bret Hart, Undertaker and Shawn Michaels stop being featured on BRAVO (for those that don't know, it's a girl pop magazine from Germany). I'd guess 96 or 97, I had a friend that bought it every week and she'd give me a heads up when there was a poster or stickers or whatever on somebody I liked back then which out of the people they were likely to feature it really means only Bret or Bulldog.

It is my understanding that the WWF expansion in continental Europe in the late 80s/early 90s was due to the TV industry opening up to private companies that needed new content. The two star shows for children that were proven TV commodities outside of Europe were WWF and Japanese animation (Japanese cartoons were nothing new in Spain, France or Italy, probably other countries too, but state-owned channels usually had the rights to locally produced animation as well as the popular US cartoons). After a couple of years big boom the WWF Superstars format was a failure in Europe. Nobody wants to sit through endless jobber matches if TV is going to come to your country maybe once every two years and it may not even go to your city anyway. After 1993 the only countries where wrestling was big were the UK and Germany. In the mid 90s I used to get all my WCW and WWF TV from Germany actually. They showed every syndicated or cable show and there was wrestling almost every night.

Barcelona was drawn by the WWF brand and, this is not a joke, Tito Santana vs Undertaker. We didn't know a match order beforehand. Tito went over as clean as he was going to (urn shot and three piledrivers if I recall... I was there but haven't seen the match in decades). This is something that with the internet couldn't be done today but it was a huge deal locally.

For most innovative: this is now something forgotten but there was a stretch in 1993-94 where somebody in AAA, most of the time that somebody being Rey Misterio Jr., would come up with a new crazy "move of the year" that would be topped a week or two later. This was shortly after the days when an Asai Moonsault was a crazy move that some wrestlers in Mexico (like Atlantis) stopped doing because it was TOO RECKLESS. So on that regard it was a really exciting time to be a fan, being pumped up all week until Saturday after lunch you could sit down in front of your TV for hours watching AAA to see the crazy stuff people would come up with. Unfortunately that trend by 98-99 became too stupid and these moves started to look more ridiculous than cool. On the same note, it was great watching All Japan Women to see all kinds of different moves that most men were unable to do as they were not as flexible.

No problem sir. I just watched this on youtube. This is one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen in pro wrestling. I saw the ground in 3D!!!