Herodes

Roman is the only star they have along with Cena and Brock. Have him come out tonight with Takers hat and coat and threaten to burn it, some valiant babyfaves run in (fired up, no intricate sequences and without music playing on queue after a dramatic pause from Roman) and get some heat back into wrestling finally. Listening to that bored crowd yesterday was awful.

They should have had Roman come back to the ring while Taker is symbolically removing his mma gloves and beat the shot out of him, set his gear on fire and leave him laying in a ring projected with maggots to close the show, anything to really add some heat on a performer which they never do. Instead it's a mawkish goodbye and #thankyoutaker no doubt with some network special to follow of all the marks in the back applauding and tweeting memories. There's. I desire to go all out on the heat, the crowd dislike Roman anyway which is a rarity (there's no real heel heat for Owens, triple h, mix, Wyatt), here was a chance to put some real nuclear heat on someone but they would rather go for he applause and thank you bullshit.

Last show I watched on the Network prior to Mania was a Prime Time from 1986 with a main event of Big John Studd vs Ted Arcidi. As you can imagine it wasn't a classic but in terms of telling the story it should have told and crowd heat reacting to the story it was better than anything on Mania with the exception of Goldberg vs Lesnar. Everything else was pretty awful and/or heatless and fell short of Studd/Arcidi standards.

I exclusively watch nothing after the mid 90s other than a once a year foray over mania weekend. I don't know when it happened but the indy influenced style up and down the card is awful, everything is worked for applause rather than cheers, fans shouldn't be applauding at wrestling shows. Every match has these endless cutesey intricate sequences, set ups, reversals, near falls and kick outs etc. There was nothing in anyone's work displaying baby face or heel traits or nuance, even supposed fiery comebacks feature the same intricate bullshit and close near falls. This was the fucking worst.

"Fuck that PC bullshit, hard" is why we are where we are today in the world. What ifs are pretty meaningless, and somehow I doubt you would have ever called anyone "that Japanese guy"....

"That....Indian guy" has a name, Jinder Mahal. Let's not go down the road of denying ethnic minority performers a name.

Junkyard Dog was a great pro wrestler

stro is being predictably awful, the show was fine and what you would want it to be aside from the obvious nonsense of Beth Phoenix being inducted and hilarious shout its to grizzled vets of the game who paved the way like Candice Michelle and Kelly Kelly.

It wouldn't be WWE event without El P repeatedly telling us how little of a flying fuck he gives about the show....followed by his thoughts on the show

I understand that Bix is a credible journalist covering wrestling and his work has been covered in some major outlets, not just some chap who writes about wrestling any more than you're some chap who writes about Shakespeare; it's both your professions, and your writing carries weight in your respective fields. The facts are pretty clear and his act of murder should be decoupled from his overness in MSG in 1983.

Parv, don't go full Snuka Truther. Even if you've gone down the virtue signalling lols path, he killed her.

Parv sounds like a guy who just discovered an alt-right dictionary in the wake of Trump and he can't wait to use all his favorite new words and phrases. SJW! Virtue Signalling! Etc

I don't rate wrestling matches, but as an avid reader I have rated books for many years for my own reference, on a standard 5 star scale (no halves, quarters etc). Basically I define 5 stars as the absolute elite - Shakespeare, Proust, Homer, Milton, Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, Dante, Ulysses, Les Miserables and very few others. Anything else is relative to those so that when I've read a great book, say Somerset Maughams Of Human Bondage, rather than give it 5 stars I judge it against my 5 star list and rate it accordingly so that when I look back at decades of books read, the truly elite are differentiated from those that I merely loved.

And as a Lucha fan, watch weekly Lucha tv from 89 to 2005

Grimmas, watch more 80s mid south, 80s and 90s Memphis, Georgia, JCP, WCW, World Class, USWA Texas, SMW, Southeastern before making such a ridiculous statement. Smackdown may be a decent show after years of massively lowered standards and expectations based on tv formats that haven't significantly changed since the late 90s where fundamental tenets such as feuds progressing and good promos are considered exceptional rather than expected. It's a nothing show in the grand scheme of things.

Now if only people can stop applying the "one style" fallacy to Lucha...

It's not just ease of availability and (zero) cost, it's about viewing patterns switching to consume and rank all matches, completist "MOTY viewing", sample old wrestler matches and form opinions based on isolated match watching etc. The desire to watch an enjoy a 6 hour territorial tv comp for example not to add to the pantheon of great matches but to watch stories develop, promos, squashes and narrative arcs seems to be almost dead. A match is a relatively small commodity that requires relatively little time, minutes rather than hours, click, add to playlist, rank or dismiss with little time for context.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand....

One of the takeaways from the puro vs Lucha thread was the obsession with fans and inability to avoid labels ("hipsters" seems to be a popular one these days)

Yes that's exactly what's being advocated with this "nonsense" and "crying". Thanks for your adult contributions to the discussion.

Not just modern wrestling though, but the way in which older wrestling is regarded. In a time of abundant, free footage, the trend has now become to cherry pick best matches of a promotion or wrestler and it's rare people want to sit through a 6 hour comp of Memphis tv that will likely have no "MOTYs" by current prevailing standards eg there was another popular tape of uswa from early 92 that focused on the Lawler and co vs moondogs feud that was mainly studio brawls, brutal squashes, mystery tag partners, story progression, intense promos etc supplanted by misogyntic Eric embry angles where women were getting stripped and whipped and racist Dennis corraluzzo promos at koko b ware. But it's a great tape and something which would seem to have no place in the match-focused approach of today where old footage is all about ranking and discovering matches rather than the whole package. there is too much to watch, it's basically all free and watching a match is on average only a 15 minute commitment which can be assigned a star rating and then move on to the next match.

To take a slightly different angle than old vs new fans, there is an overall trend on both sides to want to list and quantify matches, to add matches to the canon, and basically boil critical judgement and appreciation of wrestling to just "matches". Hence endless match reviews and star ratings and what does or doesn't qualify as a MOTY (now the discussion cuts straight to is this the greatest match of all time or not). We are getting so much footage old and new that we need to consume and either promote or disregard in rapid order to allow us to move on to more consumption; matches serve as the most easily quantifiable commodity in the never-ending quest for "the list". There was something more to be said for the joy of watching tv tapes full of matches that would never qualify for the famed "canon" but also promos, angles, gimmicks, stupidity etc. Is the end goal to have spreadsheets of matches that make "the cut" and is the joy of scouring a John McAdam tape list and reading all about Georgia or Memphis angles and happenings gone? One of the best tapes I remember seeing was a 6 hour comp of Memphis tv from late 85 to 86 which aside from the famed loser leaves town match had no matches that would sniff a respectable star rating yet still manages to be the most entertaining wrestling I've seen thanks to the likes of Dundee, Lawler, mantel, landell, hickerson, Russell with wild angles, incredible interviews and lots of nonsense etc. does that have a place in the new match-centric, list-obsessed world of wrestling fandom?

Overbooked, that's one of the best posts I've read on here, and touches on a lot of the key issues being discussed without seeking to define limits of where the discussion can and can't go. Most interesting is about how the orthodoxies of "good wrestling" have been codified, and the "language" of smart fandom and how fans struggle to apply these supposed "truths" to Lucha. The easy route is to try and go through lists of "great matches" but the problems there are looking at matches outside of their context with the burden of trying (and often failing) to "get" them by applying the traditional orthodox structural standards which dictate what selling, finishes, heat segments etc "should" be.

Not saying there hasn't been great stuff since, but as an overall peak it's been a long time. Once people started obsessing over fans of Lucha, Memphis etc it inevitably sours discussion, since the accusation of disingenuousness is introduced. The canon is defended more religiously than ever.