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With Taker the gimmick always had legs, corny as they might have been. From the original Grim Reaper to the evil cult leader of the Attitude Era, the we'll-pretend-this-never-happened Biker era, into the WWE Legend Taker era there's always been some substance there. Kane as a character has never really gone too far past "Taker's presumed dead brother who was burned for a while then wasn't". It was like the took one of Hogan's villians of the month from the 80s and made a 20+ year run with it.

Nice to see they finally realized that what helped get Cena past the stage where the cool thing was to boo him might just work for Roman as well (and so far it has). Namely keeping him away from the main title picture and putting him in the position to have good matches with folks.

I think part of this stems from not wanting to encourage people to jump the rails, which happened fairly regularly to both companies in the Monday Night Wars era. Ever since then, WWE has gone out of their way whenever possible to make it clear that anyone coming from the crowd is part of the show and not some rando. Also Vince's quirk of people always being in their gear no matter how ridiculous, which among other things gave us the Randy Orton Never Wears Pants meme.

The narrative they were going for was how the guy who personified everything the 80s wanted to be did so at the expense of his family, and perhaps all in the pursuit of getting validation from his parents who didn't seem to want anything to do with his chosen profession.

Not discounting Hogan's working ability, because....c'mon, but he's always been pretty open about how he knows he was never the most talented wrestler ever. His famous quote of him only knowing how to do 3 things but doing them better than anyone says it all. I can see Hulk being comfortable saying Flair was a better technical wrestler than him because he knows he was far more successful doing what he did than Ric was.

As someone who ends up having to watch everything kid related that comes out (my son is 5), Ferdinand looks better than most movies targeting that audience. I'd expect it to do very well, and I hope Dave doesn't try to downplay it since it won't beat Star Wars.

That's what I was hoping. I really wish this can be the year we finally break the lucha logjam.

It shouldn't get lost in all the box office jibber jabber that Dave straight up called Ryan Satin an asshole on Twitter today.

It was just mentioned in today's WON update that there will be five "acts" (his term, whatever that means) going in to the HOF this year.

Obviously a sack of doorknobs is going to be a huge PPV draw opposite Floyd, but hasn't Conor been the clear #1 draw in UFC for a while? It's not like that was the only big gate he was part of.

Cena does have the potential to take that Rock leap and become a megastar off the back of enjoyable popcorn movies and/or animated voice over roles. He'll never be at that level as just the pro wrestler guy who shows up on the Today show occasionally.

Dave's point on the Conor/Cena stuff is while more people probably recognize Cena, Conor makes more money and that's the only stat that really matters in business.

So did Bryan stuff Bix in the lockers when he worked on the newsletter? His constant subtweets and out and out pissy mean girl tweets are getting hilarious.

lol I was trying not to say goth looking since I was afraid someone would well-actually me over one or both of them not really being goth or whatnot.

I got the impression she initally was doing it because it was Reid's dream but along the way found her own passion for it along with how much her dad enjoys it. That's not all from the documentary by the way, just from several times she's spoken about it.

Looking at the pic of Ruby's crew on the WO front page reminds me how terrible the WWE makeup team is. They must be so used to working on overly tanned/bronzed faces that pale complexioned folks like her and Paige look like mimes on TV.

They brought him back to be ref for Brock-Jinder, and when they changed that they clearly had no other plans for him other than to stick him in the 10 man.

RIP Hideo Itami (they just did a Coming Soon video for him on 205 Live).

I had a feeling when Ruby started growing her hair out she was going to get a call up soon. Not wanting the women on the roster to have short hair is like Vince Quirk #687686876. At least this hopefully solves a couple of issues, NXT had a glut of women not getting enough work on TV, and the main roster had a laughably small women's division since the brand split. I don't think any of the six brought up are ready for prime time to be honest (Paige is sure to have tons of ring rust), but at least it freshens things up.

Nothing says "Smackdown definately isn't the B show, no sir" than doing the exact same angle Raw did the night before.

It seemed that Hunter got hurt on the backbreaker deal he did on Nakamura, and for a while guys were just kind of improvising while he surveyed the damage. He also kind of disappeared for a while after, I assumed the doctors were checking him out on the floor or something.

After last year's miracle with Shane, AJ vs literally anyone will be well recieved.

Pure speculation, but I could see that being a situation where Brock didn't want to work with him. The way he worded it made it sound like Vince never really saw Finn as a main event guy, booked him to get killed by Kane like a chump to dull his heat, then used his lesser crowd reaction as justification to not have him in the main event.

One of the many Flair family curses is an inability to hit moves off the top rope.

I mean, it's automatically better than any of the late 90s-2000s WCW War Games, and as much as the 80s ones are beloved this one won't end in a lame manager submission.