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Dave seems confident thar Nakamura is coming up after Mania.

Garrett Kidney made a great point in the podcast/rant he did reviewing the Impact reboot mess. Heel Cody doesn't just play to the people in the back row, he's playing to the people 150 feet away from the entire arena. He's so over the top and cartoonish and without being surrounded by the other wacky parts of the WWE Cinematic Universe it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Kind of surprised it took this long for something like this, seems like a show parodying Southern rasslin' would be right up Vince's alley.

Cena-Taker was the original plan, hence the winky reference by Cena last week.

I'm probably getting my hopes up for nothing, but the "anyone can enter" SD women's match seems like a good way to debut Asuka on the main roster.

That's another issue, I could never buy Orton as subservient to Bray since he's been portrayed as a top level guy almost since day one and Wyatt's been beaten by everyone and lucked into the title thanks to a gimmick match. The other builds have been so much better it just makes the ridiculousness stand out even more. As much as I have zero need to see another Shane WM spotfest, the build up for it has been fantastic. Miz and Maryse dropping truth bombs while Cena/Nikki can only respond with variations of "NO, U" has been fantastic, Bryan's promo on how he wants to punch Miz in the face for constantly trolling him by shittily copying his moveset was fantastic, and then you have Randy out there saying he's taken Bray's magic powers away by burning the remains of his long dead sister. Every time he does a promo all I hear is "One of These Things Is Not Like the Other".

I am actually watching the shows, and them going from "I will never face you for the title" to "sike, it was just part of my evil plan" in like a week came off (to me) as them realizing they had less time to get to the end than they realized. I mean for those of us who knew that was the scheduled WM match it was fine, but I'd imagine it was a hard out of nowhere turn for those who don't follow the insider news.

There was also that weird time where Warrior abducted him and it was implied that.....things....were happening to him.

I'm hoping that something changed at the last minute, since it's really depressing to consider the long term payoff to the months long Orton-as-a-Wyatt angle was always meant to be "it was just my master plan all along to pretend to be subservient and give up my title shot for no reason then burn your house down". Because that was like some shit you see when the writer of a comic book gets fired/quits mid story arc.

Not hard to argue that even being in the role of solid worker herding the noobs in NXT would have been a step up over whatever the fuck the DCC gimmick was supposed to be.

ROH is also one of the shows on the Fight Network so Anthem basically fucked themselves by fucking with their PPV which completes the circle of dumbshittery.

Yeah, his reaction was more "I ain't got no fight with you" than fear, plus kayfabe wise he figured Taker was there to fuck up Roman which would be what Braun wants.

Also Dave has been really into watching the Friday night CMLL shows ever since someone made him aware of the stream.

"Fuck that owl" is a pretty good mic drop tho, have to give her that.

So there is a show on the Observer site that reviews 98 Raws, but nothing that reviews lucha or EVOLVE or other indies? On Tuesdays they review retro Raw and Nitro. They did review Lucha Underground when it was airing, and Dr. Lucha has a semi-regular slot on the Friday WOL shows. Dave does tend to go over the big indy shows when they happen.

I was actually starting to get into the storylines the last couple of weeks, but I have zero interest in watching this reboot.

Alvarez of all people made an excellent point on the last Bryan and Vinny show reviewing 98 Raw that one of the biggest reasons Austin vs McMahon was so huge is because he was doing to his boss what people watching wish they could do to theirs. Fans could live vicariously through Stone Cold giving his boss the finger, and Vince was great at being the perfect foil always willing to show ass for him. Now we have three hours of Steph browbeating the talent and constantly reminding them they can be fired at a moment's notice which will leave them homeless and destitute. Everyone cowers in fear of the boss, and no one in the audience that they are trying to cater to wants to see 3+ hours of bosses browbeating the talent. There's nothing for the fans to get behind, who wants to cheer for these milquetoast-ass mofos who get their balls handed to them on a regular basis?

Jerry also retweeted someone who posted a photo of an old PWI Weekly with the headline of "Jerry Lawler charged with rape and sodomy" (he seems to just retweet anyone who tags him) so it doesn't seem he's paying a lot of attention these days.

Lucha kind of does that with cibernetico matches, and they tend to usually be pretty good. Even if there's some guys involved who aren't any good, it's easy to limit them to just a couple of spots where they don't bring things down too much.

I don't think she was ever on their level wrestling wise, but her connection with the fans in NXT was something else. Sadly, the 11 million writers on Raw don't know how to write a babyface so she was DOA as soon as she moved up.

Two new collections, Mr. Wrestlemania with all of Shawn Michaels' WM matches and a Day After Wrestlemania collection including a lot of stuff that happened before it was officially A Thing to have big stuff happen then.

When did "make the smarks melt down" replace "drawing money" as the main point of the wrestling business?

I guarantee that writeup of Taker-Roman, while quite good, was putting way more thought into things than was actually done by Vince. He wants to give his boo another Mana Coronation Moment, and I don't think there's much more to it than that.

One thing I think that is kind of lost here is while yes, fat shaming is a shitty thing to do, pro wrestling is largely a cosmetic business so commenting on someone's size (or lack of in the case of someone like Cheeseburger) is kind of different than some men's rights activist troll type calling all women fat on Twitter. Like it or not, the largest and most powerful company in the industry has two guys at the top who have a fetish for bodybuilder types and anyone not meeting that standard seems to have to work 5x as hard to get to the starting level a big jacked up guy would be. Things are changing slightly, of course. We're past the days where you wouldn't even get a glance from the WWF if you didn't have a physique that looked like you could explode at any minute, but there's a reason Triple H still scouts for talent at fitness contests. IMO, the bigger issue to me was always height rather than weight. It just looks silly matching up guys with like a foot difference in height and 75+ pounds difference in weight when the idea is to pretend it's a real athletic contest. When they have someone like Sasha beat Nia Jax with a rollup they might as well have a neon sign up broadcasting how fake this is.

It seems like the majority of their training is doing drills nonstop, which is all well and good until something goes wrong. It's not like they don't have trainers who would seem to be able to teach to those moments, but I suppose a lot of that is just instinct too.