sek69

It's becoming a bizarre psychology experiment at this point, it seems. I've never seen any company so hell-bent on damaging something they could have made serious money off of. Dave seems to be of the opinion Bryan's too nice of a guy and they want guys slotted at the top to be cutthroat. Bryan doesn't seem to be wired that way so they don't consider him main eventer material.

That's not something I see Vince caring a whole lot about, for several reasons.

Not complaining, but adding Fujinami was quite the random move. What's WWE's gain in doing this?

Yeah that confused me too. It's not like they were dressed as non WWF guys and it didn't appear as if they were doing anything distracting either. Most I noticed is the guy dressed as Flair did the "hey I'm on TV" stand up and wave thing at point.

I'm guessing the only hope the NXT women have is if the next post Wrestlemania talent purge consists of all the main roster divas other than Nattie/Paige/AJ/Bellas. On a somewhat related note, is Total Divas done after this current season? It seems that show is the main (only?) reason that the women who can't wrestle out of a paper bag are being kept on the roster.

Not to mention the story of them buying a house together made TMZ, and recent history shows they only do so when WWE tells them to.

They did a video on the app (I know, i know) where they tried to ask Rusev about it, he responded in Russian several times until asked if his and Lana's relationship was more than business and he said it was none of our business and walked off. So it looks like they are setting up including their real life romance as part of the story.

The only fly in the ointment here is if NXT did start to be a successful touring brand, I don't see Vince not wanting to get his hands on it.

Because it was clearly a parody/fan post not intended to be believed as the actual script.

The stuff with Rusev's lawyer was something, did no one bother to see if that guy could pull off an accent before putting him on TV? I guess one good thing about it was how it caused one of the best Vince-via-JBL flip out burials.

I'm hoping Dolph and Cody are in there to do the "holy shit" bumps (maybe Harper too), so Bryan won't have to hold up that end of the bargain. I am wondering how far they're gonna go with the "lawdy, i'z afraaaaid to climb this here ladder" stuff with Truth.

I think the length of shows in the 80s was determined more by the capacity of VHS tape than anything else. Most of the JCP shows that went three hours got butchered to hell on home video, perhaps Vince was just thinking ahead since I'm sure that was a big revenue stream at the time.

So what happened to Bo Dallas? Injury of some sort? I realize he wasn't setting the world on fire but it's like he fell off the face of the Earth.

I feel the backlash against Cena has cooled off because this is the first feud he's been in a while where he's actually shown getting upset at losing a match.

Yup and he ended up getting pretty badly burned because of it, like 40-50% of his body.

Even before the unfortunate Smackdown ending, it seemed like they were planting seeds for a turn with the whole "I tried my best and gosh darn it, it just wasn't enough" deal they were doing already. Hell, turning heel would be the best thing for him since he's clearly never going to be the #1 babyface and they badly need heels.

I doubt it. I'm sure them making "Superkick Party" videos for .com and trying to trademark the too sweet hand gesture nearly twenty years after it was introduced to wrestling are just coincidences. I mean I don't think anyone's losing sleep over it but it's clearly another example of the petty behavior WWE is known to indulge in when they don't get what they want.

TV was changing to a national syndication format instead of local TV stations individually paying for content. You can argue Vince made things hard for other promotions to get syndication coverage like he did, but the TV business changed on a larger scale than just what impacted the wrestling business.

I'm guessing had Vince decided to get into fights we'd end up with the WBF version of MMA.

Dave's write up in the new WON seems to indicate Ivelisse Valez is one of the divas who was released, I guess her "attitude issues" were not wanting to put up with Bill's bullshit.

I remember reading somewhere that Jim Johnson is extremely reluctant to do anything on camera, some kind of stage fright/camera shy thing so I would think he'd be uncomfortable getting an award like that. I agree it's well deserved though. So many classic themes that really set the stage for a lot of guys. Something like theme music doesn't seem important at first but the right theme is like the icing on the cake to a great gimmick.

HHH likes the internet when it's telling him how great NXT is, and hates it when they tell him WWE has been a pile of shit for the last year or so. One could argue he's doing a one man good-cop/bad-cop routine to make sure Vince thinks he's on his side about those Damn Millennials.

Just noticed they skipped Raw #178 (9/30/96) on the recent batch of uploads. Looking at the results there doesn't seem to be any content related reasons why they would bypass it.

"Vince killed the territories" is really one of the biggest myths in wrestling. Well, OK he probably had a direct hand in killing the AWA by raiding all their talent, but the rest were killed off by the local TV business changing from stations paying for content to demanding *to* be paid. Vince got out ahead of the curve by setting up his own syndication network so when the landscape changed he was on much better footing that anyone else.

I know on my Roku streaming stick I wasn't getting any new content until I checked for an update to the system software, I guess it was blocking the app from updating until that was done.