sek69

Watching Raws from 1995 on the Network, I never realized that Bertha Faye actually debuted in her Monster Ripper gimmick (not mentioned by name of course) when she first showed up to attack Medusa.

The Verge has a story here on the WWE Network, one thing mentioned in the comments I never thought of as being a deterrent: current episodes of Raw/Smackdown being delayed a month before they go up. I know it's because of contracts and what have you, but today's binge-watching consumers expect to be able to watch current episodes of shows within a few days max. The rest of the TV industry has trained viewers to expect quick turnaround, and WWE is stuck in a bad spot.

Tyson Kidd has been awesome on NXT, his asshole babyface gimmick has legit been the best thing WWE is doing for months now.

AJ in particular seems like just a naturally tiny person, but she did seem to lose a lot of weight when she came back. Maybe it's just more noticeable on someone that small. I can't even imagine the pressure the women must be under in a company where they run angles treating you like a fat cow if you aren't sporting a six pack at all times.

Funny thing about Steph, my wife was watching RAW on Monday (which usually doesn't happen) and when they were replaying the arrest angle her only comment was "wow, she works out too much. it looks like she has a buff dude's chest with boobs attached".

Vince Russo was burying Impact tonight for having too much wrestling on it. So many jokes came at the same time that my brain locked up.

Honestly at this point, 90% of people's technical problems were on the user end. If you have good internet but a POS router for example, your WWE Network experience will suffer. That's not to say there hasn't been a stutter or two on the live feed, but it seems that the people who have problems every month are the ones still rocking the 2005 era Netgear routers. Also it shouldn't be undersold how boned WWE's Canadian fans are. They might as well just released an announcement telling everyone up north to just use a proxy to get the US version.

Dave said on the Breaking News audio that the plan was cutting $10 million this year and $30 million next year.

The latter could also suggest your customers are so poor they have to use gift cards and/or low balance debit cards. That would be a sore point for a company that just fell short of expected TV revenues because the consensus your audience are all poor dullards.

So I wonder what the spin will be for the large number of cancels. I'm betting either A: people only signed up to get Wrestlemania for $10 or B: lapsed Attitude Era fans signed up only to cancel when nothing from that time frame was being added.

I always seemed to gravitate to the heels, Randy Savage and the Horsemen were the coolest guys in the universe to 1987 me. It didn't help matters that the WWF kept pushing Hulk as a moral babyface with the "prayers and vitamins" stuff, and I kept thinking what a dick he was to his friends all the time.

So it would seem to be a tip-off that the Network numbers are going to come in low if they already are planning to cutting 10% to please Wall Street, would it not?

They would add episodes of Saturday Night and were starting Worldwide and I think Mania (one of the WWF 90s B-shows) a few months before the service was shut down. They would also be doing themes every month and once in a while there'd be never before seen matches in those too.

So my wife recorded the WWE/Scooby Doo movie off of Cartoon Network and for some reason it's retitled Scooby Doo! The WWE Mystery! and all references to Wrestlemania are changed to "Superstar Mania".

The Russo fiasco wasn't the main reason but it was definitely a factor. Felt that having Bellator go from weekly to monthly shows probably caused a change in thinking TNA was necessary to help promote them every week. Also that there's probably only a handful of people who would have a chance to get spots in ROH or in Japan.

So Dave mentioned there were 3 big stories coming out, one was the WWE Network numbers, we now know the second was TNA getting dropped by Spike, what would #3 be? Sting officially signing? Gina going to UFC?

That has to be a record of some sorts, has one person ever killed two different major promotions? For all the "LOLTNA" stuff, they were a nationally televised promotion.

I've been getting that impression for a while, given the push for it would barely be considered half-ass until the last week or so. The YouTube stuff especially makes no sense, since the biggest potential market would be lapsed fans from the Attitude Era. Right now none of that stuff is on the network (other than PPVs), and if you want to see the TV that led up to what they do have you have to go to YouTube to see it.

It seems the plan is to add a lot of stuff in August/September when renewals come up. Bryan made a good point on one of his shows where if WWE had content that appealed to people other than PPVs on a monthly basis they wouldn't have to panic when renew time comes up every six months.

Agreed, considering Vince doesn't like to push guys he doesn't think could win fights for real.

I'm imagining Vince going on in his 80s announcer voice about how MANLY Bryan is for doing this while Hunter kicks rocks while muttering "so what, I would have caught BOTH robbers". In fact, he should say that in his next troll promo on Raw.

Say what you will about TNA, but EC3's theme has been an earworm in my head all day today.

Neither did Krusher Krushchev, the gimmick was Uncle Ivan turned a good Minnesota boy into an evil commie.

Someone asked the question in the WO mailbag to Dave if Vince really expected such an obnoxious character to get over as a face, and apparently he did since Vince loves Elvis and thought everyone would cheer for the guy. Speaking of 80s WWF fans rebelling, the story on Demolition is Randy Colley got replaced as Smash because people recognized him as a former Moondog, but somehow no one noticed Smash 2.0 was Krusher Krushchev with hair?

I don't think Neville is bad at all, but I can just see Kevin Dunn savaging him when he gets called up because of his look.