JerryvonKramer

I'm interested in this point, Loss. Here's a question: if Savage vs. Steamboat was scheduled right behind Hogan vs. Andre, would they have worked the match in the same way? Would that have been the right type of match for that spot on the card? Just a talking point.

I didn't find it a hoot. But then again... how many people laughed at Mae Young's kid? We might not find it funny, but it clearly was a comedy spot. The point was never about whether or not US shows have comedy spots, it was about whether or not US crowds laugh in the same way Japanese crowds do (and even more specifically how that comes across on TV). Not really going to respond to the rest of what you had to say. Randomly and arbitrarily accusing me of binarism in my thinking just feels like jumping on the nearest and most convenient point -- to the extent where I suspect that had I not added the binary coda to that post, you wouldn't have mentioned it.

jdw - I'll be honest, getting bogged down in specific examples with you is among my least favourite activities. I'll make a general statement based on watching hours and hours of footage, you'll go and find a card from 1986 or whenever to disprove the theory or observation. I think you want me to come back with specific counter examples. It's a game for which I've no interest or time. Just not the way I roll, never has been. We can all find examples of cards with long main events, short main events, two long matches in a row at the end, hot crowds, cold crowds, etc. etc. It's not very interesting to list them. And finding exceptions to general rules is easy to do. I want to cut to the chase here. What's our bottomline conclusion then? Is it this ... That crowds can't get burnt out and can stay pumped for 4 hours if the wrestling is good enough, that match sequencing essentially doesn't matter if the crowd are invested in the wrestlers and the fueds. Is that the sort of statement you are driving towards? Would you sign your name off on that? Would everyone else here sign their name off on that? Either crowds can get burnt out or they can't. Either match sequencing matters, or it doesn't. I don't think it's too simplistic to say that we can reduce this whole debate down to those two binary questions.

With the laughter thing, I did manage to track down Heenan vs. Warrior, and it was difficult to tell exactly what the crowd was doing because it was so noisy in general, the music, general pops for Warrior, the commentary team. I think in All Japan the key difference is that things are quiet enough for you to hear the laughter -- same with that Les Kellet match I was talking with OJ about. As for peaks and troughs I don't know. If the filler matches weren't needed before Hogan vs. Warrior, why did they program that way? Same with Hogan vs. Andre, why didn't they run Savage vs. Steamboat right behind it? There must be some reason for it because the nothing matches look very deliberate in all of the first decade of Manias and into the second. Your explanation for this, jdw, is "tradition". I don't see that as being a very satisfactory explanation. JCP stacked the card late, I never said they didn't. What I did say is that the semi-main would be about 10 minutes and worked in a different fashion from the Flair match which typically goes longer and involves early stalling or matwork. This has all been flatly disputed by you jdw.I've watched all those shows in the past year complete with play-by-play notes that run many pages. Maybe we watched different shows. Yes the crowd is stoked for the Flair match, but there's still a moment when they come down before being brought up again in the early going. You're saying he didn't do that, the first 5-10 minutes is just more "stuff to do". Well I've been told, so I guess there's nothing left to say about it.

jdw, you've got to draw a distinction between the booking of an average card and the booking of a Wrestlemania or a Starrcade though, no? I mean apart from Mania 4, when did Hogan ever not go on last on a Mania card during his peak run? Do I think Vince thought about these things? I absolutely do. You don't put on Rude vs. Snuka in a nothing match just before the main event if you're not thinking it through.

You've given me examples of comedy matches, not examples of the crowd laughing audibly like Japanese crowds do. I can't seem to watch the Weasel suit video (blocked in this country), but my memory of it is the crowd popping massive for Warrior and the commentary team playing up the laughs. I'll try to see if there's another version on there.

Well let me ask you then NintendoLogic: do you think Warrior vs. Hogan would have suffered if something like Punk vs. Taker had been right before it? Do you think it would have gone down the same way or would it have been affected? The peaks and troughs within a match I'm talking about are in a 40-minute Flair match following something like a Tag title or US title switch. They are going from a high into Flair stalling or sitting in a hammerlock or something. It's been a while since I saw Hogan vs. Warrior but doesn't it start with them nose to nose and a series of immovable object vs. irresistible force spots with the crowd going absolutely mental? I think an audience might be able to sustain that for 20 minutes if they are coming into it ready.

See, I thought he was just shitstirring or something, but this was actual kayfabe stuff. Really weird that they'd do that. I have all the Bobby Heenan shows somewhere because I've got all the Primetimes from that period -- actually all the Primetimes from the start of the show to the end of 93 or something. It's just gone into that ever-expanding blackhole of footage I'm accumulating. On the show I thought Gordon was kinda shooting or at least semi-shooting on WWF, but from what you've said he was just relaying kayfabe angles. That's really bizarre, why would they do that? Loads of people. There was an interesting split in the demographics of the DiBiase line and the Tommy Dreamer line actually, but I guess most people there went to both. I didn't have time to see Dreamer because I only realised the meet and greet was there late on so only had the interval to play with. The more I think about it, the more DiBiase's appearance at that show seems kinda random. He only came out for the opener, didn't seem like he wanted to be there, and that was it. Weird. Why would he fly half way round the world for that? Couldn't have been a massive pay day.

It's not comedy matches or even elements. WWF has always been a very comedy heavy promotion. All I've said is that I can't recall too many occasions where the reaction of a crowd has been one of them falling about laughing. Obviously I'm not saying that Americans don't laugh, I'm just saying there's a cultural difference between the way American audiences and Japanese audiences react to things. The laughter you get in 80s All Japan is a certain type of laughter too, kinda warm, everyone is in it together. I don't know what jdw has a bee in his bonnet about. He seems to be wanting to argue that there's some wrestling universal here so feels the need to stamp down any difference between US and Japanese wrestling that he can. ------------------ Anyway, to come back to the thread topic, I'm not convinced that you can just throw out the idea of peaks and troughs because you can think of examples where a show has had back-to-back hot matches. jdw dodged this question to indulge in his favourite hobby, which is finding new and inventive ways to disagree with me inthe most condescending way he can come up with and/or winding me up at the same time. That's something I wanted to come back to, which is that match structure itself has ups and downs built into it. It's a point that was lost in the mix. If you look at NWA cards, there may be a hot semi-main but the Flair match will start slow so your "trough" is the first 7-10 minutes of matwork. I've seen dozens of shows structured in that way. WWF didn't have long 30-minute+ main events like that, so they structured their cards differently. Instead of 7-10 minutes of matwork, you get 2 filler matches. KrisZ said that most other territories booked their big shows more like NWA than WWF. I'd be interested to see if the match lengths were about the same. Peaks and troughs is not something I've made up by the way, it's a very well known consideration for any crowd when managing an event. Not just wrestling, any event. Let's throw it out the window though, because jdw can think of Liger-Sasuke and Pegasus-Sasuke.

I don't really understand your game here jdw. Would it make your head spontaneously explode to admit that Japanese audiences have a habit of laughing during matches in a way that US don't tend to? I mean I'm not saying it's never happened, I'm saying that in over 20 years of being I fan I can't remember a whole lot of times when I've heard US crowds do that either in WWF shows or Crockett or WCW shows -- even during comedy spots or comedy matches. The reaction for the Tommy Young spot tends to be a pop, not a big laugh. Watching 80s All Japan it was noticeable how many times the crowd laughed. I haven't just made it up here. I don't really understand your insatiable desire to want to prove me wrong. But hey ho, it's another thread and that's what you do isn't it.

Because that's what I said

If you can find as many examples of US crowds losing their shit in the 80s as there are in All Japan, then I'm happy to be proven wrong. In 100s of hours of watching WWF and NWA though I don't recall it ever being a thing. And certainly never heard the Tommy Young spot get an audible laugh.

A lot of off-camera title switches around that time too. Think they were trying to reinvigorate the house shows. Also, I missed Chris's post on the page before. Wonderful resource.

Who is the best shoot interviewer would you say? Sean Olivier does a lot of the KC ones and I think he's solid and inoffensive but he's not someone who is going to press a point -- so if Barry Windham wants to be evasive, he'll give him an easy ride. Many of the other interviewers are downright horrible. You know, the ones who are just gagging to say from the very start "and THEN you got to the WWF ..."

I think their positioning on that card was more to do with their bad behaviour out of the ring. That was their first match back wasn't it? Anecdottally, there was a lot of LoD merch in school around that time. As much as there was Warrior and Bret Hart stuff. I've said it before but I don't really remember Bulldog being over huge with kids in school, but I was in Wales so some of them might have been ambivalent about cheering on an Englishman. I'd be interested to see if WWF tried touring Europe and the UK in particular before 1991.

you'd have to search about, but I remember being shot down or at least challenged when I was arguing this a year or two ago. My claim was that the extent to which Bulldog was a draw for Summerslam 92 was overstated -- that people were just turning out for the novelty of WWF. I don't think it's possible to have it both ways. If Bulldog can be proven to be a draw in Europe, I think you have to give props to the Road Warriors too because they headlined a lot of cards around that time. Bret Hart probably doesn't get enough credit as a European draw. If you can prove the name on the marquee was WWF and it's primarily that which was drawing, then none of them get credit.

I just watched this OJ: I agree it was pretty funny and the crowd is falling about laughing. Les Kellet I'll maintain that this is a very different sort of crowd from the stadium or big arena crowd I was thinking about earlier. Also never heard American crowds laugh in this way. Sure someone could dig up some obscure example of where it happens, but I'm not buying for a second that crowds were doing that at Flair's Tommy Young bump.

How much credit would anyone give the Road Warriors for some of the numbers WWF were drawing on their 91 and 92 European tours? Royal Albert Hall shows, big crowd at Wembley Arena, 19,000 in Barcelona. A lot of those shows seem to be headlined by them defending their titles, typically against the Nasties.

I think that this might be to do with the type of venue and size of the crowd as well. I'd liken the old Joint Promotions shows to the sort of crowd you might get for a snooker match. The same is true of a lot of those 80s All Japan matches too though. More intimate venues, I'd say, are going to be where you can hear people laughing.

Not audibly on TV. At least not on any Flair match I've ever seen. But it happened all the time in 80s All Japan.

jastrau97 - Cultural context has to play a factor. For example, take your average British crowd in a stadium or big arena setting. Most of the time, they are going to treat it like a soccer match -- by which I mean they'll be noisy and make their own fun REGARDLESS of what's happening in front of them. Take that TNA show I went to last year, the crowd decided that night they were out to have fun. Most of the card was crap. The crowd were deciding who to cheer for on the fly. They'd sing songs if they got bored. On TV and to an American perspective it sounds like they are popping a lot, but that's not exactly what was happening. I don't really know how that would factor in to booking wrestling, because to a certain extent promotors are guaranteed a noisy crowd -- that's just what big British crowds are like -- but a crowd being noisy isn't necessarily an indictator they've done something right. ---- There is one thing that Japanese crowds do that I've never heard an American or a British crowd do, and that's laugh en masse at "comedy antics". Even if you look at stuff like Bundy vs. the midgets or Bam Bam vs. the Dinks, or Gobbledy Gooker or whatever, the crowd isn't really laughing its ass off. Yet in Japanese wrestling it happens fairly regularly and therefore you have the idea of a comedy match built into booking card structure.

Question for jdw: to what extent did each of those matches have peaks and troughs (or valleys as you call them) WITHIN each match? The principle holds true for match structure as it does for card structure. I think one of the problems with Rock vs Cena is that it didn't build, it's basically one long finish sequence. I'd be willing to bet all those AJ matches were not all straight sprints. Even in a bomb-heavy environment like 90s All Japan there are still quiet moments and high spots in matches. Maybe the real problem is that crowds can't get up for an hour and a half of near constant near falls?

One of the reasons I included the WWF caveat in the OP is because I was thinking of all those Crockett shows where you'd get a great semi-main featuring, say, Arn and Tully going into a big main featuring Flair. I'm not sure that Crockett or NWA ever did the peaks and troughs to the same extent. We've definitely watched some Crockett shows where the crowd has been killed though -- the Chicago Starrcade in 87 springs to mind. Where you have The Road Warriors failing to win the tag titles from Arn and Tully and then a mostly dead crowd for Dusty vs. Luger and they are actively hostile by the time Garvin vs. Flair swings around. I'd argue that main was great enough to turn around the crowd, but there's an interesting parallel with WM29 there in terms of a loaded card with a pile of big matches in a row. I honestly don't know if any one philosophy is right because we've seen some legit GREAT semi-mains. One argument might be that you can only do that sort of thing if you can count on someone like Flair in the main event. Another is that the TYPE of match is important. The semi-mains in Crockett tend to be 12-15 minute semi-sprints whereas the main event goes long. Arguably the crowd are brought down by the early matwork in the main before Flair and opponent bring them up again.

We touched on this in last night's show, but I wanted to go more in-depth on it here. In the 1980s, it seems to me that most big shows -- at least those put on by the WWF -- were booked with a "peaks and troughs" mentality. You build to peaks and take the crowd up, then you give them a break, a chance to buy a drink, and bring them back down with a nothing filler match before taking them back up again. In the late 1990s, Russo and co changed this general philosophy as the booking of live events became seconded to "writing for TV" and we got the philosophy of crash television filtering through to PPVs. This idea that there's always something unexpected around the corner, the 24/7 Hardcore title, Mae Young getting her bra out etc. etc. In the 00s and into this decade, there seems to be more of a philosophy, especially at Wrestlemania, of stacking the card with big matches all in a row. Wrestlemania 29 is as good an example of this where you had THREE big matches in a row closing out the card: Punk vs. Taker, HHH vs. Brock, Cena vs. Rock. No matter what we think of the outcome, the INTENTION there was bam. bam. bam. So, here's the thing I'm wondering: Is it a mistake to move away from the "peaks and troughs"? I mean it was clear to anyone watching that the crowd was fried by the time they got to HHH vs. Brock. That match died partly because the crowd was burnt out. Now you could argue that HHH and Brock should have been able to overcome that, but why did the match sequencing put them in that position? I want to contrast an early Wrestlemania card with the thinking at WM29. Here's Mania 6 as a representative example: Rick Martel defeated Koko B. Ware via submission with the Boston Crab at 5:30 - trough, just an opener Demolition defeated WWF Tag Team Champions Andre the Giant & Haku (w/ Bobby Heenan) to win the titles at 9:15 - peak, tag title change and Andre turn to pop crowd big Brutus Beefcake pinned Mr. Perfect (w/ the Genius) at 7:47 after a catapult into the ringpost; during the bout, Mary Tyler Moore was shown in attendance; after the match, the Genius attempted to steal Beefcake's hedge clippers and sneak backstage but Beefcake caught him on the floor, rolled him back in the ring, put him in the sleeper, and then cut the Genius' hair (Perfect's first national TV pinfall loss) - bubbling over match, crowd is still on a high from last match, coming down a bit, but Genius haircutting would have been something to get excited about Roddy Piper fought Bad News Brown to a double count-out at 6:47 when both men began brawling on the floor and Piper attempted to hit News with a steel chair; Piper had half his body painted black for the match; after the contest, both men continued brawling in the aisle all the way backstage - semi-peak / bubbling over match, this feud was featured and Piper was over. Would have been something to get up for and keep things bubbling over. Bret Hart & Jim Neidhart defeated Nikolai Volkoff & Boris Zhukov when Bret pinned Zhukov following the Hart Attack at the 18-second mark - trough The Barbarian (w/ Bobby Heenan) pinned Tito Santana with a clothesline off the top at 4:33 - trough Dusty Rhodes & Sapphire (w/ Miss Elizabeth) defeated Randy Savage & Sensational Sherri at 7:31 when Sapphire pinned Sherri with a roll up after Elizabeth shoved Sherri as Sherri grabbed at her on the floor; prior to the bout, Rhodes introduced Elizabeth to be in his and Sapphire's corner; after the bout, Rhodes stole Savage's sceptor before dancing in the ring with Sapphire and Elizabeth (Miss Elizabeth's surprise return after a 3-month absence) - big peak, featured feud, crowd seeing Elizabeth would have been a big deal. Men and women fighting in the same match was a spectacle. The Orient Express (w/ Mr. Fuji) defeated Shawn Michaels & Marty Jannetty via count-out at 7:36 after Jannetty had salt thrown into his eyes while on the floor - bubbling over match to keep crowd jazzed but with a heel going over to bring them down into ... Jim Duggan pinned Dino Bravo (w/ Jimmy Hart) at 4:15 after hitting him with the 2x4; after the bout, Earthquake attacked Duggan and hit two sit-down splashes - trough. Duggan being killed by Earthquake would have brought crowd down more to set up for ... Ted Dibiase (w/ Virgil) defeated Jake Roberts via count-out at 11:53 as Roberts was distracted by Virgil on the floor; after the match, Virgil returned backstage with the Million $ belt while Roberts hit the DDT on Dibiase and passed his money to fans around ringside; prior to the bout, Gene Okerlund conducted a backstage interview with Roberts regarding the match; stipulations stated the winner would earn the Million $ Belt - big featured feud with lots of build, DiBiase getting a DDT was a moment to pop for. The Big Bossman pinned Akeem (w/ Slick) at around 1:50 with the sidewalk slam despite interference from Ted Dibiase before the match; Dibiase hid underneath the ring after the previous match - trough Rick Rude (w/ Bobby Heenan) pinned Jimmy Snuka at 3:51 with the Rude Awakening; Steve Allen did guest commentary for the match - trough WWF IC Champion the Ultimate Warrior pinned WWF World Champion Hulk Hogan to win the title at 22:50 with a splash after Hogan missed the legdrop; after the match, Hogan presented Warrior with the world title belt; both championships were on the line in the contest; voted Pro Wrestling Illustrated's Match of the Year - massive peak --------- Now let's think about Mania 29. That had only 8 matches to the 14 we got at Mania 6. What happened to all the time would have been given over to the extra 8 matches? Simply put, they worked longer matches. If you look at how Mania 6 was structured, the crowd couldn't possibly have been burnt out by the time they got to Hogan vs. Warrior. They'd seen two big matches already (Dusty vs. Savage mixed-tag match and Ted vs. Jake -- arguably the tag title match was a third big match), but there was a lot of cushioning in between those and the main event. The crowd had Bossman vs. Akeem and Rude vs. Snuka to catch their breath ready for the big match. Mania 29 basically scrapped all such "buffer" matches. We went straight from Punk/Taker into HHH/Brock into Cena/Rock. Straight through, no real break apart from the welcoming of the HoF inductees. On paper you'd think that a card that ends like that would be more satisfying than one that ends with two short nothing-y matches like Bossman vs. Akeem and Rude vs. Snuka before the main event, but in practice -- in terms of managing the crowd response -- it seems to me that 1989 way of doing things made more sense. Do you agree? Disagree? What's your take on this?

Where the Big Boys Play #41 – Clash of the Champions 9 Chad and Parv are back with a vengeance to take a look at Clash of the Champions 9: New York Knock Out. In this show: Chad recounts his experiences traveling with Scott, Justin and the Place To Be crew over Wrestlemania weekend, Chad and Parv break with convention to talk modern wrestling for a while and offer thoughts on Wrestlemania 29, John Cena, The Rock, comparing Taker vs. Punk and Taker vs. Shawn Michaels, the booking philosophy of “peaks and troughs”, Parv recounts meeting his all-time hero Ted DiBiase at Southside Wrestling’s Raw Deal 2 in Stevenage, who was the last act to make it with a masked act in the 1980s?, Parv talks about BrickHithouse’s amazing custom-made Gordon Solie WNN comp, some thoughts on Butch Reed, is Funk-Flair “I Quit” a 5-star match?, listener comments and much much more in a longer-than-usual show.