Gregor
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Everything posted by Gregor
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There are, and there are also a lot of Reds fans who wish that Marty Brennaman would stop griping about his team's best player during his broadcasts The baseball announcers who are best described as "entertaining personalities" are generally polarizing, just like Monsoon is.
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I don't hate Monsoon, but that match and Harts-Steiners are two in which I distinctly recall him annoying me. I remember Savage goes for a pin on Santana, hooks the leg, and then when Santana kicks out Gorilla says that Savage shouldn't have been so focused on hooking that leg. He spends his whole announcing career telling guys to hook the leg, and then, when someone finally does, well, he might have gotten the pinfall if only he hadn't done that.
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Were there any good options for the mystery partner? The main one I can think of who wouldn't have been a letdown was Chyna, but I imagine they wanted to give her in-ring debut some buildup. If I remember correctly, Owen never actually tags into the match, which I found weird (but I last watched this years ago).
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A minor detail in an old post that no one read, but according to Dandy the Jalisco in 1992 CMLL was Mogur. Sure enough, in thecubsfan's database Jalisco's tenure coincides perfectly with a disappearance by Mogur. So, for the thousands of people wondering where Mogur went or who that newcomer was, there you go.
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Is there a way to hide avatars? I vaguely remember the past version of this board having the option to hide them, but if that option exists on this version I can't find how to use it. Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this.
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Soup's praise for this match got me interested in watching it. I knew it had a reputation as being kind of long and boring, but I remembered literally nothing about it other than Bret winning, so I figured it was worth a watch. The promos leading up to it are really good, too. As for the match, ahhhhhhh, I dunno. After the promos I was kind of expecting them to wrestle this like Flair vs. Steamboat, where it feels like each of them is trying to prove something, but this just feels like the typical Flair-Bret match. Move-for-move, this could have been wrestled at a house show in late 1992. Bret even pulls down the straps for the first time in ages. Bret doing the drop toehold into the figure four is the only part of this, other than the super-clear finish, that really goes well with the way that they built this up.
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I don't agree about 1994-1997 Vince. From when Heenan left until when Jim Ross became a regular RAW announcer, WWF commentary wasn't good. The caricature of Vince as an announcer ("baaaaaaack body drop," "he got him no he didn't") is actually a pretty accurate description of what he was like from 1994-1996. He and Lawler were AWFUL together. Lawler contributed little other than one-liners and cheerleading the heels, so Vince had to pick up the slack and cover stuff that wasn't his strong suit. As already noted, he was gaga for Shawn Michaels and his commentary probably hurt Michaels overall. And this was the height of the weak current event tie-ins, too. When Ross came in, Vince still did play-by-play but the focus of his other comments was storyline and character stuff, whereas Ross handled match psychology and stuff like that. It was a lot better, but it probably helped that the storylines were better and that they ditched the pop culture remarks. Edit: Now that I think about it, Vince had plenty to say about the psychology of the matches, and Ross talked about character stuff, too. I guess I'm not really sure why the two of them gelled, but they did.
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"Carny." Anyone using that sounds like a condescending ass (to be fair, they're generally going for that). What happened to that period of people on wrestling boards trying to make other people on wrestling boards feel guilty about the way they watched wrestling? Edit: I forgot "superworker." That one's just silly to me, though, as I never got how it was different from "great worker" other than being one keystroke shorter.
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[1998-01-18-WWF-Royal Rumble] Shawn Michaels vs The Undertaker (Casket)
Gregor replied to Loss's topic in January 1998
The opening part of the match, with Undertaker beating Michaels all over the place, is surprisingly weak here. There's some awkwardness between them, but for the most part the spots are good; they just just don't seem to flow from spot to spot very well. As an example, at one point Michaels counters a chokeslam by grabbing onto the ropes and hitting a moonsault. They pull that spot off better than you'd imagine, but Undertaker ends up in control again just moments later, so it doesn't really accomplish anything. In another surprise, the match actually picks up once Michaels takes control. He doesn't have any great offensive moves (other than the awesome piledriver on the steps), but they just seem to find their groove during this part. I guess it just feels focused, and Michaels never seems to be killing time out there. The casket teases are good for getting the crowd into the match and then, when Undertaker fights his way out, thinking they're seeing his comeback. Towards the end, Michaels does a flying elbow onto Undertaker, who's in the casket, and it's kind of the inverse of the moonsault spot - it sounds good on paper, ends up looking kind of iffy, and works anyway because it fits in with the flow of the match. Why does Earl Hebner close the lid when they're both in the casket? Of course that doesn't sort anything out, so he tries it again just seconds later. The ending is lame but amusing - they've had four years to improve upon their original finish for having Undertaker lose a casket match, and all they could think of changing was not having Undertaker fly to the top of the arena. I guess I'd never watched until the end before, because I used to give them credit for axing the disembodied promo, but, no, this match has one of those, too. This pretty clearly slots in between Badd Blood and Ground Zero in ranking the three matches these two had around this time, and because I didn't like the WrestleMania match I'd call this Michaels' last good match for a while. -
[1998-03-29-WWF-Wrestlemania XIV] Shawn Michaels vs Steve Austin
Gregor replied to Loss's topic in March 1998
They get off to an awesome start with Michaels throwing jabs and celebrating and Austin chasing him down and beating the tar out of him. Then the ref ejects HHH and Chyna and the match loses all of its momentum somehow. For one thing, DX had been such a big part of helping Michaels keep his title that it seems strange that no ref had thought to send them to the back until this match. Is Mike Chioda just that much smarter than Earl Hebner? Then you have stuff like Austin chasing down HHH for no reason (even with the interference, in the biggest match of his life Austin should be focused solely on Michaels) and the brawling up by the band and dumpsters, all of which gets rendered pointless when Austin just goes right back on offense. I complained a lot about the Unforgiven match, but Austin looks like much more of an asskicker there than he does here. It takes Michaels forever to take control. I assume it's in part because of the injury, as there's no way Austin would have gone to a chinlock if everything were OK. Some of Michaels' offense is nice, like the chopblock after the Tyson distraction, but for the most part this section of the match really drags. Michaels' stuff with the knee isn't really vicious enough to seem threatening. The grimacing is pretty distracting (I know, not really a fair complaint). Austin's comeback doesn't feel like anything special, although the finisher reversal stuff is a nice sequence. In the end, I think they do a much better job stacking the deck against Austin in his next two PPV matches; this one doesn't feel like much of a conquest. Mike Tyson is barely a factor at all. I know that this is a big part of WWF history, and the crowd goes crazy when Austin wins (and keeps going crazy as the year goes on), but by itself this match doesn't even seem like it builds up to the big moment all that well. The crowd is surprisingly quiet for large periods of this (which leads to stuff like Michaels flipping them the bird just to get some heat) or chanting "Holyfield." Ross tries hard to get this over as this huge match and sounds silly when he says that he's never seen anything this intense; he's broadcast matches from both guys within the past year that were more intense than this. I know that as a big moment this was a success, but, I dunno, the crowd was going to go nuts when Austin won regardless of how it happened. It doesn't feel hollow like Sting's victory at Starrcade, but I don't think that the wrestlers did that good a job of setting this moment up. -
I didn't really have any opinion about this match going in, because I honestly remembered nothing about it except for the very end. Watching it just made me appreciate the rematch even more. There really isn't any drama until McMahon shows up. Dude's offense is really weak here, and he doesn't seem like any kind of a threat (I get that that's part of the storyline, but it doesn't make for a compelling match). I liked his bumps more in the Over the Edge match. Here Dude takes a hiptoss off a stage as part of Austin's offense at the start, and later he takes a suplex to the steps as a hope spot. The hiptoss doesn't really add anything to the match other than a big bump, and the suplex is far too big a bump to be just a hope spot, especially given that Dude never comes back with anything equally as devastating. Austin's on offense for the majority of the match, which makes sense but, again, doesn't create much drama. This gets better once Vince arrives. I really like the spot where he baits Austin up the rampway. The abdominal stretch spot is kind of cool but doesn't make much sense - if the timekeeper rings the bell, then whoever's applying the hold wins the match? It can't be that simple. The end is a mess, as Dude stops applying the claw for some reason and then goes to reapply it just so that he can get backdropped to the outside. Not a fan of the elbows to the chair. That's a lot of complaining about a match that, in spite of its flaws, is generally entertaining and accomplishes its purpose of setting up the rematch, but watching it after the rematch made the flaws stand out a lot. Dude looks really limited here, a big step down from where he was as a heel in 1996. Maybe some of that is on him wrestling as a goofy hippie, and some is on Austin being less vulnerable than Foley's '96 opponents. Regardless, he doesn't seem to have much in the tank other than bumps. Some of the storyline stuff annoys me, too - why is Jim Ross allowed to question McMahon's integrity again? Why do they play a video package that portrays Vince in a bad light? Ross is a lot worse here than in the rematch, although I did enjoy it when he points out that ratings when up when he replaced McMahon on commentary.
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The argument that this match started yesterday got me interested in rewatching this. I'd loved it the last time I watched it, and going in this time I was kind of expecting to feel like the wrestling became overrated because of the great booking. The stuff in the ring at the start doesn't really contribute much to the match, other than the McMahon slow-counting stuff, but other than that pretty much everything feels focused. The ringside area Attitude Era brawling is a lot more intense and less contrived than it is in later matches (even if it involves a bunch of pointless cars set up by the entranceway). Austin's clothesline over the barricade in particular is awesome. I'd kind of remembered a lot of the stuff with the cars as Foley taking bumps for the sake of taking bumps, but really Austin takes most of the abuse there, and when Foley does it's a hope spot or a transition to the next part of the match. I really liked the way that McMahon and company escalate their cheating - they start off with Vince leaning slightly towards Dude with his refereeing, follow that with changing the rules on the fly, and by the time they return to the ring Pat Patterson is actually getting physically involved. As a result, the match always feels like it's moving forwards and going somewhere. Obviously Vince is terrific here, but it wasn't until this time that I appreciated how good Jim Ross is in this match. I always got his indignance (with my favorite bit of that being his mocking Patterson for his pronunciation of the word "North"). He really does do a good job of getting over even small stuff, like Austin taking Dude back to the ring - he says something like, "Austin doesn't want to win the match in the back seat of an old Mercury," and somehow it feels like, yeah, that wouldn't be definitive at all, Austin wants to win this the right way. Undertaker's presence doesn't bother me. I think it kind of helps, actually, as without him there the match should be a mockery in which Austin barely gets any offense. There's some stuff that doesn't make sense to me, like why Austin's music still plays if McMahon hates him so much, but The Undertaker isn't an issue.
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Not that you were implying it didn't, but I think that the 4/88 Dandy win actually did happen. This match from April 22, 1988 (assuming the date on the camera is correct) features a freshly shorn Satanico brawling with Dandy, and they look like they're feuding.
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I don't know if this was a mistake. It looks bad in retrospect, but when he made his return the crowd went crazy for him and he felt like the second-most over face in the company (Austin was incredibly stale at that point). The booking of face HHH was the bigger problem, and how much he was involved with that I don't know.
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"Smark" is an annoying term because it's almost always the other people who are smarks. "Yeah, we both talk about wrestling on the internet, but you're a smark and I'm not."
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Oops. After reading in the Observer that the tantrum happened after the match, I went back and checked, and, yeah, there it was. Michaels storms over to (I think?) the timekeeper, shouts right in his ear, and keeps yelling at him while heading back to the ring to celebrate.
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It's interesting to hear Eric Bischoff talk about how he learned how to announce from Verne Gagne not letting him know things ahead of time and thus forcing him to react to what he was seeing, which Bischoff feels made him sound less fake. For some reason I never pieced together Bischoff's time as an announcer with his philosophy of keeping WCW's announcers in the dark.
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I have no recollection of 2000s Lawler's matches, and I assume that people here generally like those. Either I've never seen them or I've forgotten them. With that said, I've never liked WWF/WWE Lawler. As a part-time heel wrestler, he was good in his role, even if I didn't enjoy watching him, and I'll give him that. As a commentator, he's pretty much always been bad. In the New Generation years, all he did was cheer on the heels. His one-liners weren't funny, and he and Vince were really annoying together, although some of that was probably the fact that they were stil trying to do the topical references thing. For whatever reason he was better with Jim Ross, and I thought he did a good job sucking up to Vince during the Austin angle. Again, though, I'm struggling to think of what he was actually contributing in this period other than a break from Ross talking. My impression of him from his return in 2001 until maybe 2005(?) is that he was sort of like Lord Alfred Hayes in that he was this guy whom I guess you were supposed to like even though he was rooting for the heels. The best stuff he did as an announcer was probably his ongoing hatred of Bret Hart and his unabashed love of Owen. It really annoys me when he starts treating Owen like every other face after Owen turns in late 1997.
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Ciclon Ramirez, Aguila Solitaria, and Pantera II vs. Jerry Estrada, Tony Arce, and Vulcano (June 14) Really good trios match featuring a really good performance from Ciclon Ramirez. He has a good duel on the mat with Vulcano in the first fall, and then he spends most of the next two falls taking big bumps for the rudos. If there's a flaw in his showing, it's that he opts for an over-the-top dive at the end of the match instead of doing his usual missile. On the rudo side, Los Destructores keep things interesting with a bunch of cool double-teams. Jerry Estrada gives a very Jerry Estrada performance. People who like him will be amused by the same stuff that annoys people who don't like him. I don't think anyone can deny that press-slamming Ramirez into Virginia Aguilera is awesome, though.
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I think 1996 Shawn is held back from this discussion by a lack of must-watch TV matches and the incredibly disappointing Vader feud (which is even more disappointing when you see their house show matches). I'm a Shawn fan, though. There are probably a lot of people here who don't like stuff like Shawn vs. Diesel and Shawn vs. Sid.
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I imagine that this topic comes up on every wrestling message board in existence, but I haven't seen it here, so... What's the best year a wrestler's ever had, from an in-ring performance standpoint? Baseball fans always talk about those magical years, like Ted Williams' 1941 and Bob Gibson's 1968. What are the wrestling equivalents? Because wrestling's years aren't individual, separate entities like sports seasons are, you can be even more specific with your endpoints if you want. It's just that "the 365 days from December 28, 1996 through December 27, 1997, for Sting" doesn't pack the punch that "Sting's 1997" does, to use one example.
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This is more relevant to this board than to internet wrestling fans as a whole, but I love HBK-Diesel from Good Friends: Better Enemies. It's big and cartoony and hokey, and I don't care. The focus is on Diesel destroying Michaels and Michaels selling every blow like a KO, (rather than on Michaels' acting, which is the kind of hokey that probably would have bugged me), so it really feels like Michaels is in real trouble. That's all I want out of big matches like that. Michaels climbing up after the jackknife has never bothered me. He looks like a goof, but he was motionless for like twenty seconds after the move.
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Are you sure about this? I remember skimming through Meltzer's WrestlingClassics' posts one day and reading one about how it was the Germany RAW that did it. I'll see if I can find it. Okay: Sid vs. Foley was from the Germany RAW.
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Uh, is he talking about the spot where he superkicks Diesel and gets a visual fall on him while the ref is out? Did he say why he took time off after WrestleMania, or did he just say that he didn't want to do it?