NintendoLogic

I'm pretty sure it's always Lombardi who plays Doink and Kim Chee and any other role you can just stick anyone into.

The Japanese wiki apparently says that people being pissed off by AJW shows running late and causing them to miss the last train was one of the things that killed the 90s joshi boom. Fair enough, but that has nothing to do with how entertaining the shows were. That'd be like calling Wrestlemania X-7 the worst show of all time because the Austin heel turn was a factor in the decline in the WWF's business.

If you want to make sweeping pronouncements about Shawn's career arc, you should probably watch his 1996 matches.

The show didn't cause me to get stranded in Tokyo, so why should I give a crap?

Having watched Blood on the Sand, I'd put it above the Rockers match from the 91 Rumble.

I had said in the past that the ladder matches didn't hold up that well, but I was going off old memories. When I rewatched them recently, they held up surprisingly well. I'm still opposed in principle to matches where physically beating your opponent is a secondary goal, but they were mostly worked like pseudo-Last Man Standing matches where the focus was on the ladder as a means of incapacitating the opponent rather than a vehicle for stunt bumps. I prefer the first one. The second one is almost as good, but Shawn blowing off the leg work hurt it a lot.

Here's what I'd say, in chronological order: Rockers vs. Orient Express, 91 Rumble WMX ladder match Kliq tag, Action Zone vs. Jarrett, IYH 2 vs. Diesel, GFBE vs. Mankind, Mind Games vs. Taker, HIAC vs. Cena, WM23 vs. Cena, 4/23/07 Raw vs. Taker, WM25 Note that I've seen next to no Rockers in the AWA.

Well, that was certainly a very awkward way to shoehorn a rightist political crack into a wrestling discussion. I'm not a right-winger. But I don't see this going anywhere productive, so I'm just going to drop it.

One limiting factor is that, if I'm not mistaken, not that many people have personal computers in Japan. They mainly access the Internet through their cell phones, which is less conducive to that sort of thing.

Togo is a huge fan of Che Guevara and had the last match of his retirement tour in Bolivia because it was the country Che died in.

As far as the Benoit thing goes, are you guys similarly outraged by Dick Togo paying tribute to a mass murderer?

I've said for a while now that the only way for women's wrestling to draw in the US is by going the 80s AJW route and have them appeal primarily to young girls. Anyway, girls like AJ and Daffney are certainly attractive, but they're not stereotypical bombshells. Even the idols in joshi tend to be prettiest girl in school hot rather than supermodel hot.

Do we need to revisit that WNBA conversation?

Del Rio has done a couple. MVP did a few as well. And they did a spot at that Fatal 4-Way PPV where Swagger Germaned Punk while Punk Germaned Rey.

It occurred to me a day or two ago that Vince Russo is the James Buchanan of bookers. I hope there are enough history geeks here to understand what I mean. So who's the George W. Bush of bookers? Stephanie McMahon?

I recently came across a Stone Cold promo from 1996 where he casually mentioned that Gorilla Monsoon was just a figurehead and Vince McMahon was the real boss of the WWF. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TglE8P5V5AA Was this a big deal at the time? Did he catch any heat for it?

If you were going to rank top 90s WWF PPV matches, the six-man from International Incident would be up there for sure. But yeah, we're pretty much at an impasse. You can point to his lesser-known PPV matches and various TV matches, but let's get real. The overwhelming bulk of his case is based on matches everyone has seen a million times. I agree that a major negative aspect of Shawn's legacy is the popularization of smoke-and-mirrors gimmick matches that blur the distinction between good workers and mediocre ones and shorten careers (and in a few cases, lives). But the vast majority of the matches Shawn worked during that period were straight wrestling matches (I know you've said that Mind Games is a de facto gimmick match, but I remain unconvinced). And the gimmick matches were built to logically. There was no "let's have a TLC match because it's my signature match" or "let's have a Hell in a Cell match because that's the theme of the next PPV." Guys like HHH and Edge were far more reliant on gimmicks, and I feel like their sins are being transferred to Shawn in a way that isn't entirely fair. It's true that WWF heels were limited by the style, but Savage and Rick Rude were far more successful in that milieu. And I'm certainly not going to defend Shawn's first heel run. It's been pointed out in the past that HBK/Perfect at Summerslam was disappointing because it matched two big bumpers with no offense, so it ended up being like a boxing match between two counterpunchers. But Shawn was able to transcend that. Maybe Hennig would have as well if his body had held out, but you know how that goes. As for comparisons to Dustin and Tito, I think they're both fine workers. I could see them both scraping the outer reaches of my top 100, but I haven't really thought about it systematically beyond the very top. Anyway, peak performance is by far my most criterion in evaluating wrestlers, and Shawn smokes both of them on that front. It's possible that they would have done better than Shawn if they had been given the opportunities he had, but I judge guys based on actual output, not fanfiction what-if scenarios. If you rate peak Dustin and/or Tito above peak Shawn, you probably see it differently.

That's one way of looking at it. On the other hand, working with the same guy night after night gives you the opportunity to work out the kinks and build a rapport with your opponent. Like, if you watch that one Flair/Steamboat house show match in Landover that Dave went crazy over at the time, it's basically a truncated version of the Clash 6 match. Shawn, on the other hand, only had one chance to get it right. Look at his schedule in 1996: http://www.thehistoryofwwe.com/96.htm Other than Vader, he hardly worked any house show matches at all against his PPV opponents. In fact, it kind of blows my mind to know that he didn't have a single match against Mankind prior to Mind Games. There's also the fact that the mid-90s WWF style was more physically demanding than the AWA style. Shawn had 19 singles matches on PPV from 1994 to 1997 (20 if you include One Night Only). Of those, only a couple were outright bad (he was sick as a dog at the 97 Rumble and was working against Kama at the 95 KOTR), and a lot of them were very good, particularly Mind Games, which I consider a top 5 match in company history. In fact, you could argue that during that run, he had the best WWF tag title match, the best Intercontinental title match, and the best WWF title match in history. Any way you look at it, it's a hell of a run. That writeup of the cage match lines up with how I saw it, and I'll take your word for it on the other match. But again, I think it shows how much the gimmick helps. When all else fails, just throw the other guy into the cage. By contrast, check out this match on Raw between Shawn and Hunter Hearst Helmsley: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHt3fkErpKQ It's not a MOTYC or a lost classic or anything like that, but it is a really good TV match. If a match like that happened on Raw today, everyone at DVDVR would be raving about it. Jumbo/Flair/Hansen and some good hands versus Bret/Austin/Vader and some good hands? I'll give that one to Martel. And Shawn's matches with Bret and Austin were hampered by the two hating each other with the former and his back being completely fucked with the latter. 80s WWF wasn't exactly workrate central, but truly elite guys like Savage, Steamboat, and Bret were still able to have plenty of quality matches in that environment. That Hennig didn't do the same is pretty alarming. I will grant that his back was fucked for much of his run. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that he had an unbroken two-decade streak of quality, just that his portfolio of good matches encompasses that whole period. And I think that having 11 years of quality work with three or four being truly great is enough to count you among the very best of all time.

Undertaker's 1997 would probably count as well, at least until his mid-2000s resurgence.

With Bret, it was largely a necessity since he didn't have an established non-submission finisher and Vince didn't want his top guys tapping out. Also, the way his finishes built off previous matches was pretty notable. He beats Bigelow at KOTR with a victory roll, but Owen blocks it and gets the pin of his own. Bulldog beats Bret at Summerslam by blocking a sunset flip, Ramon tries to do the same thing at the Rumble, but Bret manages to roll through. I like things that make it seem like wrestlers are scouting their opponents.

6/3/94 may never have been the consensus greatest match ever, but if you look at any list of 90s All Japan matches, the top three will almost always be 6/3/94, 6/9/95, and 12/6/96 in some order. I'm curious as to when that consensus came about. Also, 1/20/97 usually comes in fourth, but it didn't even get ***** from Dave at the time. Was it because the initial TV broadcast only showed like half the match?

This might seem counterintuitive, but I think Toyota is like Riki Choshu in that she's at her best in singles matches when they're kept relatively short, albeit for different reasons. Choshu simply doesn't have enough in his arsenal to keep a match interesting beyond a certain point. Toyota has the opposite problem-she has too much stuff and wants to do it all in every match. Going shorter forces her to pick her spots.

I wouldn't call the WM25 match an all-time classic or anything, but it did do a good job of building drama and working around their physical limitations. It's almost certainly the best WWE match between Cena's 2007 run and the rise of Punk and Bryan last year. And I could be wrong about this, but I don't recall either HBK/Taker WM match being built around "Hey, let's have a classic!" The first match was an unstoppable force/immovable object deal with Taker's streak on the line against the one guy he had never beaten, and the second match was about Shawn being so obsessed with ending the streak that he was willing to put his career on the line for another shot.

I'd never heard of ION Television, so I Googled it and found out it's the former PAX TV. I suppose this is a step up from Touched by an Angel reruns.

I meant in the sense of carrying them to something way better than what they would produce of their own volition. It's true that Nash worked harder with his Kliq buddies, but it's not like his contributions to the GBFE match are all that earth-shattering. I wouldn't call the Sid match at Survivor Series great by any means, but I can't imagine a better Sid match, especially a 20+ minute one. The demands on a top guy in a national promotion with a PPV-based business model are totally different than for a top guy in a territorial promotion with a house show-based business model. I'm more impressed by being able to do a dozen or so high-profile matches that are intended to be attractions in and of themselves along with a few high-end TV matches than a bunch of matches that are designed to get audiences to buy tickets the next time the promotion comes to town with the occasional blowoff. The only Martel/Zhukov match on the AWA set is the cage match, which was like 12 minutes and had the advantages of a gimmick and blood. It's true that Shawn's style is largely conducive toward pinballing around for big guys. But he also worked really well with guys like Owen Hart and Jeff Jarrett, who don't fit that description at all. My tastes tend toward the semi-epic, so I'm not nearly as impressed by sprints. I'm also not a huge fan of the touring heel champ shtick. I think it's pretty telling that when Hennig came to the WWF, he had few great matches, almost all of which were with Bret Hart. Even if I were to accept for the sake of argument that Martel and Hennig's title runs were better than Shawn's 1996 run, Shawn still has two decades' worth of quality output. Hell, there are 11 Rockers matches on the AWA set.