NintendoLogic

I've decided that it'd be fun to revisit an idea I originally had about five years ago. If you could put any group of matches in history on a single card, what would it look like? It's basically a best matches/desert island list, but with a twist: you have to put it together like an actual card. That means a couple of things. One, each wrestler can only be in one match. So you can't just list eight Misawa matches. Well, I guess you could, but it'd be kind of cold to bring him back to life for your show only to have him die on you again. Two, each title can only be in one match. So if you include Hogan/Andre from WM3, you can't also have Rock/Austin from WMX-7. The length of the show is up to you, but something like twenty Iron Man matches would probably try the patience of most viewers. When I first had this idea, I had virtually no exposure to anything outside of big-time American wrestling. And my tastes were still fairly heavily influenced by the likes of Meltzer and SKeith. With that said, here's the card I came up with. Hart/Austin submission match, Wrestlemania 13 Angle/Benoit, Royal Rumble 2003 HBK/Taker Hell in a Cell, In Your House: Badd Blood Rock/Jericho, No Mercy 2001 Savage/Steamboat, Wrestlemania III TLC II, Wrestlemania X-7 Rey/Eddy, Halloween Havoc 1997 Sting/Vader, Starrcade 1992 That isn't a terrible list for the most part, but it isn't really reflective of my current tastes. So I need to do some thinking and revise my list. In the meantime, feel free to come up with your own. If you could include a sentence or two about why you included each match, that'd be great too.

Not really. Outside of Japan and North America, the NES was actually outsold by the Sega Master System. But the SMS only moved 13 million units worldwide, so even in areas where it was big, it wasn't that big. In other words, if the product is good, it'll export well. If it isn't, it won't. It's not about culture. You're ignoring the bold part as he def emphasised that them having a large crop of big name US/foreign talent played a big part in them being able to succede outside Japan. I don't see how this undermines my point. If The Rock signed with New Japan tomorrow, they'd have no trouble breaking into foreign markets. An aside: given the current situation in Japan, why don't more Japanese wrestlers try to break into the US? At the very least, a solid run with the WWE would increase their bankability when they return to Japan. The biggest issue is probably the language barrier, but that's what Rosetta Stone is for.

But some cultural products do export well. They may not be the ones that dinosaur lawmakers approve of, but that's neither here nor there. You're from New Zealand, right? In that case, you probably wouldn't know just how big the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sony Playstation were in America. And again, New Japan has done well in overseas markets in the past.

Maybe he means the WCWSN match were Hogan no-sold the powerbomb.

My favorite moment along those lines is from his Summerslam 2006 match against Randy Orton. At the beginning of the match, he won a collar-elbow tie-up, and the crowd absolutely lost their shit. That he was able to get that kind of reaction in his fifties against someone who wasn't particularly over at that point shows that the things that make Hogan Hogan are pretty much timeless.

He was talking about Japanese entertainers. The biggest stars in the Japanese music, television and film industries are not very well known outside of Japan. As I recall, his thoughts weren't fully formed on the radio show. He said "Japanese cultural" and then started talking about entertainers. Here's what he wrote in the most recent Observer after he had time to collect his thoughts: He then wrote the following: In other words, if the product is good, it'll export well. If it isn't, it won't. It's not about culture.

It's worth pointing out that Kissing Suzy Kolber referred to Madonna in the halftime show as "Blonde Chyna."

The Summerslam match was pretty good, but MITB was much better.

If you worked a program with Hogan, you were basically set for life. Also, I can't think of anyone else who got over in such a wide variety of wrestling environments. Maybe Terry Funk, but that's it. For all of his association with cartoon wrestling, it's easy to forget that he first got over huge in Verne Gagne's AWA and Antonio Inoki's New Japan. Which brings me to an interesting hypothetical. Meltzer has said that if Vince didn't have Hogan, he would have built his national expansion on the back of Kerry Von Erich, who would have self-destructed on the road. What would the wrestling landscape look like today if Verne had come to his senses and done everything he could to keep Hogan in his employ?

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I can't recall a recent example. Most of the time, I find they do the thing where the FIP hits a single big move, which leads to a simultaneous hot tag, which is the bane of my existence.

After some digging, I found the following Dave post at Wrestlingclassics: But this doesn't quite jibe with what Dave wrote at the time: "He would have what the contract called "reasonable creative control" of his character during that lame duck period so that he couldn't be unreasonably buried on the way out." There's a pretty big gap between "can't be unreasonably buried" and "can veto anything he doesn't want to do." And again, he noted that Bret and Vince didn't agree on what it meant: "Hart talked about the clause in his contract giving him "reasonable" creative control, but McMahon claimed that refusing to drop the title in Montreal wasn't reasonable. The two argued about the finish in Montreal and the legalities of their respective positions all day Sunday and well into the night before finally agreeing to do a DQ finish in Montreal." Regardless, none of this changes the fact that the mess was entirely of Vince's making and he was entirely at fault for how it went down.

I can't remember the last time I saw a heel miscommunication spot in a tag match.

I'm going to ask this again. Can somebody please provide a source for "reasonable creative control meant both parties had to agree?" If Bret had unrestricted veto power, then "reasonable" is completely meaningless. And Dave's writeup of how everything went down in the 11/17/97 Observer indicates that Bret and Vince did, in fact, have differing interpretations of the word.

Vince's bewilderment at the idea of finding a certain type of woman attractive is especially amusing given his track record of hiring Divas with rather, ahem, mannish features.

I found the old Observer where Dave did his initial write-up of 6/3/94. Here's what he said: And in the first Observer after Kawada won the Triple Crown from Doc, Dave said that the one live report he got called it the best match held at the Budokan that year. So 6/3/94 was highly regarded, but it wasn't some Sgt. Pepper's deal where it was called a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization right out the box. On a completely random side note, in the 1993 awards issue, Kenta Kobashi and Manami Toyota placed third and fourth, respectively, in the Best Technical Wrestler category. If that isn't proof positive that the award is completely meaningless, I don't know what is.

We've all heard complaints about how wrestling has become increasingly bland and homogenized. Many of us have even made those complaints ourselves. We can debate the extent to which this is true from an in-ring standpoint, but it's unquestionably true when it comes to the names they use. In the past, wrestlers have generally operated under a few rules when coming up with names. 1. Not the creative type? Just use your real name. Examples: Lou Thesz, Bruno Sammartino, John Cena 2. Alternately, you could go in the complete opposite direction and go by something completely fanciful. Examples: Sting, The Ultimate Warrior, The Undertaker 3. You can split the difference and add some razzle-dazzle to your real name. Examples: Ric Flair, Randy Savage, Chris Jericho 4. A snappy nickname never hurts. By themselves, Shawn Michaels and Buddy Rogers are pretty bland. But combine them with The Heartbreak Kid and Nature Boy, respectively? That's more like it. 5. When all else fails, you can't go wrong with alliteration. Examples: Hulk Hogan, Bruiser Brody, Killer Kowalski You can get more bang for your buck by combining two or more rules. Take Bret "The Hitman" Hart (rules 1 and 4), Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat (rules 3 and 4), or Jake "The Snake" Roberts (rules 4 and 5). Taking the cake is Ravishing Rick Rude (rules 3, 4, and 5). I would classify gimmicked foreign names like Fritz Von Erich and Nikita Koloff as a variant of rule 2. This isn't to say that every name in the old days was a winner (The Handsome Half-Breed? Ugh). But I'd say the hits far outweigh the misses. Which is why I find it so baffling that the WWE currently seems so hell-bent on disregarding all of those rules. Dolph Ziggler? Alex Riley? Daniel Bryan? (Admit it, the name sucks) To see what the future holds, let's take a look at the WWE's farm system: http://www.fcwwrestling.info/talent.html Wikipedia tells me that none of these guys are using their real names. Which makes it all the more shocking to see how bland and colorless most of these names are. Being born with a boring name is one thing, but using a boring pseudonym is just stupid. Again, having a snappy nickname would mitigate this, but from looking at their profiles, the only ones who have nicknames are "Showtime" Percy Watson and "The South African Super Studd [sic]" Leo Kruger. Let's explore a few of these names in greater detail. -Corey Graves: Some Googling tells me that he wrestled in the indies under the name Sterling James Keenan. That's not a great name, but at least it gives you some idea of what his character is supposed to be. Calling him Corey makes him sound like a washed-up teen idol. -Remember how I said that you can't go wrong with alliteration? Well, whoever is coming up with the names for developmental talent is trying their hardest to prove me wrong. Jason Jordan? Kenneth Cameron? Jesus. Then there's Husky Harris. Look at the alliterative names I mentioned earlier. Hulk. Bruiser. Killer. Snake. When I hear those names, I think of toughness and physicality. When I hear Husky, I think of, I don't know, the Iditarod or something. -Eli Cottonwood: This is an example of someone being shoehorned into a preconceived gimmick. I've seen some of his earlier stuff on Youtube, and he was working a psychotic redneck gimmick. But if you've ever heard him speak, you know that he sounds like he belongs on Prairie Home Companion, not Deliverance. Loss has spoken plenty of times in the past how today's top stars not being perceived as tough guys is a problem. I think a bigger problem is that none of them come across as larger-than-life figures. A big part of that is the naming system, which makes guys blend in rather than stand out. As a result, all you're left with is guys fake fighting in their underwear.

That Amazon-looking blonde chick in the Naylor segment is Danielle Moinet, formerly of the Lingerie Football League. Does she have an onscreen name yet? It'd be pretty funny if she got to keep her name and Eddie Guerrero's daughter didn't.

If you take the "promoting tree" into consideration, how does Eddie Graham rate? Watts, Cornette, Dusty, and Heyman can all be traced back to him.

Tell that to Ted Woolsey. Not to go too far afield, but wasn't Woolsey's whole bit that he mastered the art of reworking Japanese gaming things into a western context to the point that there only remained "a lingering amount of uniquely Japanese element to it"? Yeah, but I took Ditch to be saying that the FF games could be translated verbatim without any issues.

Tell that to Ted Woolsey. Just to be clear, New Japan has absolutely no shot of breaking into the US in a big way. Weren't they running shows in rec centers when they came to the US last year? And the current WON says that Tanahashi makes something like $260,000 a year. I know that Japan isn't the land of big paydays anymore, but holy crap. I wouldn't be surprised if Yoshi Tatsu made more than him.

On the most recent Observer Radio, Dave talks about the sale of New Japan to Bushiroad and the new president mentioning plans to expand New Japan internationally. Dave said that talk worries him because Japanese cultural products don't export well. What? Has he never played a video game or watched an anime?

I don't disagree with the overall point, but are there really that many goth guys in TNA? Jerry seems to be classifying anybody who wears a hoodie to the ring as goth.

They didn't script a storyline that made him seem like he was in the running though. Compare this to say Chris Benoit winning the Rumble in 2004 and it's like night and day. Who did get a storyline, though? Pretty much everyone this year was "blah blah blah oh BTW I'm in the Rumble."

Everyone who thought that Sheamus winning was a huge shock must not watch Smackdown on a regular basis, because he's been one of the top two or three babyfaces on that brand for the past like half year. I'm pretty sure he hasn't eaten a single pinfall loss since he turned.