NintendoLogic

It's like I was saying in the thread about the aging of wrestling fans. A title match should be able to sell itself. Asuka's the champion. Rhea wants to be champion. You don't need to add a third competitor to add layers of plot and intrigue.

The funny thing is, Hogan/Andre was the match at WM3 with a pure sports build while Savage/Steamboat was the one with a sports entertainment build. The former was a straightforward world title match. The latter had Steamboat trying to gain revenge on Savage for crushing his throat with the ring bell along with all the ancillary nonsense with George Steele.

That wasn't directed at you, my man. It was for all the folks in this thread saying that the quality of matches doesn't matter and all they care about is good vs. evil storytelling. The notion that pro wrestling needs some kind of storyline hook to work is belied by the fact that some of the most successful promoters in history (Giant Baba, Sam Muchinck, Vince the Elder) stuck to basic booking patterns and almost never ran angles. Really, why does every match need a story? Do people need promos and video packages to explain why Patrick Mahomes wants to win the Super Bowl? Of course not. The motivation to want to be a champion is self-explanatory. Feuds rooted in personal issues are great and all, but winning championships should be presumed to be every wrestler's default motivation. Promotions where there's a complete disconnect between wins and losses and championship success (late period WCW, TNA for most of its existence, current WWE) are rightly regarded as the worst of the worst.

A heel destroying a babyface's boombox sounds like a 90s WWF feud. In fact, I'm pretty sure something like that with the Headbangers and the New Age Outlaws.

If the fans want to turn her face, why not turn her face?

The same thing happened in WWE. The women's audience went down as the women started being pushed more. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that women as a whole want to watch women's wrestling, particularly ultraviolent women's wrestling. The exception is when the wrestlers are pushed as teen idols and role models to young girls. Bayley could have worked in that role, but we know how that turned out. Other than that, the best way to draw women has historically been with good-looking pretty boys who can sell sympathetically. And reality TV.

The trainee's name was Hiromitsu Gompei. Hase had personally recruited him into pro wrestling and promised his parents he'd be taken care of in the dojo. I think Scott Norton said in a shoot interview that Sasaki suplexed the kid to death, which sounds to me like a bullshit pro wrestling story. In any event, Hase was never able to get a straight answer about what had happened, which is what led to him leaving New Japan. It should be noted that Hase and Sasaki did end up teaming again several years later, so I guess they worked it out.

Personally, I hope all the footage has to be edited to the point where it becomes completely unwatchable and it ends up being a huge black eye for both NBC and WWE. It's what they deserve.

That might predate Peacock. I've seen posts from years ago referring to "technical difficulties" on the WWE Network during the Johnny Be Gay promo.

When Stephanie was pregnant for the first time, Vince wanted to do an angle where he would be revealed as the father. She of course rejected it out of hand, so he suggested that Shane could be the father instead.

There definitely is too much romanticizing of the past. Wrestling could get away with being simple because most entertainment in general was simple. Wrestling was never high art, but the contrast between it and everything else on TV wasn't as stark. These days, there's more prestige programming than you can shake a stick at, and traditional pro wrestling storytelling can't help but look like the dumbest and most low-rent shit imaginable by comparison. There's only one thing pro wrestling does better than any other medium, and that's provide entertaining wrestling matches. And that's what it really comes down to. Most complaints about storytelling are really complaints about the in-ring style. If you think most modern matches are hollow exhibitions, building them up by having someone get hit over the head with a coconut or whatever isn't going to change that. Look, every generation has fans who think the wrestling they grew up on is best and today's wrestlers don't know how to work. If that describes you, might as well own up to it. There's no shame in moving on from something you enjoyed as a kid as it changes to appeal to new generations. But don't elide the real issue.

Rikidozan was a former sumo who had shot on and knocked out legendary judoka Masahiko Kimura, so the fans bought into him as a skilled fighter even if his matches were fixed. That's largely the case in general. The public as a whole may not have thought pro wrestling was on the level (although a surprising number did-again, there wouldn't have been so many attempted shootings and stabbings of heels if no one thought it was real), but they thought the wrestlers themselves were legitimate tough guys. When Dick Shikat double-crossed Danno O'Mahony and exposed him as purely a creation of promoters, it killed wrestling in New York for over a decade.

Awesome. Thank you for sharing this. It's always great to hear from someone with inside info. Regarding Kansai, my best guess (and this is pure speculation on my part) is that AJW had been struggling at the box office with Hokuto's retirement and the end of interpromotional matches, so they reached out to JWP for a lifeline. JWP agreed to lend them Kansai in return for giving her a run as WWWA champion. In turn, this necessitated making Aja a transitional champion for the reasons you mentioned. Toyota's first title win seemingly being a last-minute decision adds a new wrinkle to the story. It seems like there was a lot of panic booking in AJW in 1995.

The librarians and Nakazawa have been banished to Dark/Elevation, so AEW evidently agrees with those who thought having them on the Buy-In shows was driving away fans. In fact, that's probably the best thing about AEW. If something clearly isn't working, they try to figure out why and course correct instead of doubling down and trying to beat the audience into submission.

Actually, the Bellas were responsible for a significant increase in female viewers for WWE at a time when the male audience was collapsing. It should be noted that the decline in WWE's female audience was matched by an even bigger decline in viewership for Total Divas and Total Bellas.

Khali's a worthy candidate in the sense that it's a fake hall of fame with no real criteria beyond "not currently suing the company" and "wouldn't create a PR nightmare." But even from a WWE-centric standpoint, there have to be dozens, if not hundreds, of wrestlers worthier than him. Really though, Vince and the WWE HOF can fuck off forever for not inducting Vader while he was still alive knowing how much it meant to him.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure there was a strong societal norm against the use of blackface back in 1998 when DX did the Nation parody.

I can't say I'm entirely comfortable with WALTER facing a guy whose neck is held together by duct tape and twine.

They also had a disclaimer for exceptionally bloody/violent content like ECW and the original WarGames matches. Really, though, editing out objectionable content is a chickenshit move. If it's worth paying a billion dollars for, it's worth preserving in its entirety. They knew what they were getting into when they gave Vince McMahon all that money. They need to own it.

HOF induction probably means a lot to the talent because it comes with a WWE Legends deal and all that entails. In fact, that's why HTM has turned them down. He can make more hustling on his own and still own the rights to his character. By the way, let's not jump the gun on Khali. The only source for him being one of the inductees is a since-deleted announcement from WWE India.

By Khali, you mean Kane, right?

Doug Furnas once said that in All Japan, you'd go out with a general idea of how long to go but went for however long it took to hit the crowd peak. In the WWF, on the other hand, all they cared about was hitting the time cues. Of course, a big part of that is the difference between an arena product and a live TV/PPV product. Recall that All In nearly ended in disaster because Okada's match went way over the allotted time. They had to drastically cut the main event as a result and still came dangerously close to going off the air with the match still in progress.

You know, Stardom might be on to something. They more than doubled their revenue last year, and their recent Budokan show outdrew New Japan's. And that was in the wake of both the pandemic (and restrictions in Japan are far more onerous than in the US) and the death of the woman who was poised to be their breakout star. They're not exactly short on workrate, but the booking is mainly faction and storyline oriented. Maybe it really is just as simple as presenting well-booked programs and having a charismatic star (Giulia) to build around. It reminds me of when WWE's PPV buyrates were in the toilet pre-Network and the typical excuse offered was that PPV was dead. The past few years, UFC and now AEW have emphatically shown that such is not the case. Just because WWE can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done.

Sports-based means wins and losses mattering for rankings and title shots. Cody said from the very beginning that the in-ring aspect would be a buffet. If you thought AEW was going to be The Young Bucks Present UWFi 2.0, that's on you.

Rush just re-signed with ROH last month, so if he is stuck there, it's because he chooses to be. What it comes down to, I think, is that he and his family are a package deal and AEW surely isn't desperate or stupid enough to give Bestia del Ring a job. Also, some folks in AEW apparently aren't high on Dragon Lee because he broke Hiromu Takahashi's neck a few years ago.