WingedEagle

Fingers crossed it holds up, but no issues on my PS3 thus far.

Man those event centers were so great. There's definitely a place for them today. Did I lose my mind or did they not include Reigns/Orton when running down the card?

I loved Raw last night. Which means I loved everything relating to Lesnar/Cena that it more than made up for the weak filler throughout the rest of the show. Heyman was out of this world again, Cena took a crowd that 2 hours into the show barely cared enough to boo him and mad himself a babyface again while breaking out of his standard promo, and the closing segment was completely predictable. Which was a damn good thing. This is the hottest anything's felt since Bryan's peak heading into Mania, and in a totally different way. On the other hand, every week it feels more and more like Reigns will need to be incredibly protected. Its probably too late to Goldberg him, but short matches and no speaking other than screaming before the superman punch feel like the way to go. At this stage he feels awkward and exposed when carrying things for too long. I think Loss mentioned it a while back, but unless they want to risk repeating the run to Mania this year, they may have to hold off Bryan's return until after that point, because Reigns isn't showing much that makes me think he can keep a crowd behind him at that level. If they're committed to him long term they need to see it through and try to make it work, but pushing him on this accelerated timeline is going to come with some bumps in the road.

For those that subscribe online, does this or any other formatting trick make it easy to print the Observer if you subscribe online? I like getting a hard copy in the mail because its easy to save, but if there were a simple and budget-friendly way to to do the same with an online sub I'd certainly do that.

Didn't see this one coming. http://www.wwe.com/inside/alberto-del-rio-released Curious what happened.

I'm only through 5 shows and thus have the 2 all-timers Meltzer is touting still to come. Tourney's been great, but I haven't thought anything on the level of Tanahashi/Ishii or Nakamura/Ibushi which were the standouts last year for me. How do others see this wrapping up? My gut is they're building for a Tanahashi/Okada final as its arguably the biggest match to sell the Seibu Dome on short notice, while at the same time giving Tanahashi a win over Okada in a non-title situation and setting him up to reclaim the title from Styles at the Dome show.

I haven't read a thing about what Rogers is offering. Is it a premium channel like standard HBO, or a premium offering like the HBO package that includes HBO on on demand? There's a huge difference.

Was looking back in an old Observer where he wrote up a Naoya Ogawa vs. Kawada match from 12/03. In short, Ogawa is awful but was presented strongly and effectively, Kawada worked around his weaknesses and the crowd ate up everything. Even though he had nothing to say about the match being all that fantastic, it sounded like he rated it ***3/4 because of how into it the crowd was. Now I haven't watched the match yet so I don't know if this was any good or earned its rating primarily because of a super hot crowd. Any merits to the idea that a crowd's impact is greater when you don't understand what the announcers are saying and possibly dragging things down?

For $10 and up until probably $15 a month, the network is a no brainer for me. I'll usually get mania and sometimes one other PPV during the year. Throw in every single other PPV which I've had a blast going through and apparently a lot of other things that I haven't touched yet and there's no way I'm not getting value out of this. They could pause adding anything from the library for a few years and it probably wouldn't change a thing for me. Now I'm posting this here, I read the Observer and spend an inordinate amount of time watching and reading about wrestling compared to the average fan. They've got my money. But I'm not sure how they hook in more casual fans. Mania season should bring another bump of some sort. A uniquely compelling PPV main event may do some business. There's probably still a very real technical hurdle for many fans -- if I couldn't access the Network via PS3 and didn't another console, I wouldn't subscribe. I'm not willing to deal with hooking up my computer to the TV every time I want to watch something there and don't enjoy watching video on the pc or tablet for very long, so perhaps adoption may pick up in the months and years ahead as its more accessible to more of the fan base. While I don't expect it to move numbers simply by being pushed on a random Monday night, I actually thought a hard sell of Summerslam '98 this week was effective in that it promoted something specific that people may want to access. The PPV library and other content is great, but its so vast and abstract that outside of us diehards who know what's there and can already envision how much fun it is, more casual fans might find it overwhelming at best or simply another version of the 1000 channels they already have on cable and don't have the time to sort through to ID content they're not already familiar with. Not sure how much unique and original content they can/should produce to encourage new subs, but I think focusing on specific programming rather than the sheer quantity of content may prove more effective. Just my two cents anyways.

I was talking to a friend last night during her promo and couldn't decide if she was great or beyond terrible. She's not bad at conveying emotion, but it almost seems like she has zero control over what she's going to emphasize. Kind of like Brick Tamland screaming "LOUD NOISES" with no idea why he's doing it.

People were becoming apathetic to and rejecting babyface WCW Hogan. I also don't believe he was generating anything remotely approaching Cena's merchandise numbers. Would heel Cena sell a boatload of tshirts to adults without turning away too many kids? Maybe, I don't know. But I think there's a big difference between rejecting Cena and enjoying the act of booing him. The latter is part of the show at this point.

The 3:16 promo, first stunner at McMahon at MSG, Tyson angle are all possibilities for Austin. I might also go with the image of him passing out with the blood at Mania 13 or the time he brought the beer truck to ringside. Rock is tougher. As far as his iconic moments there's the face to face with Hogan before they brought the vehicles into play, the finish at Summerslam '98, perhaps the face to face with Cena setting up the first mania match. There's also the taped Raw where Austin helps Foley win the title from Rock with a chair shot that's pretty damn memorable. I feel like you also need at least one Vince promo or strut to the ring on the list, but offhand can't imagine where to start narrowing down that list.

Do people actually hate or even dislike Cena? It always seems like they just enjoy booing him.

As long as it was a face incarnation, why not Dustin? That'd also work great on the eventual turn.

Don't know why this bugged me, but they've got the date of No Way Out 2003 listed as 2/22/2003. Apparently the correct date is 2/23/2003.

I remember doing my best to scribble out Savage's face with a marker on the cover of every magazine I had after he turned on Hogan. It was a lot of fun being an 8 year old wrestling fan. I didn't have cable until 1991 so outside of catching Superstars on Fox, I was dependent on magazines for all wrestling content. Read WWF, PWI and depending on the cover, The Wrestler / Inside Wrestling / Sports Review Wrestling over and over and over to get my fix.