JNLister

It obviously wasn't announced in any way, but IIRC, at the point the MSG tickets went on sale it wouldn't have been unreasonable to hope/think/predict Omega-Okada would wind up headlining.

Don't know how many of them are any good, but there's four different JBA-Glamour Girls matches on Prime Time Wrestling in 87-88 on the Network (plus the Royal Rumble match) and a Tateno-Kai singles match.

Thinking again, that sounds right, particularly with the trademark issue.

It was one year of WWWF Championship Wrestling from 82-3 and then the first year of Superstars of Wrestling from 86-7. IIRC, one of the WWF shows at the time had been cancelled and Sky had a deal for a certain number of hours programming each week, so they did Classics to make up the time. (It's possible it was to replace Heat, which moved to another broadcaster for two years in the UK.)

By inexplicably turning Kairi Sane heel six months earlier.

Isn't there some weird bug where a large part of their archive is one day off? Like enough that there must have been a consistent error when they were digitising and tagging stuff.

That's the same as the "shoehorn guys on screen at Wrestlemania for 10 seconds so they can get a PPV payoff" though. It makes perfect sense until you remember they control how payoffs are determined.

I say this every year these days, but Dave needs to ditch the categories. Half the voters don't understand how it works (especially that non-wrestlers are counted in a regional category) and it creates logjams (Mexico overall, UK with Daddy vs everyone else). The best way to do it is that voters have no limits and simply say "Yes", "No" or "Abstain" on every candidate, with a clear understanding that it's fine to abstain on somebody you don't know much about. Entry threshold is 60 percent (or increase it if needed) of people who voted Yes or No on the candidate, ignoring abstentions.

1st Ring is very cheap to run. I saw a page on hire costs and I think at the 'standard' ticket prices most groups charge there, you can cover the venue hire with about 60-80 tickets.

Contrastingly, I remember a lot of them as being quite short releases. They'd cut out all the dead space between matches, plus ECW Arena had long intervals (arguably needed them given how tighly packed it was sometimes and how slow that made getting round the arena to the merch table, food stand and bathrooms.)

IIRC, one of the first things Bill Watts did when he was brought in as booker-of-sorts in 95 was watch an MSG show from a regular seat in the top deck and listen to the audience.

A quick limited workaround that will do random shows rather than matches: https://www.cagematch.net/?id=1&nr=231922 Replace the numbers at the end with a randomly generated number -- at the moment the limit is 231947. Seems to cover everything in their database (which certainly goes back to 1972 for All Japan).Obviously from there you can do a random number generator to pick a match. (ah, sorry, didn't realise you meant limiting it to a specific set of matches like the discussion board!)

These are actually better than full episodes! They are from the later days of The Wrestling Channel showing old ITV footage. When the channel started, they got me to pick out matches to make themed episodes (like 'Hart Family in UK' or 'Dynamite vs Rocco'.) That got harder and harder as the archive records were a total mess with no dates or run times for the shows, so it was difficult to fit them in the slot, even with the flexibility The Wrestling Channel had. Eventually they just started dubbing random tapes and sending them over. In a lot of cases what they sent was effectively a copy of the master tape of the evening's recording that would then be cut down as necessary to fit the 45 minute slot on ITV. The Wrestling Channel usually had enough leeway to show them in full (especially as it was the most watched programming) so quite often they were showing stuff from in between matches and even some parts of matches that never aired on TV before.

He actually said there's probably fewer than 10 who haven't explored other options. That's not the same as "want to leave". Realistically, unless you're on main event money or personally committed to the idea of WWE above all else, why wouldn't you keep your options open?

I thought he said it did 200,000 searches in the Google Trends chart, not 200,000 buys.

Way past the territory days, but I did a couple of visits to the Channel 5 studios in 1997, which I cover in my book Slamthology:

Assume this is the best place to mention this here. I've done a free, updated version of the travel guide section from my book Purodyssey. It should have pretty much all you need to know about visiting Tokyo to watch wrestling: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lKQNNq7oPfufX5tOOh-HI6f_An0SCy6o/view

Cyndi Lauper should really be a lock for celebrity wing in New York.

For 2019 I'm continuing my goal of watching/following a wider range of stuff, but with the addition of a new 'no backlog' rule, which means I have one week to watch a match/show from the point it becomes available (through whichever service/method). If I don't watch it by then, it can't have been important/hyped enough and I let it go. It's an intentionally arbitrary rule designed to remove the guilt/pressure of getting through backlogs and the whole process starting to feel like work.

Dave's still doing the "non-wrestlers count towards the 60% threshold for 'their' category" meaning Gary Hart and Bill Apter were in the same category as CM Punk and Randy Orton.

Almost literally in the red shoes case -- Tirantes translates as braces or suspenders, which he was unusual in wearing. More importantly, he was a heel/rudo-favouring ref in AAA in the 1990s and now has the legend/nostalgia status. I don't know if he was the first such heel ref in lucha, but it definitely stood out when AAA was picking up viewers in the US and Europe. At that time at least they normally had two refs for the trios matches, so it wasn't so much that the babyyfaces/technos were screwed, but rather they needed a bit of luck as to which ref was paying attention when they went for a fall or were hit with an illegal move.

The US had a few variants on Big Daddy (eg Big Daddy Ritter for JYD). I'd assume many of them were just taken from the same original source material (the Cat On A Hot Tin Roof character), but it's possible one of the numerous Brits in Stampede suggested the name for JYD. The UK also had an Undertakers tag team in the 60s, but that and the WWF character was obviously just the same generic gimmick rather than borrowing the name. Similarly we had a Jimmy Hart in the 60s, but that was just coincidence.

It's a bit of both. Blue Justice is an annual show in Nagata's home town. Kojima was returning from an ACL injury earlier this year that was serious enough that he got surgery.

I always thought you could do an epic feud settler/"who is truly the best all-rounder" match that was a twist on the British rules. To win you have to get both a pinfall and a submission (in either order) and only then are you eligible to win by knockout.