JNLister

I noticed a lot of the stuff in the Final Bell came from 74, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if they simply grabbed a handful of tapes and then picked stuff from there.

Trivia note is that Baker went on to open the first major training school where anyone could turn up and pay their fee rather than it being a closed shop deal. That produced the likes of Doug Williams, Alex Shane, Jodie Fleisch and Johnny Storm who went on to be the main guys in the FWA era of "new school" promotions (and in turn inspired many of the guys wrestling and promoting today), and in later years gave a grounding to Zack Sabre Jr and Prince Devitt.

Re Japanese pronounciation, there's a good explanation here: http://www.learn-japanese.info/pronunciation.html The short version is that "su" is an anomaly. Japanese is made up of sounds rather than letters. Most of these sounds are what we'd think of as a consonant followed by a vowel. Most of these sounds are then pronounced as we'd expect, whether it be ku, nu, fu, mu or sa, se, so. However, with su, the u is clipped to the point of almost disappearing if there's another sound after it. Hence Kensuke Sasaki is "Sa-sa-ki" but Great Sasuke is "Sa-s'ke"

They didn't buy the tape library until a couple of years ago. Even if it had been part of the purchase of the Stampede promotion itself, it presumably would have reverted back to the Harts when they stopped making the agreed payments.

NXT develops characters. WWE calls up the gimmick.

Is it not that you have to be on the ballot 15 times before you are permanently excluded? If not, it should be.

I've got a YouTube playlist of a whole bunch of Vader-Wanz matches: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq8CDItFqmRiZVAI7lCv8Q4z2q_DvZ6jy

Rockers-Brainbusters from the Nov 89 SNME. I think it might actually be one second over, but that is with three falls.

That was indeed the case. Here's Pete Roberts's recollection from a profile I did on him for FSM:

Spotted something reading the Observer from a couple of weeks ago. Dave clarified that while people thrown off the ballot permanently under the 15 year/under 50% rule are eligible to get back on as and when they qualify for the historical category, the 50% rule will then apply again immediately the first time they reappear on the ballot as a historical candidate.

Even if you think Rudge is better in-ring than Breaks, they're not exactly in the same planet for WON HOF candidacy given the criteria. Rudge would be the most literal "workrate-only" candidate ever. Breaks is a great worker who was the most featured TV wrestler ever in the UK, was active for 30 years and a top star for most of it, and was regularly a main eventer despite being about 140 pounds. In-ring is his strongest point, but he's certainly got "something to offer in all three categories."

Yeah, just came across a Quinn-Haystacks match from Europe and Quinn is only a couple of inches shorter. Given Haystacks was maybe an inch or two shorter than peak-height Andre (http://www.freewebs.com/giant-haystacks/andre.JPEG), Quinn must have been a legit 6'5"/6'6" ish.

I suspect there's no way a Europe guy gets on this year. We've already got the Daddy logjam issue, but now I'm seeing people who are clearly voting for Ricki Starr based on his US run and are thus being counted as European voters even though they've likely not even considered the others in the category. I get the logic behind the region/era categories, but it really is a total mess in application. At this stage I really think it would be better to scrap all categories and ballot limits and just give people a straight list of names and ask them to vote Yes, No or Abstain, stressing that it's both acceptable and desirable to abstain if you don't know enough about the candidate. The threshold would then be: Twice as many Yes as No (ie 66% yes of those who voted on you): In Twice as many No as Yes: Off the ballot In between: Stay on ballot next year

I talked about this with St Clair recently. He was pretty much a middleweight right up to when he got the British title. He'd been away in South Africa, came back to Joint and said he wanted to be in main events and possibly in a title programme. He then got invited to a Joint Promotions board meeting where he made his case and was surprised when Max Crabtree said he'd be a great fit for the heavyweight title because he could get crowd sympathy by being outsized. They then had him do a program with McManus, including the first clean win over him on TV which aired only a few weeks before he "stepped up" to heavyweight and won the title.

The bicep injury is why Nigel didn't go to WWE. The Hep C is why he stopped wrestling in TNA.

"Watch this match." "Where are the tits?" would have been a bad story. "Watch this match." "Holy crap, this is incredible. I can't believe this athleticism. These girls are amazing. But where are the tits?" was a funny story.

The Titan Sinking book is a different animal altogether to the History of WWE review books. It's surprisingly good given the subject matter sounds so depressing. I reviewed it at my blog: http://www.prowrestlingbooks.com/titan-sinking-james-dixon/ Also reviewed the Funk book: http://www.prowrestlingbooks.com/more-than-just-hardcore-by-terry-funk/

So "we're going to upload Hulk Hogan's Rock'n'Wrestling" turned out to be "we'll upload one half of a two-part episode and that's it for now". Pretty much typifies the attention span of the folk running it.

Complete list in chronological order: http://www.reddit.com/r/wwenetwork/wiki/wwe_network_shows#wiki_1994 Hall of Fame section from a different site, which has stuff in the same sections as the Network itself: http://returntotherunway.com/wwenetwork/getCategory.php?category=Wwe%20Hall%20Of%20Fame On the latter, you need to click on the eye icon to the left to go to the relevant WWE Network page. For stuff that's been deleted you'll still get a page, with listing, on WWE Network but the video will just bring up an error message. Note also on the latter you can not only choose 'Wrestlers' to get a list of all the matches a guy has on the network, but you can then go to 'rivals and partners' to get all their matches against a particular person, in date order, including tags, and without spoilers. Why WWE can't do this is another matter...

For what it's worth, whenever they put up a temporary section and then take it down, the usual deal seems to be that anything that can fit into an existing section (eg World Class TV) gets moved there and everything else gets deleted. Of course, there's no real reason to delete anything. I get the horrible impression they've set the menu structure up so that there's a limit on how many sections they can have and how many things can be displayed in each section. As I've previously mentioned, there are a few things such as the 1993 and 1994 Hall of Fame that are still up there (and can be accessed if you have the URL) but can't be accessed through any of the menus.

Mentioned this on Twitter, but the "what if everyone who pirated it had paid" argument doesn't just fall down on grounds of money. I'm willing to bet that a large proportion of stuff that is torrented/downloaded doesn't actually get watched -- people get it because they see it, think they might watch it at some point, and get hold of it before it disappears. When it comes to purchases of downloads or one-off streams, people are only going to pay for stuff they definitely intend on watching, probably very quickly. Of course the game changes when you get "all you can stream" services where the key is to make sure it's cheap enough and has enough content that people keep subscribing and don't necessarily calculate whether it's good value for the amount they actually watch. Worth noting that Pivotshare, the subscription service now used by Smash, is the same one used by ICW in the UK, which puts up all its live events plus a weekly TV show and shoot interviews. They launched in March for the equivalent of about $6 a month and quickly reached a thousand subscribers. It's a 70-30 split, so they are on course to be getting around $50,000 a year, so we're talking enough to pay one or two people a full-time salary.

Looks like WWE have managed to break their menu system, even on PC browsers. There appears to be a limit on how many thumbnails they can show in any one section, which they've now breached in Hall of Fame thanks to uploading every single 'this guy's getting inducted' video. All the ceremonies from before 2010 are now only accessible by using the 'by year' drop down menu, which in turn only goes back to 2004. The 1994-96 ceremonies are now no longer accessible in the menus at all, but they are still on the Network itself.

The thing I don't get about the split 'big' shows is they still stick everyone on the card and wind up with 9 or 10 matches, including a bunch of six-mans and eight-mans. If they really have plenty of top guys over, they should surely be able to literally split the roster across two shows, do six or seven matches on a show, and give plenty of time to all the big matches.

His latest volume (the sixth of a planned seven) deals with his first few years in the US. I didn't enjoy it as much as the earlier volumes though as it feels a lot more kayfabed, even though I don't think that was the intention.

NXT touring doesn't necessarily have to be profitable. It's part of a bigger picture. Working regularly in front of crowds of several thousand rather than a few hundred is a key part of developing talent that can make you money on the main roster.