thebrainfollower

I HATED Gordy and Williams as a team in WCW. You compare them to Goldberg..........but Goldberg, at least as soon as a serious push began, was a babyface. Monster heels eating up and destroying everyone are fine but they have to get theirs at some point and not ALWAYS be booked as totally invincible. Hear me out. Let's say Kane pins UT clean at WM XIV and then destroys Austin easily to win the title. Okay fine.........where do you go from there? IF the idea was the Steiners are terrible (I don't agree) and we have a new babyface team to fill their role and are using Doc and Gordy to get them over that's fine but if the final idea is just "make the Steiners miserable till they quit" (and YES I think that was Bill's idea) with no final ending of sending the fans home happy I am not and NEVER for it. Which is why the Vader thing in the end works, because even though his run was too long, the final pay off with Flair is worth it.

I think 1992 gets a free pass unfairly sometimes. The first half is great, the 2nd half has some really strange booking the mega push of Doc and Gordy I cannot stand and some really really just awful PPV shows. Great TV matches and roster though. 93 Likewise has some great great TV matches but some lousy big shows and bad booking decisions (Vader drew terrible all year, you COULD argue that's WCW's fault but you could ALSO argue trying something different would have been a good idea) Also in 92 why did Sting drop the belt so fast? Was he tanking that badly with gates compared to how business was in 91? Or did Bill Watts just see more money in Ron Simmons?

I'm still wondering who she feuds with. I could see them turning Nikki when she comes back (they sort of set this up a BIT with Brie mocking Nikki for leaving and losing once) as she is the most over with live crowds of the type they like, or maybe just going with "heck people are cheering for Sasha, let's go there". If either are allowed to stay consistent as a character ala Stone Cold in 97 it could work. If not it will just be heel Charlotte dominating the likes of Paige and Becky. Or wait for Bayley to be called up, but honestly I think this points to a larger problem. WWE has had heels on top for the last few years across the board. At no point have I seen the WWF so bad at creating good babyfaces. Top to bottom, men, women doesn't matter they just cannot get anyone loved by an audience and when it happens organically they squash it DEAD DEAD DEAD. For a promotion that had a 50 year history of babyfaces on top this is just absurd.

They seem to be slowly turning Charlotte, or at least turning her enough that Becky and everyone can turn on her. I HOPE this is something more than the usual "all women are evil and hate each other" that WWE seems to do nowadays.

Nope. Leaves the sport in a few years at most.

I watched the show on classics on demand for the year I had it and it is most definitely NOT a myth. Okay it didn't happen at every promo every week in a show that had 10 promos, but it happened all the time, out of context, was annoying, made no sense and made me sad. If someone like Dusty is THAT insecure, then again so are most people at that level around then. The WWF at the time did things totally differently. You get the sense that if they filmed backstage today as they do now, and say Hogan bumped into the Rougeau brothers, neither would even know what the other was up to at all, let alone even care. Hogan might now even know who they were and think they WERE faces when they went into their "All American boys" song. Which would actually have made a funny bit.

Smack hit it on the head. HHH was just another boring midcarder in 1996 so him losing meant nothing. HTM was one of the most reviled and best drawing heels of the Hulkamania WWF and the roof darn near blew off the Garden at his comeuppance.. Always found it odd there's no press slam though.

Same guy is showing the UT-Bulldog title match as well as the only Chris Chavis match televised that I know of.

I would have had Michaels somehow convert the Mandible Claw into a pin, maybe ala the sleeper kick out in the corner (though they used that 2 months later for Bret-Austin) and get a fluke win and then immediately Mankind destroys him until UT makes the save. If you want to continue the Vader feud, have Vader attack Shawn after that until Sid makes the save and then accidentally KO Michaels.

I'm a big fan of matches going somewhere and meaning something so I will go with the 88 one as the 87 one was meaningless right after it finished.

The only Savage - Dibiase matches to make CHV that are not PPV were on the Macho Madness tape. Savage-Steamboat, NONE of them made tape except for a Toronto one that on best of the WWF volume 9. There's some Savage-Santana stuff on The Macho Man and Elizabeth tape and the cage tag is on the best cage matches tape, whatever that was called.

Is there a HHH winning finish in that time period that WAS a great finish and didn't deflate a hot crowd? But yeah that 2003 finish is one of the all time worst.

I take your point Johnny but I find that's not quite what bothers me as much. I love old Charlie Chan movies, and heck they are racist today. But the thing is, they were not such at the time as much. Wrestling in the 80's was much MORE a product of its time, so even Bill and Mid South, I can live with that. WWE today is basically Donald Trump's America as a TV show. It's now one of the most sexist, homophobic racist shows on TV far more than anything else I can think of and THAT really turns me off it today.

Finishes matter but sometimes clean finishes aren't important. A lot of people think the worst thing about HIAC I is the finish, but realistically what were they going to do? Shawn would not job, nor should he have in that case, and having him pin Taker clean in that match in that setting would have killed Taker's aura off worse than ending the streak ever did. So you get what you get. As for Shawn-Mankind I probably would have gone with a wrestling pin rather than Sweet Chin Music but I am not sure why Shawn winning that one would have been a bad idea. Now I sound like a Michaels apologist.

JVK - master of the all heel promotion - So have you been secretly booking the Divas' division for the last few years?

1 - Jerry Lawler - I like the in ring work of face Lawler better and also would say the character works better as a face. The WWF heel Lawler seems like a parody to be honest. 2 - Hulk Hogan - One of the greatest drawing faces in the history of anything. Most important wrestler in the business as a face. Fond love some people have for Hollywood Hogan, his best work was as a face. To me that's beyond dispute. 3 - Felt his in ring work as a heel was better but it's close. The character works far better as a face though, call it a narrow win for heel. 4 - Austin - Again, how much did he draw as a face? VS the heel character that helped decimate the biggest run in wrestling history it was so unpopular? This seems almost silly to me. Sure in ring as a heel but that's unfair as most of that was before the Owen injury and was was after that was against far superior workers to his 98 and 99 runs. Face all the way. 5 - Answer is heel in every way. Not even close 6 - See #5

Since joining PWO my happiest moments have been learning that both Chad and Kelly have the same favorite match I do, Savage-Warrior from WM VII. Savage's WWF story up to and inc WM VIII is the GOAT wrestling story. Thanks Kelly for convincing me there is a rational intellectual argument to how I wanted to vote. Savage is my GOAT pick for sure.

Harley and the Kongs are a good pick. So obscure I spent 30 seconds thinking "That..............happened"?

The only thing Vince can manipulate his audience to do his hate the product and give up watching. He seems decent at that.

Goc hit it right on the head. They will keep giving us heel champions who are just HHH minions until we finally figure Reigns is a better choice and accept him winning. Then after he does he will turn heel and become HHH's new minion.

Vince likes the guy and is who Vince wants to see on top. There is nothing more complex than that. It is baffling that a publicly traded company is the vanity project for a senile neo-facist, but that's WWE for you.

I'd hand Texas back to Mexico tomorrow if I could lol. I never said in my post that the Von Erichs selling hurt WCCW. The original poster did and I don't agree with that BUT it does make me like watching the stuff a whole lot less now. And I think it MIGHT have hurt Kevin's career in that he didn't have a lot of options of where to go, but then he didn't want to, so the worst you can say about this then is that it COULD have hurt his career. I guess a see a huge difference between the average Japanese worker than a Von Erich. Thought that point was kind of an irrelevant cheap shot Matt of little value at all to this discussion. And there's scrapping then there is dominating.

I look at Kevin at least and I am reminded of a kid I used to play wrestling with when I was about 7 or 8. He was a baseball player and thought he was really tough. As a result he never really let me do any moves because "I'm an athlete so I'm better". I stopped playing with him in general. Kevin seems to work the same way. He doesn't WANT to ever look bad and get beat up so he doesn't. And has the political pull to make that happen. He barely sells anything usually. I watch him and I am not sure if I am watching a guy too dumb to know wrestling is a work or too selfish to accept it, but either way, it takes me out of wrestling. And it's not like Backlund or the Steiners. They are guilty of the same thing at times but the reasons are different as they legit COULD destroy virtually any opponent without breaking a sweat. Kevin could not say that outside of his fantasies and therein lies the key, because daddy owned the company they could and did turn them into reality.

And HHH. I forgot about that one.

Bodyguard no. The rest could work.