Migs

I can't believe it took this many posts for someone to mention the legendary Mutoh blade job. For years people described blade jobs on a scale relative to that!

90 minutes with Rogers and not one utterance of "Midnight Express"?

They really should go to a more structured schedule. Flipping on a random Raw (in order) in the morning is currently my favorite part of the Network. Could it be so hard to add 5 new episodes a week of ECW, an 80s WWF show, etc.?

If this is late 1983 or early 1984, Kaufman is sick or dead.

Wouldn't Vince have a shot at basically all the guys who had been willing to work for Angelo Poffo? Orton, Garvin, etc... Savage is one of the few guys who seems like a plausible Hogan replacement in this scenario.

I think the issue is that Shane was initially a babyface because they wanted everyone to like WCW - they were setting up a new show (Nitro), and no one was going to watch the heel show. You want the fans to be rooting for Shane to support the new show. Of course, they then ran the Bagwell-Booker match and decided they couldn't do a WCW show... well, now they feel they have to just run the straight invasion angle, but that's not really going to work with a face WCW. But the heel turn on Shane was pretty hasty and pretty poor, which made the whole angle muddled and direction-less. The night where ECW showed up was very exciting (Heyman's initial promo is tremendous)... but then they rushed into uniting ECW and WCW, which really sucked the energy out of the angle. They became not invading promotions, but the "Alliance," essentially a generic heel stable fighting the WWF. No energy to that at all.

I legitimately had not thought about the Sporting News in a good 10+ years. I did read it religiously as a kid, though. I don't recall them ever having wrestling coverage.

I am vaguely tempted to go to a TNA taping at the Hammerstein. Seems like it might be amusingly bad. Is that right? Or will it just be dull? Haven't been following TNA at all as of late.

Stevie took the WCW deal slightly too early. If he stays in ECW another six months, being that over, I'm guessing he gets a run as a top guy (probably main events November to Remember) that would have shifted the perception of him going forward. Heck, you could absolutely see the WWF in 1998 signing the bWo whole cloth and Stevie getting a decent push. Not sure he could have ever been THE guy, but he could have been way closer to the top.

Yes, and '88.

This is still one of my all-time favorite promos. The camera work being a bit unsteady (particularly on the word "sport") gives the impression that the building is physically shaking, which in turn gives the promo an even bigger feel.

The Bash one has about a disc's worth of stuff not on the Network. Agreed that the rest is fairly pointless.

First time seeing Bo. Thought he was pretty funny. This feels much more like a souped up Raw than a PPV, but that might be the new norm for the non-major shows.

I feel like I've seen this Rusev push so many times over the last few years. What makes him any different than Kozlov or Ryback? It ends in him finally losing and the mystique being busted.

Cody could be way more smarmy if they're going to set up the turn.

Love Heyman grabbing the cheap sports heat and defusing the Punk chants in one sentence.

One thing lost in this conversation is the ability of wrestling generally to appeal to a more educated fan base. WWE has limits on what it can do because it's a big company that needs to maintain a certain level; it can't take risks. But smaller companies absolutely can. I don't watch Chikara, but the idea of a deep, long running story arc that could be watched as a "season" is something that definitely could be sold as akin to a Breaking Bad or the Wire. And the way Quackenbush talks about wrestling, as "performance art" is absolutely the right verbiage. In fact, don't know why more independent promotions haven't tried to go this route. "Hipster #1, I can't believe you watch wrestling?" "Oh man, you don't understand! it's just as good as Game of Thrones... it's really performance art, when you think about it."

I still think they'd have been better off putting Dreamer over here. Funk as champion was a pretty bad flop creatively, and the Funk's last stand gimmick always felt a bit cloying to me. Dreamer winning would have been a much more natural and earned emotional moment.

Maybe, but probably not for a while. I don't recall any of those shows ever being on Classics on Demand. I don't even know how many of those tapes WWE owns. RF Video still sells a lot of those tapes (on DVD), so it makes me wonder who's in possession of the master tapes. They showed at least November to Remember '95 on the network, and maybe Holiday Hell '95.

The analogy is to a band playing a live show. Should they play what they want, or play what the crowd wants? On the one hand, the fans paid money and feel entitled to see the band play the big songs. But the band might also feel a responsibility to play a fresh show, not one where they go through the motions. And moreover, while some fans want to hear the hits, other people will love the band much more for playing the deep cuts or new arrangements of old songs. Benoit and Malenko may not have given everyone what they wanted, but they clearly gave some people what they wanted (at least among the PPV viewers). A bunch of people loved that match. Now, not everyone did. Maybe they could have done things that would have made the bikers like it. But that might have made it far worse art for the people who loved it. Moreover, that match is such an extreme example that I'm not sure it proves any specific point. Most of the time, the workers putting on the artistic performance that they want to put on is going to create the most interesting art, even if it's not the most crowd pleasing. And if the art the worker wants to put on doesn't excite a good size fan base, they're not going to have a long career anyway.

If you watch 2001 in sequence, the upgrade from Lawler to Heyman, and the downgrade when Lawler returns, is really jarring.

I think Face Corino worked pretty nicely in the 2000 ECW environment. With RVD otherwise occupied, he did very nicely as the guy going after Justin. The character quickly shifted into more of a tweener mode after he won the belt, and that was probably the best place for it (like Shane Douglas in much of 94-95). There was a certain contingent that was going to cheer him, but the character was definitely better as a heel.

Matt - I absolutely loved it as a teenage smark in 2000 or so, even if it was always a little behind (UK magazines took time to get to NYC then).

He did a shoot with Sandman, Scorpio and Fonzie that was quite entertaining.