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That Attitude Era set looks amazing. Crazy that they have all this great material sitting in the vault and have only now realized there might be a market for it.

I agree having this as a "safe space" is counterproductive if the idea is to experiment with different ways of looking at wrestling. There are right wing leaning members (such as myself) who would feel alienated if it was all progressive liberal talk.

Jumbo vs Windham Muta vs Windham Hogan vs Chono Bret vs Tiger Mask (I and II)

I don't think I buy that. This is a simulated fight. I don't think anybody is pushing for intergender fights in UFC. Guessing you weren't paying attention back when the UFC was selling Ronda as a once in a lifetime athlete and everyone was fantasy booking her against male bantamweight?

I'd argue the only truly feminist way of promoting wrestling would be to have the women compete with men in serious matches. Feminists want to have more women doing all these things that have been traditionally tied to men like leadership roles and what have you, so it just seems like a logical progression of that to get rid of the sex gap entirely in sports. I'm not joking. Kana/Asuka was my favorite wrestler in the world back when she was promoting shows where she'd main event in these intergender tag matches against shoot style legends. A large part of what made those matches so great was the feminist narrative of this women who shunned the traditional joshi style and wrestled like a BattlArts worker trying to prove she could transcend the sex gap and hang with the old masters. The tag against Ikeda/Syuri was one of my favorite matches from 2012

I'd be for getting some yes/no threads going. I'm interested in Japanese indies but it's hard to find recommendations for stuff that's not WWE/TNA/NJPW so I just sort of watch what sounds good and it's hit or miss. Same thing for when I dabble in lucha. I agree with soup that it is a problem to have most places that discuss this things just being focused on anticipated matches instead of critical evaluation and it's why I really miss having the active yes/no threads from DVDVR/puroresu.tv/WKO for giving a place for that.

One of my favorite things about wrestling is that it's one of the few forms of entertainment left that's not afraid to break the rules of not being politically correct, so I'm not a fan of the SJW shit that's been creeping its way into wrestling discussions at all. People complain all the time about WWE lacking true heels, yet when they do have a heel do something to make you legit want to see them beat up (like making fun of Red Flair's death in a promo) they have to deal with a ton of heat from SJW's. It does take some of the fun out it that there's a vocal section of the fans who can't handle the sleaziness inherent to the business.

Add me to the list of people who doesn't listen to podcasts and finds it annoying for people to bury their points on 3 hour shows instead of posting them on the board.

I liked it for how he tries to bridge the gap between the subjectivity/objectivity debates. To me, the talk of being objective when making value judgements on the quality of someone's sounded ridiculous. The legal analogy made a lot of sense in explaining what someone might mean when talking about "objectivity" in wrestling.

All I wanted was to see the Austin/Benoit Smackdown match in perfect quality so of course the upload every episode from 2001 except that.

Hell of a match. Actually thought it was more of a great Orton performance, though, with how vicious he went after Funk in the first half and then selling the leg for Funk's comeback in the 2nd half. It makes me think Orton deserves more pimping as he's someone who's so smooth and natural looking in everything he does you don't even notice how good he is.

That surprises me. I know there was a lot of against Kobashi but I had no idea there was anything like that for Kawada too.

I would say that Misawa didn't as clearly bookend his career because he was still active with no sign of retiring, within I'd say conservatively the next 5 years liberally 10, before his untimely passing so it could be contended that he would have done more to add to or detract from his case which leaves that little bit of open-endedness to his career that the other do not have even-weirdly, Funk who is still wrestling feels like his career is very much concluded because over the past few years it has become very obvious exactly what he can produce with his body completely broken down and it has in no way really effected his over all case. A very odd nit to pick I know but reading your break down made me feel inspired this fine Friday morning Meltzer said Misawa was actually talking about doing a retirement tour soon in the months leading up to his death. Also just look at how he was moving in his last year. There is no way he could have wrestled 5 more years unless you just mean doing tags where he spends the match on the apron and only does a few elbows.

Bryan benefits a lot from no one really going back and looking at his Indy work with a critical eye. During the last few years of his run, I noticed the Wrestling KO guys were pointing out the holes in his work and how he often gave in to the worst tendencies of his opponents when against a Davey Richards or Naruki Doi. Most voters, though, just seem to assume he was having classic after classic.

The point that having a lot of people discussing somebody and pointing out their pros and cons kind of goes both ways. I am almost certain Kobashi is going to place behind Misawa and I think a large factor in that is Kobashi getting a lot more criticism for going overboard with the head drops even though such criticisms are just as valid when applied to Misawa. Hell, El-P actually got flak when he said he'd be counting it against Misawa for being the one to kill himself with wrestling like that. Would love to be proven wrong, though, that all the Kobashi criticism is just a sign of people being more engaged with his work.

I love Eddie but he is definitely a case of people seeing the level he was working at his last few years and just assume he was at that level the rest of his career while only watching the Halloween Havoc 97 match.

Watch his match with Kawada at CC 1995 and see if you think Khali could have done that.

1. Hansen 2. Flair 3. Bryan 4. Terry Funk 5. Misawa 6. Kawada 7. Kobashi 8. Jumbo 9. Liger 10. Eddie

I'd be more sympathetic to this view of the common point brought up by folks in these threads explaining why they left off some heavily pimped guys in those styles wasn't just "I never got around to the footage." As it is I have a hard time seeing how it can be denied that there wasn't a significant portion of voters influencing the results who are mostly unfamiliar with wrestling outside the US mainstream.

I agree with everything said here. See, I think the underachiever line has been stuck to Windham for so long that some people actually underrate his output. We have him looking great on tape as early as 1983. He has the outstanding 1986-88 peak and then another run nearly as good from 1990-93. And within those peaks, he shined in nearly every role you could imagine him occupying other than promotional ace. Honestly, can Bret or Savage better that? Can Austin? I don't think comparing him to 3 guys who are also getting ranked way too high and who are some of the clearest evidence of the lists's mainstream US slant does much to help him. Windham is overrated as hell. I don't think there's any worker out there who gets the same free pass for disappointing performances and being shit for long portions of his career as Windham. How many other top 25 candidates are there with big matches from their prime as bad as the Muta match at Superbrawl? Looking past the Flair matches his 80's resume is also surprisingly thin and his good 90's work is more fun midcard stuff than it his all-time great level stuff. I think it's a given that he's not better than Santo and Akiyama but I don't even see an argument for him being better than JCP contemporaries Morton and Eaton, both of whom destroy him in output and longevity.

Taue over Akiyama actually seems to be a minority opinion among people who ranked them both since Akiyama had a higher average vote. I'd be more interested in hearing what the fuck those 7 people who ranked Taue but not Akiyama were thinking.

Atlas is underrated as fuck. He was great at selling for heels and could move like a gymnast while looking like a bodybuilder. He was great at translating the role of that 80's action hero into wrestling without coming across as cartoony.

I don't see how anyone who put serious work into this project could see these results as anything but a massive disappointment. 2 years of discussion and watching shitloads from all over the world and it's pretty much a generic mainstream US list with a few token obscure guys and big name puro guys. I'd argue it's actually it's actually a step back from the the 2006 since the small victories in BattlArts and WOS guys ranking is pretty much negated by US guys getting rated way too high and women nearly getting shut out.

Glad this thread got bumped. I was watching the Negro Casas/Rush hair match the other day and struck me as odd that it seemed to get praised at the time from a lot of people who aren't high on near-fall heavy stuff like Shawn/Taker. The first half was pretty great but then it felt forced how the match just went into near fall after near fall to make it "epic" and it didn't feel like something the match needed at all. It could have been forgiven if it ended in a good finish but instead all it built to was an utter bullshit low blow finish that destroyed any good will I had left towards the match. To me, the match highlights CMLL aping the self-conscious epic and it's far from the worst example I've seen. In the Atlantis Anniversary show matches from the last few years, for example, it was pretty much the same thing as Shawn/Taker with half the match pretty much just being move->near fall->lay around->repeat. In a way, I think big lucha matches might be the worst example of the style period as at least in the big WWE and puro matches you have guys trying to get big runs of offense and the drama of looking for their finisher instead of just trying to sell every move as a potential match ended. I'd be interested to hear what others think about these CMLL finish runs as, again, it seems odd that most of the people pimping these matches are generally not the ones who dig the style elsewhere.

I feel like in a few years when people get used to WWE taking women's wrestling seriously and companies like Stardom making their product more accessible people are going to look back on this list and see the ranking for women as a huge weakness. I like Curt Hennig but there's plenty of women who didn't even make the list with a resume that smokes his.