shakla

If you can find a reference for that, I'd like to see it. Thing is, there isn't anyone named "Carter" in the Forbes billionaires list, nor is Panda listed in their largest private company list. Doesn't mean you're wrong, but I'd figure someone that wealthy would be on their radar. For TNA losing over a quarter billion, hard to say. That would be over a period of around a decade, and Panda still generates revenue. You're looking at losing around $20-25 million a year. I don't know, there isn't a clear path.

In part from being a private company, it's tricky to figure out the truths with TNA. For the workers who are making around $30K and/or work on a per appearance deal, I would assume and hope they can supplement their income. Whether it be from a second job, royalties, conventions, etc. The way TNA's taping schedule is, talent probably has a lot of downtime and gaps to work something else in. Not saying it's an ideal situation. It looks bad image-wise to know that workers on a show with decent production values on a national cable network are making less than a typical assembly line worker. But I doubt more than a small % of wrestling fans know about TNA's payoffs. On the private company front, I wonder about 2 things: What is TNA's estimated annual revenue? We will never get an exact figure, but what do you all think the ballpark is? $25 million? $50? Less? What is the net worth of the Carter family? Lots of columnists pass off them being billionaires, but I've never seen any concrete proof of that. Panda Energy being a private company makes it tricky. I don't doubt the family is wealthy, but billionaires? Not sure about that.

Wrestlers and/or office types?

Conway and Lagana were there, but John and Christy weren't. Russo left in Feb of 2012 and there were rumblings of Bully Ray popping into creative meetings. 2012 had a lot of solid points, but TNA fell back into some pits. It's amazing to think that Rob Terry has been kept around while Styles, Daniels, and Kazarian have been given their walking papers. Those guys had good contracts, Rob Terry is likely on a very cheap per appearance deal. Or, to put it another way, Terry was more willing to work on a low-end per appearance deal. I'm sure they would take any of those guys back if they agreed to a pay cut.

Not sure if it was edited for the network, but on the OB of the Scott "Gator" Hall vignette, "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going" by Billy Ocean was playing.

I wish I could remember who said it at DVDVR to give credit but you know which one is which because Nikki has New Knockers and Brie has Bryan. Before Nikki's enhancement, the main way to tell them apart was Brie's tats near her pelvic/lower ab area and Nikki wearing a flower in her hair. I think around the time they transitioned from arm candy for Raw guest hosts to wrestling more tags with the "twin magic", the flower was dropped. To bring this back to Meltzer, on the podcast for the 1/4/2010 Raw where Bret came back, Dave said something like "And Nikki Bella, she is going to be in trouble, and that's all I have to say", apparently she was noticeably heavier than Brie.

Weren't both of Cryme Tyme released in '07 and came back a short time later tho?

Also, I thought their release was of the "they requested their release" type. Just wanted to take a break, they weren't even gone a year.

Wiki has him at 3 WHC, 2 WWE, 1 ECW, 1 ROH, assume that's the combination. Was an OVW champ once as well. I was at Wal-Mart earlier today and they have a Slam City figure of him as an ice cream vendor (with the street cart).

BTW, do they give TV ratings (like TV-14) for the Network shows? I wonder what last night's Legends House got, with all those 70 year old guys taking it off. I'd also like to know how the clientele felt about having all those "legends" in the show. They pay $50 or whatever to see some attractive guys, and then you get Mean Gene and Jimmy Hart showing it all.

I can picture someone using old tapes like a table cloth to put pizza boxes on during a late night pow-wow at CNN Center, especially during the Jim Herd era..

If it's possible to bully Awesome Kong, then yes. When she did the promo about being pregnant, they made fun of her for being fat and said something like "what guy would want to sleep with you?" But I'm not sure who the face/heels were during that time.

2005, radio station goofed up their facts. Thurl Ravenscroft (good potential manager name, a few generations ago) died in 2005 and did Tony til he passed. Lee Marshall, not sure what to say, although it amused me that the 1-800-COLLECT Nitro parties or whatever were a thinly-veiled way to get him away from the WCW staff.

I would love this. I have a friend of mine who is working on a book anthology of her zine, and thought how great that was. It would be neat to see something like this done with the WON, covering every year. In the past, I've lost issues from time to time, so this would help me out a lot. Also, would be great to keep notes on certain issues. Anyone else interested in this? I would like something of the sort. Granted there would be other years available that aren't already on the site (being 1991-1996 at this point). I assume he has the "at least from 1992 on" line since those are the issues saved on computer?

I'm not a big MMA fan, but UFC does have the bonus awards, like fight of the night, so maybe star ratings aren't that far-fetched. I'm not sure how you could give DUD ratings or such tho.

Well, sorta. DVD came out in '05, so this wasn't specifically taped for the DVD. If HHH did tape something for the DVD, would it have been different, I assume not.

But this wasn't for the Warrior hatchet job DVD. This was for a Wrestlemania retrospective deal. I think it may have been the WM2000 "Wrestlemania all day" because I remember HHH having the belt with him at the time. The clip of HHH on the Self-Destruction DVD was from that 2000 special. They put a graphic in the upper corner denoting it was from 2000, not specifically taped for the DVD.

On how he treated the fans, most of the praise comes from recent years where he did paid signings at conventions and such. I've heard nothing but praise about Warrior during these events, usually talking to fans at length, making sure the photo came out OK, taking his time with the signature, etc. But an organized signing is way different than getting autograph requests during the prime of your career, while walking in a hotel/airport, with a busy travel schedule.

That promo was one of my favs as a kid. Remember watching the recap shows just to see it again. Even if a lot of it was "OMG, Ultimate Warrior just cursed! Awesome!" "Hold it right there, freak!" (huge pop) "If you're looking for a full-length, action-packed adventure....."

Queering makes the world work! Yeah, Fred Phelps can rot in hell, but don't speak ill ot a creep who portrayed a character that was wildly popular in people's youth in the late '80s-early '90s. I do think a lot of it came from the idea of how hyperbolic that 2005 hit piece doc was that it somehow erased, or lessened how much of a bigoted and bat shit crazy guy Hellwig was in real life. Maybe he was on his way to lessening the crazy aspects, who knows, but yeah it is interesting to see the outpouring of positive emotions for a guy that if not for being this wildly popular cartoon character, probably would be getting the treatment Phelps got. The Uconn speech was in 2005, the Depaul speech was in 2006. I don't think the DVD really erased anything since those speeches and a lot of other online outbursts occurred around that period. He had mellowed out in the last few years. Didn't rant quite as much. And the video he did when Savage died really won a lot of people over.

I think you read it wrong. It's $750,000 base + royalties + 35% on merch I meant 3.75 million over the course of 5 years, not that much per year. Sorta translated it into a baseball-type contract.

$3.75 mil base for 5 years, wow. Wonder how much his WCW deal ended up being. Heard he got a lot from that since he was under contract for awhile post-Halloween Havoc '98.

Did that have something to do with fishing? Really, he had mellowed out the past few years with the political stuff. And I know that tribute video he did for Savage won a lot of people over.

Dave was spot on about Nancy Grace. One of the few who reported it fairly, rather than make an assumption or take someone's assumption and run with it, like most seem to be doing.

"There was no text to explain what happened, so we can only offer up a description of the ink drawings within. Namely, that the Warrior KO'd Father Christmas, then depantsed him ,stripping him down to only his underwear. He followed this up by chaining him to the wall and looking at him in a manner we can only describe as... distributing. Presumably he came down St. Nick's chimney shortly thereafter. Or maybe he came up his chimney. Who knows. We'd rather not think about it." - R.D. Reynolds, The Wrestlecrap Book of Lists, pg 133. PIctures: http://officialfan.proboards.com/thread/487928/ultimate-warrior-christmas Here's what someone wrote in the comments of deadspin's Warrior article: "I met Warrior at PAX last year, and actually asked him about that comic. He basically said that, by that point, he'd had his fill of fighting with the artists on the book, and just let the artist on the Christmas comic draw whatever he wanted. He didn't even look at it until years later, when people started talking about the "Santa Rape" thing, and he had to conclude they were right, it looked like he had raped Santa."