funkdoc

This has gotten serious enough that Brian Zane is deleting some of his popular Wrestling With Wregret videos, such as one that spends a good bit of time on Joey Ryan & all of Cornette's guest appearances. It's even made the guy who runs the Mongo clip Twitter account retire, because he doesn't want to watch wrestling anymore. FYI the video-game industry is going through almost the exact same phenomenon right now too, except there it's more focused on major publishers & media outlets (IGN being a big example) as opposed to indies...

Hello everyone, this is something i've had on my mind for a while but never really discussed... We often talk about the "wrestling bubble" mentality, where people think wrestling's problems, quirks & trends are unique to this particular industry. We've occasionally mentioned cases where this is wrong, but one i wanted to bring up is the tendency to miss the forest for the trees when discussing creative & business trends in wrestling. For example: Wrestling fans often see the business's greater economic success in the 90s as evidence that things were done better then, but you almost never see anyone bring up how many other industries were thriving during that exact same period. To use music as an example since that's what i know best, the 90s were responsible for more Billboard-certified diamond albums (10 mil+ copies) than any other decade in history. If i were to write a book on the record industry in this decade, it would be 267 pages of "Kenny G had a diamond album." repeated for the entire thing. Point being: i'd argue that this was more a product of the 90s US economic boom resulting in more purchasing power for the middle class in particular. Wrestling just happened to be one of many beneficiaries of that, in my view, and that's not something that gets brought up very often. Another one i think about is wrestling's indie boom in the mid-2000s, and how people don't seem to make the connection with other entertainment industries here. To keep the music comparisons going, i don't think it's a coincidence that Samoa Joe & CM Punk broke out around the same time that, say, the Arcade Fire did. The mid-late 2000s are also seen as a golden age for indie rock, and i'd argue that these are similar phenomena that resulted from the Internet's expanding reach and power. One last thought to get the point across: i often see people on this board complain about fans not being emotionally invested in winning and losing, "THIS IS AWESOME" chants, and wrestling's general transformation into a nerd subculture. Again, this is far from just a wrestling thing - look at the movies breaking box-office records in recent years, or how A Song of Ice and Fire was made into the biggest TV show in the world. The biggest winner from this year's Grammys posts selfies in Sailor Moon clothes. Nerd culture has become not just mainstream but, i would argue, hegemonic now - acts like the New Day getting as over as they have likely couldn't have happened without this. And even in sports, winning & losing have become an increasingly less important part of the story for younger followers in particular. The athlete who's inspired the most heated discussion among your millennials & zoomers? Colin Kaepernick. The most popular Youtube sports personalities (e.g. Jon Bois) tend to focus more on human-interest stories and historical oddities than the "who's the best?" debates that have traditionally dominated sports fandom. There's plenty of discussion to be had about why this is, but i would again suggest that wrestling fandom's turn away from wins & losses is a product of wider phenomena. If you'd argue with any of this, or you're thinking of other examples that the wrestling bubble overlooks, feel free to discuss!

My favorite example of this was Mr. Perfect being booked to win the 1990 Royal Rumble until Hogan pitched a fit at the last minute. That one's been surprisingly persistent - OSW Review stated it as fact in one of their videos. Think it has to do with so few people outside circles like here knowing that Perfect drew poorly with Hogan on the house shows before the Rumble... One nugget of bullshit that Keith actually issued a mea culpa on years later: Ludvig Borga being booked to work Luger at WMX until Luger spoiled the finish of that match to a reporter. He admitted that story came from Borga himself working him over email, lol

BTW, racism was another factor in the harassment here that isn't getting talked about as much - Hana was Indonesian-Japanese, and those of you who know the language can find this as a running theme in the comments. just awful all around, fuck

hoooooooly shit this has been a way-too-common phenomenon in the J-Pop/K-Pop idol industries for quite a while now, so awful to see it pop up in wrestling now too RIP...

for Christian you forgot "who wouldn't cut his hair" =P

the way to do it for younger folks is to draw parallels to anime or comic books or whatever shit like that they're into. anime is the most common i find, it's kinda the "alpha fandom" in a sense. and that's basically what wrestling's been for quite a while now anyway! WWE in general isn't likely to work tho, just because of the sheer amount of content to keep up with. AEW's much more reasonable.

yep, as someone who's been exposed to a bunch of Discourse(tm) surrounding fandom culture for other fictional works, i can 100% confirm that wrestling is far from unique in terms of fan toxicity tho in the modern era the direct physical violence has mostly been replaced with false accusations of pedophilia and the like - you could argue the potential long-term impact on one's career (not to mention actual survivors of child abuse!) makes the latter *more* dangerous in some ways

yeah, Dutch Mantel was the first one to say it IIRC...if Vince is still in charge then idk if it really means much though

Wasn't it Barry O who made shit up about Patterson specifically because he was gay and it would be easier for people to believe?

Yea it grew out of a lot of...i guess you could say feminist/punk/riot grrl-ish circles who grew up on Rollergames? It's actually real neat how it developed!

league is officially RIP now i guess? wonder if the positive reception will make Vince try it a 3rd time...

One important thing to clarify: Modern roller derby doesn't have nearly the amount of overlap with pro wrestling that the old stuff does. The 2000s revival *started* as an ironic hipster sorta thing, but it's evolved into a real sport that just keeps some of the old aesthetics. So i imagine this would mainly be a retro thread, not that that's a bad thing!

fuck it, tonight gave us the wrestling equivalent to the Gerogerigegege on a big stage and it's exactly what i want at this point

Yeah, i think they're looking at how the IC title used to be when it was held by guys like Patterson or Pedro or Savage. Having a main-eventer as your first champion is a proven way to make a belt matter, so i'd bet bottom dollar FMKK nailed it.

can definitely recommend the Incredibly Strange Wrestling book, having read it myself a long time ago. IIRC they won the Worst Promotion award in the Observer multiple times, but it's the sort of thing that i think would've played much better to 2020 audiences. Put it to you this way: the promotion's name is taken from a classic MST3K movie, and they had a gimmick taken straight from another MST3K movie (the Aztec Mummy). (EDIT: well they also did a lot of 90s edgelord shit that would not go over well today at all, e.g. "The HIV Kid" who'd do run-ins and openly blade himself to clear out the ring) Tim Hornbaker's work generally tends to take the pattern you described - not the smoothest reads, but invaluable resources for the kind of people who tend to post here!

Something i've been thinking about lately: even in actual sports nobody seems to talk about how much better the sports medicine field has gotten at dealing with knee injuries. The worst ones used to be a death sentence for your career, no matter how young you were (look up Robert Edwards sometime), but now we have Teddy Bridgewater landing a $20+ million/year contract after coming back from an injury so gruesome it made people vomit when they saw it. This makes me think Magnum TA may be the most underrated "what if he came along now?" case in wrestling, given he was likely on track to become NWA champion. i'll also notice Between the Sheets bring up other guys who tore up their knee and were never the same afterward (e.g. John Nord) and go "what if" as well.

Hi, surprised this hasn't been mentioned on here yet so figured i'd make a thread! So this bombshell dropped recently: https://www.wrestlinginc.com/news/2020/03/wwe-network-not-available-in-saudi-arabia-until-further-668297/ Been hearing ~rumor and innuendo~ that this is because the Saudis haven't been paying Vince, but not positive. Regardless this seems like a huge deal for WWE's fortunes, no?

i've argued this before, but i still think quite a bit of this comes down to much stricter policies toward drinking at sporting events. Major League Baseball started taking this seriously in the 80s (training ballpark staff to recognize repeat orders, etc.), and it took quite a while for other sports to catch up. My father would tell me stories about how night & day the Cleveland Browns stadium culture was with the original team (1995) vs. the expansion team we have now (1999). And since wrestling is always years behind everything else when it comes to these things...you can see where i'm going here. The difference in fan behavior during the Attitude Era vs. just a few years later is what got me thinking about this.

fellow Cleveland native coming in to second this Ohio's just an underrated area in general for wrestling. WCW did some work there too when they got big - hell, i went to the Nitro where they ran the WHO DROVE THE HUMMER angle! The RAW held on the same night as the final Nitro was in Cleveland too (missed that one sadly). Going back further, what i find interesting is that we Ohioans weren't really considered a territory in our own right but were a region that multiple other promotions tried to win over. We seemed to get WW(W)F TV more than anything else even in the pre-Hogan era; when i'd talk about wrestling with older folks i'd mainly hear the Bruno/Strongbow/Ivan sort of names as the ones they remembered. Georgia Championship Wrestling also tried to work their way into the Ohio market though, and we got their TV too - i first got an inkling of this when my high-school history teacher mentioned Tommy Rich as his favorite wrestler growing up. And there's the NWF, which had quite a bit of talent overlap with the WWWF... Can't think of many other states exposed to as wide a variety of styles, outside of the very biggest ones.

given that this is at a fighting game tournament, this match was def about playing to the live crowd i actually welcome that, given how allergic WWE is to the idea on their TV

Cornette's already there

Wrestling Twitter is where the future of the community lies. People our age may not give a fuck about it, but spaces like that & Tumblr have already raised one microgeneration and are continuing to do so as we speak. Again, look at that article i linked a couple pages back or so - that's more the kind of audience i suspect AEW is going for in the long run. It makes sense considering that women, transgender & nonbinary people are gaining greater media platforms and becoming more open about their fandom as time goes on; the PWO demographic is a dead end in comparison. It's the same reason the comic book industry has been willing to eat shorter-term losses to get POC & female superheroes over, and WWE hasn't exactly hit a home run with this crowd... re: the Cornette stuff, "transvestite" is an outdated term that is often used to refer to actual trans people even though it shouldn't. Just "cross-dresser" or something at least wouldn't have any implication that an obviously cisgender gay guy is trans. Have a thousand words i could say on the Islamophobia discussion, but i'll leave it at this: white liberals are absolutely no less capable of it than Republicans are, and Maher & Hitchens are not exactly favorable comparisons for you here.

here's an article getting at some of the recent stuff i've talked about wrt the way wrestling fandom is evolving, and how AEW might already be tapping into that: https://uproxx.com/prowrestling/glow-aew-nontraditional-fans/

tbh activity fell off a cliff after the GWE voting and doesn’t seem to have recovered since would put this down to the development of Wrestling Twitter and other such spaces. the message board in general is a dying medium, aside from the occasional niche community such as board gaming (and even there, Discord is steadily taking over). the character of wrestling fandom is changing too, in a way that’s less suited for forums. among younger generations i see a whole lot less star ratings, and more headcanons & fanfics. tl;dr wrestling is basically anime anymore combine that with the irrelevant TV product since WM and welp,