funkdoc

the thing is that Starrcade wasn't *always* supposed to be the biggest PPV of the year. that was something they went back & forth on, we've talked about this before. at one point it was supposed to be Superbrawl, because of how close it was to Wrestlemania. think of '92, where it was headlined by Sting winning the world title from heel Luger. or '93 with the Sting-Vader strap match! when Bischoff took charge, he wanted Halloween Havoc to be that show. the main events for '94-'96 all bear this out: Hogan-Flair retirement match in a cage, Hogan-Giant with the monster truck wackiness, Hogan-Savage. tl;dr Starrcade was only "the granddaddy of them all" for the first few years and from '97 to the end

hello, i briefly mentioned this in another thread but was planning to make this one for a while. you've probably noticed that my posts here tend to be about social phenomena or wrestling criticism itself, as opposed to talking about specific matches or what have you. the reality is that i'm not too into watching wrestling anymore, and take much more interest in the business/political side & the development of the critical scene over time. why is that? in short, i can't stand how formulaic most in-ring action tends to be. in particular, i completely detest the shine/heat/comeback structure and the whole need for babyface comebacks in general. i'm not a comic-book guy or a movie guy, i'm a sports guy. and what bugs me with wrestling comebacks isn't just how common they are, though that is a part of it, but how lopsided they are. most of the time it's someone getting completely dominated on every level, then completely turning it around the other way to win. real-life comebacks mostly happen when someone isn't *too* far behind, and it takes me out of it when you see that kind of structure so rarely in wrestling. basically, i would prefer a greater variety of match structures in general. have a heel making the comeback once in a while, even, just so people don't know what to expect. i know it's cool to hate the Attitude Era here, but i think some amount of unpredictability for its own sake has real value, and i just don't see that mentality being applied to match structure. now, i haven't watched nearly as much as yall on here, so i'm sure i'm missing good stuff that does this. i'm just used to America & fighting spirit. am i the only one who feels like this at all?

Yeah as we've talked about before, I don't get the charge that trying -- even if we ultimately fail -- to minimise personal biases and so on to try to arrive at a list that is fair is perceived as arrogant or totalizing. To my point of view the oppoisite position of "I know what I like and what I like is great and that's the only criteria that matters!" seems in my view arrogant and almost Nietzschean. It actually reminds me of watching Jerry Springer or something, it's those levels of entitlement and those values I see at play. And the impulse is pretty alien to me. It's surprised me at times during this whole process. to me it's not "what i think is great is all that matters". i think of it more as "this community project will be more accurate if each individual involved is true to themselves." if i were doing something like this solely as a personal project, i might even come up with my own BIGLAV...but i think you get a more complete picture from something that reflects all the biases of all the different members of the community. the stuff you said about Dory sums up one of my main problems with your approach - certain people get a benefit of the doubt that others don't, and that benefit of the doubt comes from reasons besides merit or personal connection. Dory gets a fair shake from you because he was chosen to be NWA champion and was constantly praised by his fellow workers, but others who may be just as good or better won't get the time of day. i regard the opinions of wrestlers to be worthless because they have different criteria from fans and they're often being political with their praise or criticism (witness all the Randy Orton love from old-timers, or Lex Luger on the opposite end). that's where we're at a fundamental impasse, probably. EDIT: oh hey others touched on some of this while i was writing this. sorry! also, i think the anxiety over "narcissism" is rather overblown, and usually comes from older generations as a critique of the current one. if anything, most people are constantly told that their opinion DOESN'T matter, and social media is providing an outlet to work through that.

i can totally relate to anarchistxx there, and plan on making a thread since my specific issues are different from those above. i'm actually more interested in following the development of wrestling criticism than i am in watching the shows. that's my primary interest, but i like the business/political side as well. when i do enjoy wrestling, it's the real offbeat stuff that tends to be considered "objectively bad" - think early FMW with the martial artists who didn't know how to do a worked match.

wait, did you mean San Francisco here? that would certainly fit, yes.

Hogan's buddy and a genuinely bad worker, with plenty of awful gimmicks as mentioned. should be easy to see how that would do it! i'm in the camp that thinks he was approaching "decent" in early 1990 or thereabouts...he at least seemed more motivated. that disappeared for good after the accident though, and his 1993 comeback was especially brutal; Judy Bagwell's memory is correct on that promo, as he was going for sympathy but came off so poorly that someone in the crowd shouted "KILL YOURSELF!"

this is a great example of why era adjustments could be useful if we knew how to apply them. we can't point to Brock as a draw because of how the business as a whole changed, but incorporating "buzz" factors casts him in a better light. that said, you are selling Bossman a bit short there. "top 5 drawing Hogan house-show opponent" puts him ahead of plenty of guys, and his matches with Hogan were easily better than Kamala's (or even Orndorff's, i would argue). people think of Mr. Perfect as a legend when he was the absolute WORST-drawing opponent for Hogan during that time...

the difference is that a big part of what we discuss here CAN be added to through "sabermetrics". namely, stardom/drawing power. i was just listening to an older Exile where they talked about this random lucha show in Atlanta that had Hijo del Santo vs...LA Park, i think. apparently it was a total one-match show, yet it drew a crowd of 6500. given that 1000 is a strong number for US indies, i feel like there's a huge "Value Above Replacement Level" going on there with those guys, like HOF-level. in fairness, some people here do argue along those lines, e.g. Dylan & co. with JYD. but i still see a lot of this stuff being written off as "what-ifs". Loss: i mentioned you because i try to name names with stuff like this, and you were the first that popped to mind. in particular, i think of your use of the "what-if" line with regard to Flair getting main-event opportunities. i absolutely would adjust for that if i were doing something like a top 100 list, because i don't believe much of anything is a meritocracy; there's always going to be reasons beyond skill that earn someone those chances. the difference is likely in our vantage point for that kind of project, and this is actually something you see in sports as well. most people think from the perspective of the fan, i.e. "will i be telling my grandkids how awesome this guy was?" i suspect the majority of GWE participants fit this category. it's always been more natural for me to put myself in the shoes of the general manager or booker, and the question i ask is more like "if i were the one bringing in talent, would i be begging to have this guy?" that leads me to try and strip all surrounding context for evaluations, as well as one can anyway. this seems to be a rare approach for wrestling criticism, but maybe i'm missing something.

i haven't downloaded this yet, but this is interesting to read because it very much mirrors WM6. that show had more angles in the midcard, but one of the big takeaways from the 1990 yearbook was that the main-event build was TERRIBLE. there, it was because you had a babyface match with both guys acting like heels on promos, but the general point is similar: nobody remembers the weekly TV, so this has been lost to popular history.

the GWF thing is a very good point, but Booker getting the TV title is exactly what was referred to here. re: martial arts, people likely just mean that part of his moveset. he was really heavy on kicks that at least SEEMED like they could belong to that category.

Dunno. He wasn't phenomenally over as a Harlem Heat member but the team did have their moments and to me he had some comic value as the delusional self appointed leader of the nWo C-squad. dude was a legit commentator too one of the DVDVR crew (i think SLL maybe?) made the interesting point that in almost any other promotion at any other time, Stevie would've been the one from Harlem Heat to get the big singles push; he was bigger and a much better talker than Booker, so i can definitely see that. the theory is that Booker got pushed because of Bischoff being such a mark for martial arts.

Why is the conclusion to all that not just "wrestling was way better then"? for me, because history hasn't looked kindly upon that approach in much of anything. think of the people who kept saying the Eagles represented the death of rock 'n roll - how do they look in retrospect? there's merit to each generation's work, it just takes a lot of effort to find for those not steeped in that generation and its attitudes. i don't see what makes pro wrestling some special exception. also New Orleans is the best goddamn city and you better be having a blast there! quick recs: Central Grocery for a muffuletta, Jacques-Imo's so you can say you had a shrimp & andouille cheesecake.

so this thread got linked in a recent discussion... i can honestly understand where people like Joe come from on this one. the analytics community in sports has found that the quality of play improves over time in every major team sport, with all sorts of compelling evidence backing this up. if you see wrestling as mainly or even partially an athletic activity, i actually think it's a reasonable position. in case anyone was curious, this does affect people's "greatest of all time" arguments in sports, but in a rather complex manner. generally it's assumed that the best players from the 1920s would still be some of the best today, since they would have access to the modern advantages. however, it's harder to dominate any sport today like Babe Ruth did, so modern players often rate above older players with more impressive raw numbers. higher quality of play means that there's less of a gap between the best and the average, so that gap counts for more in today's game. i see people like Loss talk about "grading on a curve" or "rewarding what-ifs", and wanted to bring this up at some point. statistical analysts in sports DO base their judgments off "what-ifs" in a sense, since there are scientific ways to adjust for those. it honestly boggles my mind that people don't seem to understand that concept, but i guess it's not really widespread...

we've discussed this before, but one of the defining characteristics of the Attitude Era was pushing whoever got the big pop. witness IC champion The Godfather, or the New Age Outlaws & Too Cool winning the tag belts. that seemed to work out fine, as they only did it with the midcard titles...the problem was the "midcarder -> world champion" insta-pushes that didn't become a thing until well after the Attitude Era was done. i think World Champion Jack Swagger may have led us to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

who says that, JvK? closest thing i've seen is people like Dylan arguing he was the best US worker in '96, not the entire decade.

yeah, basically this. the gym shorts in particular are the turn-off for me, makes him seem like some random dude at your local gym's pickup basketball game. and ya, New Day is one of those acts that shows a clear generational divide. they're *easily* the biggest reason my wrestling-watching friends still tune into RAW at all. offbeat shenanigans are the cool thing these days yo~ EDIT: i think the appeal of these guys (and Ambrose, et al.) may tie into something larger. specifically, whether you got into wrestling before it became purely a nerd fandom. we have a whole generation now who has never experienced it as anything but that, with Jimmy Redman probably being this board's most prolific example. basically, to a lot of people, wrestling is more Star Trek or Doctor Who than the NFL, and that means goofier or nerdier guys will have a lot more appeal. i think of anarchistxx's post in one of the recent WWE threads, where they kept going on about how Reigns comes off as a real star and the other guys are indie geeks. a crucial point that misses is that the crowd themselves are geeks nowadays; of course they'll connect a lot more with people they see as "one of us"! i will once again go back to Cody Rhodes saying "the fans don't want to root for a Clark Gable anymore, they want to root for a Seth Rogen". most people here were raised on Clark Gables and John Waynes, but that shit is passe to twentysomethings. that's really at the heart of these kinds of arguments, i think.

there's a difference between "nasty and spiteful" and the kind of stuff we associate with the tabloids. it's not the law's place to prevent anyone from digging up 20-year-old dirt on Bill Cosby, as long as there's evidence for it. The case is about privacy not about finding evidence for criminal activity. Did Hulk Hogan do anything illegal? was addressing your general sentiment re: that type of journalism, sorry! on the particulars of this case, that Florida judge makes it awfully difficult for me to sympathize. i think i agree with Bix/kjh more than anyone here - stuff like this tends to be seen as an unfortunate but necessary byproduct of the First Amendment. hell, a NBA team owner was forced out of the league under quite similar circumstances not too long ago...

there's a difference between "nasty and spiteful" and the kind of stuff we associate with the tabloids. it's not the law's place to prevent anyone from digging up 20-year-old dirt on Bill Cosby, as long as there's evidence for it.

well, he & Honky Tonk Man were basically the embodiment of pre-ROH indie wrestling, so there is that...

so this weekend we have one of the biggest tournaments for fighting games (Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, that kind of thing), Final Round in Atlanta. IIRC both Xavier Woods and Kenny Omega are there to compete in Street Fighter 5, and both have made public appearances in the past for that scene as well. The main live stream for the tournament is at http://www.twitch.tv/teamsp00ky, in case anyone was curious. so hey, let's have a thread to bring up other random stuff along these lines! i think i've posted about Samoa Joe's personal Twitch stream here in the past, though that went on hiatus once he went to NXT obv. Cody Rhodes's Zelda fandom, CM Punk & the Green Ranger having beef at a Comic-Con, anything like that is fair game here. have fun~

you could make an argument that Sara Del Ray, Awesome Kong, LuFisto, et al. are basically the women's equivalent to the pre-ROH indie generation that always gets forgotten

as someone totally outside this project, this thread has been a breath of fresh air for me. it's neat to see some of the most prolific reviewers acknowledging their own shortcomings, given the lack of that in their normal posting. i mean, both JvK and OJ sometimes tend to have a "this shit sucks" tone about them. here it's more like "there's something there but i just don't get it" and that's rad as heck! even though i'm not doing ballots i guess i can give something from my recent watching: my head understands the flaws with high-flying spotfests, but my heart still has a place for them. i've come to watch wrestling in general the way i would watch a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and thus not get hung up as much on cooperative spots or loose offense. i regard kayfabe as completely irrelevant anymore, so "exposing the business" only hurts with me if it's at a level that would look bad in a movie fight scene.

TURBONERD POST WARNING king of kong is kinda BS, actually, aside from the general notion that twin galaxies was and is all kinds of sketchy. i know a fair number of people from that community who won't try to defend TG, but have met billy mitchell IRL and will vouch for him. definitely some fake drama in that film... also, neither of the main characters are even in the top 10 donkey kong scores anymore so maybe that has something to do with it. hard to get mad over anything that happened there when the scene has moved so far beyond it

Archie Gouldie for biggest territory star w/ footage not nominated? Bix's podcast following his death mentioned that he had tape of lots of his title matches, but who knows if that'll ever see the light of day?

just came in here to say exactly this it was such a huge concept among that crowd that you eventually had people using it to describe shit like Kelly Kelly matches