funkdoc

yea i'm not into shaming women for porn/stripping/sex work, but shaming someone for being in the donald trump fan club is a whole nother can o' worms

yea, i don't think final 4 has ever been anything real special. we've had one of the nasty boys, crush (in '95 after spending all of '94 jobbing), and fake diesel make it that far...

you know, we could have a thread on wrestlers with interesting stories in boxing just off the top of my head we have wight, JW storm, derrick dukes...plus guys with legit success in the sport like mero. count me as another who never knew about this whole story. great work!

not porn but buff bagwell comes close enough to deserve a mention imo

i'd argue this is a function of the whole "Pro Wrestling Only" mentality of this board. i suspect if we had a real off-topic subforum (not one where stuff is still supposed to be tangentially related to wrestling) or a working shoutbox or *something*, we wouldn't get these kinds of derails. but i'm done now so get crackin~

holy crap have i learned not to open this pandora's box ever again GOTNW: i haven't actually watched anime in forever, i just know that almost any time i glance at my facebook feed it's got people blowing the fuck up over one punch man. it's the kind of hype i haven't seen for a series in ages - we're talking "this has saved anime"-type stuff. this is hundreds of people i know IRL from all over the US, and they tend to be the anti-tumblr crowd if anything. it also gets brought up in my chat when i stream on twitch, and quite a bit on my twitter timeline (which skews closer to the tumblr set)...i just got the impression it was this genuinely buzzworthy thing among a large portion of nerds. i used the examples i did because they've gotten that kind of reaction from the kind of crowd i think pro wrestling should be targeting more. i sometimes think this board could use more people from those demographics. that's basically what i was trying to get at, just in an apparently clumsy & derailing way!

i think the period with punk & bryan & the shield was WWE's all-time peak of in-ring work, in a vacuum anyway. most people get more into matches when they have strong heat, so the "in a vacuum" part is key there. but that time did seem to bring back a fair number of lapsed smart fans...

FWIW i don't recall us giving nearly this much shit to the guy who has ultimate warrior in his top 100

i'm 30 and i feel like a baby on this forum somehow a discussion on modern cultural relevance doesn't seem that fruitful to me when hardly anyone involved knows what, say, undertale or one punch man is. i love the old man concentration on this board but i guess this is one of the downsides!

must...avoid...trish stratus joke...

Him mattering is a part of the ridiculous DVDVR/PWO bubble. Move on fellas. I think he's basically just shorthand for the sorts of reviews you'd read in the late 90s / early 00s. The experience of many people first coming online and reading about wrestling was the same. Whether it was Keith in particular or any of the other ones is immaterial. They were all of that particular mindset, the influence of which -- if you venture a tiny bit outside of the "ridiculous bubble" you refer to -- is still in evidence everywhere. Meltzer influenced them, they influenced lots of random people who found them when they first came online. jdw might come in and say "oh well, back in the 90s", but jdw isn't 99% of people. People who actually received the newsletters by post account for a fraction of the people who got online during the Monday Night Wars to read Keith Scott's rants or The Rick or CRZ or any of those dudes. Let's not try to write them out of history. Most "normal" fans didn't even know what the Observer was when they first got online. this is a point i v. strongly agree with you on. scott keith was in something of a unique position in the 90s because he reviewed EVERYTHING - well, just all the american big 3 PPVs/clashes, but that *was* everything to us back in the day. we weren't reading the observer because fuck paying for things online, so the writers who had all their stuff out there for free became the important ones. i think you can still see the influence of guys like keith today if you watch, say, OSW Review - they share a lot of his workrate dogmatism and even repeat some of his BS rumors (i think mr. perfect winning the royal rumble was one of those, for instance). i suspect you'd see a similar character flowing through places like wreddit.

not even close witness the total lack of heat for juniors on tokyo dome shows. american fans used to think that was just the JP fans being their polite selves but nope, turns out the juniors were basically the WCW cruiserweights!

this is precisely the point i tried to make when i talked about this a little while back we've reached the point where you can push people specifically *because* they're bad at their job, since that's one of the only ways to make fans genuinely hate you anymore

lol at calling the GWE stream "cult-like" people getting together to watch stuff and chat is a big thing these days. hell, a site where people do that while watching other people play video games got bought by amazon for about $1 billion. neat concept tho!

my short answer: every period has its own authenticity. today's lies in the search for identity as a response to a culture that prizes analytics over social interaction and an onslaught of information on just how absurd everything ultimately is. what got me on this was that i remember you saying you enjoyed wrestling as a cultural snapshot of its era, and i think a portion of the current stuff totally is! but if it's the culture itself you don't enjoy, then nothing doing obviously.

see, here's a crucial point that some people here seem not to realize: "hipster" culture has now become the mainstream culture in america, and in general this is the era of postmodernism. when you look at what's most influential these days, what gets buzz, you look to seattle & portland & san francisco & brooklyn. and a lot of the biggest hit material these days is recycled from either nerd shit (comic books, fantasy novels) or old movies/TV shows. think of how long remakes or homages to the past have been a hollywood staple - everything you say about AJ styles could be applied just as vociferously to, say, JJ abrams! everybody and everything is "self-aware" today, not just wrestling. as an example, check out this clip (audio quality not great, sorry!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXEBkKEvJjw this is one of the hottest comedians in america. he seems to be trying to tell the shittiest jokes he can think of, as some sort of meta riffing on the entire concept of celebrity roasts. this is the sort of thing that's considered clever comedy in this era. a lot of this is probably thanks to the internet turning more people into nerds on some subject matter or another, but the seeds were sown in the mid-late 90s; think of mystery science theater, space ghost coast to coast, or south park. as we get into the 2000s we have somethingawful and 4chan as online cultural forces, along with the rise to prominence of adult swim and the daily show and family guy, and before you know it adam sandler's wearing a reddit trollface shirt while hanging out with the living meme that is guy fieri personally i believe it's always more fruitful to try and understand a particular culture than it is to write it off, but i just don't like repeating broad historical patterns.

GOTNW, i think JvK is referring more to the general presentation than the wrestling style

the OSW Review guys don't show themselves on camera, for what it's worth i do think there's a lot of value in putting your stuff on Youtube simply because it's such a larger platform, but you can just throw your audio podcasts on there!

yea, i think you can say kobashi is the japanese ricky steamboat - crappy promo but tremendous physical charisma that comes across to the cheap seats and makes him one of the most natural babyfaces ever.

the other japan 80s set is the bigger fujiwara showcase, i thought?

the problem with mabel's look in 1995 was that barney the dinosaur was huge at that time, so that would be the image associated with any fat person in purple the viscera look would've been good then imo

oh i think it was that herc had more than savage in the period up to hogan's "retirement", but then with 92 both of them should still beat him. sorry~ speaking of which, i think 92 was the funniest year regarding this topic. IIRC the guys who wrestled on every pay-per-view were a few you'd expect (savage, undertaker, shawn), one guy who's lower on the totem pole but still not too surprising (martel), and...virgil. tons of guys missed one show, bret & flair most famously.

actually, fun fact: hercules had more PPV paydays than hogan or savage in the 80s. the champion wasn't on *every* PPV back then, and they often didn't defend the title when they were. lots of tag matches on the non-mania shows! furthermore, i've said for a while that the MSG house shows of that era should be treated as the equivalent to the modern B-level PPVs, so one could look at those more in-depth if you wanted to take this farther. i remember the one with cyndi lauper originally wasn't supposed to have hogan, but they added him vs. valentine at the last minute when business wasn't looking as good as they'd hoped.

yea, japanese tends to do that when there's only one vowel in a syllable. they pronounce okada's first name in a similar fashion ("kazuchka"). vowel sounds are drawn out when there's two of that vowel in a row. think "iizuka" or "mutoh" ("oh"/"ou" is actually "oo" but they spell it differently in romaji).

have we really not mentioned mabel yet? that may be one of the most significant cases - a look that helped kill a main-event push.