funkdoc

stay solid and fire up some kamala matches yo~

IRC is a possibility - i wanted to create a #PWO channel somewhere, but unfortunately the internet at my new place keeps disconnecting me from IRC. the taima streams have also already been serving this function for some people, and that seems to be the simplest option & the one that makes the most sense?

yea i'm with matt d - the bulldog matches are the reason i'd have kerry as the least valuable player for '91 WWF. most people would go with the warlord or virgil just on rep, i reckon.

on one of the WTBBP podcasts, the guest talks about how warlord looked way better in a chikara match than he ever did during his actual career. moving around like a human being instead of an action figure, supposedly - guess not being so juiced-up helps!

did i wander into the greatest shoot interviews ever subforum

tbh i think the idea of bigelow as a midcarder for life is the revisionist-history notion. when he was PRESENTED as a top star, the fans totally bought him as one; witness survivor series '87 or his NJPW career. it's really obvious if you think about it from the perspective of a kid who hasn't totally realized wrestling is fake...he's bigger AND quicker/more athletic than hogan, so of course he can beat anybody! this really goes back to loss's idea of getting over being mostly about winning a lot (with the caveat that you can't beat the wrong guys at the wrong time or else it backfires). not all losses are equal of course, and the LT thing pretty much screwed bam bam, but if that never happened you could totally make him work.

the thing is that a goldberg push just doesn't work with guys who rely so much on chinlocks and front facelocks. monsters need explosive offense!

yea, clickbait lists are the bread & butter of the internet nowadays and idk why this thread is even a thing

re: garvin, it's a ridiculously tiny sample - some stuff shown on smoky mountain when they brought him in. seeing him vs. andre will make that match a holy grail for you...

ronnie garvin gets kinda shafted on the length of peak rating i'd say, due to the lack of 70s footage. from the clips we have i could easily buy him as a guy in the "best in the world" conversation then. i also enjoy the fact that the humanities academic here is the one coming up with a statistical system for performance art

the idea is that women are an untapped audience, and i think stuff like the US women's soccer team and NXT are bearing that out. to look at another world with a very similar fanbase to wrestling, check out your superhero comic books these days - you have things like a female thor (whose comic outsells the original's, IIRC) and catwoman coming out as bisexual. focusing on minority audiences has helped spark a mini-revival there, something i'd compare to modern NJPW if you really need a wrestling analogy. i think that's the future for a lot of the pop culture that hasn't already gotten there, and i include wrestling in that statement. sasha-bayley will be canonized if that happens, i'd bet.

the story with sasha-bayley is a far more relevant story in 2015 than anything else WWE has done, easily. there's something of a cultural zeitgeist with feminism and the reactions to it atm, particularly in the internet-nerd circles that make up a lot of live wrestling audiences. this is the wrestling that will be a time capsule of its period, in the way that mid-south and such were in their day. masculinity is *so* 1999, and no amount of company backing or lack thereof can mask that feeling with this generation.

in the sense of being irrelevant losers with dumb gimmicks, that team still takes the cake i think

whoa some of my image links got messed up and im at work now =(

thing is, reigns has been great in more organic TV settings so the ability is there. just vince being vince

yea this thread reminds me a lot of the recurring backlund debate on titans of wrestling and i feel the same way about both - i think the "anti" side slightly misreads the reason fans came to these shows. i think this came up before and i used a sports analogy but didn't quite explain it well enough, so i'll try again. so one of the major draws of sports is expressing pride in your city/country/school, and usually the best result for fans is their home team completely destroying the opposition. by and large, people don't watch sports for the same reasons they watch movies or TV - with sports, the heroes are more personally connected to you through geography/shared history. just think of how often people refer to their sports teams as "we"! i think people viewed territories with strong local heroes, like WWWF and world class, in the same kind of way they viewed sports. it also helped that new york and texas have some of the richest sports traditions in the country, and are states that generally see themselves as the best (in different ways, of course). thus, i would argue that fans saw the top faces in these promotions as an extension of themselves and their state, and these wrestlers' dominant nature played to the populace's regional exceptionalism. this connection is especially powerful when the athlete in question is from the fans' home state, as the von erichs were, but it still happens with cases like backlund because if you succeed in a region and stay around long enough, you become an adopted son of theirs. i wonder if this isn't the sort of thing meltzer means when he's critical of rewatching - yea, it's silly in a lot of ways, but here i think there's real merit to the idea that watching wrestling solely as "entertainment" leads us to miss the forest for the trees.

yea, powers actually looked like he went off the juice during the early days of raw. i recall there being one match on there where he actually got a full ring entrance to Crank It Up, just out of the blue.

i talked about this before but neidhart & JYD were brought in as a tag team. i swear that was like the last thing watts did before leaving WCW, had his fingerprints all over it

big bully busick. really. they had a bit of a heel vs. heel TV feud where they traded wins

eva marie is one of the only genuine heels in NXT right now because the fans believe she's just "using" wrestling, and that's really important. compare to sasha giving all those interviews about how eddie was her favorite wrestler growing up and she loves the business, etc. - that's why people like her & danielson can never truly be hated by the core audience. smart fans have always been some of the biggest "respect the business" marks around, period. also i dig la sombra, but i feel like dragon lee would be the best fit in WWE of the current CMLL guys? dunno, i'll leave that to the experts...

everything about jason the terrible & the zodiak in stampede. that whole thing *is* pro wrestling to me

rollins imo

my lasting in-ring memory of sid is his godawful rear chinlock

diamond & tanaka actually did team up for a minute in WCW! there was a little angle in 94, i think just after hogan arrived, where they were basically the orient express under different names. that was also when they brought in the mongolian mauler for a nathan jones-level run.

bret vs. austin definitely wasn't i quit, it was just a submission match. part of the reason people prefer that to almost any i quit match is the lack of silliness with the mic. anyway, i quit has way too many WWE clunkers holding it down to be a top contender i think. last man standing has been hands down the best modern WWE gimmick match, for what it's worth.