funkdoc

count me in as another poster who's been increasingly turned off by parv's attitude as of late, even beyond this. sorry, but artistic criticism is an area where the postmodernists got it right - objectivity is an impossible goal for human beings. enforcing a single consistent standard ain't gonna work here, bud~ like, i've watched .001% of the amount of wrestling anyone else here has this year, but this almost has me tempted to submit a ballot. watch me have jinsei shinzaki in my top 100 because japanese monks are fuckin rad as hell m8

thanks for correcting my silliness earlier itt~

yall are missing an important part of loss's argument he's saying it's not just winning that matters, but beating the right people and (probably more importantly) not beating the wrong people at the wrong time. this is the factor that hurt the likes of diesel and 2003 HHH, and probably the freakin snowman in mid-south and any other example you could dredge up. i think a good point in loss's favor is how much even the internet fans have bought into the WWE canon view of HHH as one of the greatest of all time...he lasted long enough to have a whole generation of fans who weren't around for 2003, and stayed on top throughout.

i'm not so sure about that, loss. the MMA cred probably counts for more than you think it does, as there is a lot of overlap between people who watch that and wrestling. this actually reminds me of an old scott keith post where he basically said that if you gave chris benoit the undertaker's music & entrance & presentation, he would get just as over as undertaker did. i don't really buy that, just from the lack of height alone. guys come off dorky when they're doing a gimmick that doesn't fit them, and that will always be a factor no matter how much they win. maybe you just mean that guys will get a strong reaction period if they win all the time, in which case i'm with you...but i'm not sure how much that's really worth. IIRC you generally view cena's reactions as a positive, whereas i consider them a reflection of his low ceiling as the company ace.

that's a good point matt. i will admit that i'm naturally skeptical of white-savior narratives on stuff like this, too. just didn't want to say that for fear of violating "PWO", but i'll stop there. in a business as carny as this, though, i think you just have to take what you can get...

speaking of tito and weird results, i have to throw in the obligatory mention of his 1992 pinfall win over the undertaker. that one was in barcelona, so they were clearly going for some sort of local appeal with the matador thing. stuff like that is why i could actually buy him being considered for the world title that year - if they were planning to do more international tours, his gimmick would've gotten over in a number of places. another less obscure but funny one: bastion booger's first televised match was a clean job to virgil. in 1993. you know, the same year that virgil was doing jobs to blake beverly. also parv, i don't need you to upload the match but i'm glad it exists =)

parv: i think you misread marty's post a bit there. he was comparing *duggan* to bruno, not murdoch. i actually like his "bruno for the 90s" line on DDP!

WOS is a more convenient catch-all term, and i believe it's easier to find matches online by searching with that. i have no problem with changes in language when they serve a practical purpose like that.

my all-time favorite example of the WWF's booking of short-term main-event heels: sika gets to headline a SNME vs. hogan in '87 (granted, as a replacement for kamala, but still). afterward he steadily drops down the card...culminating in a house show where he jobs clean to SD jones. i swear i'm not making this up - it used to be on youtube but appears to be gone from there now. it's not the prime time match between them, that one's a sika squash. i think it may have been a show in the west indies where they decided to book a "hometown" win...

yea tiger mask is canonized in the WON lore & japan, and even among the workers & hardcore fans in mexico. it was seen as mandatory to have a bunch of him

yea the run of HHH followed by JBL was what turned off this attitude era fan and his brother also going to get justin credible out of the way. there should be a thread for "jump the shark" moments for particular generations of fans, by promotion - he seems like the most obvious one for ECW.

i consider any positive impact that penetrates the wrestling bubble to be a huge, HUGE plus for this sort of thing. so few wrestlers have ever achieved that to any meaningful degree, and even the likes of hogan have always been seen as icons of trashy culture more than anything else. i'm on board with this!

herb kunze is a math professor these days, not sure he'd want to do something that public w/ wrestling anymore

dammit i missed matt's original post i very much side with him on this. the reason i love this forum so much is that it's not full of boring canonlords, that it has people willing to completely redefine good and bad work. hope it stays that way!

i swear i heard somewhere that van hammer was actually meant to be "heavy metal ultimate warrior". like the vignettes before his debut made it look like it could be the warrior, IIRC

yea i remember a good amount of internet buzz around TNA during the period alucard described. a lot of "better than WWE!" talk. people were even giving aces & eights the benefit of the doubt at first...

in sports, we adjust for those extenuating circumstances. baseball is the only major team sport here that doesn't have a uniform playing field, so your sabermetrics types will absolutely dock hitters for playing in tiny ballparks that made home runs easy. that's a major reason the analytical crowd doesn't consider jim rice a legit HOFer even though his raw power-hitting numbers were among the very best for over 10 years. i strongly believe in doing the same for any type of performance - i tend to think "if i were a promoter/general manager/what have you, would i be begging to have this guy?"

re: the cardio thing, i'll throw out tamura as potentially the best ever. but he's a shootstyle guy so he wouldn't be on parv's radar, which i totally understand.

i got the impression that was supposed to be part of her character. like she's supposed to be the ordinary gal who's still full of self-doubt? dunno

a good night, all in all. and i even missed the first 2 matches! cant see myself watching NXT weekly but these are neat

i dug sasha faking a concussion off that armdrag bump, exactly the sort of thing that works even on smarky crowds

i said it last year and i'll say it again: mexico is the most stacked category by a RIDICULOUS margin. i think that likely owes itself to lucha almost always being the black sheep even among the hardcore fans, with only a couple brief exceptions (peak AAA, peak mistico).

you just made parv & kelly's month with that one

yea, what was so unique about jordan was how he was very strongly cast as NOT a "black athlete", which some of his own actions backed up. remember him not supporting a black senate candidate vs. one of the biggest racists in congress, because "republicans buy sneakers too"?