(BP)

I think it's hard enough being a fan as it is without people hearing that the Walt Disney of professional wrestling chases employees with a pair of his soiled underwear.

Show and Henry at Money in the Bank 2011 is good. It doesn't overstay it's welcome. Vader vs Yokozuna from a Raw in 96' is fun because they just clobber each other.

Stuff like that makes me not want to give them any of my money much more than the state of any wrestler's push ever would.

Probably Foley. Flair never had the crossover appeal Mankind did in 99-2000. although Slick Ric on Boy Meets world would have ruled.

Oh wow, the best part of that story is Brisco shooting on HHH to get away.

I thought they'd done a pretty thorough job of editing the language on the ECW stuff, but I'm watching November to November 97' and Taz just called Brakkus cum-drunk. I don't remember Taz being this awful on the mic in ECW, but this is about as bad as his TNA commentary persona.

It's been fine on IE. There was a couple of days where it would occasionally freeze and rewind 10 seconds of the show, but that hasn't happened in a week. I was planning on mostly using the XBox app, but in the mean time I can hook my laptop up to my TV.

Watched the Wrestlemania 14 rewind, and they make a lot of Michaels's well known issues at the time. If he flakes on them again, who do they put opposite Austin for the presumably vacant WWF title in the main event? Does it hurt Austin at all going forward to beat an upper mid career like Rock or Helmsley, or is he so over it doesn't matter?

I just looked up some New Rockers to see how Marty was there. He never really plays up that the gimmick is essentially a guy stuck in the glory days of his career who tries to recapture lightning in a bottle with an equally deluded dork. Ideally it should have played out like Kingpin. Snow tried really hard though. Just watched then squash the Hardy Boyz when they were just Boys on Superstars. Fun match.

Started rewatching 97' from Final Four on. I'm up to Cold Day in Hell, and I'm excited for Canadian Stampede. Every show things are clicking more and more, and the in-ring is a lot better than during the height of the attitude era.

Man on the Moon came out in December of that year, so probably. I remember they tried to get Carrey for a Wrestlemania angle with Lawler that year.

Nice to see the original version of the mania 3 main event is on the network. The edit from the 50 Years of WWE release is awful.

A lot of it has to do with roster depth on a given year. There was that year where they had forty entrants, and they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel to fill it in. I haven't watched all of this year's Rumble, but this is arguably their best roster in some time. There's a reason 92' is often considered the best, besides Flair and Heenan being awesome, and it's that a lot of the biggest stars of the 80's/early 90's intersected with the guys that would be on top of the company for the rest of the decade. So, it's possible that some of these most recent Rumbles will seem like a much bigger deal later from a historical perspective. It still seems to bring in lapsed and casual fans, so I'm sure it's not going away soon.

As long as he doesn't work Del Rio three PPV's in a row...

They haven't announced a celebrity inductee yet. It was going around that it was Mr. T.

Flair's eyes bulging out of his head while he screams at the crowd to stop chanting YES would be perfect.

I think there's a distinction between what people on the internet identify as a smart fan, and everyone else who are, "smartened up." The audience was at one time made up of people who either considered wrestling a genuine sport, or only understood it to be "fake" in some vague way. Since then, McMahon introduced the "sports entertainment" umbrella, kayfabe eroded completely, the pro wrestling exposed show aired, and Tough Enough literally showed rookies learning to take bumps. Everyone in the crowd might not even know it's called a bump, but they know what it is and the basic mechanics of it. I think the change in fan perspective has really hurt WWE crowd reactions, since everyone's there to take in a show rather than watch a competition. There's a dearth of rabid grannies trying to get over the guard rail at HHH. The only real heat they generate anymore is from smart fan moral outrage, but they're getting really good at harnessing it and feeding it into the show.

Watched some mid 90's WWF yesterday. It's funny that Vince is apparently so controlling about what goes on in the booth, because when he was the lead announcer he would let things degenerate into chaos all the time. His RAW team with Heenan and Bartlett where they try to bury each other is cringe inducing, and there was a point at Survivor Series 96' when he let Ross and Sunny snipe at each other to the point where it's uncomfortable. I don't know if it's because he couldn't scream at them on mic, or because he was amused by it. On Ross's screaming, I noticed that he'd get exceptionally loud during stretches in the match with long rest holds, I guess to compensate for a lack of crowd reaction.

I'm Ben. My younger brother got me into WWF and WCW in 97' when I was 10. I started watching because of the crash TV aspect, and stuck around through the 00's because of an attachment to the attitude era guys. In the last five years I've become less casual in my viewership, and thanks to lurking here and DVDR, I've discovered a lot of great Lucha, Puro, NWA, AWA, and early 90's WCW. I live in a hub for indy wrestling (Jersey/Philadelphia), but I follow it minimally. My favorite wrestler was Shawn Michaels at one point, but I've definitely outgrown a lot of his stuff. I really look forward to talking with you guys.