The Man in Blak

I'll second this. It looked like he had trouble getting into the ring before the match even started. There were a couple of moments (like the powerbomb in the corner) where I thought there was a chance of a legitimate injury because Tenryu barely had enough strength to do anything. There was a point where Tenryu "hit" an enziguiri on a kneeling Okada where his other foot didn't even leave the ground. When the match ended, I was more relieved than anything.

This made me laugh more than it should have.

Without wishing to derail, this is my problem with so much Lucha. And I do think it is a legit criticism of Dean too. I think a better derail than Lucha would be a comparison to modern American wrestling, which I feel like Malenko has unduly influenced, for better or worse. Even in the moments when Lucha feels overly choreographed from a physical standpoint -- and, in my experiences so far, I would consider those moments to be more rare than what is posited here -- I still find, more often than not, that the competitors are able to express and perform conflict on a more emotional level through selling, playing to the crowd, etc. There's still real heat and friction that provides an emotional undercurrent to all that slick choreography. With Malenko, though, I rarely see him even trying to present that aspect in his work and it ends up creating a machine-like quality to so much of his work as a result. And I don't think it's an accident that a lot of contemporary WWE work (and, just for the sake of stirring the post, a lot of contemporary ROH work) shares this quality as well, considering the pervasive influence of the Malenko/Guerrero series and Dean's current employment as a WWE road agent. It shouldn't be surprising that the most basic ROH house show match works as effectively as Malenko's greatest hits; an alarming amount of the spots are taking their cue from those matches.

The GWE "March Madness pick 'em" had Dibiase's eventual placement as a tie-breaker, but I think Shawn Michaels would have been a better choice - I'm hard-pressed to think of any other candidate who seems primed to have more variance in the ballots.

Hansen Kawada Flair Tenryu Kobashi Funk Liger Casas Misawa Mysterio Dibiase lands at 81 and I say Jumbo falls all the way out of the top 15. EDIT: Swapped Santo at 10 for Mysterio.

If you're looking for more Hamaguchi singles matches that are worth a look, NJPW World has a Hamaguchi/Fujinami match from 11/5/1981 that I enjoyed quite a bit (outside of the finish, which is garbage). It's only around 12-13 minutes and it's Fujinami, but Hamaguchi acquits himself quite well as a veteran gatekeeper that wants to teach this upstart junior a lesson.

Saint's Michinoku Pro match in '96 and it's worth watching, I think. I don't know that it's necessarily a great match - the last round is a disaster that shows off all the overly "cutesy" tendencies mentioned in this thread, along with a badly blown spot as a cherry on top - but it's an interesting look at how effective he can be with a crowd outside of WoS (albeit in one match). Saint's on the bubble for me, primarily as a gateway guy to the style. His playful, comedic escape artistry works, I think, because it emphasizes the aspects of the British tradition that feel the most antithetical to typical American in-ring style. With Saint, "restholds" become highspots; they become opportunities to show off flashy escapes that look great in the moment, but lose their luster as they become more familiar. In a weird way, those escapes enhance the presentation of those holds as truly dangerous predicaments by calling excess attention to them, but that illusion can only hold on for so long. Once you see the magician do the same trick twice, it's hard to stay curious.

That's fair, though it's also sort of funny, since one of the suspected reasons that WWE was so hesitant to push Bryan is because they felt that Bryan was only over because of the "Yes" chant.

It's tough for me to see Big Bossman (who has the same intangibles score as Bryan -- a 4) pulling off a segment like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cny4Q0tILRE But, then again, I think Dustin Rhodes (also a 4) deserves a higher score too, considering how idiosyncratic the Goldust character was in the ring. His early promos were bizarre because they were random quotes from old movies, but it was his in-ring character work that got under people's skin and made the gimmick so memorable.

Or they didn't actually have access to watching Smackdown and, thus, were stuck with Raw during the Triple H reign of terror. Smackdown was on UPN (through September 15th 2006)/CW (through September 26th 2008)/MyNetworkTv (which was over the air in many markets) until Sept 24th 2010 and debuted on SyFy October 1st, 2010. Pretty much the entire "true" brand split era, a case can be made that more people could access Smackdown than they could Raw on TNN/Spike/USA! I guess that was my fault for walking away from the product during the "false" brand split era of 2002-2004 that preceded the window of time that you described, since what I described in my original post was the situation I was facing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Or they didn't actually have access to watching Smackdown and, thus, were stuck with Raw during the Triple H reign of terror.

Dustin and Cena are locks, though I suspect I'll be lower on Cena than most. Cesaro and Undertaker are currently floating around the bottom 10-15, but not guaranteed. Joe and Nakamura might sneak on as well, depending on how my remaining homework for them plays out.

As far as the audio issues at the end are concerned, I know that some Skype-driven podcasts have the host and participants record their individual audio output (in addition to the host's recording of the combined stream), which get merged into a single stream in production, using the host's "combined" recording as a sort of road map for synching things up. That's a whole 'nother set of technical and logistical hurdles that may not be conducive to how the reactions shows are normally produced, though.

This is where I'm at as well, though I would put forward another potential factor, which I mentioned in the Rumble thread a while back. Whether they're trying to be clever/meta or just incompetent, I think they're trying to manufacture the same sort of audience sympathy for Reigns that was (naturally) occurring for Daniel Bryan: - The Sheamus cash-in is analogous to Randy Orton's cash-in at SummerSlam. - The Royal Rumble defeat can be read as being analogous to Daniel Bryan not being in the Rumble (except "better" because Our Guy, Reigns, actually fought all the way from the beginning!). - The final beatdown on Raw is analogous to HHH beating down a handcuffed Daniel Bryan on Raw. I think they had a myopic view of why Daniel Bryan was successful. Rather than seeing Bryan's success as appreciation for being a once-in-a-generation talent, I think they saw his crowd reactions as being a result of the fans buying into Bryan vs. The Authority (even if that buy-in was more on a meta level), just like they had bought into Austin/Rock vs. McMahon and are trying to recapture lightning in a bottle with Reigns. It's short-sighted incompetence that, nevertheless, gives someone like HHH all sorts of opportunities to exert influence.

Great summary! Also, bonus points for comparing Vince McMahon to a malignant tumor.

I think that, to this point, I've subconsiously disqualified most of 1999 for the WWE roster by default due to how screwed up priorities were around that time, but yeah, it's a fair point to include it in Undertaker's down period as well. Some of the early corporate ministry tags aren't bad and Undertaker/Shamrock at Backlash '99 was a surprise to dig up through this process (and I tip my hat to Loss for that one), but there's a lot of uneven work for him from that period.

Undertaker's hovering around the bottom of my list. He's a fascinating mixture of character-focused performance, spectacle, legitimate work, and multi-faceted special attraction (as gimmick for the first part of his career, then as "legendary dragon to slay" in the later part). There's a longevity argument to be made too, though I'm loathe to make it because it's longevity bolstered by unprecedented protection. The most damaging era for his candidacy isn't his early WWE stuff (which I actually find to be a bit underrated); it's the "American Badass" run in the early 00s, where he actually was the slow, unnuanced and overprotected lug that many smart fans perceive(d) him to be. He ended up doing an admirable job of folding in the better aspects of that persona back into the Undertaker character, but the period of time taken to get there churned out an alarming amount of awful, Nash-level stuff.

They could do a lot worse than Punk/Lesnar as a template for Ambrose/Lesnar.

I was very happy to hear the reaction show call attention to it.

Maybe I'm just a deconstructionist at heart, but I'm not really interested in trying to divine whatever intent Chris Jericho brought to his matches. (The same mostly goes for evaluating if somebody was really "working hard" in a match, as though pro wrestling was otherwise a leisurely pursuit.) There is no limit to the amount of post-hoc bullshit that someone can use to cover mediocrity. So, yeah, I feel like there's plenty to criticize in Jericho's matches that doesn't require any of that conjecture. Dangerously sloppy execution at various points throughout in his career, overly contrived and hammy tendencies once he settled into the WWF, and a dearth of all-time classic matches as a whole. I like late 90's heel Jericho as a character too and it's true that Jericho eventually adapted to and ended up excelling in the modern WWE house style of storytelling. But he has ranged from corny to truly dreadful as a babyface and I don't know that excelling in the WWE house style makes him great or even good as much as it makes him consistent because consistency is the aim of that particular design. Even when he's a half-dozen steps slower than someone like AJ Styles, he can be counted on to deliver a decent, if ultimately unsatisfying, match to fill PPV time...which puts him on par with about 20 other people on the WWE roster right now. If being a solid hand for a long time is the sort of thing is valuable to you, then I can certainly see an argument for including him on a ballot, but I just don't know if that's enough to make the cut for me, especially given the gigantic list of candidates that are also worthy of consideration. I wouldn't say that he's outside the top 200 for me but, if I'm not putting Shawn Michaels on my ballot, there's no way in hell I'm penciling in Chris Jericho's name.

In my experience, the Network performance is really uneven across devices - I never have any trouble with my Roku or my phone, but the PS3 frequently stutters and jumps backwards in the broadcast. Even now, as I'm rewatching the PPV, it's jumping around a fair amount on PS3. (Which is unfortunate, since the PS3 version of the Network app might have the best interface out of all of them.)

Maybe he can write his 4chan treatise like Film Crit Hulk to make up for lost time.

I bounced off the main event pretty badly on first watch, though maybe I'll appreciate the layout more the second time around. It told its story well enough, but that story did a remarkable job of making Ambrose and Reigns look second-rate. Reigns blowing off the Kimura and multiple chairshots so that he could spear his best friend for the pin felt about as video-gamey as you can get. Whatever Lesnar does at Wrestlemania, it's going to be a huge letdown unless they hot-shot him into the main event. And even that would present more booking problems than solutions.

The Taka match didn't hold up at all when I rewatched it. Taka has a decent opening shine, but the crowd never buys into any of it because they're too distracted by everything going on with the APA and the McMahons outside of the ring. At one point, the APA double-teams Triple H, throws him into the ring where he gets hit by flying moves from Funaki and Taka and he still kicks out. If that segment was designed to be an instance of him getting shown up like Flair, then it failed miserably.

If there's any capacity for self-awareness in you at all, you should probably keep this sort of comment in mind before you casually dismiss an entire tradition of wrestling.