pol

I believe the story of Vader being based on a manga character is wrong as nobody has ever been able to produce the manga he supposedly originates from. I heard what actually happened is they commissioned Go Nagai to design the gimmick (maybe just the helmet/mask thing).

I think the Rumble is better than the EC for setting up the Mania title contender as it allows guys to lose without really losing. One problem with the EC is how it interferes with booking the lead up to Mania since you have to have 5 top guys get beat. I think the scheduled gimmick PPVs are awful for booking, I'd honestly even say get rid of the Rumble were it not such a tradition and a draw in its own right (although is it really the Rumble match that's the draw or just the understanding that it's one of the year's major shows and the beginning of Mania season?). I'm curious what value you guys think establishing traditions like this has.

I watched the Benoit Rumble match. They worked a 5 minute TV sprint for 20 minutes. For a match of that length I expect some sense of escalation and the feeling that we've come on a journey since the opening bell, and there was just none of that here. There's no big match feel, it doesn't feel like anything of consequence is happening and all the announcer's proclamations about what a great match we're seeing come off as really weird to me. I'm a little worried that I'm being unfair to the match by going into it looking for negatives since the word on it here is so bad, but I'm fairly sure that even if I'd gone in expecting a great match I wouldn't have seen it as better than *** or so. The standing ovation for Benoit at the end comes off as very strange given the almost complete lack of heat for the majority of the match. One positive of Angle and of the go-go-go style in general is that while it can never reach the emotional highs wrestling is capable of, on the flipside the matches pack enough action in that they are rarely boring - I'd be surprised to find an Angle match I considered worse than **, because so long as you're actually doing stuff I'm always going to be moderately entertained. I'd be interested to hear how others feel about that.

Could someone list a couple of Kurt Angle matches that are well-regarded by Meltzer/the wider smart fan community that they'd consider the most egregious examples of his flaws? I pretty much checked out of WWE after 2003 or so and prior to that I was very much in thrall to the standard smark consensus.

Which finish? Benadryller? Have you seen his Dream Gate match from this year vs YAMATO? Not a Dragon Gate style match at all aside from some minor interference, and a totally different style of match from the usual Ricochet bout. Yeah the Benadryller. I guess I don't mind the move itself so much as the ridiculousness of building stretch runs around the struggle to get a guy up in the fireman's carry, just so he can set them back on their feet and kick them in the head. Just kick them in the fucking head! Was the YAMATO match the one built around Ricochet getting his leg worked over? That's one of the few Dragon Gate matches I've seen. I remember enjoying it, will have to give it another look.

I'm nowhere near the curmudgeon that Parv is () but I also can't stand the majority of indie wrestling commentators I've heard. Why would you call wrestling as if it's a work?

I hope to god the "THIS IS WRESTLING" chant never makes it to WWE crowds.

I'm interested in seeing more of him. I think WWE hitching their wagon to PAC instead of him was foolish since Ricochet at least equals him in wow factor and blows him away in terms of look and charisma. On the low end I've seen stuff like his recent EVOLVE match against Uhaa Nation where the typical "they did too much and none of it meant anything" indie criticism applies. On the high end his New Japan matches against Kota Ibushi and KUSHIDA I felt did a good job of building to the spectacular spots and making them memorable. His finish is stupid, imo.

Mark Rose strikes me as more like Adrian Street than anything, but I don't know if he ever wrestled in Japan?

The Boma Ye has to be one of the least protected finishers this side of the figure four. A single one never finishes a match these days. Agreed on most of the others though.

Five years to me seems like enough time for a person nobody's even heard of right now to potentially make a top 100 case for him/herself and is therefore excessive IMO. Could it be pushed further back than 2016? Yeah maybe.

Is it possible that they blame the underwhelming initial Network numbers in part on building Mania around Bryan?

As far as wrestling games go, the Fire Pro Wrestling series is probably the most shockingly blatant in its copyright infringement. The Undertaker appearing as "The Undead Taylor" is the best.

Udo from one of the Dragonball Z movies looks very familiar

As a big fighting game geek I've noticed a very common trend of characters that are clearly based on one wrestler or another. Going to name a bunch from memory here and others can chime in with theirs. Was originally going to restrict this to video games but I know this is common in at least other Japanese media since copyright laws are pretty lax there, so why not bring other media into it too? I'm gonna avoid wrestling games since pretty much every character in every unlicensed wrestling game is based on some real wrestler, but others are welcome to chime in with those if they wish Zangief (Street Fighter): Victor Zangiev Hugo (Street Fighter): Andre the Giant Alex (Street Fighter): Hulk Hogan King (Tekken): Tiger Mask El Blaze (Virtua Fighter): Rey Misterio Jr. Raiden/Big Bear (Fatal Fury): Vader Marstorius (Fighter's History): Bruiser Brody Muscle Power (World Heroes): Hulk Hogan Dasher Inoba (Ehrgeiz): Antonio Inoki Some I'm unsure about... Gai Tendo (Buriki One): Kazushi Sakuraba? (I believe he had dyed red hair at one point) Patrick van Heyting (Buriki One): Dick Vrij? Nationality is the same.

Watching EVOLVE 35 right now, dear god the commentary is just awful. Barely calling the matches, practically acknowledging it's a work with how much they talk about guys being "entertaining"... it really detracts from the action.

This was a lot of fun to listen to. I love the "elbow heard 'round the world" match. I think seeing the match where Misawa unmasks helps for context here, it's like he's had enough and isn't going to take any shit any more. I believe I've heard before that the knocking the guys off the apron was a standard Jumbo spot in tag matches, but Misawa takes exception even though given his standing as a midcarder he would've been expected to just sit there and take it like any other midcarder. That's what makes it so great. As for what Parv was saying about promos, there's a match where Jumbo does guest commentary and while I don't understand much Japanese I did catch him calling Misawa and crew "punks" (in English) about a dozen times. So yeah I think the idea of him being a veteran disgusted at this young upstarts is pretty much on point.

The hardcore/deathmatch style. The "crazy shit" in those "classic brawls" makes me physically ill. I honestly have no idea how anyone could find people being mutilated to that degree entertaining. And the All Japan style absolutely took a tremendous physical toll, but if you want to compare the two styles in terms of physical destruction/drug addiction/early death, the arrow's pointing strongly in the other direction. Is it? I'm genuinely ignorant here, but I would have thought that far more guys have seen long-term ill effects as a result of simply taking a ton of hard bumps/shots to the head than from working bloody deathmatches.

My biggest problem with the Beyond match was some of the more theatrical stuff (taking turns to strike each other while selling exhaustion) comes off as hokey in that kind of setting. In front of a big crowd that stuff is fine, in front of maybe less than 100 people in a tiny room not so much. I find Busick's facials and mannerisms kind of goofy too.

Speaking of EVOLVE, they're not something I follow but I read this in the Observer: Sounds good to me.

I do think that if the intention of the GOAT project is to poll from a true cross section of smart wrestling fans then that's a pretty naive goal when the discussion is hosted on this site. Yeah you can vote without signing up but how many people will? I would be surprised if the final results are not very skewed towards the PWO consensus (and no, the site isn't a monolithic entity, but there are trends).

I'm pretty new around these parts but I've never seen any closed-mindedness or intimidation personally. I strongly suspect that what you're referring to is people being offended that they're asked to back up opinions that would be considered self-evidently true elsewhere.

I'd really like to see a paper on the interplay of the real and fake in wrestling. I think two popular views of wrestling among non-fans are 1. it's a fake sport that purports to be real and 2. it's a fictional reality just like any other, but neither of these actually get to the heart of what wrestling has historically been. Some things to explore: 1. Why, even in kayfabe, is the Montreal Screwjob a bigger deal than any of the hundreds of other screwjobs that have happened before and since? 2. Worked shoots in general. 3. The UWF-i vs. New Japan feud... shoot-style guys doing spots where they refuse to cooperate with the New Japan guys' fake pro-style offense, even though the shoot-style guys were also fakes. On what level was the audience supposed to take this? On what level did they take it? 4. The general presentation of real shooters in wrestling (thinking of Brock a few years ago pretty much calling Cena a fake pro wrestler). I'd love to see literary analysis applied to this stuff, especially stuff from the kayfabe years. I think the way wrestling purported to be a legitimate sport yet would constantly undermine that facade in an effort to convince you that this time it really IS real is fascinating.

That kind of thing (as well as popping up after suplexes that had been sold normally prior) kills suspension of disbelief for me because it's a disruption of the established logic of the match. My reaction is "oh, they weren't really kicking out at 2.9 because they'd taken so much punishment", "oh, they aren't really so exhausted they can't get up after taking a suplex", etc. I think the discrepancy comes from the fact that Dave likes his wrestling to seem real. To me, that's an outdated notion of the kayfabe era. I look at wrestling the same way I look at any other work of fiction - I don't need it to be realistic, but it has to respect its own internal logic. I've thought for a while now that this difference in outlook is why WWE's creative is so nonsensical and inconsistent - they believe they have to seem real, but they know everyone knows it's fake, so they've just given up on the logic and consistency necessary to maintain the pretense of being a legitimate athletic contest (as Dave often characterizes WWE as saying: "it's wrestling, everyone knows it's fake, so it doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense"). What they should be doing is accepting that everyone knows it's fake but working to produce a coherent and logical fictional reality, but I guess to the people in charge this is a totally foreign way of looking at wrestling after all the kayfabe years. This might warrant a thread of its own...

Not only is it overused, but a common spot is for one guy to kick out at one, hit a move on the other guy who then kicks out at one. Few things feel faker than that to me. It's just another form of the tough man bullshit that gives us guys taking turns to no-sell forearms to the face.