brockobama

Actually been thinking about this a lot recently because a few weeks back I happened to watch the two most famous film adaptations of the mutiny on the HMS Bounty, both the 1935 classic with Clark Gable and the fantastic Charles Laughton as well as the 1962 version with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard. The latter's a pretty famous box office bomb that was also panned critically for decades, being seen as this overlong, aimless, unrefined retread of what was already a well-regarded film. Though I recognize the '35 version as much tighter and more cohesive, generally a better film in just about every way, I enjoyed the '62 version much more for how it reveled in its characters and relayed the passage of time and let things build to a boil naturally as opposed to all at once. At the same time I've been reviewing 1996 WWF and have really enjoyed a lot of the RAWs despite their general lack of quality because they're so to the point. With most of these matches it's a real simple idea of "this guy is plain ol' better than this guy" or "this guy has a superior strategy" or "this guy can capitalize on the other guy's mistakes" or what have you and the quick, efficient telling of those stories is really enjoyable. It's been hard to go back and watch 2018 matches for the most part because I'll find similar ideas played out over two, three, four times as much time but done more lazily or aimlessly or just in a less interesting way. Not to say that Crush squash matches are better than the New Japan Cup stuff I've been trying to get through but Crush has the benefit of brevity and even if he's boring he's only boring for four minutes at most. So I dunno. I think it's sort of an inverted bell curve where I tend to like the smaller stuff where there's little wasted time/space but I also tend to like the drawn out matches that go in a lot of directions. It's not always perfect on either end of the curve but I'd take a lot of those matches over the 20-40 minute matches that dominate most of industry.

Llave

I do think Zack's character does smooth out some of his rougher edges and I've come around on him a lot but man, the dude's still one of the most frustrating wrestlers today and his technical work is a huge part of that.

Watched this again recently for the first time in a long time since I'm reviewing Austin era stuff for my blog. Classic match, best thing in either man's career up to this point, huge highlight in a bad time for the company, huge spots still hold up, etc etc. You've heard it all before. The thing that stood out to me this time around was how believably you could buy Shawn as an actual heel in this match, depending on your frame of view. After all the shit he pulls at SummerSlam and how Vader is treated in general, Shawn coming into this match hot and applying some notably aggressive knee work (including a figure four that I've worked myself into believing was a dig at Foley by way of Flair) and eventually going as far as just whacking the dude in the knee with a steel chair, it really reads to me like he's supposed to be the bad guy. But at the same time you can see it as a mere human being backed into the corner after weeks of psychological warfare by a pair of real freaks and trying to survive by any means he can. Fun twist in a match that I already thought very highly of. By the by, where's this "worked botch" talk come from, Foley's book? With the way it segues almost directly into the Mandible Claw tease it's easy to see it as a work, I guess, but I sort of don't buy Shawn as that convincing of an actor.

I think the big question is who exactly these 'current wrestlers' are. That's easily the group of votes I know least about. Is Dave handing out ballots to guys who worked with Bryan extensively or is it just his pals like Jericho who may or may not be in love with the guy?

I, for one, would love to see Cena try and write a puppet-based Dracula musical.

What are you talking about, brother, he had the Million Dollar Dream. re: the Bret/Austin talk, though, to what degree does this overrated talk stem from people thinking the Survivor Series match is better? Did that mindset exist immediately from the time of WM13 or did that only build and build in the years afterward? As for my own answers a few spring to mind. Most of the lesser AJPW fivers, basically anything that has anybody but the core four and Jumbo/Fuchi before them feels overplayed to me. Joe/Kobashi is probably the only ROH match that holds up to that level for me, though I might go high on a few Dave didn't. The big one(s) for me, though, are WarGames. I recognize that a huge part of my disconnect is merely an unfamiliarity, as I know just about nothing about the build and every attempt I make at doing a deep dive into WCW ends with frustration about TV, but even aside from that they're just sort of above average cage matches to me. I also think that the man advantage/strategy of them never hits quite where I'd like it to. Were I a star-rating man I'd still have them around or above four flakes, since it's a whole bunch of mega-talented dudes going all out, but none of the ones I've seen have ever struck me on a "this is one of the best matches of all time" level.

I guess you could say that that's the problem, but yeah, I'm mostly indifferent to it all past the "well that's dumb" phase.

So much more incest and watersports discussion on this episode than I ever would have imagined.

Makes sense. I've seen them called that elsewhere, but it was from people who I know are big PWO lurkers.

Ditto regarding Okabayashi and Hama. Delightful matchup.

Been meaning to ask this for a long time and this seems as good a place as any to do it: where did the El Clasico and El Super Clasico titles for 6/3/1994 and 6/9/1995 come from? Obviously it seems like they're ripped right from football/soccer, but it seems like an odd thing to me, using a pair of Spanish sports titles to refer to a pair of Japanese matches. Who coined these terms? How long have they been around?

One that makes a lot of sense but was very frustrating and over-emphasized in my experience was vets grilling guys on how to properly feed for their opponent when getting up. Stuff like making sure to always use one specific hand to sell with and one specific side of your body to rise off the mat with, which sometimes differed between vets.

The Deford article led me to read The Boxer and The Blonde for the first time in a number of years, so thanks for that, I guess.

What was Bret's take on Angle? I could easily be wrong, but I can't imagine he had anything but glowing things to say about the guy. I wonder if Angle's trajectory changes at all with direct Bret influence.

One of these things is not like the other.

Rip's certainly taking this argument in a different direction. https://twitter.com/Hustler2754/status/864465439111434241 https://twitter.com/IVPvideos/status/864478674313252864

Zellner: "The reason Joe Malenko quit [AJPW] is because he's now part owner of a pharmacy." Bix: "I'll say!" This killed me. Real good episode in general.

Only half of the podcast is spent talking about how dumb his droopy pleather hoodie/vest was.

At least for a while, Chono has Team 2000 Crash as his theme, which I'd put over most anything Orton has ever done in the ring.

This is the root of the problem for me. As Matt was getting at, selling is one of a couple ways in which I derive meaning from the narrative of wrestling. If wrestlers are already forming their narrative around a structure that I find to be fairly clichéd and overdone, and then one or more of them stop pretending as if the consequences of those efforts matter, then what should I care about what they're doing? Of course, you could flip that logic on its head, arguing that if the efforts are clichéd to begin with, ignoring them isn't so much of an issue, but I guess I'm trying to find something here that I can latch on to. I see this argument a lot and while it's very true, I find it funny, because my experience with knee problems (both of 'em) has been usually the opposite.

Considering that... A. I don't use or really even approve of star ratings B. There are very large gaps in my viewing history C. It's been a number of years since I've seen a lot of the classics that I *have* seen ...here are some snowflakes: ***** Jumbo Tsuruta vs Billy Robinson - AJPW 03/05/1977 Stan Hansen vs Andre the Giant - NJPW 09/23/1981 Ric Flair vs Ricky Steamboat - NWA 02/20/1989 Sangre Chicana vs El Satanico - EMLL 05/26/1989 Masakatsu Funaki vs Tatsuo Nakano - UWF 07/24/1989 Ric Flair vs Terry Funk - NWA 11/15/1989 Dan Kroffat & Doug Furnas vs Kenta Kobashi & Tsuyoshi Kikuchi - AJPW 05/25/1992 Akira Hokuto vs Shinobu Kandori - AJW 04/02/1993 Stan Hansen vs Kenta Kobashi - AJPW 07/29/1993 Bret Hart vs Owen Hart - WWF 08/29/1994 Shinya Hashimoto vs Hiroshi Hase - NJPW 12/13/1994 Nobuhiko Takada vs Shinya Hashimoto - NJPW 04/29/1996 Bret Hart vs Stone Cold Steve Austin - WWF 03/23/1997 Negro Casas vs El Hijo del Santo - CMLL 09/19/1997 Atlantis vs Villano III - CMLL 03/17/2000 Samoa Joe vs Bryan Danielson - ROH 10/02/2004 Samoa Joe vs Necro Butcher - ROH 06/11/2005 John Cena vs Umaga - WWE 01/28/2007 Blue Panther vs Villano V - CMLL 09/19/2008 John Cena vs CM Punk - WWE 07/17/2011

I think a "was pushed to be the top guy or 1b to Cena's 1a" guy being a disappointment is a bigger deal than a "might have been a top guy but became perennial secondary title fodder" guy being a disappointment. And depending on how much you value his TV work, some people might not call Sheamus a disappointment. EDIT: Orton's also done it much longer and will probably still do it after Sheamus is gone.

After reading Phil and Eric review it, figured I'd watch this today for the first time in ~8 years, since I'd only ever seen it right when I was first getting into lucha and didn't really get everything. But man, what a match this is. Such drama, such suspense. It's been a while since I could call a match actually, literally breathtaking, as I was gasping at a few of those topes. Both men play their roles superbly working to and from a faux heel turn in the first two falls, to the point that people are booing Panther (against a Villano, no less) just before he rips the mask off. By the time the tercera starts, though, he's won them back, despite the fact that Villano has already started bleeding through his replacement mask and is in a very sympathetic spot. Watching this, I figured that Panther had just ripped off Villano's mask in a moment of righteous indignation, but these comments about the water loosening up the mask never occurred to me and adds a very interesting layer on top of an already great match. I don't always take into account how the crowd reacts when I'm watching a match, mostly due to the fact that we usually have very different reactions. But here, due mainly to how much CMLL focuses on crowd shots, the audience really stood out to me. In the tercera, I think, there's this shot of an old woman in some nice formal wear, and she's arguing with a fan a row or two behind her, off camera. She's got a Panther mask and in the process of arguing with this fellow fan, she puts it on and looks at the camera before returning to her argument. When Villano wins, there's a bunch of shots of fans celebrating, some practically weeping, some jumping for joy. They return to this old woman, first peering down to the concrete floor to see that she's dropped her Panther mask, or perhaps has thrown it down in disgust. Quickly she pulls it up and tosses it into the crowd, frustrated, humiliated by her idol. This moment of defeat juxtaposed with so many images of triumph really sticks with me. So much of wrestling just doesn't warrant a big reaction from me most of the time, even when the crowd watching it live is loving it, so when my own reaction is somewhere close to the sort of adulation we see here after the match, I think it's the sign of quality. Delightful stuff.

Real missed opportunity at the end not saying that Sam would have to play the role of Super Porky due to his height. I might never listen again because of such a gaffe.